From an ancient Chinese village

From an ancient Chinese village

Sinoblog 5 - There are a billion more stories like these

Apparently Typhoon Raninam hit Zhejiang province about as badly as Charley hit Florida - worst in 48 years, they say. The Nanxi River, as seen in nice peaceful pictures in this account, rose five feet in the wide spots. The gorges in the pictures must have had incredible white-water flooding.

 

In the end, of course, it's the people you remember, and pictures of them are more fun than pictures of buildings. I've run into a few:

 

My interpreter for an evening speech I gave to about 30 Chinese government workers who have travel orders to the United States. Unfortunately they don't speak a word of English, but fortunately she's a very good interpreter (I'm pretty sure - they laughed at the right places), but unfortunately she was also in charge of the circuit breakers, and unfortunately they tripped, so she headed on off to tend to them, leaving me to entertain an audience of 30 who speak no English (comma here?) in pitch darkness. I think this qualifies as a public-speaking challenge - best solution gets leftover Chinese small change.

 

The woman I saw crossing the street with a small girl. Nothing particularly unusual except that she had an IV plugged into her right arm and was holding the IV jar nice and high with her left hand as they walked along.

 

The beggars. Do you give to the pushy ones who follow you and tap you, or the passive ones who just sit there with their begging bowls, or both, or neither? Take a look at them before you say not to bother.

 

The students who sit in front and try very hard, and the ones who sit in back and simply will not stop talking.

 

The old lady and the flag. The typhoon fringe knocked down a flagpole on the sports field outside my window. The Chinese flag lay there in a puddle for two days as all the young basketball players walked past. Finally an old lady and a young boy came out and spent a long time gradually working it free, rolled it up carefully, and exited stage right.  The pole's still lying there.

 

The old man walking down the crowded shopping street with a big live turtle by the tail. Turtles can really wriggle.  

 

The old man who followed me two blocks on a hot day. It turned out he was hoping I'd give him my water bottle when I finished it, instead of throwing it away.

 

Travel is broadening, and travel to a country in such different circumstances than the U.S. stretches your thinking, and like other stretching exercises isn't always fun. If it improves your imagination or understanding, though, it can make you better at teaching or whatever you do. I'm going home to try it.

 

 

You can see the traditional housing and the new high-rise, and also the late-20th century block style

Some of the new construction strikes me as monumental in style as well as in size.

SINOBLOG 4: CHINESE TRAFFIC RECONSIDERED

It's common for visitors to speak of Chinese traffic as "chaotic", with no rules. Certainly it's a challenge for a visitor to reach the other side of the street alive. At the same time, there's a big difference between chaos, with no patterns, and patterns which we may not see at first.

 

George, smarter than Dad like his siblings but too polite to point it out, drew my attention to the online article "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?", by Linda Baker, on Salon.com. Ms. Baker spent time in Suzhou, a couple of hundred miles up the road from here in Wenzhou, and her description of traffic there fits very well with what I see. She makes a simple point: in a week, she saw no accidents at all, despite endless violations of what we think of as the rules of the road. If there were real chaos, China could abandon the one-child policy because every urban intersection would steadily lower the population.

 

Apparently a new wave of thought in traffic engineering suggests REMOVING many of the barriers and rules, on the ground that people often focus too much on the rules and too little on the real traffic situation. The human body, it's suggested, has evolved to have reactions fitting speeds up to about 20 mph, and urban traffic moves at about that speed. Chinese intersections may be more efficient, in terms of moving pedestrians, engine-powered vehicles, and people-powered vehicles through them because they intertwine in ways that make Americans crazy but are locally well-understood. For example, you adjust speed to people in the road, not a speed limit.

 

I thought about this as I walked back from the bus stop, and have several observations:

 

1) With all the movement and intertwining and close proximity, no one seemed angry. Whatever is happening is accepted, and everyone automatically takes into account not only competing road users but their directions and speeds.

 

2) Some of the rules are unfamiliar, but are still rules. One part of the traffic light cyle stops all straight-through traffic but allows more turns. For example, straight-through traffic is stopped in all four directions, right turns are permitted from all four directions, AND left turns are simultaneously allowed from, say, eastbound turning north and westbound turning south. Some merging is needed, but no one crosses anyone else's path.

 

3) The trick is to go with the flow. I try to cross with groups of local pedestrians, staying downstream from the main body and listening for any screeches, honking, or sickening thuds, but the pedestrians pick their way through, deciding which speeding cars to let through and which to step in front of. If you try to increase safety by increasing your speed of crossing, you interfere with the flow and get a definite brushback. 

 

4) If you stop to watch an intersection, traffic will stop and watch you. A dozen bicyclists will look at the crazy foreigner looking at the road.

 

All this is kind of satisfying for an economist trained to think of thousands of microdecisions creating a more efficient system than any authority could design, and I concur with Ms. Baker that there seem to be few accidents (I did encounter a motorcycle-pedicab bang, from which apparently all parties resumed travel once the Pedicab ad been turned right side up again). The multiple uses of road and sidewalk space (including shopkeepers' siestas and dinners) are consistent with housing space being relatively scarce and valuable.

 

On the other hand, I still see very young children with heavy bandages and casts, and I still notice the child standing on the floor of the scooter as Mom or Dad weaves through traffic. That traffic is still extremely varied, with real questions of compatibility. This week's strangest was a Pedicab train - you put the front wheel in the seat of another one and pull them both, and we passed a procession of thirty-eight, all towed by one slow truck.       

With Cynthia, our expert liaison from Wenzhou University, on the river

Living Room - Map of China a bonus

The water machine - hot and cold potable water - makes regular cooking possible

Rafting the Nanxi

DCP_0952
Originally uploaded by sinoblog.

Drifting down the current is great relaxation. The boatman has less fun poling back upstream.

Sinoblog 3

Chinese Weddings

 

It was a special honor to be invited to the wedding dinner for the sister of our Wenzhou liaison person. The wedding itself is private - immediate family - but followed by a ride to the hotel, greeting by a very active dragon with fireworks and a really elegant Chinese banquet (a succession of 15-20 dishes including fish, shrimp, lobster, crab, and oyster), with the bride (in beautiful white, then red, then blue gowns) and groom going around to each table for a jolly toast and passing out small gifts to all the guests. Dress is informal - the bridegroom and the two of us had the only three neckties - but there's no doubt about the warmth and enthusiasm of the whole group. This one may be a little hard to reciprocate when Wenzhou people come to Michigan. 

Old canals reflect very new buildings

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Originally uploaded by sinoblog.

Old and new architecture is mixed throughout Wenzhou.

sinoblog entry

Sinoblog 2 Spreading Wisdom and Truth

Now we are into the process of explaining the U.S. system. There may be one or two gaps remaining, according to the results of the first test. The mysteries of the Electoral College remain elusive, but I think they've got the idea not to be surprised at anything that happens this November.

For the most ambitious, I pointed out that the Senate has six-year terms, so that not all will face elections this fall.

Test question: Why will some U.S. politicians not face election this fall?

Sample Answers: They are not old enough.

They have no money.

They have not enough IQ.

They are in prison.

I've noted before that China seems to be building the twenty-first century directly on top of the nineteenth. The construction business continues to thrive - a half-finished 17-story building I saw last year, on which construction was halted when the company ran out of money, has disappeared completely, but two twenty-story replacements are well under way.

Perhaps the most disturbing part, at least from this visitor's point of view, is the children in the road. I was in a taxi, doing the usual 50 down a city street with three lanes each way, when a girl about four years old showed up dead ahead. We dodged her, but where were her parents? She was crossing alone. Even younger children were squatting on country roads as we went barreling past at 60 or 70. Maybe cars have been spreading faster than a grasp of the damage they can do. There's no question that parts of this country, especially on the east coast, are changing, and even progressive social change can leave a lot of victims.

Ferryboat down the Nanxi

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Originally uploaded by sinoblog.

This really is the only way to get there, apart from swimming - which our driver proceeded to do.

Rock Formations up the Nanxi

DCP_0944
Originally uploaded by sinoblog.

This is part of the gorges we hiked through.

Sinoblog 1- All right so far

July 31, 2004 -

 

Getting to China isn't easy, but I'm very proud of my brainstorm - the last 5 rows on a 747, where the fuselage narrows, have 2-4-2 instead of 3-4-3 seating, so my colleague and I could have a window seat and an aisle seat with no middle seat, and there's a nice roomy gap between the seat and the window.Being in row 63, we had about 20 minutes waiting to deplane in Tokyo to reflect on how great this was.

 

The people here couldn't be nicer, with or without electricity (17-hour failure on Friday). We just took a trip up the Nanxi River and came back down; 2-3 mile hike along the river through incredible gorges - a couple of boat rides where they just couldn't get a walkway in - followed by a visit to a 12th-century village, including a demonstration of the traditional wedding. The bride was a beautiful actress - with the costumes, it carried me back to  Harold and Soyoung's wedding - while the role of the groom was handed to someone in the audience.

 

Rafting along more of the Nanxi, with the raft a tad unstable - for some reason I got the blame - followed by paddling and return. It makes it easy to forget I actuallycame here to perform work, but I think that'll go well. Teaching starts Tuesday.In general, we're off to a much quicker start than last year, since I had a good idea just what I needed for the apartment. I also remembered where to find Pizza Hut, the Chinese English-language TV channel is now available in Wenzhou, the bed is softer with an air pad, and the taxi drivers actually understand where I want to go.  

 

Next: Explain, in simple English, how the Americans pick a President. Wish me luck.