Not China-related: Obama for Obama!

Yimei just shared an amazing photojournalism site with me.  I thought this one was pretty cool: Obama for Obama!!  For the record, this is NOT how you should decide in an election where you can actually vote. 

Otherwise, this has been a good week, though with little that is particularly striking.  Been going to class and having great times and nice conversations, and progressing some on everything but writing (I'm not going to be able to write in Chinese for a few more years, if ever).  Then hanging out with friends!  This has gotten much more common over the last few weeks, which I am very thankful for, though I wish I could have done it sooner.  But I'm seeing a pretty nice section of Kunming life, or at least Kunming expat life.  From my host family and their buds, to Chinese students at my institute (mostly studying languages and language-teaching, with plans to study abroad in Thailand or Oklahoma) to lots of people from SE Asia here on scholarship, many of whom speak incredible Chinese (Thais especially for some reason, plus they speak good English, and sometime Korean, or French, or.. ), to my old classmates, who I now talk to in a mix of pidgin English and two-month-level Chinese.  

Then there are other Americans and Europeans, like the people at frisbee (though this is changing: we now have a bunch of Chinese players who started watching and got intrigued!  One day Kunming will be the leader of an All-China Ultimate League :-), and finally I've spent some time with the established Kunming Laowai, people who came here and have set up businesses and created lives.  I ran into the people who are sort of employing me the other day, and had a drink with them and the owner of a couple restaurants in town.  That was really interesting--he has an incredible Indian place along with a pub/library, plus he does runs into Laos to 'import' Beer Lao, which is widely known among expats for being waaay better than anything local (I liked it ok, but my beer palate is not particularly experienced).  It was sort of interesting to see how people adjust to this place long-term, and I'm curious to know how they end up here--was it some sort of plan, or were they just hanging around for a while and finally decided the hostel was getting old?  I definitely am impressed at the sort of hodge-podge of work that most people undertake: my employers, for example, run the GoKunming website as well as two or three others (China City Listings! Check it out!).  Then they work for Fodor's Guidebooks, keeping the chapters on SW China up to date.  And they do some consulting work for right now the China Economic Quarterly.  Plus they've been in several movies, frequently getting their brains blasted all over the TV. Basically if something comes up that looks sort of cool, they jump on it, even if it's different from anything they've ever done.  I kind of like that style.  It works is that the pool of capable people who are native speakers of English and also can get by in Chinese is pretty tiny here, especially people who are here long term and have free time.  But the random stuff it's possible to find doesn't pay on the order of first-world jobs, so you have to take whatever you can get. 

Beyond that, I'm reading a lot and relaxing some.  Not a bad time at all. 

Big Macs and late night wanderings

So this evening I met up with a guy who shared a room with us in Shangri-La.  He's on his 4th month out of six, and has been for quite the ride: started in Western Europe, made his way over to Russia and then across the Trans-Siberian Railway to Ulaanbaator, from there through China, and now tomorrow onto Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia before flying home from Singapore in December.  So that's cool, and it was fun to talk to him again, but it also furnished some new Kunming experiences:

1). We ate at McDonalds!! I normally don't really go for the "I've been out of the country for sooo long; I need a Big Mac now!" type thing, but his mind was made up--supposedly no McD's in Vietnam--and I have to admit that it tasted pretty good.  I'm not actually sure if I've ever had a Big Mac at home, but burger, fries, and coke were all welcome here.  And eating all of this sitting on the second floor of an absolutely franchised McDonalds, looking out over the downtown walking district with all of its neon signs and talking with this friend from New York was pretty surreal; I felt like I was in some random modern American city.  Globalization.....

2). I have to mention this because I'm an economics student: Big Mac Index!!!  And I can confirm that in real life, I paid 22 kuai for a Super Sized (well, not really by US standards, thank goodness) Big Mac Meal.  By nominal exchange rates, that's just under $3.  I'm having trouble finding American prices online now (probably because they vary from state to state), but next time you visit the Golden Arches you can see for yourself if the Yuan is as undervalued as everybody likes to claim (if it's undervalued relative to the dollar, the Big Mac will be cheaper--in dollars--here than at home.  In a perfectly 'flat' world, the Big Macs would cost the same everywhere, since they're more or less identical no matter which country they're produced and consumed in.  If currencies are all valued 'correctly,' a given amount of money in one currency should always buy the same amount of stuff as its equivalent in another currency, since they're worth the same amount.  But in real life things don't always work like that.. ).

3).  After an interlude of ping pong and movie, I ended up walking home pretty late at night (why I'm still up writing this even though I have class in 7 hrs).  That was a sort of good experience: I was kind of nervous, but even at midnight there was lots of activity on the streets (more than any American city during the day, hah), and tons of policeman on almost every corner.

4). However, when I got to my university, I found the gate closed and locked!! Aaaahh!!  Luckily, that was only the main one; they have an interesting system of locking some gates, keeping attendants at others, and leaving still others wide open.  Whatever works, I guess.  After some scared wanderings, I called my host dad and he came to get me (felt bad about this, esp since he tipped a guard on the way back). So everything worked out ok, but I think the lesson is to check the curfew before you leave in the future.

Waiguo Ren

So in the past couple of weeks I’ve spent a fair amount of time with various segments of the foreigner population of Kunming (this has been to some extent by design: since I’m living with a family and taking one-on-one classes, finding people to hang out with when I want to be able to understand requires a fair amount of effort. It’s actually a lot harder than I expected--I think that unless they have some context with you, people here don’t like to make new Western friends. This has been documented, and it’s legit—that’s not why you come to China. But it’s frustrating for me looking for anyone who will speak English to me without furtively looking around for other more interesting people. Part of that is probably me being shy, but there’s definitely no acknowledgment if you walk by somebody, and most of the conversations I’ve had have yielded zero desire for continuation on the part of the other party. Both of these are definitely more negative here than in the US, which is discouraging).

There are a lot of waiguo ren around—1800+ are registered on GoKunming (an amazing, amazing resource for living here), and those are only people who speak English and want to use discussion boards. The basic overview is that most people are single and under 35. They’re split between students, who are normally here for about a year specifically to study, and what I’m going to call ‘lifers’ who have been around for a long time and don’t have definite plans for return. They seem to find work here and there, some translating, some teaching English, lots working for NGO’s that help relieve rural minority poverty, and some doing various sorts of businessy stuff. I don’t think there’s any really high powered businesspeople like in Shanghai or Hong Kong because this is Kunming, which doesn’t have exactly the same potential for monetary gain. Then there’s a few older couples who have come here to take breaks from life or to teach English or to live cheaply. Countrywise, I haven’t seen very many Latinos or South Asians and only a few Africans, but other than that there’s a good spread. Some more specific notes:

--Community centers. It’s funny because there’s one road that has all the foreign establishments (turning onto it, the ratio jumps from about 1/500 to 1/3), but to a large extent each country has its own restaurant. So there’s Salvador’s, which is run by Americans and has amazing ice cream and apparently cheeseburgers and lots of friendly outgoing people who speak English as their native language—the first time I went there I got into a conversation with possibly the most stereotypical American I’ve ever met. He was from California, worked in the movie business, and had a jovial, prosperous, straightforward manner that I think could be termed Reaganesque. This was notable because I didn’t have to initiate the conversation, and it lasted longer than it took for him to quickly chug his drink and move on (see above). Then two doors up there’s a pizza place owned by Italians, and around the corner there’s the French Café, where I do hear actual French spoken whenever I walk by, and further on there’s the Prague Café. There are also a few Indian restaurants, though that’s one ethnicity that I haven’t seen around very much, and several Korean restaurants. It’s nice, though, because even on foreigner street most of the restaurants are interspersed with Chinese restaurants, and at night there’s a fair amount of exchange among all of them.

--Sort of along the same lines, I’m impressed at the extent to which groups form of very similar foreigners. There’s some overlap among classmates, since that’s not done by nationality or anything, but once class is over people split into national groups. Not surprising with the other Asians, who want to talk to people they can understand, but I’ve also seen groups of for example Eastern Europeans talking to each other in English. Interesting. Then there’s the longer-term expats who I think are grouped by when they arrived—when I went to learn about my internship (which I haven’t been to for a week..oops..) I ended up spending time with the owner of the company (which has six employees) and his friends. They came from all over the English-speaking world and Western Europe, but had all been in Kunming for several years and China total for about 10. My favorite example of this is the Ultimate Frisbee group, which except for the one Chinese guy who set up the thing is basically composed of people who have graduated from liberal arts colleges within the last three years (seriously: Macalester, Whitman, Oberlin, Georgetown, Emory [ok, last two not quite, but still], Earlham, Swat. I think those are all the schools that have been named).

--Other thing that I’m realizing but can’t really comment on: it’s definitely a very different experience being a foreigner here and being a black foreigner here. I think there are six black people in this city: one of them is my friend, from Zambia, and the other five go to Yunnan Da Xue (the other university). I went exploring with my friend Chiyombwe last week and we got several looks and points a minute. I don’t get any reaction at all when I’m walking around alone.

The Rise of English

The other big observation about classes so far is that it’s funny because though a lot of the students are from various parts of Asia (this university is a target school for teaching Chinese to SE Asia, since we’re so close), the teachers all speak Chinese and English. So when the class doesn’t get something, they say it in English and all the Americans and Europeans nod, while the rest of the class isn’t much better off. This fits with the fact that as a country, China is totally into English, to the exclusion of every other language on the planet as far as I can tell. ALL the kids take English in high school; ALL the infrastructure is labeled in English as well as Chinese (except for some road signs, which gave me trouble on my first walk); there’s an entire China Central TV Channel devoted solely to English, the only non-Chinese programming I’ve seen yet, despite the fact that this province alone has 50 different minority groups, most here for centuries, who presumably have at least a few languages among them; and most books and newspapers have titles in English as well as Chinese (I can’t decide if I like this or not: on the one hand it’s nice to have some idea of what’s going on, but on the other I keep getting my hopes up at the sight of some letters I recognize, hoping I’ll be able to learn something, only to find nothing but hanzi for the next 200 pages). This is probably the right call—English is the world’s language, period—and they’re definitely making themselves more right by insuring that another billion-plus people speak it as their second language (I’ve read that the number of people studying English in China is greater than the number of native speakers of it in the world. That might be exaggerated, but not by much, and it gets the scale of this across pretty well), but I’m not totally sure how I feel about it. One it means that traveling in China as an English speaker is categorically different from and much, much easier than doing so speaking some other language (Social justice types: Discuss! Is this fair/just/avoidable?), and two it seems a kind of depressing premonition of the end of linguistic diversity. After watching The Linguists and Wade Davis’s TED talk (this is worth watching if only for the last two minutes, when he tells the story about the shit knife), that’s something that I’d like to avoid, but I really don’t see much of a way out of it. The difference between knowing English and Croatian, or Spanish and Mam, or Chinese and Naxi is so huge that there’s virtually no reason anyone would choose to study that latter three, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not beautiful ways of communicating and valuable lenses through which to view the world.

Some thoughts so far

So in the attempt to create more, smaller posts I decided to separate my narrative posts from my observation ones. They're still both pretty long, though. Here's some thoughts on life in general so far:

--Living somewhere without language. This has been less of an issue than you would imagine. I think the key thing is to have somebody who’s literate and fluent and is on your side. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand them either, just that they’re there to rescue you if you screw up and point you around if you need guidance. Otherwise, most day-to-day activities can be accomplished without words at all. In most cases—stores, banks, restaurants—both parties know the ritual well enough that you don’t need to explain anything. That’s sort of cool, actually. The one big problem with being mute is feeling isolated, which I’m not enjoying very much at all. But I think that kind of comes with the territory, and writing this blog helps with it. Why I’m eager for lessons to start.

--Along the lines of being lonely, I’ve had a lot of awkward encounters with other waiguo ren (‘outside country people’). There are quite a few who hang around the school building, and a fair number were at the temple today. I’m never quite sure how to act: on the one hand, I came to Kunming in part because I wanted to avoid the huge numbers of Westerners who go to places like Beijing and Shanghai (admittedly, I didn’t take this as far as I could have, since Kunming is still sort of a destination or at least a transfer point for lots of nearby destinations. That’s why I’m in this beautiful place instead of some polluted, stifling city in the interior), but on the other, some company would be nice right now! Though if the only thing we have in common is that we both stand out like sore thumbs, is that enough? For the moment I’ve sort of settled on a nod, somewhat more pronounced than what I give to Chinese people but not exactly a loving embrace. I still haven’t had a real exchange with any of them, which I think needs to end soon. But I suspect they’re having the same thoughts I am, because they’re not exactly jumping out at me either, and several of the ones I’ve seen speak pretty good Chinese (I assume, sigh).

--People here speak English. Not great English—they’d be discriminated against at home—but understandable, coherent English. I think almost every single person under about 30 is totally capable of carrying a conversation with me, with some effort but still. I was at the temple this afternoon, probably the single most non-Western place I’ve ever been, and a girl comes up and starts talking: “ Do you know why we have all the fish and turtles in the pond? It’s to symbolize long life.” NOT great for the self-esteem. And actually I’m realizing that I’m pretty lucky that my host parents don’t speak it; if I were staying with a college student I doubt I’d have learned anything up till now.

--As of this evening, I've been in China for exactly one week. That seems like the biggest understatement ever. It feels like I've been in Kunming alone for at least 2-3 weeks, with maybe 10 days more in Shanghai. Wish I could learn to adjust my perceptions like this at Swat!