Out and About Chongzuo

The Yushu earthquake in Qinghai province has dominated the news here in China. Wednesday was China’s official day of mourning. At 9:30 in the morning air raid sirens blared and there was a moment of silence. No one was allowed entertainment for the day; every TV channel played the identical morose montage and all entertainment-based websites were offline. As an outsider I can’t help but wonder if this government policy inspires more frustration than compassion. It seems like the government treats its citizens like untrustworthy children. For all the talk of modernization, China has some maturing to do.

Mature or not, there is no doubt that the times are a changing in China. Rapid economic transformation is evident by the countless factories and high rise buildings springing up out of the land that was previously 5’x10’ farm plots. Change is also evident by the generation gap between our students and their parents. I think the current generation shares many of the same traits that the baby boomers have. They are in fact a bit of a baby boom themselves with more than 200 million people between the ages of 15 and 25. They tend to be both economically and culturally more liberal than their parents. They borrow money rather than save money and they value trends and fashion even more than Americans. They love what is new and hate what is old. There doesn’t seem to be much counterculture here. When these kids grow up and have money they will make a great consumer market.

Another odd thing about China is how a craft that took weeks of painstaking work to make only will sell for a couple of dollars. Labor has no value in China. Minimum wage is ~$1/hour but it isn’t enforced. The government doesn’t bother enforcing things like that. They care about political and social stability, and economic growth. Things like expired food, pollution and traffic laws (China has the highest traffic accident morality rate per capita of any country) are simply not priorities here.

Enough social exposé, let’s get on with the happenings of our lives.

A few weeks ago we told our students we hated it here and we were going to go back to America… “April Fools!!” A few moments of bewildered silence passed and then suddenly all the students screamed at the top of their lungs, “AAAAAAAAAh!!!” One of Fiona's students said "You should not joke. I almost cry!" We got them good.

I’ve been teaching the non majors a new topic each week: personal introductions, phone calls, school, family, jobs, and this week, talking at work. The school asked me to teach the students cultural awareness and get them to talking out loud in English. I try to keep them learning and also keep them interested. Many students flipped out when I told them about same-sex and interracial marriages in the United States. My PowerPoint presentations are getting increasingly detailed and lengthy but there is nothing as useful and entertaining as describing things with diagrams and photographs.

The past two weekends we have chosen to stay at home and ride our “motos” (Chinese for moped) around the area where we live.
We have explored in just about every direction. A few times we have ended up going down long single track dirt roads and getting to little impoverished villages that feel like they are waaay out there.

No way these places are on any maps. Perhaps we are the first foreigners to ever venture here. Everyone looks at us like “what the hell are you doing here?”

The rides have given us a sense of the local surroundings. To the East and South there lies beautiful farmland country, farmers, tractors, water buffalo and not much else.

To the North lies the center of our town called “Jiangzhou.”

Jiangzhou straddles the meandering Zuo Jiang River. We found an ancient leaning tower on an island in the river.

Past the Zuo Jiang River are beautiful karst mountains and about an hour into these mountains lies another small town whose name is unknown.

To the West is the new development of Chongzuo City (our school is part of this). It is an area about 2x4 miles composed of brand new roads and streetlights. Only about 15% of the land has buildings on it and the rest of the land is abandoned banana plantations. The buildings are all less than three years old and they tend to be 4-8 stories tall. At each construction site there are little shanty towns that house the construction workers. There are very few people or cars on the streets and it seems like a brand new ghost town. There is no way this development is economical and is obviously a result of government planning.

This photo is of a local in front of our school.

This illustrates how they build roads in China. They lay a foundation of cement about a foot thick. I figure given the abundance of cheap limestone and coal, it might be cheaper to build the roads like this, not to mention that these roads will hold up for a long time.

Last week we went to our first “KTV” which is Karaoke Chinese-style. Basically you go into something that feels a little like a nightclub except there are dozens of private rooms complete with Karaoke machines, deafening speakers, lasers, and black lights. T.C. invited us to a company party there. Fiona and I sang a few songs and played dice games. It was pretty fun but it was one of those things that you need to have a few beers in you to properly enjoy the experience and we never got there.

We have been getting our fruits and vegetables at the outdoor market. It is a huge farmer’s market that goes on all day and is a little cheaper than the grocery store. It has just about everything you want and more, including dead dogs laid out next to the cages of dogs ready to be butchered. One man’s best friend is another man’s dinner.

-George

Trip to Guilin and Yangshuo

Last weekend we had a holiday for “Tomb Sweeping Day”. This is a day for the Chinese to honor their ancestors and clean off their graves. The holiday ran from Sunday to Tuesday, but most of the holidays in China aren’t really holidays because you must always make up the days of work/school you missed on the previous/following weekend. We were supposed to have our Tuesday classes on the Saturday before, but we managed to convince the school officials to let us make them up on a different day. We left Chongzuo on Friday and took the bus to Guilin, about a 7 hour ride. After arriving, we realized we had a problem because the hotels require us to have passports to get a room. Well, our passports are getting new work visa’s and are in Beijing right now. Luckily, we traveled with our students and they were able to find us a hotel that would take our California Driver’s Licenses.

On our first day in Guilin, we went to Merryland which is the Chinese version of Disneyland.

It is complete with a Buddha where everyone prays before they enter the park. It was a rainy day (the first rain we have seen in China), which worked to our advantage because there were no lines for any rides. In the Wild West Town, there were pony rides, so I got pet my first horse in over a month! I was so excited to see a real horse!

There were signs everywhere in Merryland that said “No Striding”. It should say “No Running”. The Chinese really need to employ some native English speakers to write their signs.


We didn’t really want to go to Merryland because it was just like an American theme park. It also meant we didn’t get to see that much of Guilin, but we were invited by our students so it was polite to go. Merryland is surrounded by the nicest scenery of any amusement park I have ever been too.

That night we took the bus to Yangshuo, the hometown of one of our students. We ate dinner with her family once we arrived and ate our first field snails! They actually didn’t taste too bad, and we ended up eating more than one. Yangshuo is a very touristy town, with a “West Street”. We saw the most foreigners we have seen since arriving in China, more per capita than even Hong Kong. The best part about it being such a tourist town is all the western food! It was great to be able to read the menus and know exactly what we would be eating.

We rented bikes on a rainy Sunday and rode into the countryside.

We saw the “Big Banyan Tree”, a tree that is almost 2,000 years old (right click to open in another window for the full effect):

We also took a boat ride into a cave and saw the amazing stalactites and stalagmites, which are precipitated limestone deposits.

Then we ate the best Chinese food we have had since we’ve been here. I love dining with the students because they know exactly what to order. It is hard to eat the Chinese meat with chopsticks because it is often infused with shards of bone and grizzle. It is definitely an art, but we are improving.

The one night we were in Guilin we met another English teacher, Luke, who went to University of Southern California for college. We exchanged phone numbers with him and said we would meet up in Yangshuo. We got together with him and his friends Sunday night at Monkey Jane’s. For any young foreigner traveling to China, Yangshuo is the city to visit and Monkey Jane’s is the place to stay. It is a hostel, with a bar on the top floor. We traded teaching stories and the funniest one from them was a student who named themselves “Autism”. They suggested maybe Autism was not the best name, so the student changed their name to “Not Autism”. I think the students just open the dictionary and randomly picked a word that sounds pretty. We have some pretty funny names too, like “Forever King”, “Stone”, “Rainbow”, “Hedgehog”, and “Hamburger”. After Monkey Jane’s we ventured to a Chinese club and danced the night away to some awful music.

We woke with horrible hangovers and spent the morning sleeping. This area is famous for the karst topography, formed from limestone dissolution inconsistencies. We spent Monday without our students and walked up one of the mountains in the city to get a good view. The mountains are just amazing, and if China wasn’t grey every single day, it would be even more beautiful.

On our way home, George realized that in his hung-over stupor, he had left his bank card in the ATM machine. My bank account got hacked into last week, so I had to cancel my card. This left us with no Chinese money, and no way to get money. Luckily, we had some American money on us. We had bus tickets as far as Nanning, but that is 2 hours away from our school. We had to get money to make it home. Once we arrived at the bus station, we convinced a motorcycle driver to drive me to the bank and I could pay him 5 US dollars because I had no Chinese money. I said good-bye to George and hoped I that I would make it back to the bus station with the correct money. The motorcycle driver turned out to be very safe, even giving me a helmet to wear (helmets are rare). Once getting to the bank, I was told I needed a passport to change money. If you remember, we don’t have our passports right now! We ended up using the security guard’s ID, after I started to freak out telling the banker, “I have no money, no passport and don’t speak Chinese! You need to help me!” In the end, everything worked out and we made it home safe and sound.

We had a busy week organizing our classes and making up the classes we missed because of the holiday. We held English Corner this week in a classroom and showed the students some American TV. We showed them “Friends”, “The Simpsons”, some music videos, and “Charlie Chaplin”. They thought Charlie Chaplin was hilarious.

We are spending this weekend taking care of business, exploring the country side on our “moto” and tonight we are going to eat pizza with TC, our one American friend. Talk to you soon!

- Fiona