Cao Mei and Zhu Jia Jiao

Since Danny ditched me to go to Taiwan, I had to fend for myself this weekend. Ok, to be slightly more accurate, we tried to find me a flight but it was really expensive to fly on the weekend and I didn't want to take off work. In the end I stayed here while he attended his cousin's wedding. I made him promise to write a post about it but I don't have exceedingly high hopes since he has currently posted a whopping total of two posts.

 Anyway, I had a really relaxing Saturday sitting around the house and catching up with various friends in the states via skype and google voice. The only productive things I did all day were clean up a bit and make a bowl of spaghetti. I had wanted to go for a walk in the park but it is still cold here and I got lazy.

Sunday I tagged along with some of the grad students from the observatory on a trip they planned to pick strawberries (cao mei) and visit an ancient water town (Zhu Jia Jiao).



Picking strawberries was really messy. The spaces between the rows of plants were super narrow and covered in thick gooey mud. It was sort of like walking on an incredibly muddy balance beam. They told me to bring plastic bags to put over my shoes which I did. Unfortunately the bags kept getting stuck in the mud so I gave up and just got my shoes really muddy. By the time I finished collecting berries I was really muddy and tired but I had a box full of berries.

Next we took the bus for about a half hour to the water town. I may have mentioned in the post about Xitang that I was trying to go to all 6 ancient water towns. This was the second one I saw.

Zhu Jia Jiao was smaller than Xitang but pretty similar in the architecture. There weren't any little museums to wander through - just restaurants, snack booths and shops with touristy knick knacks. Unlike Xitang we didn't pay a cover fee to enter. I think it was actually sort of a shame because it meant it was not quite as nicely maintained and didn't offer as much to do or see. It was still a really pleasant day and I enjoyed the company at lot. We got lunch and walked around the shops. I bought a musical instrument and a photo album.

While I looked around Zhu Jia Jiao my strawberries sat in a cardboard box on the bus for a few hours and started going bad. Oh well. All in all it was a pretty nice trip.

Seeing Red

I always thought red was good luck in China. It is the wedding color and you give people gifts in red envelopes all the time. I think I heard something about it being considered bad luck to write someone's name in red once before. I forgot about it until my co-worker told me I had to rewrite a student's certificate because I wrote in red. I thought it was really silly and unnecessary and I saw no reason to rewrite it. I grade their papers in a red pen all the time and write notes to them with their names written in red. My students don't say anything about it...

One of my other co-workers said writing someone's name in red means you want to cut all ties with the person. Google said it had something to do with the color red being reserved for the dead in ancient times, I'm not sure if that is correct though. It also said that prisoners had to sign their name in red before being executed and that only the emperor was allowed to write with red ink. The color red has very different meanings in China than at home.

At our wedding we followed some Chinese customs and received red envelopes. I picked Tiffany blue and chocolate as our colors and didn't decorate anything in red. I wonder if many locals here would say it was bad luck. Nobody at our wedding minded as far as I know.

Anyway, I rewrote the certificate. It probably would have been less frustrating if my co-worker gave a reason rather than just telling me I needed to redo it because that is how we do things in China. Maybe it is just because I'm American and we are always taught to question things and speak up about our opinions. The Chinese in contrast have more of a do what you are told mentality.

I was trying to think of what customs I follow that are comparable. Specifically, are there American customs that I would correct someone of a different culture for not adhering to it? The best example I could think of was a Jewish custom. When I was little I was taught never to write god's full name unless it was in a prayerbook because it was disrespectful. Instead you have to write G-d. When I was a kid, before I gave much thought to the custom I may have corrected people for writing it. Once I grew up and thought about it, I realized not everyone has that custom and decided I didn't care if people follow it or not. I don't actually follow that custom myself anyway so it isn't really relevant.

I'd love to think that I personally wouldn't force my customs on anyone but maybe I have and didn't even realize it. I'm curious what things people who moved to the states from China or elsewhere think are silly and frustrating about Americans. To me it just seemed pushy and sort of rude to insist I rewrite the certificate, but maybe I am being culturally insensitive. It is really frustrating when little culture clashes like this come up. I still am baffled by the locals' insistence that windows be kept wide open all winter long. I don't understand why they only give out one menu per party at restaurants here. I know Chinese restaurants serve things family style and traditionally one person orders but western restaurants in China where you order individually still only give one menu per table. I try to keep in mind that I am a guest in this country and sometimes you have to sort of go along with things but it can feel frustrating when someone pushes their custom at you without explanation. Good communication usually makes this better but then there is the language barrier...

At 30 You Stand Up

On Tuesday Danny is turning 30. Personally, I always found that number scary. I feel like by 30 you really should have accomplished things in your life. In Chinese there is an expression "San shi er li." It means at age 30 you stand up - in other words at 30 you are supposed to become independent and have a family... scary. Fortunately, I still have four months until I'm thirty.

This weekend I organized a little party at our place for Danny's birthday. It was pretty low key but I think everyone had fun. We have started to find some nice friends here and it was fun to celebrate with them.
















I cooked some but forgot to take a picture until the food was almost gone.



















I made ice cream cake and wrote Danny's name with M&M's.







We hung paper on the wall and tried to get our friends to draw on it.

Joe got Danny a Lin jersey.

Quelling the People

While I was home last month I decided to get some info about China's history. I stopped by Strand when I was in NY and bought a few books including Quelling the People - The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. I thought about putting a paper cover over it before I packed it to take on the plane to China but I just shoved it in my bag and didn't have any issues.

I had heard of the Tienanmen Square Massacre, but I only had a hazy understanding of what happened. I don't think I learned about it in school. In China people call the massacre the June 4th incident. Many Chinese people also have a hazy understanding of what happened. History is told from the perspective of the victors, this is especially true in China. The government has a lot of control over the people and distorted the facts about massacring their own citizens. I get the impression Chinese citizens often feel indifferent about politics and think whatever the government says goes. The government seems to have told the public that the student demonstrations and hunger strikes in 1989 were violent and put China in jeopardy. While not everyone believes it, many people seem fairly indifferent to the government's actions. Danny found the movie below about Tienanmen Square on youtube. It is very clearly in favor of the rebels and anti-government so it may be slightly biased but it gave interesting insights.



If anyone is interested you can see the rest of this video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB70mWXrzEE
This is just part 1 of 8 but you can find links to the rest.

I also thought this movie was interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9A51jN19zw&feature=fvst

Coming from the US, I find it pretty crazy that if you try to search for info about this stuff online in China the government is able to block it and has a whole team of workers whose job is to hide information about things the government doesn't want people to know. It makes me think of the Ministry of Truth from the novel 1984. I can't believe that is really people's jobs.

Living in China and seeing how little people are paid and how poor their quality of life is really disturbs me. Watching these movies and seeing how people live makes me think they really are oppressed and the government must really see them as expendable. Truthfully, I still don't know enough about the Chinese government but it seems pretty corrupt and screwed up.

Mission Impossible

There are six big ancient water towns within an hour or two of Shanghai. I figured eventually we should try to make it to all of them. We decided to check out Xitang first mostly because we recently watched Mission Impossible 3. Tom Cruise ran through the streets of Xitang shouting “Zo kai, zo kai” in a crappy Chinese accent. There were a few restaurants in the town with faded signs showing Tom Cruise standing with their staff or that said eat here to see the views from the movie.

On Saturday we got a 9:00 am bus from Shanghai Indoor Stadium along with two friends. Our bus driver cheerfully told us we should head back early and be on board by 3:45 since there wasn’t much to see. I was a bit worried there really wouldn’t be much to do.

I loved Xitang. It is a very cute area with tiny narrow streets and tiled rooftops. It is what I picture when I think of a traditional Chinese town. It is really touristy and charged an entrance fee for the town of 100 RMB. I thought that sounded really weird at first but they do use some of that money to make the town cleaner and nicer. They also have things like street performances of Chinese Opera that are paid for by the town. We pretty much spent the day wandering around. We looked at various little shops. I bought two handmade sketchbooks with real flowers pressed into the paper, four Chinese lanterns and a musical instrument called a xun all for 163 RMB (about $25). We had a bunch of snacks, some of which I’d never seen before. They cater to tourists a lot so the food was actually pretty good and I even found a few veggie items. As we walked along we checked out a few of the town’s little museums. Most of them were tiny and not that exciting but they were included in our tickets, so we wandered through them. There were small gardens called the drunk garden and the west garden, a button museum, a tile museum and a few others. We also took a boat ride. The main appeal of the town is that it is just very pretty. I took a ridiculous number of photos. Since it is a water town there are canals everywhere. Some people compare these towns to Venice but the architecture is obviously completely different. It made for a really pleasant day trip. I can’t wait to check out the rest of the water towns!

Urban Planning

Last weekend we checked out Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. It was sort of interesting.

The main thing I liked was the giant model of the city on the 3^rd floor.



It even had a model of Danny’s office (the one with the giant observatory globe but no telescope) and our apartment. We think they were not lined up exactly the right way though.



The other cool part was lots of photos of Shanghai in the past and today so you could compare. I mostly liked the way the old photos looked better than how modern Shanghai looks. We got a book of Chinese propaganda posters while we were there. It also gave us ideas of a few other places around the city we might want to go visit.

6 am Super Bowl

Anyone who knows me well knows I’m not a sports fan. I sort of hate sports in fact, but I have gone to a super bowl party pretty much every year of my life. I generally locate the other guests who find sports boring and gossip with them, pausing to check out the commercials and the half time show. Danny loves football and was eager to see the game. Since it happened to work out that the super bowl fell on the day of the lantern festival and I thought I didn’t have work, I agreed to wake up at 6 am and go see the game.

There are two sports bars in Shanghai that I know of that cater to expats. We went to The Camel. Even though it is actually a British pub this morning it was filled with Americans. I’m not a fan of football but sports really do bring people together. I have to say, I really like being around Americans every now and then. It makes me feel at home. I was disappointed they didn’t show the same commercials but Madonna put on a pretty decent half time show. She looks really good for a woman in her 50’s.