I spend about 16 hours a week with Chinese college students, mostly discussing America and American views of China. I’ve learned a lot from them, but the main things I’ve learned are that (1) Chinese people are interested in American culture and that (2) they don’t know much about how America really is.

In the interest of helping increase global understanding of America, and in the interest of improving my crap Chinese, I present: 千里迢迢, a Chinese-language blog I’ll be running about American culture/music/politics/etc. If you can read some Chinese, check it out, If you’re decent at Chinese and want to be a contributor, shoot me an email, and if you’re neither of those things you can still help me out by leaving comments telling me what you think Chinese people should know about America.

For anyone who is living under a rock, Barack Hussein Obama has been elected as the next President of the United States of America. Further coverage of the Chinese perspective will appear here later, but for now I want to encourage everyone (American or otherwise) to read/watch both Obama’s victory speech and McCain’s concession speech. They were both absolutely inspirational.

I have never been more proud to be an American.

I have to say, the fact that I’m composing all of the beats on American Expatriate in their entirety has really opened up some possibilities in terms of songwriting. In the past, my beats were always arranged around the sample. The sample determined everything: the mood, the tempo, what could and could not be added, and the more samples I added the more constricted I became in terms of what I could do with a beat.

Now I’m finding that composing my own beats (and having the resources to still have them sound good) is allowing me to make more dramatic changes in my instrumentals, as well as add tons of little extra tweaks to complement the lyrical content. For example, a programmed sounding synth-beat can suddenly break into wide-open, clear-blue-sky piano chords for a moment of lyrical epiphany, and then sink subtly back into the synths. Or whatever, that’s just an example and it will be up to you to decide whether any of this stuff actually works when the album’s finished anyway, but the point is, it’s possible.

I haven’t been doing much writing, but I’m not particularly concerned. I have three songs more or less completely done at this point, a good plan for a fourth, and I’m sure more will come. I still haven’t constructed a solid plot outline for it yet, but I’m thinking that may come after most of the songs are written and it’s just a matter of arranging them properly. The main character and his rather peculiar issue is established and evident in more or less everything so far. I’m not going to tell you anything about that yet, though.

One of the main reasons I’m even living in China is to improve my Chinese. While I speak more fluently than I did a few months ago, and some of the rust has come off, I find that I’m really not improving much, and it’s time to take things a bit more seriously.

That left me with three options. I could step up my studying on my own time, enroll in a school program, or find a tutor. I’ve already proven myself to be fairly lazy, and my work schedule makes attending any kind of school more or less impossible. Chinese tutors, though, are plentiful and inexpensive, so that’s the road I’ll be taking.

The problem with that is that unless you get really lucky and find a great one, you still need to more or less design your own course of study. Choosing a textbook is at least partially your decision, as is exactly what you study and how the tutoring sessions work. That affords a lot of customization, but it does mean you have to be extra careful you’re not wasting your time, too.

The first step, as I see it, is choosing a textbook. It’s tough to know exactly what fits with your level; I’m making my judgement based primarily on vocabulary. But even then, you need to figure out how the sessions will run. Will you read the textbook aloud? Practice the vocab/grammar? Prepare the text beforehand and then discuss it together/get quizzed on it by the tutor? It depends on your goals, I guess, my hope is to improve my active vocabulary (i.e., the vocabulary I know well enough to use myself when speaking) significantly, so I’m planning to prepare each lesson beforehand, and spend the tutoring session discussing questions I have with the grammar, being quizzed on the content, and discussing related issues more freely to practice my speaking and listening.

Once a week, I plan to dedicate a tutoring session to pure pronunciation for the first half, and pure conversation for the second half. I’ll read from simple texts and have my tutor correct any pronunciation mistakes; then we’ll discuss whatever topic I’ve prepared for the day and he will help me express anything I’m not sure how to say.

My current plan is to have about 4 hours/week, which will cost me 100RMB/week. I’m hoping the expense will keep me on the ball enough to actually work outside of the tutoring sessions. My school also offers two hours of free lessons every week, which I’ll probably dedicate to more relaxed, informal study. I’ve got a textbook here called Chinese Idiomatic Phrases for Foreign Students, I think I may do some lessons from that or just discuss whatever’s in the news recently.

Anyone who likes music or lives in America should know this name. Pitchfork interviewed him recently and it’s worth reading, check it out here:
Pitchfork Interviews Pete Seeger

Typically, I’m not one to be amused by Chinglish. I’ve seen tons of it, and as someone trying to learn Chinese I’m not really inclined to mock other language-learners just because their English is full of mistakes. Occasionally, though, I do come across something worth posting for other reasons.

It’s gotten cold here recently, cold enough that I’ve invested in some long underwear to keep the chill at bay. Yesterday, I bought a set by a brand called Septwolves. Like many Chinese companies, they have decorated their box with some English. Above a clearly photoshopped picture of some wolves in a forest is the following text:

The wit of the wolves coexists with their action. Against the atrocious nature, the Wolf is as staunch as human beings. The never-altered objective presents a perfect face of the teamwork of wolves.

Below the photo, it continues:

The viability of wolves has far surpassed the consciousness of human beings. What the wolves most care for is “what benefits the Group the most”. Humans are inferior. The losses never change the desire of the Wolves for success. The true feeling makes the Wolf understandable and reliable.

Odd grammar and capitalization aside, this is a bizarre marketing strategy. I know it’s in English, so most of their customers will never read it, but convincing people they’re inferior to wolves seems like an odd way to sell underwear. And their Chinese marketing approach seems to be similar (if more direct); printed on the picture in large, stylized characters is the brand’s apparent motto: “我喜欢狼.” (”I like wolves”). No kidding!

I like wolves too, though, and it turns out their underwear is very comfortable, I just bought another pair today.

Thusfar, my investigations into the indie music scene in Harbin have turned up more or less nothing. However, indie music does exist in China, and my internet searches have proved more fruitful.

An excellent source for cutting-edge Chinese music is the artist social networking site Neocha. This is an absolutely awesome site that someone REALLY needs to make a version of for the English-speaking community. Essentially, it’s like a more customizable Facebook for artists both visual and musical, and some of the stuff on there is really awesome. Recognizing that, the people who run the site have started a netlabel (creatively titled “Neocha Netlabel“), through which they’re releasing collections of free music.

You can check out the full collections here, but I’m going to feature some of the songs on this site too, for those of you who don’t want to try to navigate the Chinese. Unfortunately right now Yahoo’s servers don’t seem to want me to upload the song, so check back in a bit and hopefully I’ll have some stuff up. For now, you can check out that site if you have a Neocha account. If not (and you can read Chinese) consider getting one, it’s worth it.

Most people know about the horrors perpetrated by the sadistic heads of Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Many also know about the American failures to rescue Jewish refugees and the general lack of urgency about shutting down the camps. I think the number of people who know about the atrocities committed by Japan during WWII, and the part America played in that is much lower. Today I came across some information so disturbing I feel I really need to write about it.

WARNING: This blog entry contains graphic descriptions of the horrifying human experiments carried out at Unit 731 by Japanese scientists. If you have a weak stomach, or just aren’t looking to read something disturbing, I highly suggest you skip this entry.

For China, World War II began in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, seizing a large chunk of territory and setting up a puppet state called Manchukuo. Harbin, of course, is a part of that region, and so came under Japanese jurisdiction starting in 1931.

In 1932, the chief medical officer of the Japanese army, Shiro Ishii, was placed in command of the “Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory”, based in a suburb south of Harbin. Here, secret chemical and biological research was conducted until the facility was attacked in 1935. The Japanese government, sold on the usefulness of this type of research, gave Ishii a blank check to begin a more extensive program, and in 1936 his team began work in a much larger facility closer to Harbin. Officially, they were the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. Colloquially, they were known as Unit 731.

Officially, the 731 was a lumber mill; but in actuality its purpose was human experimentation. Scientists and staff jokingly referred to their test subjects as “logs”; these logs were acquired by the Japanese secret police, who stole men, women, and children off the streets and shipped them by train to Unit 731. What exactly happened to people once they got there? The list is long, and extremely horrible.

For one, the scientists performed numerous vivisections–surgeries on live patients–often without anesthesia. Sometimes they would infect the “test subjects” with diseases first. Sometimes they removed organs. They amputated limbs, sometimes reattaching them to the opposite side of the body, they froze and unthawed body parts to study the effects of gangrene, removed parts of people’s brains, raped and impregnated women and then experimented during the pregnancy. They even performed vivisections on newborn infants.

God, I wish that were all.

They also tested the effectiveness of explosives (and effective treatments for shrapnel wounds) by tying unprotected test subjects (i.e., Chinese people) to boards at varying distances surrounding an explosive, and then detonating it. They also tested numerous chemical and biological agents in this manner, as well as flame-throwers.

They infected their subjects with numerous diseases from syphilis to the bubonic plague, then infested their living quarters with fleas. The resultant infected fleas were dropped from airplanes over Chinese cities, resulting in thousands of deaths.

Other miscellaneous experiments were also performed. The full extent of these will probably never be known, so here’s a sampling courtesy of Wikipedia. Prisoners were subjected to:

-being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death.
-having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism.
-having horse urine injected into their kidneys.
-being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death.
-being placed into high-pressure chambers until death.
-being exposed to extreme temperatures and developed frostbite to determine how long humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting and gangrene on human flesh.
-having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival.
-being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead.
-having animal blood injected and the effects studied.
-being exposed to lethal doses of x-ray radiation.
-having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers.
-being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline.

I wish I were making this up, but the people at Unit 731 even gave out poisoned candy to children to study its effects in the local population.

Now, all of that alone would be horrifying enough, but unfortunately there’s more. When the war ended, Shrio Ishii and his fellow butchers knew their lives were in danger, but they also know that their experimental data would be of interest to American military scientists (who weren’t allowed to experiment on people) eager to get a head start on the Russians. They met with the Americans and parlayed a deal, trading the data on their horrifying experiments in return for complete and total immunity. I’ll say that again, because it bears repeating: The United States of America granted the heads of Unit 731 complete immunity. Shiro Ishii, a man who Joseph Mengele could take evil lessons from, died in 1959 of natural causes, without having served a single day in prison.

Someday, I intend to go to Unit 731, which still exists today as a museum. I’m not sure I’ll be able to stomach it, but it seems like the sort of thing I should see anyway, as a reminder of the horrible things that war and righteous nationalism result in.

Teaching English. It is the classic expatriate profession, the long-popular escape for nationals of any English-speaking country with an itch to travel and a semi-respectable command of the English language. But what is teaching English actually like? It’s sort of a hellish language, really, full of contradictory spelling rules, labyrintian grammatical constructions and sometimes-nonsensical pronunciations (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, refer to the classic “ghoti” example). It’s especially difficult for Chinese students in that it’s essentially the opposite of Chinese, which has a simple grammar and no verb conjugation at all. So how do they learn it, and how do expats, most of whom speak no Chinese, teach them?

First of all, English is almost always taught by Chinese-speaking teachers, at least in part. It is a required part of the curriculum for all students beginning in middle school; most Chinese students of English won’t encounter a foreign teacher until college. Even then, their main teachers are still generally Chinese people rather than native speakers, except at the most prestigious schools. The college I teach at, for example, has plenty of regular English classes, almost all taught by Chinese people. Foreigners are brought in for special “speaking practice” classes and also Spoken English seminars. So at the college level, my priority as an English teacher is generally just to get them to actually talk, and work on their pronunciation a bit on the assumption that their regular English teachers will iron out grammatical errors, although I do correct the major ones whenever they crop up.

For those students lucky enough to be able to afford to attend a private English school (like the one I work for) before learning English in their regular schools, the approach is different. At our school, we teach with Chinese TAs who help translate whenever it’s needed and take care of some of the administrative stuff (God bless them, they also deal with parents for the most part). Most students start with no English, so the early stuff is mostly teaching them set phrases: hello, goodbye, how are you today, etc. My younger kids don’t, for the most part, have any idea what conjugation is or that there are rules that exist to govern it. They just know that you have to say “I am”, but “he is”, “we are”, etc. They don’t know why.

College students most common problems tend to be with pronunciation, fluency, and memorizing the vast variety of different words that get thrown at them. Many of them can read and write at a much higher level than they can speak. The young children I teach are almost exactly the opposite, their issues tend to pop up most often when they’re trying to read and spell, but often they can respond to questions they hear fairly well.

Students at both levels, and even adult speakers with fairly good English, often struggle with the sounds in English that don’t exist in Chinese, especially the “th” sound in “thanks” and the “v” sound in “very”. The word “usually” also becomes “urally” frequently, although I’m not sure why. I try to drill these sounds frequently with my little kids, but it’s a constant struggle, especially when they get old enough that they are taking regular English classes in school, since most of those English teachers also can’t say the sound correctly.

Still, their English is a hell of a lot better than most Americans’ Chinese…

“Free Tibet” is a phrase with a bit of a history. More or less since the Chinese army entered Tibet in 1951, some people have complained that Tibet should be its own country. Over time, rhe cause became popular among Westerners, especially students and celebrities. The intensity of the protesting comes and goes as things in Tibet happen (or don’t), but the song has remained more or less the same: “Free Tibet.” Well, in the West, anyway.

Why has this particular cause attracted so much attention in the West? As I see it, there are two reasons. One is Western perception of the Chinese government, which is shaped mainly by the knowledge that they are Communist and that they once killed students in Tiananmen Square. They are, as a result, “evil”. Western perceptions of Tibetans are based on the Dalai Lama, who seems calm, wise, peaceful, spiritual—everything it seems the Chinese government is not. Controversy closer to home is always complicated, but from afar the China-Tibet issue comes off as good-versus-evil to the uninformed.

The other reason I believe Tibet has attracted so much attention is that it appears to a certain nostalgia many Western intellectuals have; a desire to return to a simpler, more “pure” time. Tibet’s “spiritual” traditional society, its ruggedly beautiful terrain, and its ancient, mysterious religion all give it a special sort of “flavor” that Westerners feel is being destroyed by the modernity the Chinese government brings to Tibet.

Unfortunately, those perceptions are grossly misguided. Traditional Tibetan society was essentially a slave society. The vast majority of Tibetans were extremely poor, there was no real justice system, and the political structure of its “spiritual” government was rife with corruption, exploitation, and perversion. In the book The Struggle for Modern Tibet (the autobiography of a Tibetan who has lived in Tibet, mainland China, India, and the United States), Tashi Tsering describes how he was chosen to become a dancer for the Dalai Lama, taken from his family (forever) as a kind of “tax”, and forced into a dance troupe run by a sadistic director and forever plagued by horny Tibetan monks. These monks (not allowed to marry) took out their sexual frustration through sexual relationships with the children in the dance troupe—Tsering describes this as common practice. Anyone who believes Tibet should return to its roots, leave China, and become a religious nation headed by the Dalai Lama should read that book.

Similarly, what China does in Tibet often goes unreported or is misinterpreted by a Western public eager to find fault with the Chinese government. For example, last May, some Tibetans began a violent riot that caused millions of dollars in damage and touched off a series of racially-motivated hate crimes against Han Chinese and Muslims. Non-Tibetans in Lhasa were stabbed, beaten, and even burned alive in the streets. The Chinese government sent in police to stop the riots, and even though there’s no evidence of violence and the Western reporter in Lhasa at the time reported seeing no police misconduct, the story that played in the West was one of a “brutal crackdown” against “peaceful Tibetan protesters”. CNN even doctored a photo of Chinese police vehicles that ran on their website, editing out Tibetan rioters who were attacking the trucks. Myriad other news media ran misleading headlines and photographs, including numerous photographs of police in Nepal beating protesters that were labeled as if they were photos from China.

Lest you think I’m parroting the Party line here, I urge you to read the aforementioned book (The Struggle for Modern Tibet) and do some research about Western news coverage of Tibet yourself. All of this stuff is well-documented.

You might be surprised to learn that even the Dalai Lama isn’t interested in seeing a fully independent Tibet. While he does want more political autonomy for the region, he does not want it to be a separate country. Nor should he. If Tibet became independent, it would be a disaster for the Tibetan people.

Why? Well, as it turns out, Tibet is still quite undeveloped, economically speaking. China pours money in but gets almost nothing back. The Economist reports:

In 2001, for example, for every renminbi of Tibet’s economic growth, central-government spending increased by Rmb2, according to Mr Fischer. In that year alone, state spending increased by 75%. By 2004 the situation had changed only slightly, with Rmb0.65 of economic growth requiring only Rmb1 of increased subsidies and state investment.
-The Economist

Many might be inclined to blame this on government policies designed to keep Tibet weak, but actually NPR reports that in fact, Beijing pays for 90% of all government expenditures in Tibet, and floats gigantic infastructure projects like new highways and a massive hydroelectric dam.

Now, let’s imagine for a second that tomorrow, Tibet were to become its own country again. What would happen?

Well, the Dalai Lama and the rest of the exile community would probably return. They would arrive to find a society greatly changed from the one they ruled half a century ago, and a people who have had little contact with them for decades. They would also find strong racial tensions that did not exist in the 1950s, and that has frequently erupted into violence in the past. They would also find the embittered remnants of the former Tibetan provincial government, possibly unwilling to rescind control. It seems unlikely that the exile leaders would actually be able to run a modern nation on their own; but even if they were theoretically capable, what money would they use?

As mentioned above, Tibet’s economic output is insufficient to support the region. The removal of all Beijing’s political infastructure would undoubtedly weaken Tibet’s economy further, leaving the new “nation” in the hands of an inexperienced relgious sect with little governing experience and no money.

Tibet would have almost no hope of finding support from other nations, either. China would certainly never support an independent Tibet, and other nations would also refuse support for fear of angering China and harming trade relations.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I can’t imagine any way that a “Free Tibet” wouldn’t quickly devolve into some third-world hellhole, complete with all the starvation and social instability that comes along with that title.

Maybe someone can convince me otherwise, but it seems to me that the first thing we should have in mind here is what’s best for the Tibetan people, and I just can’t see any way it’s good for the Tibetan people to separate from China. Feel free to argue with me in the comments.