We didn’t really ease back into our GZ life. The weather is quite nice – slightly sunny and warm (the mid to high 70s), so I managed to get 4 loads of laundry hung out and we turned on the A/C for a bit to eliminate the dampness in the apartment. Also, today was the Foreign Affairs Office’s Chinese New Year Party. Imagine our surprise to arrive at at Brazilian buffet and grill called Latin, and complete with dim sum, chinese servers dressed in cowboy hats and bandanas, and a band playing your favorite latin tunes! It was all a bit odd. This evening I uploaded photos and managed to completely destroy the kids music SD card while loading some new tunes. Arghh- that music has been the soundtrack of our homelife! Tomorrow it is banking, groceries, post office, and taking Mei-mei in for her last school medical check. If she doesn’t pass this one we are throwing in the towel. In the afternoon our kindergarten friends are taking us to the flower market. The Spring Festival decorations are great. I particularly enjoy the orange trees everywhere. I will post a photo soon and hope to purchase a little tree of my own tomorrow!
February 9, 2010
I just finished reading the historical novel, The Last Empress , by Anchee Min. It was an interesting account of the last half of the life of Ch’ing Empress Tzu Hsi, more commonly known as the Dowager Empress. Although, as a woman, she could not be the formal ruler of the empire, she served as regent or co-regent for both her son and the adopted son who succeeded him. When not officially appointed co-regent by the court, she still maintained a great deal of power through her influence on the emperor, and the favor she had with many important government ministers.
Visiting the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City last August, I learned that the Empress was a “bad guy” in Chinese history – depicted as despotic, xenophobic, self-serving, and prone to nepotism. In other words, she was the embodiment of the evils of imperial power. This well-researched novel presents her in a different light, as someone trying to maintain a failing empire in the face of weak leadership and a court with all the aforementioned qualities assigned to her by her detractors.
The novel is set in the years from 1863 to 1912 – beginning shortly after the first Opium War and covering the Boxer Rebellion. Reading the novel left me pessimistic about Chinese governance and Western involvement in the country. Has nothing changed in the last 125 years in terms of the nature of Chinese governance and the opportunistic involvement of the West?
Just reading about the way that imperial China was managed was amazing – rulers who had basically never left the Forbidden City, knew nothing of the life of their own people, and possessed virtually no practical knowledge exercised severely limited control over the military, provincial governors, etc. However, so much of what I read about the Ch’ing dynasty reminded me of the treatment in many of the books I read preparing for this trip of the party elite in contemporary China – out of touch and out of control – mostly just trying to hold it together enough to stay in power.
Reading about the way the West characterized the Empress Tzu Hsi was humiliating and eerily familiar. She was cast by the Western press (and by the Chinese governments that would suceed the Ch’ing era) as a reactionary, seeking to maintain her power and to subvert the will of the Chinese people (i.e. the establishment of a parliamentary system of governance). Using government tyranny and the Boxers (a xenophobic collection of military units joined by peasants who attacked missionaries, embassies, and other foreign interests) as an excuse to invade, 15 separate foreign governments divided up China. In the end, despite their claims that the regime was anti-democratic, they decided to allow a puppet Ch’ing dynasty to continue, mostly (so I have read in many accounts) because they thought they could make more money than they would should the continue devolve into clan warfare. Just as the behavior of the U.S. and other Western nations was dishonest and selfish then, so does it seem to me that the way the U.S. treats the China today is marked by similar arrogant self-interest. Take Copenhagen for example. Of course China, the nation whose modern ascension derives from manufacturing the West’s goods cheaply because they don’t have the same legal protections for their environment or their workers as in the West is unwilling to sacrifice their lucrative position. Naturally corporations that relocate their manufacturing to China, Americans who continue to buy products made in China, and a U.S. government propping up what is supposedly a capitalist economy by borrowing back the money that their citizens put into the China when they purchase all those goods manufactured by under-protected workers raising their children without clean air, food or water don’t seem to care that they are the motor driving the whole mess. That’s my lay-persons take on the situation.
February 8, 2010
We’re returning to GZ tomorrow. What a wonderful trip this has been! I am feeling quite sad to leave Thailand behind and hope to return in the future.
Remember when you were 8 years old and the end of summer vacation was upon you and you mourned in advance for the loss of those summer feelings? In anticipation of the loss you engaged each of your routine behaviors with a feverish intentionality – the last swim, the last sunset, the last evening watching the hot air lanterns rising into the night sky – attempting to commit everything to memory so that once the cold of winter and the dull routine of the classroom became your everyday you may be able to recall the feelings of a different life that was briefly yours. It’s kind of like that.
February 6, 2010
Yesterday was an amazing day. Following breakfast with two baby elephants, we departed for a pier in the northeast of Phuket Province in Thailand where we were greeted with cold water and Thai breakfast sweets (a sort of egg doughnut). We then took a one hour cruise to Ko Panak and Ko Hong, islands in Phang Nga Bay. The area is noted for its beautiful scenery created by fault movement pushing up limestone blocks through the warm turquoise sea. (Think Yangshou and Guilin, China but far more beautiful or the movie Avatar but the mountains are in the sea instead of the air). The four of us hopped off our boat onto a sea kayak which we used to explore the hidden “hongs,” canals meandering through tropical caves. We checked out the mangrove lagoons, diamond cave, the bat cave, and others. The natural beauty was unparalleled with large mangrove trees, monkeys, eagles, jungle vines, walking fish, bats, limestone formations, and clear water.
We then feasted on Thai food on the boat…fried chicken with sweet Thai chili sauce, rice, curried mixed vegetables, Pad Thai, Bangkok Chicken, sweet and sour fish, and fresh fruit. (An aside: the pineapple here to other worldly with no hard center and wonderful when blended with ice.) We then went to an island beach to swim, before boating home with cold towel, freshly chopped coconuts (for the coconut water and jelly). We arrived at the pier for more cold towels and popsicles. An amazing day.
February 4, 2010
1-This ‘experience’ of living in China and Southeast Asia has been full of so many diverse experiences from the major cities and vibrant cultures of Guangzhou, Beijing, Bangkok, Singapore, Macau, and Hong Kong, the sea views of Sentosa, Phuket, and Sanya, and the rural landscapes of Guangxi Province.
2-Living on a Chinese campus and sending kids to Chinese school has allowed us to experience China in a authentic way not available to our ex-pat friends in GZ….cooking lesson at Chinese friends’ homes, invitations to celebrate Chinese Spring Festival, and travel to friends’ hometowns in rural provinces.
3-Thailand, as a vacation spot, is wonderful. The temples and canals of Bangkok create sensory overload, and the beaches are breathtaking. Soon, we plan to go on a day-long canoe tour of the caves on the Thai coast.
4-“Land use is the forgotten agenda of the environmental movement.” John Turner & Jason Rylander, Land Use: The Forgotten Agenda, in Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy 61 (1997). I often consider this as I see the unparrelled development in Chinese cities or resorts sprawling on coastal area. I wonder what did the land look like before (though at what point is always subject to nature’s dynamic cycle). An example: The hotel where I’m not sitting now and its accompanying lagoon and vegetation were built upon a mine that caused the landscape to look like that of the surface of the moon. While this is an aesthetic improvement, natural cycles have been lost. A parallel can be drawn to wetlands mitigation and restoration. While the new wetlands are replacements and perhaps provide new wildlife habitat, the natural hydrological cycles of the wetlands destroyed are lost.
February 4, 2010
We are enjoying Phuket too much to leave (and, besides, it is rainy and in the 60s in Guangzhou while it is in the mid 80s and sunny here).
Thus, we are staying on a few extra days. Don’t worry. The hotel took care of changing our travel itinerary at no cost to us, and further discounted our room. And fortunately I brought some materials to prep my class for next semester. Whatever would I do if I had to borrow some pulp novel from the resort lending library to have on the table beside me as I napped by the pool?
Tomorrow we are going to travel around the island a bit and do some canoeing in hongs, caves along the water’s edge. I am excited but look forward to a time when the kids would be old enough for snorkeling instead.
February 2, 2010
Jason and I have remarked upon the unreality of our lives at present. We vacillate between our currently distant daily life in Guangzhou with all that entails and visits to high-end resorts in exotic locations. While one existence is a little hard, often trying our resolve and patience, the interludes are so easy as to take some getting used to. Either way we are living on any given day is so far removed from “real life.”
February 2, 2010
Only now, with almost 48 Phuket hours under my belt, I am figuring out that there is nothing to do here becuase I am supposed to do nothing. The kids are in heaven. Here is a sample of what looks to be our emerging daily routine:
7 a.m. kids wake up, parents turn on television to buy a little extra sleep.
7:45 everyone is dressed and bags packed. We wander down to breakfast.
8:00-9:00 Dining al fresco, enjoy complimentary, internation 5-star breakfast buffet. Kids prefer cereal, fruit, coffecake, yogurt, pancakes and eggs. Parents enjoy Thai, Indian, and Japanese food from the “Vegetarian Corner.” Halfway throught the meal, the resort’s baby elephants, Lili and Lucky, arrive and stand nearby. Once the kids are done eating, they wander over with a few pieces of fresh fruit to trade for elephant kisses, high 5s, hand/trunkshakes, rides.
9:00 Bid the elephants goodbye and drop the kids off at the kids’ club. Jie-jie is free, Mei-mei requires her own babysitter ($3/hour). The spend the next 2 hours playing with their new friends and doing crafts like making Batik scarves and going on a fieldtrip to the poolside restaurant to make their own lunch pizza. Jason and I go for a swim, take out kayaks, and poke around wishing we were the type to lay on the beach for hours.
12:00 pick up the kids, swim in the pool for 30 minutes.
12:30 Back to the room.
1:00 Mei-mei naps. If Jie-jie is not tired she returns tot he kids club for Thai language lessons. Jason and I take turns staying in the room.
3:00 wake up, snack, back into bathing suits. Walk to beach for swimming in the Adaman sea with the baby elephants. At some point we move back to the pool.
5:45 Go up to room to rinse and change, walk down to the beach and choose a restaurant. Kids play in the sand while their parents watch the sun set over the water and discuss how that sunset was different from those on the previous evenings.
7:30 return to the room. Kids de-sanded and to bed. We take turns going to gym and work on our computers/read/watch television until bedtime.
February 1, 2010
I would like to recommend this interesting and scary account of an American member of the Islamic group Shabab, which is trying to overthrow the ineffective, UN-determined transitional government in order to establish an Islamic state in Somalia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31Jihadist-t.html
The U.S. is inextricably linked to the chaos in Somalia, and not just because Shabab has ties to Al Qaeda. During the Bush administration, an group or federation known as the Council of Islamic Courts took control of the country and established a modicum of stability. Concerned that the emerging Islamic government might come to support terrorism, the U.S. backed an Ethiopian invasion which reestablished the transitional government. I consider that to decision to be a terrible one with long term implications both for the safety of the U.S., and the chances of a stable, non-violent Somalia. Somalia and Ethiopia have a very antagonistic relationship (on account of religious differences, and territory disputes, among other things) and the presence of Ethiopian troops created the conditions for the rise of a publicly-supported militant Islamic insurgency. Long story short, Shabab is the militant faction of the Council of Islamic Courts which controls much of the country and is fighting the transitional goverment. As the NYT article makes clear, Shabab is scary but they are also appealing to more than 2 dozen young Americans who have traveled to Somalia to become a part of their jihad.
