Chinese Democracy in the Weight Room

No, not the long awaited endeavor by Axl Rose, sorry to pique your appetite...

The school weight room used to be an appalling affair. It was covered in green astro turf that was rotted away in places. Then they redesigned it, tore out the floor and put in a new one, tore out a wall of the gymnasium and replaced it with a giant window. Along with the improvements came bureaucracy; after it reopened, a few caretakers appeared to handle things.

One was a tiny bony man, probably in his 30s. The other was probably 50. The older guy had a perfect Friar Tuck haircut, bald on top with a ring around the sides, in a near perfect imitation of Chairman Mao. I called both of these men as they are called commonly in China, laoban, boss, but I always thought of this older guy as The Chairman.

The Chairman and I did not begin our relationship auspiciously. These two guys had -- and have -- a bizarre system for checking into the weight room. You'd give the little guy five kuai, he'd spend an inordinate amount of time writing out a ticket, then you'd take the ticket. The Chairman then would come find you later and collect the ticket. Often this seemed to be in the middle of some exercise or some other critically inopportune moment.

But little irritated me more than The Chairman speaking "idiot Chinese" to me. The kind where you're retarded, and he is annoyed at having to deal with that. The Chairman would come up to me and shout "TICKET" whenever he saw me. "You want to take my ticket?" I'd say in Chinese, trying not to drop a barbell on my chest. "I'm busy right now. Please wait a minute."

The Worst Language School Ever: Shantou Jail

The English teaching racket has its fair share of horror stories. You get off the plane in a foreign country, and it turns out that those modern, lovely facilities you saw on the website were, hmm, from the web. I've heard plenty of these stories -- the Korean hogwans have a particularly bad reputation. I mean when you start with a name like that, what can you expect?

A recent news story, however, has me thinking that you can get a lot worse: A young Malaysian woman acting as a drug mule was captured at Shantou airport and, according to one of the articles, is currently passing her time in jail teaching English.

The stories -- through no fault of their own, they seem well done, especially for something as sensitive as this -- leave you with many questions. Why exactly would Shantou jail inmates be interested in learning English? Since no one in the history of the universe has ever been searched at the Shantou airport -- especially flying in -- who didn't the dealers pay off and therefore piss off and contribute to the ruination of this young woman's life?

Do the women actually know they are being used as drug mules? The stories are ambiguous on this point, with some leaving you believing the women are naively unaware, and others with the impression that the women are reluctantly acquiescing to the pleas of men who have seduced them. In the end I guess it doesn't matter since they are going to jail and, barring some miracle, the grave for this offense.

One interesting point, made in Singapore's New Straits Times, is that the number of drug smuggling offenses committed by foreigners coming into Guangdong has tripled in the last couple of years. Somewhere, somehow, though we read nothing about it and it officially doesn't exist, there is a drug-dealing syndicate or two on the other side of Umi Lazim, the woman in Shantou jail, who will turn 24 years old in a couple of days on January 4th.

Additional articles on Umi Lazim and drug smuggling:

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/12/30/focus/19884070&sec=focus

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news_lite.php?id=303790

Scam Artistry

Yesterday I had the students brainstorm things they had seen, read, or heard around campus that were newsworthy. They then had to evaluate the credibility of the information (credibility being a recent vocabulary word they were still trying to get right in their mouths) and try to decide what the truth of the matter might be.


The stories ranged from the banal to the bizarre. The English Speech Competition will be held tonight in the Great Hall. A student film competition is being held, in which students create independent films that are then judged by a Hong Kong film director. A student in Dormitory D, according to his friends who posted a notice online, is obsessed with fecal matter, and has spread it all over his dorm walls.


The last one -- while stomach churning -- was sort of what I was looking for. If you wanted to find out if this was really true or not, what would you do? Silence.


"Follow the smell," one smart guy said. We all laughed. But no seriously, I said, what would you do. After much pulling and tugging they came out with it -- go to the dorms, look around, try to find the guy, try to talk to him, try to talk to other people...


I was about to put the activity to bed when one last student raised her hand.


"I want to tell a story of a freshman girl who was cheated 3000 kuai," she said.


One of my pet language peeves has become "cheat." The word is commonly used in Chinese, but the English translation, while not technically wrong, comes out odd a lot of the time. To their delight, I taught the students phrases like "She got scammed," and "scam artist" and "he ripped me off."


The student continued with a woeful and seemingly apocryphal tale I had heard before -- the young girl was approached by two "students" who had lost their money and their teacher. The girl helped them, and they were so grateful, they managed to get in touch with the "teacher." They all met up, but then the tale became more even more pitiful. They needed money for "research..."


It might have been the one time in my life I've held my tongue and was grateful that I did so. I was dying to interrupt with "How could this girl be so stupid?"-- but I managed not to. It was clear that the story was going to go on and on, so at a certain point I stopped the girl, and opened up the story to students' questions.


"Where did you read this news?" asked another student.


The girl who'd told the story mumbled something none of us could hear, and I asked her to repeat it.


"I know this news because the poor girl was me," she said, to audible gasps.


A story is just a story until it happens to someone you know. Suddenly, the kids were paying attention. My head was bursting with questions, but I left them to the students, who were suddenly like reporters at a press conference.


After a few minutes, the girl was getting so battered with questions that I intervened. I tried to put things in perspective -- I could feel class sentiment congealing into the kind that walks past a guy bleeding out on the road. I told them that it was good to try to help people, but you have to judge things carefully, and if you feel things are getting strange, you can always walk away.


I told them a story of a winter night in Beijing. A woman around my age came up to me on the street and asked if I could buy her food. She had the dress and appearance of a migrant laborer. Normally I wouldn't have stopped, but something in her demeanor demanded it. I told her I was going to the store and could buy her something there. In the store, she asked me if she could buy something -- I couldn't quite understand her question in Chinese, but thought I had caught something referred to medecine or hygiene. She came to the counter with a package of dinner rolls, several packets of instant noodles, and a package of maxi-pads. Jesus, I thought, there's no way she's a scam artist if this is what she's buying.

Out on the street, she began to launch into another sad tale of how she needed to get home, to another province...

"I'm sorry," I said. "I have helped you all I can." I turned my back and headed toward my building -- with a guilty feeling that she was probably telling the truth.

Little Brother

( Xiao di, little brother, is a common term of address in Chinese for a younger man in south China.)

Little Brother sits at the barbecue grill with black smoke streaming into his face. We walk up with calls of, “Ni hao, ni hao.” He responds with the only English he knows, “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD.” He finds amazing versatility in the phrase. With a variety of tones and inflections, he uses it to respond to everything from greetings to requests for more beer.

It is a raspy old man's voice for someone who looks about 12. In fact, Xiao Di is 17, but you'd never know it. He's got a crew cut and huge ears that are rotated forward, bat-like. One of his ears has a growth on it, an extra ledge that somehow grew out at right angles to his earlobe. He's not tall but looks tall. Thin in a way that looks like a pole grew bones, arms and legs, and started walking around. He is a natural actor and looks -- if it's possible to imagine this -- like a cross between a Chinese James Dean and a slightly affable and less-tortured Gollum.

Xiao Di is cook, bartender and waiter at a local barbecue stall outside the wall of the East Gate of the university. It's hard, given how long I've been here, to see the East Gate as it really is.

When I see it as it would appear to the foreign eye, it looks more like a refugee camp then a dining location. Dirty dogs tend to lie about under a scrubby tree. Broken concrete and gravel cover an empty lot that narrows into a dusty road. At night, stalls and food carts dot the dusty lot. There are a handful of restaurants along the road. In those ramshackle restaurants they make some of the best food I've ever eaten.

The barbecue stall that Xiao Di mans has Christmas-tree type lights strung up under the sky, and plastic, fake-wooden folding tables and chairs. On a white push cart sit items for grilling. Above the food whirs a fan with bits of plastic taped to its blades, spinning quietly to keep the flies away.

Chinese barbecue is not American barbecue. Everything is on a stick, and the portions are small. Beefballs, chicken legs, eggplant, tofu, -all are skewered and dipped in honey or pepper sauce. Xiao Di brings them out as they come up, grinning so wide his ears seem like they are moving out several inches from his head.

“Your – tofu,” he says, in a Chinese that is so non-standard and idiosyncratic that it seems like a private language. He rasps out the words and grins psychotically, rolls his eyes, and lopes off to bring beer.

One night he comes up and starts rubbing a friend's shoulders.

“One more beer?” he asks. He knows his job and is a good salesman.

“Not tonight,” my buddy answers.

“OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD,” Xiao Di says quietly, shaking his head in disapproval.

He then harangues my friend for a good ten minutes about how he is losing face because we are all drinking more, that if he were a real man, he'd have another beer.

One night he has a coughing fit and falls out of his seat at the barbecue. Another night he chases the boys working at a nearby restaurant. Another, he gets in a fight with the people he works for at the stall. For a couple of weeks in the winter, he appears in a dirty yellow suit jacket two sizes too big for him. We tell him how all the girls will be crazy over him. On another night, he's wildly throwing a butcher knife at the large rats that haunt the bushes behind the barbecue stalls.

Tonight I go down alone to the East Gate. I'm about to start my third year at the Chinese university. Few students and teachers are back yet, and the seats around the barbecue stalls are mostly empty.


For the first time, I sit down and have a real conversation with Xiao Di.

He is wearing a red sleeveless t-shirt with 23 on the back and a montage of hoop dreams on the front. He loves basketball. He plays in a nearby town and wants to know if I want to play there sometime. He has been smoking since age eight. He says contradictory things about whether he goes to school or not. He says he doesn't like working here -- in fact, has switched the stall he works at because they treated him badly at the other one. He wants to get a factory job.

In a country that encourages if does not require each family one child, he has four brothers and sisters. One brother looks just like him, he says. His sister is in Guangzhou. When I ask about his parents, he looks down and mumbles something that I don't understand. I don't press. If Xiao Di isn't an actual orphan, there is something about him that radiates isolation.

We talk. I eat, and he smokes. I have an English book. He picks it up and says he doesn't understand. I tell him he needs to study more. He tells me how much he would love to have a mobile phone. I tell him if he had one, he could call his girlfriend. He grunts and chuckles, says something in his private language, and begins rubbing his head.

After an hour or so, I pay and head home into the warm Chinese summer night. I glance back. Xiao Di is hunched over the barbecue, puffing the white smoke of his cigarette into the black smoke of the grill.

That Worldview

When you have been in China as long as I have, you sometimes get lulled into a sense of normalcy; you forget that you are living in a place that is really, really different. Then there's that back-of-the-hand-across-the-face moment that cause the chopsticks to go flying out of your hands, or the spittle out of your so pridefully-non-spitting mouth.

I had a couple of these wake-up-and-smell-the-lead-paint moments recently in class. (Luckily I was able to mitigate my reaction to a: "Well, other people might see it differently...")

I asked the students in a Toefl preparation class to brainstorm what makes a good speaker of a foreign language. What, for example, would a good foreign speaker of Chinese sound like? What qualities would you look for?

They are a bright group, and we're spot on with their answers, mentioning everything from fluency to intonation and predicting the speaker's intentions. The only thing I could think to add was appropriateness, of knowing when to say the right thing and what the right thing to say was.

"Or," as I put it, "Knowing when not to say something."

I gave the example of telling people they were fat. This was a common thing a few years ago, though it seems to be on the decline now. Students would come up to foreign teachers and simply tell them that they were too fat.

"You just can't call someone fat in America," I told the class. "Especially if it's a woman, and especially if it's true."

I went on to explain that personal appearance in general was fairly off limits, unless it was positive or you were extremely close to the person. The kids in the class nodded -- they seemed to have already figured it out. They were sophisticated enough to have gotten it without my needing to tell them -- or so I thought.

After I gave my little admonishing lecture, one of the better students raised her hands and asked in all seriousness: "But can we call someone chubby?"

* * * *

With the freshmen, these things are a little more expected; they haven't had much contact with foreigners, most of them. They are sort of blank slates. Their general knowledge is limited. They are just starting out on their studies of journalism. I've found that what gets taught at the end of many journalism courses -- ethics, responsibility, core values -- has to get taught right up front here with the youngest students, and has to be repeated over and over.

The students had an assignment to research a case in which the journalistic value system broke down, or to find a story that was missing a core value. They then had to present it to the class. I walked around to different groups, and caught a story that seemed interesting: one of the few boys in class was telling his classmates about a story he'd read about Tibet.

"So what's the problem with this story?" I asked.

"I think it is an example of bias," he said. The student went on to explain how all the sources in the story were right in line with the government's view on the Dalai Lama and Tibet. We had talked about bias, balance, propaganda, accuracy and fairness in a story we'd read the previous week. The story had been about the U.N. rejection of a Taiwan move to discuss independence -- it had been filled with difficult words like "inalienable" and "secession," but the students had done well and I was proud of them.

"Great," I said. "When we come back from the break, you can present this story to us."

Lone, the student, began the presentation, and I helped him by writing "Dalai Lama" on the board.

"Do you know who the Dalai Lama is?" he asked the class, most of whom shook their heads. "He is a secessionist who wants to break Tibet from China."

A Summer in the Local News Business

Ever wonder how journalism works in China? I am not sure if this story is representative, but it certainly touches on some interesting problems. Emma is a student of mine from a nearby city.


A Summer in the Local News Business
By: Emma Lu

This summer holiday, I interned for the Guangzhou Daily's Shantou office. I went to Chaonan, Jieyang and downtown Shantou with Ruan Xiaoguang, a journalist from Guangzhou Daily. We went to Chaonan to report on a boy who drowned in a sandpit filled with water; we were invited to Hualixi Village to cover an event with little newsworthiness but met with lots of strange things; and we went to Jieyang to investigate an underwear collecting activity. Yes, you heard correctly, underwear！

The event that we first covered was a boy who drowned in a sandpit filled with water days before in Chaonan, a district of Shantou.
When we got to the boy's home, his parents and his aunt talked with us about the details of the drowning. That day the boy went to the sand beach to play with his friend and his little sister. A factory was using sand from a beach for construction, and they had left a few sandpits full of seawater. The boy was catching fish in the sandpit but he was so careless that he fell into the water. He tried to stay afloat because he couldn't swim. His little sister also jumped into the water and tried to pull him up. However, he drowned in the end and his sister also nearly drowned. An old fisherman was called by the boy's friend and came to pull up his sister.
When I was talking with the parents, I could see their spirits were broken. They didn't cry because they had cried so much. I couldn't recognize what they said in Chaoshan dialect although I am a Chaozhou native. The dialect of Chaonan is very different from other places in the Chaoshan area. So we had to talk in Mandarin.

After the talk, we went to that sand beach. We could see several sandpits lying on the beach, each of which was at about 60 square meters. As the boy's father had told us, the water in them was over 2 meters in depth. Nor far away was the sand processing factory, busy with many trucks going back and forth to take the sand out of the village. Some villagers told us that several factories had collected sand on this beach for about 15 years, had destroyed the wood near the beach, and had left many dangerous sandpits on the beach. As the factories did nothing to keep people away from the sandpits, there had been about 8 persons who had died in these kinds of sandpits. None of the factories had sent any compensation to the drowned persons’ families.

Why did the government allow the factories to exploit sand in their village and bring such serious safety problems? When we asked the party secretary of the village, he refused to say anything about it, and even more he denied that there were sand processing factories existing in their village. It didn't match with what we had seen on the beach.

The boy's parents wanted to sue the sand factory and the government. But they also knew it was very difficult because the factory and the government were very powerful and rich. "We still want to try, for the sake of the safety of other people," said the boy's aunt.


My second report was to cover the renovation of an old temple in Hualixi in Chaonan. Hualixi was a village in which the business of selling plastic flowers had boomed in recent years. We were invited by the village officials to cover the temple renovation. They sent a local journalist to take us there.

When we got there, the party secretary and some other officials were very kind to us. But they could hardly tell us the history of the temple which was very important to our report, and even more they could hardly speak Mandarin, a basic requirement for an official.

When the Hualixi secretary drove his car to take us to the temple, I discovered that the car had a steering wheel on the right side. Most cars on the mainland have a left-handed steering wheel. About ten years ago, many people wanted to buy foreign cars because of the high quality and the Chinese government added 100% to 80% taxes on the imported cars to limit the increasing number. But in recent years the tax rate had been gradually decreased to about 25%. But some people still tried to buy these kinds of cars without paying tax. It seemed ironic to me that the party secretary drove such a car to work.

To my most surprise, in the end the secretary gave us 800 Yuan and said that he didn't really want us to report on the temple's renovation, but wanted to get to know us and develop a friendship with us. Speaking frankly, they wanted us to do more good reports on their achievements and not to cover any bad news of their village in the future. 800 Yuan was not a little amount! We were surprised and tried to refuse but the secretary still pushed the money at us.

When the local journalist took us back, he told me that a journalist should learn how to keep good relationships with government officials and rich businessmen -- and only by relying on this could a journalist earn more money. I was very sad to hear his words. I really hoped not to work with this kind of journalist in the future.

My third interview destination was Jieyang, a city neighboring Shantou. We had been told that a series of underwear shops belonging to one company were taking back people's used underwear.
This story really interested us and we wondered what the used underwear could be used for. We went into the shop and looked around. We could see a poster saying used underclothes could be exchanged for 15 Yuan, used underwear for 5 Yuan and used bed gowns for 25 Yuan. It meant that you could buy the new underclothes and underwear in the shop at a discount if you brought in your used things, a good bargain for buyers. But why were they willing to pay money to collect these things? When we asked the shop keepers, however, they went quiet and said they didn't know.

When we pretended to want to buy the used underwear that they had collected, the shop keeper called the manager and with her permission, we gave her call. She said that their purpose for collecting used underclothes and bed gowns was just for investigative research, such as knowing how long a person wore their underclothes and which brand was the most popular. Finally the used things would be burnt up. However, the price they paid for the used things was very high and this made us doubt their answer.

We asked a manager of an underclothes factory in Chaonan, a district of Shantou, about this. The manager said that he had never heard of paying money for collecting used underwear. In his opinion, it was impossible to renew used underwear because it cost too much and it would be a deal without benefits.

Our curiosity was increasing and we worried there were some bad motivations for this deal. Would the used things be sent to some other regions and resold? Or would they be sold to some people who had a hobby of touching these dirty things?

Few people went to change their used underclothes or underwear for new ones. We interviewed some people, to get their reaction to the underwear exchange. Some people said underwear was a private thing and they didn't want to give it to others. Some people said they were worrying about strange uses of used underwear and they didn't want to get involved with this kind of deal.

The parents of the boy who drowned in the sandpit would try their best to sue the government and the factory -- but it would be hard to win. The used underwear collecting just confused me. But the thing that bothered me most was hearing that as a journalist, you have to develop relationships with officials.

Ultranationalism at the Local Watering Hole

Nightlife down here on the southern frontier is pretty limited, and recently the crowd out at night seems even more homogeneous than normal. It used to be that you could walk into the one decent bar downtown, Sunglow, and come across a handful of Shantou's foreign community. The three or four times I've been down there in the last couple of months, however, there's been nary a foreign face to be seen.

Where have they all gone? Perhaps they were dissuaded from entering by the big freestanding posterboard that's now up in the bar's entrance. The sign lists all the kinds of people that are not permitted to enter the bar.

They include: Anyone who supports a militaristic Japan. Anyone who supports Taiwan independence. On a note that might find more common consensus, international terrorists and drug users and dealers are also banned.

Perhaps this was all pomp and circumstance in honor of National Day; unfortunately, the owner of the bar, a friend of mine, was not around for comment. Large posters of Mao were hung around the bar. They made interesting counterpoint to the two young ladies singing Latin and English jazz up on stage.

MyShantou website

My apologies for the long absence to the one or two Melon readers that might be out there. I've been concentrating my attention on writing and trying to get writers for MyShantou.net, a website all about our fair southern city here. (www.myshantou.net)

There's something attractive about the website, despite the fact that it runs on a system which can't even handle correct punctuation. I guess it's the fact that it has a genuine audience: the small foreign community here constitutes one part, and the Chinese English-speaking community here, (a bigger group than I would have expected) constitutes another. But the biggest group, as far as I can gather, is the expatriate Chinese who have roots here in the Chaoshan area and are now spread across the globe from Malaysia to Canada.

I've been confronted with ultimate Chinese dilemma in becoming involved in writing and recruiting writers for the site: How much of the content should reflect positively on the city, and how much negatively? In the States there would be no question -- publish what you want. But it's just different here. A student of mine, for example, has written a great piece on interning at a local newspaper over the summer. Along the way, she came face to face with official corruption and buffoonery. It's a great story, and I have no doubt about it's authenticity. But publishing it on the site might result in the site getting shut down. Hmmmm...if a tree falls in the forest, and officials deny that there was ever a tree, does it make a sound?

Attacked by Giant Spiders!

Okay, now that I have got your attention with the overly sensational headline, let me rephrase that. The hills behind the university are fairly scenic, and criss-crossed with trails nice for hiking. I have walked in them many times over the last three or four years. On no occassion however, have I ever seen what I did a few weeks ago: Dozens and dozens of very large spiders with enormous (three to four-foot) webs. While they are not attacking, it is no exaggeration to say the hills are literally overrun with spiders.

The nature of the beast? It was tough to find out. But after some searching around, I have come to the conclusion that the spider is something called Nephila maculata, The Golden Orb Web spider, also referred to as the Golden Silk Orb weaver, and the Giant Wood spider.
I grew up in Florida with all kinds of creatures — snakes, alligators, plenty of insects — out and about regularly, so I feel pretty well-adjusted around critters. This spider, however, is kind of creepy. It is huge — I am 5′11″ 180 pounds, and these spiders were bigger than my spread out hand. And lightning fast, I discovered when I got too close with the camera.

There is a pretty good webpage here that provides an overview of what this spider is all about.

Among other things, it details the use of the spider's silk in countries around Asia — the spider is found everywhere from Japan to the south Pacific.The spider's silk, apparently, is incredibly strong — while I find this is a bit dubious, the page at one point compares it to Kevlar. One webpage I read said that in Japanese the spider is referred to as the “femme fatale” spider. Apt perhaps, as the big ones that we saw were mostly female, the male being nearly a fifth the size.

What is most interesting to me is how these spiders absolutely came to dominate this little habitat of the hills behind the school in just a couple of years. On our hike, my friends and I saw literally dozens of these things over the course of a mile or two. No birds to prey upon them? Actually, if I were any bird other than a condor, I would keep right on flying if I came face to face with one of these things.

Travels in Zhejiang

Before returning to Shantou, I had the good fortune to do a bit of traveling in and around Hangzhou -- definitely one of China's nicer cities.



The trip began bizarrely, by meeting a young woman on the airplane who turned out to be the wife of a high school classmate of mine. Said classmate's mother was something of an arch-enemy in high school; she was born-again, and I was punk rock, a stormy marriage from the start. Still, it was kind of nice to step off the plane and see a high-school mom from the suburbs of Florida there in old Shanghai.



After a brief soujourn to the Bund and LuXun's former residence, it was on to Hangzhou. Set right on the lake across from the Chinese Academy of the Arts, the International Youth Hostel there was like a little bit of Thailand further north; cool music in the cafe, and an international crowd. Okay, no great beaches so maybe my analogy is a stretch. But nice.



One night I'm in a bar that's touting a hip hop night, and my girl and I are dancing to some old school rap. Suddenly, the music goes quiet. These two young guys get up on stage and start having a rap duel in Chinese. One guy fits his favorite English word, "motherfucker" into each sentence about twenty times, to the roaring approval of the crowd. I feel I'm in some post-modern video about young China.



The highlight of the trip: Hiking the mountains outside the city. You take a taxi not more than thirty minutes and you are in a truly rural area. Couldn't a lot more of China have this kind of urban planning?



The worst moment: I'm in the Hangzhou bus station, enroute to Wuzhen. This guy is standing next to me at the urinal trough. He literally leans over, and stares at my junk. I glare at him and offer some choice angry words. But it deters him not. Incredible. Later on, I try out a solution to this kind of behavior that seems to work: "Hey, are you gay? That's cool. But I'm not. Please stop." When I say this to a boatman who's started stroking my arm, he jumps back about three feet. It's rare that you can produce exactly the desired effect in someone's behavior with a sentence.



Wuzhen, one of the so-called water towns, is a bit of a disappointment. I barely have a sense of smell, but the stench overpowers even me. Still, I have some nice chats with the old folks in the streets, though their Putonghua is barely comprehensible.



At dusk, on the eastern side of Wuzhen, the water taxis in the canal form a broken line heading for the sinking sun, and if you ignore the blatantly artificial nature of the place and the scent on the wind, it is beautiful.

Toys R Us

Shantou, specifically a little satellite community of Shantou called Chenghai, is filled with toy factories. A fact that, until recently, seemed of little importance or merit. With the ongoing Chinese product scandals, however, it's taken on a certain relevance. Especially since there are 3,000 toy manufacturers in this district and that "at least 70 percent of the products are exported to more than 100 countries and regions," according to a People's Daily Online story.

On a side note, http://www.chinese-outpost.com/, summarizes news from various provinces and seems to provide news on smaller and medium-sized cities, Shantou among them.

Legends on Legends

I'm aware that what follows is gushingly positive, so if that's not your thing, be forewarned.

A couple of weeks ago back in Shantou, I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture of epic proportions: Peter Arnett, the new addition to the J-school faculty, speaking about the life, times, and untimely death of his good friend David Halberstam.

(Halberstam, for those who don't know, was a journalist who wrote nonfiction books, the most famous of which was probably The Best and the Brightest, an account of how the Kennedy and then Johnson administrations got mired in Vietnam. Halberstam was killed in April. Though in his 70s, he was still writing, and was getting a ride to an interview from a Berkeley student. The car was broadsided; Halberstam was in the passenger seat, and was killed instantly.)

Arnett's presence in Shantou is both extremely lucky and oddly appropriate, considering the ravenous appetite for all things China among journalists and media types in the States. Not to toot our own horn, but it's fascinating to me how this small university in a strange isolated corner of southern China is attracting more and more heavy hitters from the journalism world. I guess it's a case of the right program at the right time in the right country.

Two things struck me about the lecture: One, how having a figure of such experience provides living, speaking history to the listener and two, how one of Arnett's strongest memories of Halberstam was quite personal.

"In Saigon, in 1962..." How many working journalists today can begin sentences like that? Things that most of us read in books or have only seen in movies are the man's memories, his working experience. To be able to hear those stories is simply incredible.

While he covered Halberstam's work extensively in the lecture, one anecdote stood out: Halberstam personally rescued Arnett from a beating by Diem's security forces. They'd been at some kind of protest or rally, and the increasing hostility that the police had had toward journalists bubbled over. They attacked Arnett. Halberstam, a large man with a large presence, waded into the fray and pulled Arnett out.

At the time, they were young guys, hungry for stories and passionate about covering a war. But, Arnett said, one of his strongest memories of Halberstam would always be that -- not how accomplished he was, but how Halberstam took a risk for him.

Even legends need a helping hand sometimes.

Land Grab

The number of incidents of mass protest in China in the last few years is often quoted as being in the hundreds of thousands. (So much for the image of the docile and subservient Confucian horde.) One of the main reasons for protests is land seizures, in which local government simply announces villagers have to move, as the new knitting factory goes up. Locals are often compensated, but remuneration often falls short of the true value of the property.

Here in Guangdong province the problem seems to be acute. The economy is booming, and development is everywhere. Driving from the university into downtown yesterday evening revealed an enormous factory complex being built on what I last remember as fishponds and stilt houses.

What must be China's most hard-working blog, EastSouthWestNorth, picks up on a recent story originally reported by Ming Pao newspaper in Hong Kong about a protest in the city of Gurao, near Shantou. (Read the story here.)

Scrolling down to the bottom of the page reveals some striking images of scenes more reminiscent of French inner cities than of suburban Guangdong.

Protests, a Gunshot, and Love in Macau

What the world sees from afar through the eyes of the media is fascinating, especially when you are in a place at a time when something happens. A ferry goes down in Thailand, and everyone from all over the world starts frantically sms-ing you whether you are alright; even though you are on the island where the ferry went down, a few miles from the accident, you are getting the news via satellite and a fellow traveller...the news source being Sweden.

On Labor Day, May 1st, a rare protest in Macau turned violent when a policeman fired warning shots to dispel a crowd demonstrating against illegal and cheaply-paid mainland labor. This in turn enraged and drew more protestors to the demonstration, while a nearby motorcyclist was hit in the neck with a "metal object," as it was described in a local paper. While the metal object has now been declared to be a bullet, no one has said with absolute certainty that it came from the policeman's gun. It's good to be careful, I guess, but I think it's fair to say that in all likelihood it was a stray warning shot. (Many of the original stories that day do not pick up the wounded driver. Read an IHT story here.)

Even though you could probably spit from one end of Macau to the other, I couldn't have been less aware of this event; I was much more focused on my friend's wedding ceremony, at which I had to give a keynote speech.

It turned out to be a great day. The wedding was on Hac Sa, the black sand beach on Coloane, the far island of Macau, and by far the least populated part of the former colony. My friend and his wife looked resplendent and very much in love, he in a kilt and she barefoot in a cream-colored dress. A bag-piper backed up a long procession to the beach. The local people were stunned and enthralled by the bag-piper. I got through my speech without to many gaffs. The couple drank champagne there, with their friends and family, and we all took photos on the beach.

Somewhere a few miles away, the protest was occuring. Later on, when I joked with my girlfriend about how the Macanese were going to come after her, she seemed at least half-afraid for her safety.

"I'm just kidding -- they want mainlanders like you here. Here to spend your money, a tourist. It's the da gong ren (migrant workers) they don't want, " I said.

There seemed genuine confusion there: Macau was getting rich, why were they protesting?

Perhaps for many young, university-educated people from mainland China, capitalism is new enough that they they are not comprehensively aware of how divisive it can be.

But my Labor Day was what it should have been: a rest from work, and an appreciation of greater things.

A Lucky Portuguese Cannonball

A lucky cannon shot hit the Dutch invasion's munition ship, in the early 1600s; the Dutch thought the Portuguese had some mad weaponry, and fled. Thereby leaving this strange little enclave of Portuguese, Cantonese, African and Las Vegan culture on a peninsula and a few islands in the south of China -- Macau is far enough from Beijing, and certainly different enough, to feel like a foreign country.

A brief entry today, just to let the Melon's readers know this correspondent's location. More stories to follow, I'm sure: gambling, a beautiful wedding, Russian exotic dancers, guitar-wielding trios, and wine...and rain...

Rare Tea and the Global Village

Fei Fei stood up in class four years ago, after I'd been here only about a week. She was tiny, with close-cropped hair and a high voice. But from the very beginning, there was evidence of iron in there somewhere.

"Hello, my English name is Bob. You can call me Bob. I know Bob is a boy's name, but I don't care," she said.

Bob it was. Somehow Fei Fei seems more appropriate now though: My students are no longer students, experimenting with names, growing up, at the very beginning of learning a craft. While still very young, they've gotten somewhere now, accomplished things. Evidence of this in the case of Fei Fei is a recent trip she made to Fujian province to work as a photographer for a good friend of mine. The assignment was to photograph tea-leaf picking in a remote mountain area. (See Rare Tea Company.)

More amazing to me about this job she did is the connection created between two people from two incredibly different parts of the world, two incredibly different parts of my life. My good friend Milo is the operator-owner of Rare Tea; I met her years ago on the upper West Side of New York City, where, Breakfast-at-Tiffanys-like, she took the city by storm with her verve and elegant British accent.

I would've imagined thosuands of degrees of separation between Milo and Fei Fei instead of more or less none. What strikes me about this is how fundamentally good it is: While much is made of technological connection worldwide, that connection can also be made personal. And that is good, really good. In a time when negativity dominates what we hear and see, it is important to remember that's only a small part of the story.

Southern Comfort

Out the window there’s nothing but the green drooping shadow of the hills that surround the college – no neon signs, screeching horns, or artillery-style fireworks. Most mornings, there’s just the sound of birds twittering in among the green. This morning the kindergarten behind the building is blasting happy music. Even at its insane volume, there’s something comforting about it: the fact that its main purpose is to entertain four-year olds seems to give it a pass on the annoyance chart.

It’s good to be back at my Chinese laojia, my hometown: Shantou University, just outside the city of Shantou, which lies near the top of the southernmost Chinese province, Guangdong.

As a city and a place, it’s an unusual one. It’s one of China’s five special economic zones, the cities opened up in the 1970s to foreign-style trade and investment. But it’s never been anything but dead last among the five cities: local corruption abounds. Another obstacle to development is language: the people here speak what essentially is the Basque language of China. Even Chinese people who are not familiar with the region don’t recognize Chaoshanhua as a Chinese dialect, thinking that its speakers must be from some other Asian country. There’s a kind of sleepy slowness to the city, the area, and the university itself. The kind that make you think that rapid development might just never catch on here.

There have been encouraging signs, however. A few days ago, a massive event for development was held at the Shantou port. The Same Song tour, featuring mainly Hong Kong and Taiwanese stars of the highest level, got packed in with the event, and Shantou was suddenly beamed into millions of Chinese homes. The concert was followed a day later by a fireworks show that reportedly cost in the millions of US dollars.

And the university is making the kind of progress that makes you believe in big quick evolutionary jumps. For much of the time I was here – three years in all – little seemed to happen. Now, in the space of six months, we have facilities heretofore unimaginable: a Mac lab, 40 new computers, an entire expanded wing.

But the best kind of progress comes in the form of human development. Even though I’ve only been gone for five or six months, running into the students I taught sort of makes me feel like Gene Simmons at a Kiss reunion concert; I am that adored rock star. I can understand the best moments of what it might be like to be a parent at these times. One guy, a senior I’d had since he was freshmen, simply came up to me and wrapped his arms around me in the most natural of bear hugs; the only thing odd about it was that it’s not something people really do here. “We’re lucky to have had you for so long,” he said.

In this humid southern climate that reminds me so much of my other home, Florida, on the far side of the world, there creeps in the inevitable sense of change,of it being time to go. I may end up back here for one more school year, but that will surely be my last. And then I’ll drive out the school gates for the last time, four or five years from the day I drove in, and my green-draped southern Chinese university will fold itself up in my mind into the hazy dream-like quality of memory.

Photo by Liang Qing

Night Train

It's a sea of people. Black-haired heads bob. A shuffling mass. We move a step every ten seconds. Literally. Enormous and oddly-configured luggage bumps along and pushes against us, and I push back; my rucksack is nearly as big a person. When we finally make it through the narrow iron guantlet where human swell bottlenecks and the guards take the ticket, I tell her: "Well, however bad it is, it'll be better than that." She just smiles that sweet smile.

Hard sleeper, Beijing to Guangzhou, six bunks, 21 hours, and four provinces. The distance of New York to Florida for 450 kuai, about 50 US dollars.

It's an auspicious beginning. We've got the bottom bunks, best seats in the room. The room is clean. Our neighbors arrive as the train readies to pull out; it's hard to tell how many there are, as they seem to occupy the surrounding rooms as well. It seems to be a thirty-something daughter, and several aged, stooped men. There's also an older woman, who's every statement is at the pitch and tone of someone who's undergoing real-time robbery. They all wear the matching red baseball caps of a package tour.

We're lying on our bunks and smile and say hello and nod as they arrive. One of the older men goes for his bunk, the middle one across from me. Two metal footholds jut out from the wall, and the old man hoists himself up on one, then extends the other foot across slowly to the other, so that he's spread-eagled in front of the open door...and then he freezes. I'm watching with alarm. He remains there for what seems an interminable length of time as his wife and daughter shout at him. He creaks his way back down.

I make eye contact with the daughter. "It doesn't seem very convenient. Maybe I can switch with him?" I say. Nearly as soon as I say it, I realize I'll probably regret it, and Moon, my girlfriend, starts to raise a note of protest. But the family is already profusely grateful and I'm already moving. The old man settles down into an unrelaxed-looking crunch on the clean matress.

They are from Hunan province, on their way home. They speak a Hunanese dialect that for all itents and purposes is a new and undiscovered language; every time they say something, I mouth to Moon whether she understands and she shakes her head. When they switch to Mandarin, it isn't much better; the influence of their first tongue on the lingua franca of this nation is so great that it's nearly unintelligible. Nearly everything they say, I have to get a translation into standard Chinese from Moon.

I learn something fascinating from their bad Chinese; one of the old men is grilling me later on, and keeps saying "Bay-Ging" "Bay-Ging". Even though it's wrong, I get it immediately: Beijing. And I find out the origin of the old Westernized spelling: Peking.

It's a sleepless night. The second old man, who has the black flat-top haircut of an old school Chinese leader, snores mightly. The old woman begins a discussion with the husband on the bottom bunk, who is sharing the bunk with the daughter. The discussion goes on and off intermittently from 5 am, at ear-shattering volume. Every time they start to speak, I go "Shhhhshshhhhh!" It has no effect. Sometime well after dawn, I drift off.

Groggy awakenings to the thrum of the cars on the rails. The Hunanese family is shouting over a breakfast of peanuts and fruit. As soon as I leave the bunk, it apparently means I'm ready for conversation. My salary in Beijing? My job? Am I Chinese citizen? I'm confused by this one - I've already told the old man that I'm American. Yes, but you've been here so long. Will you live here yi beizi, your whole life? Of course, I say, looking at Moon, my girlfriend is Chinese. Moon scoffs. I extricate myself from the interrogation and head for the toilet. It's too early for these questions.

Around mid-morning the family disembarks at Chenzhou. They are profusely grateful and charming. We exchange warm goodbyes. The car becomes silent as more and more people leave. Out the window, rolling landscapes of old brick and mud houses unfold, shrouded in low-lying clouds and wet air. Strange pinnacle-shaped mountains dot the views. We sit by the window and watch for a while, then eat instant noodles and fall asleep again.

The train arrives in Guangzhou at three pm. Suddenly we are thrust into the madding crowd again. Thousands of people are following an underground corridor for connections. We finally come up into a massive city square. It starts to rain, a wet hot rain. I have far too much to carry and Moon and I get irritated with each other. We make it into the bus station, nearly soaked. The bus is leaving immediately. We rush for the right door, and a bored middle-aged female guard calls us back to x-ray our luggage. We throw it through the machine, and finally find the right bus.

Moments later, we're on it and it pulls out nearly as soon as we sit down. We still have seven hours to go.

Check out photos section for Thailand photos

Thank God - or Buddha - for Thailand

Thank God - or Buddha - for Thailand.

I couldn't imagine a better antidote to Beijing than this place. Koh Pha Ngan, the small island in the Gulf of Thailand famous for the Full Moon Party, continues to draw more people. Neither sun nor rain nor coup d'etat will deter the farangs, as the Thai refer to foreigners, from flocking here.

Heading out tomorrow for three days to a remote island national park, Ang Thong, for trekking, snorkeling, and generally shedding the vestiges of civilization.

But already, after just a week, experiences here have produced many a notable anecdote-in-the-making...more to come soon...