Puppets!

A rare article on Taiwanese culture. (Technically it's Chinese, but since it doesn't exist in the mainland anymore it's really Taiwanese). They even have puppet TV shows, replete with sword fighting sequences and special effects (which are quite corny). I think I wanna apprentice...
It's a really cute museum, by the way.
The National History Museum had a big exhibition of puppets a month and a half ago... if anyone reading this is in Taipei it's worth checking out.

One Reason I Moved to Taipei

Nice to see Taipei's metro get its due.
Its only drawback is that it's a really small system- 67 stations, compared to 470 in New York. But even then it's so well designed that you can take it almost anywhere you'd want to go in Taipei. I'd even go so far as to say that it has character, if not as much as New York's. If they let musicians and breakdancers perform in the trains and stations maybe they'd catch up.
Beijing's subway, on the other hand, is miserable. Aside from being overcrowded, it's just poorly designed. The stations are deep and you have to walk through long tunnels to get to the platforms, transferring between lines takes forever. Stations are spaced so far apart you usually have to walk twenty minutes just to get to and from the stations. Trains are both short and narrow, and therefore overcrowded. There are few exits, and you often have to cross a highway once you get out. The result is that if you want to go less than 2 miles walking is often faster than the subway. Of course, coverage is so poor that you're usually going to have to take a bus to get where you're going anyway.

Pigs in Taipei

Reuters recently had a short article on what might be Dadaocheng's quirkiest sight.

I've actually passed this guy before, near the intersection of Dihua St. and Minzu Rd. He looked very happy.

Mainland China Timeline

I was told that the order of what happened in my blog is not clear, so here’s a quick timeline to get things straight.

Before China-
Fall of ’05 to spring of ’06- taught Chinese at Exeter
June ’06- went to sister’s graduation in Scotland
July-August- taught Tae Kwon Do at day camp in New York

Traveling to Tibet-
September 17-22- went to Beijing, spent nearly a week there
Sept. 22-25- flew to Chengdu, spent a weekend
Sept. 25-29- Traveled west to Danba, and went to Jiaju, Suopo, Buke and Zhonglu with Li Tong
Sept. 30- Oct. 2- Went to Dangling with Li Tong, his wife and two others we met, Wen Yi and Liang Chao- trip was a debacle.
Oct. 3-5- Went farther west, to Garze, while the others went their separate ways. Spent a couple days in Garze.
Oct. 6-8- Went even farther west to Derge, on the Tibetan border. Met Thomas, a Frenchman working in Beijing, and an annoying Chinese couple on the bus. Went with them to Pelpung Monastery, in an isolated village near Derge.
Oct. 9-12- Went to Dzongsar on my own.
Oct. 13-15- Snuck into Tibet.
Oct. 16- Nov. 1- Hung around Lhasa. Was shown karmic tests at Ganden Monastery. Went to Nam Tso with random group of foreigners. Attempted to find a job in Lhasa.
Nov. 2-4- Went with Erica and Kirk to Reting (where Erica was attacked by a deer), Tidrum Nunnery and Drigum Til (where we saw Tibetans attack a Chinese truck driver).
Nov. 5-20- Hung around Lhasa with Kirk, Alex and Jon. Hunted for pot with Jon, and did prostration kora with all three. Went to nangma several times.
Nov. 21-23- Returned to Beijing by train; stayed in Xining for a night.

In Beijing-
Nov. 23- Dec. 15- Hung out in Beijing. Lily took me to a guqin factory and guqin classes, then introduced me to her friend Ziqin, who offered to help me get a business visa. Got bad offer to teach English as nurse’s school.
late December- Forced to Hong Kong for new visa, spend a week there then spend a week and a half in Taiwan, seeing Angie and Rika. On train to HK met Steve, an anti-Communist Party reporter from Fujian.
Early January- Went back to the mainland via Hong Kong after New Year’s. On train back to Beijing met Noriko, a Japanese student in Hong Kong.
January- Back in Beijing, hang out with Noriko for a few days before resuming job hunt. Get a job offer from Ziqin. Move into Lily’s room, start getting tutored by Ye Bingxuan, a PhD student.
February- Applied for work visa, attended conference with Ziqin, celebrated Chinese New Year.
March- Got ripped off by landlord after moving to Ziqin’s apartment at the beginning of the month. Things went bad with Ziqin, and I finally quit at month’s end.
Early April- Traveled to Mt. Everest with parents.
Late April- mid May- Glasses hunt (they were lost in 1st trip to Lhasa.) Went to village near Beijing in late April, then to rock festival in early May.
late May- Restarted job and apartment hunt after getting glasses and taking a quick trip to the old imperial summer villa in Chengde. Found seemingly good apartment and seemingly good job, teaching Chinese to elementary school kids in the morning and Korean high school kids in the afternoon.
Early June- Found that the Koreans are impossible to teach and that I am the 7th or 8th teacher there, and then quit. However, the morning job goes well, even though I felt the agent I had gone through was misleading about the salary.
June- Find out that I am being underpaid, and after boss first promises to pay more then forgets his promise I quit once the semester is finished.
July- Start working for fellow alumni’s English school, which goes well. Move into new apartment, which does not go well. Decide to move out of Beijing.

A long absence

Just making sure my blog doesn't go under... I will start updating on of these days...
After half a year of Beijing, I got sick of the hassles and decided to move to Taipei, which will happen probably next month. I have a lot of misadventures to catch up on =P

Not breaking visa laws

Going back to December last year…

My main problem after getting back to Beijing wasn’t getting a job, but getting a visa. I was on a tourist visa that would expire in mid-December. I had enough money to survive in Beijing for a while. But there were other (quasi-legal) ways to get visas.
The best way, I thought, would be to get a Chinese company to write me an invitation letter for a business visa. All I needed for a 6-month visa was a stamped letter, so it seemed easy. I wouldn’t legally be able to earn money but if I freelanced as an English tutor and got paid in cash no one would notice. The catch was that I didn’t know anyone who could write me a letter.
However, Lily had a friend who owned her own company, who she said would certainly help me. I didn’t want to impose on someone I didn’t know, so I didn’t follow up. I didn’t realize it, but that offer began a chain of events that turned my life in China into a tragicomedy that is only just ending.

A week later Lily’s friend had a dinner party, and Lily wanted me to go. I agreed to go even though I’m never comfortable at Chinese dinner parties. Chinese people can never get over my non-Chineseness, watch my every move and note every faux pas. For my part I have to tell them what I think of China and the US without offending them or saying something they disagree with. An American girl I met once put it this way: “I bet Chinese people are very normal when they’re with each other. But when they meet a foreigner they lose their sense of logic and go crazy.” Finally, men always drink baijiu (“clear liquor”), a gasoline-like alcohol that the Chinese love.
Lily’s friend, named Zhang Ziqin, owned a small logistics company. It would have been perfect except she had no idea how to write an invitation letter. If I was going to play with visa laws I didn’t want to do it with someone who didn’t know what they were doing, but I agreed to meet Ziqin at Beijing’s visa office to see if we could figure it out. Ziqin was eager to help, because she wanted me to help her study English.
However, things looked harder and harder at the visa office. First the visa officers said Ziqin needed to apply with the local labor bureau to get the stamp for the letter. Then they told us Americans had to leave China to get change visas. I had no way of telling if that was really the law- Chinese visa officers sometimes like making things difficult for foreigners.
I decided to back out when Ziqin wanted me to fill out an application form on which I would have had to make up an American employer for myself. If I was going to lie on an official form I wanted to know what I was doing.

Tian'anmen and Ma Lik

I don’t think it is right to tell Chinese people what they should think about their own government, and I don’t think the US should try to lecture China. However, I see nothing wrong with writing my opinion, especially when I read something both stupid and infuriating.
According to the New York Times, Ma Lik, the leader of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing party, stated that the Tian’anmen Square Massacre was invented by the Western media, and that Hong Kongers were unpatriotic for being taken in and therefore didn’t deserve to have full democracy. The fact that people can deny events that took place only 18 years ago and were recorded on camera and had thousands of witnesses is a testament to the ability of humans to believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence. The Chinese Communist Party likes to remind people that they should “seek truth from facts,” but as incidents like this make clear anyone who has to say that truth should come from facts is probably peddling a lie.
I feel sorry from Hong Kongers who are as Chinese as anyone but are stuck in a country whose government insists that true Chinese people must believe whatever they say and submit to them unquestioningly. Ma Lik’s statements demonstrate how hopeless democracy is in China- “you may vote when your minds are controlled by us.”

On a side note, I think this shows why Taiwanese are wary of the Mainland.

The Tujia

The first day I met Lily I asked her if she liked Beijing.
“No,” she said. “People here are dishonest- they tell you one thing when they think another. Beijing has too many Hans, and I don’t like Hans.” Hans are ethnic Chinese, as opposed to minority groups like Tibetans, Mongolians and Koreans. I had assumed that Lily was a Han herself, like most Chinese people.
“I’m half Tujia and half Miao,” she explained. (Miao are known as Hmong in the US.) “My hometown is in Hubei.” She showed me some slides that another Tujia took, of their village and of people in traditional Tujia clothing.
“My friend took these to preserve Tujia culture, because it is disappearing,” Lily said. “Everyone just wants to make money like the Hans, so they leave the villages and abandon Tujia customs. No one can speak Tujiaese anymore.”
“Do you want to go back?” I asked.
“No, there’s nothing to go back to,” Lily said. “Our village is going to be submerged when they finish the Yangtze River Dam. A lot of people are angry because they didn’t give us enough money, and they forced us to move to higher ground that isn’t good for farming. Also, the concrete houses they built for us are terrible compared to our own traditional houses.”
“It would be much better if we could have our own country,” she said. “Actually, all minorities in China want their own country. But no one can say it.”
Lily told me a little about growing up in her village. Her maternal grandfather was a shaman, so she had special status when she was little. But her mother died young, and she didn’t like her Miao father, who like many Tujia had given up his culture. The Miao were once bitter enemies of the Chinese, but by now they have nearly totally assimilated.

Lily’s politics were not as straightforward as they seemed. Later she told me what she thought of China’s government.
“They have messed up China,” she said. “There’s too much corruption and inequality.” This is a common opinion these days. I don’t like the Chinese system, but I this government is the most realistic and enlightened China has ever had.
“It’s not that I’m not patriotic,” she went on. “I love China, and I’d defend it if it was attacked.” I wasn’t expecting that from someone who didn’t like Hans and thought her ethnic group should be independent.
“China was much better in the ‘70’s,” Lily said. “Everyone was poor, but there was no crime and you could trust people. My parents didn’t have to worry if I went out alone. Now they’d be afraid that I’d get kidnapped.”
I feel very uncomfortable when people praise ‘70’s China. The Cultural Revolution lasted until ’76, and the persecution, cynicism and the breakdown of society that it caused is very different from the idealized view that younger people like Lily and the shopkeeper in Lhasa have. People aren’t taught how bad the Cultural Revolution was, so they assume it was better than the ultracaptialist present. On the other hand, perhaps the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, when the Cultural Revolution was over but the reforms hadn’t yet fully begun, really were an idyllic if poor time. At least, if you lived in rural Hubei or Tibet.

Of Apartments and Guqins

(The view from Lily and Azalea's apartment)

After I turned down the job offer from the nursing school I realized that I actually did not need a regular job. Money wasn’t a problem since I had saved a lot from working in the US, and I could easily make more tutoring English. The only problem was getting a new visa, and now that I knew a visa agent I had a way around that. I didn’t have to get a work visa; instead I could get a cheaper business visa. I couldn’t legally receive a salary with a business visa but that wouldn’t matter since I wouldn’t have a regular job. I could spend as much time as I wanted studying Chinese, and could even try doing some freelance writing or translating.

In the meantime I started spending more time hanging out with Lily. Azalea usually stayed at Terence’s place, and let me sleep in her apartment since she was almost never there. I preferred her place to Terence’s anyway. For one thing, at Azalea’s I could borrow her bed when she wasn’t there, while at Terence’s I had to sleep on the floor. Also, the neighborhood around Azalea’s building was better. Terence’s neighborhood was unusually pleasant for Beijing, with clean, tree-lined streets and kind of pretty walled embassy compounds. It was also at what might be Beijing’s most convenient location (which is not saying much). But the neighborhood was dead. There was no street life and the only supermarkets and restaurants were expensive and expat-oriented. Lily and Azalea’s apartment wasn’t in as convenient a location, but the neighborhood had more stores and restaurants, and even felt like a neighborhood despite the cookie-cutter residential complex the apartment was in.
Lily was as idle as me, except for guqin classes she was taking. The guqin is an ancient instrument that Confucian scholars used to play, and is perhaps more closely tied to Chinese culture than any other instrument. But because its music doesn’t carry well and isn’t suited to concerts it isn’t very well known anymore, even among Chinese people.
Lily wanted to get a new guqin before she moved to Israel, and brought me along when she went to a guqin factory in the south of Beijing to choose one. The factory was in the boondocks of Beijing- a wasteland of dilapidated courtyard houses, dirty industrial compounds and the occasional stunningly ugly concrete office complex. It took us about two hours to get there, after switching buses once and being driven part of the way by the factory’s owner. The factory itself was in a courtyard. All the guqins were made by hand, usually from wood that had been scavenged from old buildings that had been torn down. I was told that older wood was better since it was drier.
After Lily chose a guqin we went to the factory boss’s apartment. His apartment was like a museum to himself- it was dominated by a glass case filled with instruments he had made. More instruments lined some walls. Other walls were filled with plaques and trophies that he had won for his instruments.
At the factory Lily suggested that I learn how to play the guqin myself. Later, at the owner’s apartment, she got the idea that I could learn to make them. “Just think, you could be the only foreign guqin maker in the world!” she said, giggling. “Could you teach him to make guqins?” she asked the factory owner.
“Yes, but it’s hard,” the owner said with a small smile that suggested that he didn’t think it was likely. “Most people start when they’re teenagers.” Lily seemed to only hear the “yes,” and kept talking about how I should devote my time to guqins. One problem did eventually occur to her: “Boss,” she said to the factory owner, “it’s true that guqin making can only be passed down through families, right?”
“Yes,” the owner said. “Though a lot of people have abandoned that tradition now.” Before we left Lily told the owner she’s give me his phone number.

Of jobs and visas

After figuring out where I was going to live I had to figure out what kind of job I wanted.
My main goal was improving my Chinese, so I wanted a job that would give me a lot of chances to speak Chinese. I applied to some translation jobs, but my Chinese wasn’t good enough yet, and I didn’t have experience or qualifications. I wasn’t sure what else I could do other than teach English, which to me was a last resort. So I spent most of the month after I got back to Beijing (last November to December) searching for other non-English-teaching jobs, procrastinating and writing this blog.
After a couple of weeks an English teaching job fell right into my lap. The annoying Chinese guy I met on the bus from Garze to Derge a month before called me and told me that a friend of his in Beijing was looking for an English teacher. It was a part time job, which would leave plenty of time for me to study Chinese, so I agreed to do an interview and see what I thought.
Their offices were in northwest Beijing, a little over an hour away from Terence’s place. The company turned out to be a sort of school that prepped Chinese nurses who were moving to the US, and they wanted someone to teach the nurses English. The pay wasn’t great, and the location was even farther away from the city center than their offices. On the other hand, as every male friend I have pointed out to me, it involved teaching young women in nursing uniforms.
What was more troubling than the pay and the location was that the school didn’t know anything about Chinese visas. I was still on a tourist visa and needed a work visa before my current visa ran out, in mid-December. They called a friend of theirs and found a visa agent in Beijing, and had me visit them.
Legally, foreigners can’t get a work visa in China; they have to go back to their home countries. In reality no one cared, until recently. Luckily for me Beijing has numerous visa agents who have ways to get work visas. I later heard that they use shadow companies that have (supposedly) received foreign investment to apply for the visa, and use bribes to smooth over any problems. The work permit has the shadow company’s name, but unless the holder breaks the law the police don’t need to find out that the permit’s holder doesn’t actually work there.
The company I visited looked legit enough- it was an investment consulting company that worked with foreign firms, and had a pretty good-looking office. (It was a bit hidden though- it took me two tries to find it.) I later checked out their website, which looked decent as well. They took advantage of their connections in the government and contact with foreigners to run their shady visa business on the side. I decided that I would be comfortable giving them my passport.
The problem was the visa’s cost- 5,500, or about $700. The nursing school refused to pay, because I would only be part-timing for them and could get other jobs. I wouldn’t have to try hard to get a better deal from an English school than that, so I turned down their offer and returned to my routine of procrastination and bumming around.