Jetting Around

One nice thing was that since I was flying through Hong Kong I had my choice of airlines, which meant I didn't have to fly on an America airline, or a Chinese one for that matter. Cathay Pacific is one of those more and more rare airlines where the service is still good and the seats comfortable. They had a couple of neat things I hadn't seen before in the economy section of a plane. First every seat had a power jack, though my laptop is way to big to use on a plane since the screen wouldn't be able to open all the way. They also had a really good selection of shows and movies on the little seat back TV. One interesting thing is that the seats didn't really lean back. Instead what happened was that your seat just sot of slid forward if you pushed a button putting you in a more vertical position. It worked great for me but I wonder if it cuts some f the leg room for really tall people. The best part though was that you never end up with someone else's head in your lap. Also for the first time ever the little pillow on the back of the seat, for when you lean your head back, was actually comfortable, something I thought was impossible. Of course for every two steps forward airlines have to take one step back so there were a few inexplicably annoying things. First The head phone jack wasn't the standard kind so I could only use the crappy headphones they gave me, not the much better ones I had brought, there is simply no reason for this. More annoying was this was one of the new planes with the seat belt airbags, pictured here. It's not a bad idea I guess but the design of it takes away some of the valuable inches from the width of the seat due to its balky and inflexible nature. I'm not against airbags but they could put them in the back of the seat in front of you, more like a car. Also if the plan goes down an airbag isn't really going to help unless its also a parachute.

Waiting Around (Part One)

After I made the decision to go to Guangzhou I knew it would be some time before I would get my visa and actually would be able to go to China, I just didn't know how long. When I first asked David, my new Foreign Affairs Department guy, the same job that Ma Ming and Teddy had at my previous two schools, when the semester would start he said something vague about the 1st of September. But in July when I asked him what was up he said that he was going on vacation soon and wouldn't be able to deal with the visa stuff until sometime in August. I would have been more worried about that but I dealt with the same dithering last year before going to Alaer. When mid-August rolled around and I hadn't heard anything from David I began to get worried. I tried e-mailing him but I didn't get any response. Finally I called him on his cell. He said that he was in his home town and he hadn't seen my e-mails because they didn't have the internet there, but that he would get back to his office in late August and could do the visa stuff then. He also entreated me to not worry about it.

When late August rolled around and still nothing I was getting worried again. My parents who are planning on moving to Beijing had rented there house from the beginning of September, though do to more Chinese visa nonsense they are still to this day in a hotel in DC, and I would have to move to a small hotel with them if I was still in the US on September 1st. On top of all that I was just bored. I didn't think that I was going to be home as long as I was and I ran out of stuff to do. I called David again he said that he was working on it but it would take some time for him to get the forms he needed form the government there. When September 1st came and went I moved into a hotel near GW with my parents. David also told me that the school didn't really start until mid-September, which is sort of true, so I shouldn't worry so much. This, of course, would have been nice to know a lot earlier. Finally in early September I got my visa papers from China, they actually had to be delivered to a family friends house since the renters were living in my parent's house.

I went down and used the papers to get an actual visa in only one day, the easiest part of the whole process, and bought a ticket for China. Unfortunately when I told David when I was arriving he said that it was a Chinese holiday so it would be tough to get someone to meet me. I was pretty annoyed but I was able to change the ticket to a few days later. The flight itself was long, DC to New York, New York to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong to Guangzhou, but I was just happy that I was finally going to China.

What's Old is New Again

Well I'm back. I've finally settled in my new home and got my internet working, mostly. A lot has happened since I last posted, too much for one post, so I'm going to take it slow. First I should start with where I am. I didn't really post anything about where I was going after I finished i Alaer since I was considering a lot of options and didn't want any group to hear about the other groups through this blog, but now that I'm settled down I can shed some light on what's been going on. When I first started looking around I doubted that I would return to China. There are a number of countries in the Middle East that hire people to teach English. The problem with these I discovered was that they usually wanted a teaching certificate, something in teaching English as a foreign language, and even with my experience I got very few responses. I was also considering the Peace Corps but the place they offered me was just too remote.

I also applied to a number of places in China, in parts of the country I hadn't been to, and when the other two things fell through that's how I ended up back in China. After spending a year in remote Xinjiang I wanted to go somewhere a little bit more cosmopolitan. Guangzhou is a city of between 13, if you just include the city, and 40, if you count all the area and cities around it, million people. It's situated very close to both Hong Kong and Maco. Actually it's more accurate to say Hong Kong and Maco are close to Guangzhou since they were both settled there for there proximity to Guangzhou not the other way around. So I'd say I got something a little more cosmopolitan. Guangzhou is an old city that used to be known as Canton, where the word Cantonese comes from. It was also one of the first cities to be opened up to more outside trade after Mao's death. Since I've only just gotten here I can't say much about the city but I'm looking forward to an eventful year.

A New Modest Proposal

Famous satirist Jonathan Swift once wrote an essay called "A Modest Proposal" wherein he suggests that the poor might sell there children as food, mocking attitudes toward the poor. Well some of the local governments in China seem to think that selling children is a great idea, just not for food. This New York Times article tells the story of how in some rural areas of China local officials are grabbing children from there parents on trumped up charges, or just because they can, and selling them for adoption. There are several things I find amazing about this. First is the just cartoonishly evil nature of what they are doing. The Chinese government does a lot of bad things but here I feel there must be some one twirling a mustache and laughing maniacly as children are ripped from the arms of there parents. This is also another interesting example of how little control the central government really has some times. In a society as autocratic as China you'd think the central government would be able to control the local governments easily but that's just not the situation. Local government seem to have a significant amount of power to ignore the national government on all but the biggest issues. With reporting of corruption also out the window, no part of the government really wants to encourage that since they're all corrupt, no one is able to do much about horrible situations like this.

P.S.
I'd also like to note that my sister has started writing a blog which is included in the links to the left.

Japanophobia

I've been traveling to a lot of countries around East Asia since I've come to China, but one I've been very interested in going to, but haven't had the chance, is Japan. Basically it's just too expensive for me to do on my China salary, I'm hoping that my parents might want to go now that they're moving to Beijing, but for me it's just too much. Going to Singapore for even a few days cost way too much and Japan might be even more expensive. I've read a few books about Japan and I'd really love to see some of the sights, Japanese culture is certainly interesting as well, but I also feel that living in China has given me a very negative view of Japanese people as a whole. China is rife with anti-Japanese sentiment, partially due to the horrible crimes Japan committed against Chinese civilians during there long war and occupation, and partially due to the fact that the communist party finds it convenient to focus people on a foreign enemy to deflect public anger away from them and raise nationalism.

When I first got to Japan I shrugged off most of this as just sour grapes. They were talking about some pretty old crimes and just couldn't seem to let it go. But the more I learned about how the Japanese treat there history today the more I agreed with the Chinese. Unlike Germany who after WWII made a huge effort to confront and apologize for what happened, Japan's attitude has always been somewhere between, "It happened a long time ago," and "You would have done it to us had you gotten the chance." Americans ted not to know as much about Japanese atrocities during WWII and German ones, but the number of people killed by the Japanese was also staggering. In China in particular they endorsed the wholesale slaughter of civilians in many occupied areas, in a mix of brutal colonialism and the sort of rape and pillage attitude armies had in the middle ages. In America this also gets downplayed somewhat do to some form of national guilt about ending the war with two atomic bombs. Finally we always tend to overlook the past wrongs of our current allies and Japan has been a strong friend of America since the end of WWII.

But in China there is still a deep resentment and some rubs off. Not only in China though is there still historical anger at the Japanese. South Korea still violently disputes some islands with Japan, oddly even North Korea can get behind the south when Japan in the enemy. And in a lot of other countries in Asia I've visited there are monuments and museums to what the Japanese did during WWII. My point here isn't so much to discuss the past but to note I was pretty suppressed when I realized how much more negative my opinion of Japan had become after living in China.

Everything's Changing

Well I'm back in the good old US of A until September, and it's nice to be back even if it's 100 degrees in Washington some days. Next semester I'll be working in Guangzhou, I'll talk more about that in my next post, but not only am I going to China my parents are as well. My dad took a posting with his paper in Beijing, he's been there for several months already, but now both he and my mom are going to be living there for about three years. They're renting there house, the places in the expat areas of Beijing are actually lot more expensive than I thought they'd be. Both my parents seem excited for the move, even my mom likes it more after seeing India it gives you a new perspective on what crazy means that makes China seem much more reasonable. My sister also is quitting her job in Madison and is going to backpack around South-East Asia. She might even end up in China for some time around, I just have to assure her that China's big enough she never has to bump into me. So coming in September the whole family might be in China. I've loved my time in China but I never thought my whole family would end up there. It's not that everyone is coming to China to live next to me, though I think my dad would be happy if I moved to Beijing, but I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been living in China everyone else wouldn't have ended up there. So that's me Daniel Davis trend setter.

To Everything There is a Season

I've got less than two weeks left in sunny old Alaer and things are really busy. I've still got to get a train ticket, my last paycheck, change my money, pack my stuff, give and grade a lot of finals, and teach a few extra classes. The semester is ending with a bang this time instead of the usual whimper since I don't have much time and there are a few places I want to go before I go back. My flight back to DC is on the 20th of June, but before that I am going to go to Kashgar, which is an old city famous for it's ancient buildings and gigantic Mosque. I'm also coming back to Changzhou for a few days to see my friends there and go to a wedding party Sean and Sarah are throwing. I'm really looking forward to seeing all the people in Changzhou again. After I booked my plane tickets, which was only after I told the school when I was thinking of leaving, the school turns around and asks me to stay longer to teach some other class. I told them I couldn't despite there repeated begging. It's annoying to deal with people who have mostly never taken a plane in there life and don't really have the concept of planning ahead more than a day in advanced. But everything seems mostly resolved now and the biggest problem I have is that I may not be able to transfer money home so I might have to travel around for a week with five or six thousand dollars in cash which isn't great, but China's a pretty safe country. Anyways I'll be home for the summer, until either August or September, pretty soon and I'm looking forward to it.