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Shannon O’Grady, a friend from back in the blue-rimmed glasses and white barrette days of my youth, came to China to visit me (and ostensibly, China) for three weeks this summer. A lot happened, but the most interesting parts were the people we met, the songs we sang, the tea we drank, and of course the maggots we ate…

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Back in Chengdu. And one thing hits you on the head: that China is definitely becoming buddy-buddy with Africa. Read the papers or watch Chinese TV, and you’ll see China and Africa are getting really close. (For instance this article from the People’s Daily.)

Indeed, it seems China is aligning itself with whatever countries the US isn’t involved in (more…)

My passport has three stamps — Australia, Hong Kong, China — but I’ve been to far many more countries in the past two months.

My main mission in coming to China was to understand China. And in these Aabservations, I’ve made a series of vast generalizations, stereotypes as it were, about what China is and isn’t. But to make one more generalization, China isn’t 1 country, and I’m not talking about the Taiwan issue. Even within Chengdu, people live tremendously different lives. Get out a bit, take a train overnight and jump on a bus for three or four hours, and you end up in a different world entirely.

The weekend before I left for Australia I visited my friend Ben down in Liangshan. (more…)

I decided to make use of slow bus rides to learn American history.

It’s embarrassing that my Chinese friends know more about American  history than I do, and to make it worse, that I also know almost   nothing about Chinese history.  Indeed, I didn’t know who Mao was  until I was well into college, and just learned since being here that   Japan actually occupied China substantially last century.  I really  don’t know how I missed that, but geez there’s a lot of history that’s   pretty darn relevant for what’s going on nowadays that I still don’t  know.    

But I’m not alone:  Americans tend to have a really short attention   span and a crappy sense of history. (Read Neil Postman’s Amusing  Ourselves to Death, seriously good book. And it’s short, in case your   attention span is also short.)  China seems to have a really long  attention span and they care a lot about their history.  But now the paradigm is changing, it seems.  Where stability and   continuity mattered before, progress and evolution seems to be  mattering now.  

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In a moment of weakness, I went to one of Chengdu’s 4 Starbucks for a latte.

One of the workers came over so my classmate and I spoke to her for an hour or so (in broken Chinese) about her life story. Basically, she was born in Sichuan, the province I live in. After high school she moved to work in a factory in Shenzhen. Shenzhen, the Chinese city opposite Hong Kong, has blossomed from (literally) a few hundred person fishing village to a major industrial center since the Hong Kong turned Chinese in 1997. She worked in the factory for just 1 month, living in a dorm provided by the company, and quit. Why?, I asked. “Bu hao,” she said, shaking her head and waving her hands. “Not good, not good.”

Then her friend introduced her to a job at Starbucks Shenzhen, which was better.

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Just a few short (ish) observations on contact solution, food, standardization, counting to 10….

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Quick quiz: Does time go up or down?

I generally think of time moving, well, clockwise. Or maybe forward. But not down.

But in China, the way you say “next” is basically to say “the lower one.” Next week = the down week. Last week = the up week. It’s like they are walking down some great mountain of antiquity. (more…)