Mourning the victims of the earthquake

Fundraising events happened in many places last weekend and messages are going out to people here through e-mail and on the television, soliciting money, clothing, and medical supplies. We had an assembly today after lunch to learn about the three days of national mourning and the fundraising efforts by the school. Flags will fly at half-mast for the next three days.

At 2:28 p.m., seven days after the earthquake struck, everyone stood in silence for three minutes to commemorate the lives lost. All we could hear were police sirens could be heard down the road. It was a powerful moment as I closed my eyes and imagined being in a school like mine when it suddenly collapses into a heap of rubble from an earthquake. One-fifth of humanity stood still for those three minutes.

A brief trip

The whole school went on a field trip on Wednesday and Thursday of this past week. I found out on Monday that it was finalized and would take up two whole days. I spent both days in Shanghai with Soma, the Korean teacher who teaches Chinese to the little kids and to me. He’s the only other young male teacher at the school and I practice spoken Chinese with him. I got to know him better over two days spent walking around the city - it turns out he’s half Taiwanese and speaks Chinese fluently because he studied in Taiwan and at a Chinese school in Korea. He then studied English at a university in Korea and for two years in New Jersey, so he also speaks English really well.

I bought a Chinese-English dictionary and some food (really good bread and a bag of German granola). I went back to the Yu Yuan Garden area and tried a new food – the “xiao long bao” from a restaurant that is supposed to serve the best xiao long bao in the world. Some say there’s a better xiao long bao at a famous restaurant in Taipei, but these little pork and soup dumplings are originally from Shanghai and given the long line that is always outside the take-out window, I’d say this place’s dumplings are without equal. They were really damn good and eating them next to the garden’s goldfish pond ringed with neon lights was perfect.

I went to two new museums. One was a contemporary art museum on the Bund. It was somewhat bare and had two odd exhibits – one with images of giant balloons in places around the city, including one in the museum, and a circle of video monitors showing people crawling from screen to screen in a continuous loop.

The other museum was at the Oriental Pearl TV tower, which I had never visited before. We went inside the base of the tower to visit a historical museum and skipped the overpriced trip up to the higher levels. The museum was cooler than I expected. It had a lot of old things like cars, local goods, and stones and signs that used to mark the boundaries of the foreign concessions. Much of the museum was recreations of different shops and street scenes with wax statues, which doesn’t always look great but the glimpse into each stage of the city’s history was really interesting. When we left and took the metro to the other side of the river I recognized a few names of famous places on the subway map and saw a couple of the historical buildings that we saw scale models of.

Behind all the new towers and shopping malls in the city lies a fascinating history of the rise, fall, and second rise of a huge city. It was once a small, overlooked fishing town on the Huangpu River known by some as “little Suzhou.” Since the economic reforms 30 years ago, it has became the dominant port in eastern China and now has about 20 million people (many times more than Suzhou) and is the center of China’s fashion, media, and financial industries. In between were some opium wars, rebellions, and a revolution.

And the last new thing I did was to ride the ferry across the river. I didn’t even know there was a ferry, only tour boats, until my Chinese friend pointed it out a few weeks ago. It cheap and quick – only 0.5 yuan and no more than five minutes to get across – and riding along with a bunch of crusty old Chinese guys and young delivery boys on motorcycles and was fun.

Pictures from the two days are online.

Infrastructure boom

There have been a couple recent additions to China’s rapidly expanding infrastructure. The largest building in the world is Beijing’s new airport terminal, which opened in February.

Besides the new airport terminal, “China is home … to the world’s largest shopping mall (the seven-million-square-foot South China Mall); the longest sea-crossing bridge (it stretches 36 kilometers, or about 22 miles, over part of the East China Sea); the largest hydroelectric dam (the Three Gorges project); and the highest railway (an engineering marvel that crosses the Tibetan permafrost 16,000 feet above sea level, the so-called roof of the world).”

The bridge mentioned in the article was the lead story in newspapers a couple weeks ago after it opened on May 1st. It stretches 36 kilometers across Hangzhou Bay, connecting Shanghai with the port city of Ningbo to the south. The two cities, by the way, are the first and fifth largest ports in the world, respectively, as measured by tons of cargo.

Before the bridge was built, the cities were four hours apart by train or bus, but now the trips is only 80 km instead of the 400 km route around Hangzhou Bay. The quicker travel time was not fully realized at first, however, as the bridge was inundated with private cars over the holiday weekend and traffic slowed significantly as people stopped on the bridge to take pictures (only in China!).

These marquee projects are just the surface of China’s extensive infrastructure building. New transportation links are going up everywhere. It’s hard to believe how much Taicang, Changzhou, and Shanghai have visibly changed in the nearly nine months that I have been here (not just the new buildings, but all of the smooth, wide new streets with bike lanes are really nice). Likewise, it is simply hard to imagine the challenges of modernizing a country of 1.3 billion people and the construction required to drive (and keep up with) annual economic growth of 10%.

Although a lot of it is shoddy and hastily built (the walls in the brand-new dorm and recently built apartment are already falling apart), the large projects are certainly world-class. In a survey of airports that I saw somewhere last year ranked many Asian airports near the top (Hong Kong's and Singapore's were #1 and 2). Meanwhile, bridges in the U.S. are falling apart, airports are deteriorating and our rail system is neglected.

Earthquake

The death toll continues to rise as rescuers search through the thousands and thousands of buildings that collapsed during the earthquake on Monday. More than 13,000 people were killed and yet another 18,000 are still buried. Nearly 2,000 students and teachers perished when their school buildings collapsed. It is the deadliest natural disaster in the country since an earthquake in 1976 killed over 240,000 people. I was unaware of this earthquake 32 years ago, even though it was the deadliest earthquake in modern history.

It has been a tumultuous and emotional year in China so far. A severe winter storm hit in January, riots in March, Olympics torch protests in the last two months, and now a deadly earthquake. The despair that was felt over Yao Ming’s foot injury a few weeks ago that ended his NBA season seems like an insignificant setback now.

Life is fragile and wholly unpredictable. I cannot imagine suddenly losing an entire school or office building full of people. My heart goes out to the people that lost loved ones in the earthquake.

Good news and bad news

A strong sense of nationalism among the Han Chinese has surfaced in many ways recently. Supporters of Tibet are challenged, such as an incident at the University of Southern California, where Chinese students shouted down a Tibetan monk who came to speak, and recently a boycott has been organized in China against French retailers like Carrefour and Louis Vuitton after French President Sarkozy pledged to boycott the Olympics. And of course, there are the CNN boycotts that I mentioned earlier and the counterprotests at the torch relays in San Francisco, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.

I have started to notice some people wearing “I love China” T-shirts. More specifically, the shirts say “I [heart] China” next to a map of a red China that includes Taiwan.

While the nationalism seems out of hand at times, the government is showing signs of increasing multilateralism and open diplomacy.

The Chinese President Hu Jintao traveled to Japan recently to meet with the Japanese prime minister, which is the first such meeting in a decade.

In addition, the first high-level meeting between the governments of China and Taiwan since 1949 took place last month.

Chinese officials and representatives of the Dalai Lama also meet recently, though little was resolved regarding the spring riots.

Maybe the Olympics and the heightened attention on China this year are helping to persuade the government to initiate more dialogue with their adversarial neighbors.

And in case you haven’t heard about it already, there was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in the western Sichuan province. It happened in the middle of the afternoon today and was supposedly felt in Shanghai, but I didn’t sense anything here; it’s maybe one thousand miles away from me. It’s still too early to know how bad it was. I thought only the islands of Taiwan and Japan were at risk of earthquakes.

Cell phone spam

I had never once received spam text messages on my cell phone in the United States but I get about 5-10 spam messages a week on my phone here. I couldn’t tell you what the messages say exactly, but I know they are trying to sell something because most messages include numbers and the yuan symbol “元”. I’m not surprised that it is common in China, because cell phones are more important as a means of communication and accessing information than are landlines, e-mail, and the Internet via personal computers. So naturally, text message spam is more common than telemarketers or e-mail spam. Other than ads on the buildings and billboards, text messages are the most common form of advertisement that I come into contact with. I don’t watch TV often – where the ads are loud and poorly made – and occasionally people hand out printed ads on the street or leave them in the basket of my bicycle.

Well, it looks like text message spam is spreading in the United States, to the tune of 1.5 billion spam messages in 2008.

I have the same grievance with it. I’m charged a few cents for receiving a text message so this spam can cost me money. My phone isn’t very advanced so it doesn’t tell me who the sender is when I receive a new message. Instead I hit “cancel” when it pops up on the screen and go through the menu tree to my message inbox, where I can see the telephone number of the sender and open it if it is from a number in my phonebook. Deleting messages from unknown telephone numbers without opening them requires hitting a few more buttons, so it is an annoyance and a waste of time.

According to the article, 1 out of 32 text messages are spam. If 90-95% of all e-mail messages are spam, spam mobile phone messages may reach that level sometime soon, although cell phone providers seem to have more control over monitoring and blocking unsolicited messages on their network. As cell phones become more advanced and SMS, e-mail, and web browsing more common, are we going to need anti-spam software and virus software on our cell phones?

Note: I can no longer access the front page of this blog. I can still post and edit it and view the comments, but the front page (along with all blogspot pages) will not load. If the censorship swings the other way again, I may lose all access.

May Day Holiday

I spent a couple days in Shanghai last week. Since May 1st is a holiday it was a four-day weekend. The long weekend coincided with 80-degree temperatures and sunny skies so the city’s sites were packed with tourists. I had lunch with a Chinese friend in a student restaurant on the busy East China Normal University campus on Friday. He showed me his dorm room, which was about the size of the double dorm rooms at UW-Madison, but these have four lofted beds over a small desk and dresser. The beds were a simple sheet of plywood and a blanket, no mattress. I’ll be living on campus at the Beijing Language and Culture University this summer, most likely in a double room, so I wonder what the accommodations will be like.

Later in the afternoon I met another Chinese friend who I had met at New Years party and have kept in touch with ever since. We walked along the boardwalk next to the Bund, which was packed with people, and then took a bus to the Yu Yuan Garden, which is a popular site in the area called Old Town. Until the 1980s, the city was a collection of old two or three story buildings traditional Chinese buildings, save for a few Art Deco buildings in the foreign concessions. I was surprised to learn that until 1983, the tallest building in the city was the 22-story, 275-foot high Park Hotel. Now it is the nearly finished World Financial Center, which is 101 stories and 1,614 feet high. Anyways, it hard to imagine that the entire city used to look like the Old Town and the hundreds (thousands, maybe?) of new highrises are all less than 25 years old.

Many of the old neighborhoods were razed and replaced with newer and much taller buildings. The Old Town neighborhood around the Yu Yuan Garden and a Confucian Temple were preserved, albeit significantly transformed in the way of becoming a tourist shopping mall of souvenir stores and ice cream shops.

It was a flashback to the only other time I was there, which was in late August when it was extremely hot and humid and the place was crawling with tourists. Funny to think that I was so awestruck and overwhelmed back then.

There was lots of good street food and I had some melon slices and bubble tea. We went to another food street where seafood is kept alive in buckets of water on the street. There were also a few live chickens, ducks, and snakes outside some restaurants. We weren’t so adventurous and went to a dumpling place, where we had two kinds of dumplings, noodles, and a rice dish with spinach that I found extra delicious – it was just like risotto.

We went back to the river to see the skyline and all the lights. On my past several visits to Shanghai there was poor visibility due to rain or smog, so it was nice to be able to see everything again, and it is different every time.

I stayed with my friend, which was the first time I’ve slept in a Chinese person’s apartment. He lives a long bus ride away on the south side of the city, in a neighborhood built for the World Expo. It was a barebones apartment supplied by his employer, a joint venture company with the German company Thyssen-Krup. I slept on his spare bed, which was basically a wooden box with no mattress. When you do have a Chinese mattress, it is always really firm and not much better than a plank of wood.

Some pictures are up at my web gallery.

Videos

I made two new videos of various video clips taken on my digital camera and uploaded them to YouTube. One is a collection of clips from the last week.

The other is a collection of videos taken during the week I spent with my dad in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

I also put the two videos I posted in January on YouTube:

The Christmas assembly at school

And a collection of videos in and around Shanghai

Birthday

We had a normal morning of classes on Wednesday and the students were going to go home in the mid-afternoon after two final classes. For us, the Labor Day holiday began a little early, so we have a 4½-day weekend. I was going to meet with my Chinese tutor after lunch, but one of the Chinese teachers asked me to come to a classroom. I was told to instruct the class on how to sing the Happy Birthday song in Spanish. It’s sort of unusual, and I had wondered why the teacher asked me for the lyrics the day before.

Everyone was given a piece of paper with the lyrics to the Happy Birthday song in English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. After a few quick runs through the song, aided by some phonetically-spelled, pseudo-Pinyin words on the whiteboard (kei lous kumplas feilis…), a Korean student went through the Korean version (sang il chook ha hap nee da…). Then the Chinese (zhu ni sheng ri kuai le…) and English versions (you know that one) were sung to me by all the high school students and a couple Chinese teachers.

Next I was given handmade cards by many of the students and a cake was revealed. The cake was covered in a smooth pink frosting and colorful and edible flowers. There were two candles – a number “two” and a number “four.” In East Asia your age is counted in ordinal numbers, in the same way that we number centuries, so you are one year old when you are born. I am entering my 24th year of life, so I’m considered to be 24 years old here. I guess I’ll never be 23, or at least I skipped celebrating my 23rd birthday by coming here.

The cake was kind of odd – like a wedding cake, but pink – and I was handed a lighter and told, “Okay, now you light!” Followed by, “Now you close your eyes and make a wish!” Nothing is ever quite what you’d expect it to be here. I divided the cake up into 30 odd pieces, was smeared on the cheeks with frosting, and had a student take some pictures with my camera.

The little surprise party was really cool (both afternoon classes were canceled for it), the four birthday songs were fun, and the cards were neat. They are really creative and they tried their best with English:

“I thanks that you teach well English to me so far.”
“I really happy birthday to you.”
“Today is special day >_< , your birthday!!!”
“Teacher, I really hope that you have a happy time in your life >_<”
“You are a Best teacher on the English.”
“Sam! How are you? I’m fine, thank U, and you?
“I always thank for your teaching.”
“Sam cool!”
and
“Some one say ‘Help!’ Do you know why? He is Sam. Super Sam.” (I was given the nickname Superman and Super Sam by the primary kids and it has caught on.)

Fun to see and read, but it looks like I still have some work to do turning their Chinglish into perfect English.

Korean education

An interesting article from the NY Times profiles two of the top college preparatory schools in South Korea.

I have had a pretty good introduction to Korean culture through my dozen or so Korean high school students, and through them I’ve become seen with how motivated and eager they are as students. With one exception – the worst of my students happens to be a Korean boy – they are by far my best students. For the most part, they are more mature and more motivated than the Chinese and Thai students. They are the kind of students that make teaching much easier.

It’s not that the Chinese students are lazy or less motivated. Most of them are good students, too, but the Korean students (again, all but one) are unbelievably hard working. It seems that education is highly valued in East Asian societies because of Confucian values – to respect and learn from your elders – and from the strong, closely-knit families – the school principal often tells the students, “Study harder so you can please your parents.” And the students are all really close to their parents and often say how much they look up to them and they work hard in school because their parents have invested so much in children. And the education system pushes them pretty hard; the Chinese teachers are strict and teach class with a very serious manner. The school day begins at 7:40 a.m., when the students have to be in the classroom to clean, and it ends at 8 p.m. after a 1½-hour post-dinner study period.

While the Chinese students go home and play computer games all weekend, the Korean students spend much of their weekends in the classrooms studying. I can never give them enough homework because they do it all and then they study more on their own. A couple of them are going to take the SAT later this year and they hand me practice essays to critique and I work with them on vocabulary and reading exercises during lunch breaks and on Sundays. Their relentless work ethic makes me work harder because I really want them to succeed. They put so much effort into their schoolwork that I feel obliged to work along with them, either by putting in extra time helping them with English and SAT practice and studying Chinese together (I join the three Korean who have no prior Chinese experience in their introductory Chinese class). It would be a great feeling to help see them go onto universities in the U.S. They are obsessing over SAT scores and personal essays on college applications already and bombard me with questions about everything.

Like in the article, some of the Koreans study subjects independently. One boy last semester was studying for the AP Government exam, even though he was starting from scratch with no knowledge of American history or government. Another kid this semester is studying Spanish in addition to his daily Chinese and English classes. Naturally, I help both of them outside of class when I can. And some of them take academics to the extreme. One Korean girl, who has studied English for less than two years, has already caught up to the other students who have had six years or more of English, although she has studied to the point where she falls ill several times. And when they live at a boarding school and spend a good part of every evening and weekend studying, they don’t have much of a life outside of school.

So without ever stepping foot in South Korea, I already get the sense that education is a high national priority. Thy are fully aware that English language skills, a high math and science aptitude, and a college degree are key to being competitive in the world economy. And Korea is highly competitive – its economy is the 12th largest in the world, ranks fourth in the number of international patents in 2007, and its education system was ranked the best in the world in a UNICEF study on student performance on math, science, and reading, and has more students studying in the United States than China, India, or Japan. Not bad for a nation of only 49 million people.

(Contrast that with education in the U.S.)

Education has certainly played a large role in Korea’s rise from one of the poorest nations in the world in the middle of the 20th century that was devastated by the Japanese occupation and the Korean War to one of the most developed nations (highest penetration of broadband Internet and the first country to switch entirely to HD television) with a high life expectancy and standard of living, on par with western Europe and the United States. In fact, economic predictions place Korea near the top in income per capita in the coming decades (I came across this graph in a report on emerging economies). By 2050, South Korea will have an income per capita equal to or higher than Japan and many western countries:

(source: GS - Global Economics Paper No: 134)

Speaking of South Korea, the Olympic torch was there a couple days ago and it wasn’t pretty.
“When lone protesters demanded that China stop repatriating North Korean refugees, they were quickly surrounded by jeering Chinese. Near the park, Chinese students surrounded and beat a small group of protesters, news reports said.

“In another scuffle, at the city center where the five-hour torch run ended, Chinese surrounded several Tibetans and South Korean supporters who unfurled pro-Tibet banners, and kicked and punched them, witnesses said.

“The largest scuffle erupted shortly after the first torch-bearer left the Olympic Park, surrounded by dozens of police officers on foot or on bicycles and hundreds more in buses and trailed by a water cannon, ambulances and helicopters circling overhead.”

At least my Chinese and Korean students get a long. There are even three Korean-Chinese couples among the high school class.

If the torch is such an emotional flashpoint for things that have nothing to do with an international sports competition (Tibet, media censorship, worker’s rights, repatriation of North Korean refugees), why is China parading it around the world? And why do protestors think extinguishing the flame will do anything about those problems? I know that public awareness of all the wrongs in the world is important, but flying the torch around the globe, surrounding it with dozens of security (and a water cannon and helicopters), and storing it in four-star hotel rooms all seems a little absurd.

Happy May Day! (known as 五一劳动节 here)