Being Artsy in Kunming

Wednesday 10 Mar 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: photography, travelling in china Tags: , , , , , ,

[We haven’t had internet for a few days, so I’m publishing this a few days late – a lot of these travel posts will probably come with a few days delay, just as an FYI to anyone who we might be able to meet up with along the way]

We’re now in Kunming, the first stop on our trip. We were here a few weeks ago to visit a friend for Spring Festival, so the city already feels familiar, and we went straight back to our favorite café. There are more foreigners here in Wuhan, but still nothing like Beijing/Shanghai, and the vibe here is more hipster than yuppie. And the weather here is amazing – it’s known as 春城, the city of eternal spring. If I come back to live in China in the future, it very well might be to live in Kunming.

Other than the weather, accessible size of the city, pleasant tree-lined streets, cozy cafes and overall laid-back vibe, one of the things I like the most is how much of an art scene there seems to be here. Last night we went to an exhibition opening at a gallery called TC/G Nordica, which was co-founded by a Swedish woman who lived in Kunming a few years ago, and serves as a café / gallery / performance space, with a particular focus on Scandinavian-Chinese cultural exchange. I actually read about the gallery a few weeks ago in a book about Swedish entrepreneurs in China (there aren’t many, and this woman was one of the few who seemed to have done something interesting). So it was fun to visit the gallery in person. We had a very authentic-tasting kanelbulle with our coffee, so at the very least they got that important aspect of cultural exchange right.

The exhibition was titled “四季·春天”, and featured artwork from female artists in Kunming, loosely tied around the theme “spring”. The opening was filled with people, both Chinese and foreign. And lots of people took pictures of the artwork, which in my experience doesn’t happen as much at galleries in the US/Europe (where the ritual instead generally entails standing in front of the artwork making pseudo-intellectual comments about the message the work conveys and musing over whether or not it speaks to the viewer). I thought taking pictures was a fantastic idea, so I did the same. Below are some of my favorites from the exhibition.

我发现了，在中国，每个地方的外国人都不一样。去上海的外国人一般来说是因为工作的原因去，常常是做商业还是金融的工作，喜欢在西餐饭馆吃饭，晚上去酒吧玩儿（同力，你同意不？）。在北京的外国人，有的是因为工作让他们临时住在中国所以在北京呆几年，住在北京的郊区，比方说顺义，不会说汉语。 有的是外交、记者等、还是其他比较聪明的人士，其中应该有很多intellectuals。去武汉（和类似还没有完全国际化的城市）的外国人，有的是因为（跟我一样）想理解中国和学好汉语，认为在外国人少一些的地方认识中国人的机会应该多一些。也有很多有自己的原因，有可能在北京上海找不到工作。我在武汉认识了很多在自己的国家会被认为很奇怪的外国人，不知道为什么他们都选择去武汉了。昆明的外国人呢？好像住在中国的外国人其中，昆明的是最cool的。看上去很多是先来中国旅游，然后因为特别喜欢云南决定来这里开咖啡馆还是旅舍。他们穿的衣服跟纽约和伦敦的hipsters一样（hipster是一种很cool的年轻人，一般来说穿得很时尚，受到了高等教育，很聪明，很喜欢音乐和艺术，喜欢做事做得跟主流不一样）。Hipster一般用的是贬义词，“主流人”认为hipsters太看重自己，但是我现在用这个词是褒义词，他们很cool！我在纽约住的地方（叫Williamsburg）是一个有很多hipsters的地方，一般来说我觉得有很多这种人的地方是生活很舒服和很有意思住的地方。所以可以说昆明是中国的Williamsburg。又是一个想住在昆明的原因！

———————————————————————————————–

———————————————————————————————–

———————————————————————————————–

———————————————————————————————–

Swedzerland

Saturday 6 Mar 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: travelling in china Tags: , ,

As we were having our hair cut yesterday, this very typical exchange took place (my slightly liberal translation from Chinese):

Hairdresser #1: So, Sweden. That’s the place with the watches.

Me: That’s Switzerland.

Hairdresser #1: Right, Switzerland.

Me: We’re Swedish, not Swiss. Ruidian and Ruishi are different countries.

Hairdresser #2, to Hairdresser #1: Do you even know where Sweden is?

Hairdresser #1: (silence).

I’ve had more or less this same conversation many times and in many parts of the world over the years. In English, Sweden/Swedish and Switzerland/Swiss are to many (especially, it seems, Americans) confusingly similar; in Spanish, Suecia sounds a lot like Suiza; and in Chinese, it’s tough for people to keep track of which one is Ruidian and which one is Ruishi. Maybe it’s especially difficult for people to keep the two countries apart since not only do they seem to end up with similar-sounding names in almost every language, they’re also both small, historically neutral, wealthy, and essentially unimportant countries in Western Europe. And when Sweden has a population of 9.3 million, compared to Wuhan’s 9.7 million, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that our brand recognition isn’t better than it is (despite the valiant efforts of Volvo and IKEA). What should probably be more surprising is the number of people who do know where Sweden is, like our taxi driver in Wuhan last week: “Sweden, huh? Capital is Stockholm, right? And you have a really young prime minister, with a receding hairline. I saw him on TV”.

But still. They don’t sound that similar, do they? The most classic example of Sweden/Switzerland confusion for me still has to be this conversation, which took place with a new classmate my first week at Harvard:

Classmate: Where are you from?

Me: Sweden.

Classmate: Oh, so do you speak Swiss at home then?

囧

On our way

Thursday 4 Mar 2010 by Maria | 4 Comments
Filed under: travelling in china

After a year and a half in Wuhan, I’ve now left the city that a friend a few weeks ago described as 全中国最大的农村 behind, to begin exploring some of what the rest of China has to offer. As my loyal readers know, I like Wuhan. But these past few days, the weather has been cold and rainy, and Yunnan, the first stop on our trip, is warm and sunny. Our flight to Kunming is also delayed, which Martin was sure would be the case (every single flight he has taken in China has been delayed by at least an hour, and I’ve only taken a handful of flights to or from Wuhan that have been able to keep to their schedule, maybe something to do with the all-too-common fog/smog that’s covering the city right now). And our last night here was spent in an unexpectedly sketchy hotel, where just inside the door the floor was covered with business cards with pictures of girls in various states of undress that said things like “17 to 25 years old, choose any type you want” and“青春学生” (innocent students) (we needed to catch a taxi to the airport and 6am and thought that staying somewhere on the busy street that slashes through Wuchang would make things simpler in the morning, but it’s also an area where people stand on the street corner discretely chanting 发票发票发票发票 to catch the attention of sketchy business people and government officials who want to buy fake receipts that they can cash in for reimbursements once their business trip is over, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the type of clientele the hotels there cater to is of the sketchier variety). So on the whole, while I still feel a bit sad to leave what has been my home for quite some time, it also feels good to be on the road.

Martin and I will be travelling for roughly three and a half months (which is how long we estimate our English-teaching savings will last). Rough itinerary is Yunnan – Sichuan – Tibet (if possible) – Hong Kong/Macau – Guangxi – Hunan – Shanghai – Hangzhou – Shandong – Liaoning – Beijing, then back to Wuhan for one last visit before flying home at the end of June. Where internet connections allow I’ll try to post updates and pictures to this blog. The adventure begins!

在武汉的朋友，我已经想你们了！我旅游时我们可以继续通过校内和QQ联系，估计在很多地方会有网线。我打算偶尔在这里（还是在校内和QQ空间）用汉语写一些旅游的印象。因为你们现在不在我身边帮我改对语法和词语，所以我估计会有很多错误，但是希望你们还是会看得懂！我六月份回国以前再一次回来武汉呆一两个星期，所以还是在武汉的朋友，我们可以那时候又见面。海内存知己，天涯若比邻！

Smart people

Tuesday 2 Mar 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: life in wuhan

Every time I leave a place that I’ve spent some time in, it feels as though I’m leaving just as I was really starting to get settled in — whether that’s after two months, or after a year and a half. Part of it, I think, comes from the obligatory round of final-week coffee dates, which always make you realize how amazing your friends are and how much you’re going to miss them, but only happen because of the fact that you’re about to leave.

This time around, there’s an added element of only just having settled in, in that it’s only really in the past month or so that I’ve been able to have substantive discussions in Chinese instead of in English. When the only things I could discuss in Chinese and others could discuss in English were food, weather and travel, building friendships was a much slower process. I’ve noticed in my own learning process that the more energy I’ve had to spend on thinking about how to say things, the less energy I’ve had to think about what I’m saying — and so up until now, I’ve stuck to simple, safe topics when I’ve been speaking Chinese, and on the whole most Chinese people I talk to have probably done the same when we’ve been speaking English. Maybe partly for this reason, I’ve gotten the impression during my year and a half here that Chinese people my age are generally very apolitical and relatively uninterested in social issues, since those topics never seemed to come up.

And then today, I’ve had three really interesting, several-hour-long discussions about politics, society and life, with friends who, I’m realizing, have impressively smart and thoughtful things to say. Obviously there’s sample bias — I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the people I’ve liked the most and chosen to become friends with are also people who have intelligent and thoughtful perspectives on these types of issues. In the taxi on our way home from dinner, a (Chinese) friend said that the others I had invited to the dinner were unusual among Chinese university students in terms of just how intelligently and critically they thought about these kinds of topics. So obviously there must still be a lot of people here, just as there are in every place, who care more about celebrity gossip than social justice. But now that we’re having the discussions in Chinese, I’m realizing just how many of my friends actually do care more about social justice than about celebrity gossip — which makes leaving my life here behind that much more difficult.

The common theme in the conversations was that while on one hand there are lots of social problems and a growing and worrying income gap between the haves and the have-nots, as an individual you have to find a job and find a way to pay for a home and provide for a family, and there’s nothing that one small person can do to fight strong forces in such a big country. If things get bad enough, the only feasible option is to emigrate. My opinion: China is at a crossroads, and right now it’s being decided if this will be a country where people will be left to fend for themselves (more like the US), or a country where there’s a social safety net that catches those who fall behind and gives everyone the opportunity to succeed (more like Western Europe). It’s only if you guys get angry and speak up for social justice that there’s any hope of going the route that I consider to be the better of the two. Everyone talks about stability and seems to worry that there’s a revolt brewing just below the surface, and you guys know better than I do if that’s really is a risk. But it’s at times like this that people who are brave can influence the course of history, and I think that harmony is overrated.

Goodbye flashcards

Saturday 27 Feb 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: learning chinese Tags:

I’m back in Wuhan, and I now have less than a week left before it’s time to move out of our apartment (squat toilet and no heating, but home for the past year and a half nonetheless). I’ve slowly started to pack my things, with the painful knowledge that I’ve accumulated way too much during my time here for everything to fit into my suitcase home. And at the top of the list of prized possessions that won’t make it home are the flashcards that I’ve used to learn new vocabulary words during my Chinese studies.

Flashcards: Chinese word or idiom on one side, and on the other side pinyin pronunciation on top and translation below

Using flashcards for memorization is a tool I’ve kept with me since my middle school days — they take a long time to make, but I’m a very visual learner, and I’ve found them to be a very effective tool for memorizing the thousands and thousands of characters needed for learning Chinese. I’ve made a flashcard for virtually every word or idiom I’ve learned, and the pile has grown and grown during my time here. My parents sometimes ask me how many characters I’ve learned, and to be honest, I have no idea. But I did an estimate of how many flashcards I have: around 8900. In total, they weigh 7 kg — which was what finally convinced me to leave them behind. Most words are compounds made up of two to three characters, so I’m not sure how many characters 8900 words and idioms roughly translates into (and I most certainly don’t claim to remember every single word or character that I’ve studied), but all in all, it’s a lot.

As any student of Chinese knows, learning Chinese takes a long time. For speakers of Indo-European languages, it takes much longer than learning another Indo-European language — the difference between English and Chinese is just so much bigger than the difference between, for example, English and Spanish. The US Defense Languages Institute estimates 25 weeks of full-time, high-quality teaching for English speakers to reach a level of basic communication in Group 1 languages (like Spanish, French and Swedish), while they estimate 63 weeks to reach a similar level of basic communication in Group 4 languages (which are Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic). Many before me have ranted eloquently on how difficult it is to learn Chinese (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and from a pure cost-benefit perspective, the pay-off is questionable (see here and here for more on that). (To be fair, learning English is difficult for Chinese students as well).

So on the whole, for someone coming from European languages, learning Chinese is a lot of work, maybe not the best investment of time from a pure career perspective, but incredibly interesting, and a great investment of time from a life perspective. My flashcards are my one piece of evidence of all of the hours and sweat and tears I’ve poured into this project, and when I leave those behind, I’ll have to rely entirely on my communication skills as evidence of progress… a daunting prospect. But the time has come. Flashcards, goodbye!

Ant people in the news

Tuesday 23 Feb 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: in the news Tags: , ,

I was cited recently in a Reuters article about “ant people” in China, a topic I wrote about on this blog a few weeks ago, here and here. Chinese media has covered this topic quite a bit in the past few months, and from there it has spread into English-language China blogs, both small (like mine) and big (like chinaSMACK), and then now from the blogosphere into English-language media. Interesting to see the role that blogs can play, and to be a part of the action!

Food

Tuesday 23 Feb 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: travelling in china Tags: , , , , , ,

I’m now on the last stop of my Spring Festival tour of south-west China (first Kunming, then Weiyuan/威远 in Sichuan to visit a friend and her family, and now Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to tour the city with my friend before we both return to Wuhan tomorrow). I’ve seen the Spring Festival grand performance on TV six or seven times (it’s been on constant re-run since Spring Festival Eve). I’ve lit incense at the temple to honor our ancestors, and I’ve had my fortune told by the temple nun (she thought my wish – that I want to learn Chinese – was stupid, “you can just talk to these people around you”, but my fortune was otherwise very positive, and she said that my ancestors are watching over me and making sure that things go well for me). I’ve learned to play Sichuan-style mahjong – I won 12 rmb the first evening, but then lost 20 rmb the next night, so I’m not quite ready for the big stakes just yet. When my friend’s mom plays with her friends (which they, like everyone else in Sichuan, did for a few hours every day that I was there), the tiles seem to fly back and forth across the table, and so does the money – she won 1500 rmb on Friday afternoon.

But my strongest memory of this year’s Spring Festival will most likely be the food. So much food. It seems like we’ve been eating constantly – and when I’ve been full, I’ve been urged to taste just one more thing. In China, people often show consideration for others around the table by picking the tastiest pieces out of the dishes on the table and loading them onto your plate, while urging you to eat more – which can be difficult to get used to for us foreigners, who might not like the same dishes that Chinese people consider to be the tastiest (which are usually the most rare and therefore also the most strange), and who also generally like to stop eating when we’re full. This was especially true in Kunming, where our friend’s aunt showed her hospitality by filling our plates with food, and when we had finished that, loading our plates with more and urging us to taste everything from the selection of dishes that covered the table, always enough for at least three times the size of our group. The food she cooked at home was delicious, and when we ate out it was always at very nice restaurants, but there was always so much, it was hard for my stomach to keep up. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve had rice since I left home almost two weeks ago – rice is filler food, and at every meal there’s been so much cooked food that there’s been no need (or room) for rice.

羊肉汤

In Weiyuan, my friend protected me from being forced to over-eat – she wanted me to taste all of her favorite food from her home town, so she insisted that I didn’t have to finish anything I ate. There, instead, the focus was on variety. I have now tasted cow stomach, duck throat, duck intestine, and duck tongue. Yesterday morning we left home at 6 am to have time for sheep soup before our bus to Chengdu, a soup boiled from sheep everything (stomach, intestines, skull) from which I managed to choose mostly only meat pieces from the soup and hide the sheep blood pudding under my rice. We had the soup with plum wine, “to warm us up”. I soon learned not to ask until after I had finished eating what it was I had just eaten, and sometime it wasn’t as bad as I thought (thick rice noodles), sometimes it was (pig’s ears). To be fair, most organs were perfectly edible, but it’s hard to get used to the consistency of stomach and tongue, let alone the thought of what it was I was eating. I’ve definitely broadened my food horizons on this trip.

People also have a tendency to notice which dishes you eat from the most, or which dishes you praise the most, and then see to it that those dishes magically appear again at the next meal, which really is very considerate. Our last evening in Weiyuan, we had hot pot, and the person sitting to my right, one of my friend’s high school classmates, must have noticed that I preferred to eat the meat pieces from the pot, while everyone else around the table clearly liked stomach, intestines, throat and tongue the best. When he fished around for the cooked food at the bottom of the pot, he picked out a piece of duck’s throat for the person to his right, something suspicious-looking for himself, and a piece of meat for me, to my great relief. Sometimes people say that Chinese people show emotions more through actions than words, and food definitely seems to be one way to show care and consideration.

In Weiyuan, my friend also made sure that I tasted as many of their local snacks as possible, which she insisted I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else in China (at least not with the same flavor) – most of our schedule for the three days I was there was planned around fitting in as much food as possible. I gave up early on trying to remember the names of everything I was eating. Since this is Sichuan, a lot of it was spicy (tofu with rice and a spicy sauce; spicy cold rice noodles; spicy cold egg noodles; something that looked like ravioli in a spicy soup), but there were also things that were sweet (my favorite was a snack that looked like a small pancake, with lots of different options for fillings, including chocolate; another good one was a brown cold soup with a type of noodle that looked a little bit like shrimp; raw sugar cane was peeled, chopped up and sold as a snack on the street; and all of the tea houses had a type of chrysanthemum tea with red dates, goji berries, and pieces of raw sugar cane). And then here in Chengdu, we’ve done the same thing with Chengdu food. We had lunch (which consisted of what must have been at least ten different kinds of local snacks) today at a food-court style restaurant that she said a friend of hers from Taipei flies to Chengdu specifically to eat at, and he then flies back when he’s finished his meal.

My friend's mother, shopping for Chinese medicine

And to top it all off, my friend’s mother sent me off with a huge bag filled with home-cooked meats and sausages, typical Weiyuan snacks, apples for the road, and a bag of Chinese medicine that I’m to boil and drink at the start of next year’s winter to build up my immune system. I thought that my bags coming home (with presents unloaded – the bottle of Absolut I brought seemed very popular with her parents) would be lighter than when I set off a week and a half ago, but now instead I’m coming back with overfilled luggage and more food than I can possible finish. Anyone hungry?

Incense

Sunday 21 Feb 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: photography Tags: , , ,

Incense burning in front of a temple in Chengdu

新年快乐！

Tuesday 16 Feb 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: travelling in china Tags: , , , , ,

The year of the tiger has arrived, and Martin and I are celebrating Chinese New Year in Kunming with a Chinese friend of Martin’s from university, who is back in China to spend Spring Festival with her family. We left Wuhan a few days ago, amid sub-zero temperatures, closed-up shop fronts and a seemingly non-stop salvo of firecrackers bombarding the neighborhood, and arrived in Kunming, known as the “city of eternal spring”, a place that seems like paradise in comparison. It’s very clear that they’ve decided tourism is the way to go here – apparently the old paper factories that used to cover the city in smog and pollute the lake have all been moved, and lots of money has been poured into building wide streets and an impressively walkable city-center, which includes a network of tourist-friendly pedestrian streets with shops and restaurants. Kunming apparently also has wonderful weather all year round, and Yunnan is filled with culture and delicious food. I’m still loyal to Wuhan, but I have to admit that Kunming is probably the most pleasant city I’ve been to in China.

The positive impression is also colored by the fact that thanks to our friend, we’ve been getting VIP treatment since the moment we stepped off the plane. On our first afternoon, we were taken to the “Yunnan Nationalities Village”, a theme park for displaying the cultures of the different minority groups that live in Yunnan (as well as elephants). Our friend’s father knows the manager of the park, and after being dropped off just inside one of the side entrances to the park, the manager personally welcomed us, and then handed us over to a guide who first brought us to the park restaurant for a very fancy lunch and then showed us around the park. We were driven around in a park-style golf cart, and the guide made sure that we made it to each part of the park just in time for each of the different dance performances. In the evening, the park held its yearly Spring Festival dinner for its employees and a few specially-invited local officials, and we were invited to join the dinner and observe the festivities. So all in all, a very VIP tour of the park.

A replica of Xishuangbanna's Manfeilong pagoda

I have to admit, I was fairly sceptical of the idea of a “minorities theme park”, it sounds suspiciously like a “minorities zoo”. The park itself was actually built in a fairly tasteful way, with beautiful replicas of important sites in Yunnan and examples of the types of houses that different minority groups in Yunnan have traditionally lived in (in that way, it was a little bit similar to Skansen in Stockholm, which does the same thing for traditional Swedish culture). In each “village” inside the park, there were also performances of traditional cultural dances, performed by park employees from those minority groups, which was also interesting to see and done in both a tasteful and entertaining way.

A performer climbs a ladder made of swords

But then there were also a few people who seemed to be hired just to be there, as a part of the scenery, in more of a zoo-type way. In one of the “villages”, an old woman with a tattooed face (typical for one of the minority groups in Yunnan)  walked around among the houses. Our guide thought we should have our picture taken with her, but the woman objected, and told the guide that she didn’t like foreigners because once during the Water Splashing Festival, some foreigners called her names and attacked her with water guns. We insisted that we didn’t need a picture, but the guide convinced the woman that we were friendly foreigners, and in the end we all took a group photo together. I assume that all of the people who work at the park have chosen to do so because the pay and/or conditions are better than their other options, but walking around a park to “look at” minorities still feels very awkward.

The front of the church, with the altar labelled "altar" in Chinese, and Christmas trees on either side

There’s also apparently a minority group in Yunnan that practices Christianity, and to display that group’s culture, the park had built a small replica of a church, complete with wall murals, an altar, and choir music playing in the background, and everything inside labelled and explained. As someone who has grown up in countries where Christianity is mainly seen as a religion rather than as a cultural curiosity, it was a bit surreal to see a church in the park alongside everything else. But it put the whole park into good perspective, and in a way made me feel like at least the cultural voyeurism was taking place on slightly more even terms.

The text reads: The religion, which worships Jesus Christ the Savior, believes in that God created and rules over everything on earth, and takes the Old Testament and the New Testament as its Holy Bible, has given birth to three major sects of the Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Eastern Church and the Protestantism, and churches are the public venues where its disciples worship the God. Catholicism and Christianity propagated to Yunnan's minority-inhabited areas over a century ago, and have sizeable numbers among the Miao, Yi, Nu, Lisu and Lahu minority people. To objectively portray this religious folk culture, a Christian church is built in the Miao Village.

On Spring Festival Eve, we walked around on Kunming’s West Mountain, fed seagulls by the side of the lake (apparently the thing to do here, they sell some sort of seagull food on the sidewalk), had a big family dinner at a golf club in Kunming, and then went home to watch the Spring Festival show on TV (there was singing, dancing, magic and comedy – other than the magic, a skit with a hysterically laughing woman with a recent face-lift was by far the most popular among the non-Chinese speakers in our audience, trans-cultural humor). Humor can usually be tough to learn in a new language, so I was especially proud when I got some of the jokes in the very first skit, references to popular online phrases this year. The time I’ve spent “studying” online has been rewarded.

Reflected lights

Thursday 11 Feb 2010 by Maria | No Comments
Filed under: photography Tags: , ,

Seen through the glass wall of a Starbucks in Kowloon, Hong Kong

« Older Entries