May 2008 -

31 May

Photos from Yunnan

A couple photos from the Yunnan trip. I’ll work on getting the rest of the good ones up to my Flickr photostream tomorrow.

One of the sights of Kunming is a pair of pagodas which face each other at either end of a street. At the West Pagoda, was also this building, which had mysteriously had its front wall removed. Very odd, but not overly surprising (it’s China, everything is under construction), and made for an interesting image.

Also ran across this on the streets of Kunming. It wasn’t the only one either. It occurred to me somewhat later that maybe it is to cater to all the short-legged doggies that trot through the streets.

At the East Pagoda I paid a small fee to enter the walled garden surrounding it. I never got around to really inspecting the pagoda itself because I almost immediately got caught up watching mahjong. I have a sketchy understanding of the game, thanks to coworker back in Seattle who has patiently tried to teach a number of us how to play. It’s not actually as simple as match the tiles — that’s only the American computer version.

I’m often shy about taking photos of people. In this case I compromised between really wanting to photograph the scene (there were some very amazing elderly faces – one guy with absolutely huge coke-bottle classes) and not wanting to disturb the game to ask (plus not having the language skills to ask) with photographing hands instead of faces.

As you may or may not know, there is a Muslim population in China. In Yunnan there were a number of restaurants with signs out front in Arabic as well as Chinese. This man had no sign, but he sold me some tasty food on a stick. This was in a tourist-ridden shopping area of Kunming, so I figured he was probably used to having his photo taken. He seemed indifferent, overall.

Wandering around later, I found an indoor-outdoor market. There were living and less-living animals, and sacks of grain and spices as well as vegetables, with an accompanying smell and flies in the meat section. I find it fascinating that they have squash this big — seriously, they are three feet long and look like they must be radioactive zucchini, or something.

The man selling the vegetables, though, was thoroughly immune to their amazingness and gave me an extremely puzzled look which indicated he did not understand why some crazy white girl was photographing his vegetables.

Also, the man in the back of the photo is spritzing his veggies with water, with a handy homemade device. Take a plastic pop bottle, poke a couple holes in the lid. Fill the bottle with water, attach lid, hold upside down and squeeze. No spring loaded thingmabobs required for spritzing in China.

31 May

Earthquake

It is odd to find that I am here, in China, as a witness (and very small-scale participant) in a historical event. What will they call it, ten or fifty years down the line? The Chinese earthquake of 2008? The Sichuan Quake? The media here was first calling it the Wenchuan earthquake, after the more exact location, but now seems to be using the Sichuan earthquake.

I spent some time watching television news while I was traveling in Yunnan (easy to do in airports and hotel rooms). Each news station has their own animated logo for the event — different versions of an outline of Sichuan province, which shakes, and then circles radiate outwards and words appear. Sometimes it is yellow, sometimes green, sometimes the radiating circles are a variation on the color of the province, sometimes they are red. In the Kunming airport, the ‘Air Media’ (which I presume to be produced especially for and displayed only in airports) followed the animated outward spread of quake effects with the characters for the name of the event – I recognized the ones for ‘earthquake’ – on a black screen. The characters were silver, and shot through with red cracks.

The China Daily, the English language paper which they provide at our ‘serviced residence’ has been full almost entirely of quake reports. The heroic schoolboy who stood for an hour holding an iv drip for a trapped school mate. (They refer to him as ‘Drip Boy’.) The promises of investigation and punishment regarding the high rate of collapse of school buildings. The arrival (and now departure) of foreign aid workers. There’s also a box on the front page which lists a couple numbers chosen from the most recently released. Yesterday’s paper features the following data: 68,516 killed, 19,350 missing, 365,399 injured, 15.15 million displaced, $5.33 billion in donations.

On May 21, in Kunming, I caught the second half of a televised press conference. Because there were international journalists present, each question and answer was translated into English if in Chinese, or vice versa. Near the end, the officials released the latest numbers, a long list. I noted down some of them:

42,000 dead
396,811 rescued in area
- 4,652 rescued alive from debris
162 aftershocks over 4.0
- 26 over 5.0
- 4 over 6.0
12.867 billion yuan gov’t spending on disaster
- 9.339 billion yuan from central budget
17,176 tons oil sent to area in 24 hour period
28,829 km of road damaged
- about 19,000 km repaired (didn’t catch the exact figure)
- about 3,000 bridges destroyed (didn’t catch the exact figure)
Aftershocks have knocked out power in areas it had been restored to
14 Taiwanese tourists all returned safely to Taiwan
Taiwanese indicated willingness to donate 750 million yuan

I didn’t write it down, but they also released the number of meters of bridge which had been repaired. Truly, this is a country quite obsessed with numbers.

Further in yesterday’s paper, I can learn that Tangjiashan lake, one of 34 formed by landslides blocking rivers after the quake, has been rising up to 2 m a day, but “troops have dug a 50-m-wide channel running 300 m long” to control, or at least direct water when the landslide-dam bursts. 28 of the lakes are expected to burst. Another article tells me that “Hospitals have treated 87,391 people, of whom 56,580 were discharged.” 619,400 tents have been sent to provide shelter for the 15.15 million people who have been relocated.

Some of the statistics read like mathematical story problems. On Thursday, “98.2 percent of banks in the quake-hit areas resumed services, with 238 branches still shut.” How many bank branch offices are in the quake-hit area? I think it comes to 29,750. If the death toll is 68,516, then each branch has lost an average of 2.3 customers.

Of course, while the print media is filling space with numbers and tales of brave survivors and rescue workers (133,000 troops and armed police have been sent in, with 45,000 reservists being mobilized.), the visual media is full of images that go straight to emotions. I watched an amount of that the day before the press conference, May 20…

The coverage of the earthquake dominates the TV. Yesterday was a week. Alex told me there was to be two minutes of silence at 2:28, the time of the quake. I was on the plane, so I didn’t observe it.

Last night, wandering around Kunming, we did see a gather of people and candles around a big fountain in the city center.

This morning, when I turned on the televisision, in hopes of a weather report, CCTV1 was show shots of different groups observing the moment of silence — groups of office workers, or policemen, line up together with their heads bowed. After a while I figured out one part of the series was the staff of Chinese consulates around the world.

Now we’re back to footage from Sichuan — soldiers moving rubble to extract survivors, people living under tarps, food distribution in refugee camps.

…..

I’m looking for weather on the tv, and it more images from the moment of silence, factory workers, railway crews, men in suits. A line of military men remove their hats in unison. Many people they show are crying. Traffic is stopped. Air raid sirens are going. Car horns are stick on. School children bow their heads. Soldiers hold their helmets on scene in Sichuan, silent and unmoving, but a butterfly flits across the screen in front of them. Some have their hands on their hears. People crying in the subway. Flags at half-mast. A nation showing its open bleeding heart, mourning together. Now its back to the consulate footage — they’re recycling the footage I saw before. It makes me start to cry anyway.

Of course, the moments of silence (I think it was actually 3 minutes long) were not universally observed. They did not delay my flight so we could sit quietly on the runway. The tragedy hasn’t touched the entire country deeply, reports Stupid Pig’s China Blog, not everyone is crying about it. We met a German guy in Lijiang who works for BMW, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to make motorcycle engines. We asked about the quake affects in his city (I forget which city, though) and he said nothing major — only five or six people died, and it is hard to tell if it was due to the earthquake, or to “normal” lax Chinese safety standards.

The oddest story I’ve seen though, from my perspective — and this ties directly into the theme of official numbers — is the statement that the government will issue certificates to families whose children died in the quake, officially permitting them to have another child.

29 May

Back in Beijing

After about ten days traveling in Yunnan province, in southern China, I’m back to Beijing, to nurse my sunburn and catch up with work. Suddenly I have less than three weeks left before my return to Seattle. Yikes.

I’ll upload pictures and back-post from the trip over the next few days.

18 May

Beijing Night Market

One of the things you can see at the night market in the Wudaoko area near where we live (also the site of many universities) is a thriving night market which appears after dark and gradually spreads out over the sidewalks. There are striking women of a particular ethnic group I haven’t identified selling silver jewelry and big bracelets, and horns of some creature carved into small containers. There are carts with bootleg books. There is row upon row of sandals and flip flops. There are piles of t-shirts with English or almost English slogans printed on them. The best one I’ve seen said, in letters six inches high, ‘I AM SO WORTH IT.’ I thought of exactly who I should have bought it for the next day. Maybe I’ll see it again sometime.

And then, of course, there are also the pet sellers. The boxes of puppies, the fishbowls, the tubs full of turtles. Cages of kittens, cages of hamsters. Fuzzy little baby bunnies. The occasional bird. All waiting for you to take home! And you can test-pet them! So soft! So furry! So gol-durn cute!

This evening Alex called me to say he loved this country more than rain (which he claims to love more than his mother, as a true Seattleite) because he had just seen the following: A feisty little kitten who got into it with a bunny, which turned out to be more feisty than the kitten, causing the kitten to back down — however! (as you can see in the photo) it didn’t have much space to back down in, so as it backed up it fell into the fishbowl.

Oh the indignity!

The kitten was apparently fished out (of the fishbowl), given a severe talking to, and wrung out.

Man, if he had been filming rather than taking still photos, he would have had a youtube hit for sure!

13 May

地震 means earthquake

The death toll from yesterday’s quake in Sichuan province is still mounting. The folks over at Shanghaiist are keeping up with developments.

What can I say? I’m really glad we weren’t traveling in the area this week.

In separate language lessons, Alex and I both learned the word for earthquake – 地震 (dizhen). I also learned near and far. The earthquake was close to Chengdu. The earthquake was far from Beijing, but we still felt it.

After my meeting with Grace, my language partner, I went to grocery store, which was entirely mobbed. It didn’t seem like people were stocking up for a coming apocalypse though, just everyone decided that Monday night was a good time to pick up a few things.

In front of me in line were a pair of somewhat dusty young men, with darker, more wide and angular looking features than many of the ethnic Han Chinese I see around. Between them, they had one basket and bought two pairs of shoes, two pairs of briefs, some toothpaste, a couple handtowels. They blushed and tried to look macho and indifferent while the young female checker scanner the underwear. They each pulled out wallets and contributed 100 rmb bills (somewhat less than $20) to pay; their fingernails were surprisingly long, but dirty. They had a brief discussion about how to divy up the change, and the checker, easily a foot and half shorter than either of them, but secure in her position as a city-dweller, gave them an evil look for not taking their bags out of the way quickly enough. I presume that they were migrant workers from one of Beijing’s many construction sites. One report I saw said 40 square miles of the city is under construction.

Alex has also told me that of the 17 million people in Beijing, some 5 million are unregistered migrants. They come to build the new buildings, to work in the factories, to do any number of things. Women come to work in the ‘massage parlors,’ and return home after a few years. As long as they return with money, no one asks too many questions. A great many of the migrants come from Sichuan province, something Peter Hessler mentions in oracle Bones.

On his way home last night, Alex told me he saw a pair of construction workers on the side of the road, one curled into a ball and sobbing on the other. The tremors are being felt in Beijing in many different ways.

12 May

Earthquake today

This afternoon I heard an odd noise, the kind that makes you suspect there is someone else in the room, when you know you are the only one home. I looked around, and the floor moved a bit. The curtains began to swing back and forth. An earthquake.

I couldn’t decide if it was possible for me to run down ten flights of stairs before anything disintegrated, or if it was better to be on the tenth floor (only 7 floors above me), or in the street (several large buildings to topple over), so I stayed put and called Alex. He was outside, and professed to not feel anything.

It was over in fifteen or twenty seconds; the curtains quieted.

As is my wont, I went looking for information online. (I also flipped through the channels on the tv, but didn’t find anything I could readily identify as breaking news.) The USGS’ Earthquake center page, after twenty minutes, displayed a big red mark in eastern China on their world map of recent earthquakes over magnitude 4. A 7.5 magnitude quake in eastern Sichuan province, 60 miles from Chengdu and 2:28 pm, local time. Now, two hours after the fact, there’s a second mark — a 5.4 second tremor at 3:34, 45 miles from Chengdu, 920 miles from Beijing. (I didn’t feel the second one in Beijing.)

The NY Times had thrown up a brief report, with quotes from university students (unclear if in Beijing or Chengdu) running out of their dorms. The Chinese English-language news agency, Xinhua, also had slapped something together, reporting both the Chengdu quake at 2:28, and 3.9 quake in an eastern district of Beijing 2:35. Neither reported casualties (yet). I expect there to be more information out soon, though, because the internet also turned up that NPR’s All Things Considered is reporting from Chengdu this week, which puts Robert Siegel and Melissa Block at ground zero, so to speak.

I would have been in Chengdu myself this week, except that the continued paperwork process for Alex’s work visa has kept us from going too far from Beijing, and put off the ten day or so trip we have (okay, he has) been planning in the area. With no casualties and no damage reported yet, I’m sorry we weren’t there. However, if there are continuing aftershocks (5.4 is nothing to sniff at), there may be cause to appreciate red tape and paperwork yet.