China 7

I thought I had seen every possible shameless act by the time we left Guiyang for Shenzhen on an Air China flight.  Indeed while we waited for forty minutes in the departure lounge next to the assigned gate, we thought that finally we were free of the loud throat clearing that presaged a disgusting projectile of spit.  The only premonition of what was to come was the sight of a "little emperor" (LE) -- the precious male single-child that parents dote on.  This one was three and a half years old (we overheard his proud mother ell another mother).  The LE, believe it or not, was still drinking from a formula bottle, and behaved in ways that suggested a very spoilt brat.

After we boarded the 737, Yokelin and I were in seats 14B and 14C, a young man of about 30 being in the window seat 14A.  Across the aslse in 14D was another young man, and next to him in 14E was the mother of the LE.  The LE was in the window seat 14F.  As the plane prepared to taxi, a stewardess saw that LE did not have his seat belt fastened, so asked his mom to do it.  The mom protested and said that LE wailed whenever he was restrained by the belt (Yokelin
translated for me -- she can manage simple Putonghua).  Oh, so LE's earlier screaming was aobut that!  Anyway, the stewardess insisted and the mom fastenned LE's belt, but once the stewardess moved away the mom undid his belt again!  I thought, "Oh dear".  The planebegan to taxi.  I could not believe what happned next!  LE began whinging, and his mom pulled down his pants, faced him against the side of the plane beneath his window, and LET HIM PEE THERE!  I old Yokelin to watch, and both of us were incredulous.  A while later, cookies and drinks were served.  LE's mom allowed him to break his cookies into small pieces, then smash them into crumbs,on his tray.  He didn't eat any.  He clearly enjoyed destroying them, dirtying the place, and making a general nuisance of himself. Every now and then he would do something, like pinch his mom, that tested her patience to the point she would reprimand him -- but then he was smart enough to know how to fix that.  He would wail, and his mom would then smother him in kisses, telling him she loved him (Yokelin's translation to the rescue again!).  I was really pissed off at this, but my Putonghua was not good enough to tell LE or his mom off.  However, I really worried what she might do ifhe wanted to POO.  I thought, heck, if she tried to do what she did when he wanted to PEE, I'd stand up and shout in Putonghua (I know enough to talk about bodily functions, ask where is the loo -- youknow, really survival stuff!), "Nimen kan!  Zhe ke xiao hai-ze zuo ta pian!" -- "All you look!  This kid is having a poo!"  It did not come to that, but a second PEE installment was aborted LE's mom sawthat Yokelin was staring at her when she began pulling his pants down at the time when the plane was beginning to descend.  She sheepishly hurried him to the loo -- proof that she knew what she
did earlier was a NO-NO.

A lesser demo of how rude people are was the way in which the young man next to Yokelin simply reached into her seat pocket and snatched the airline magazine from it.  He had one in his seat pocket, but to get it he had to release his tray first -- too much trouble, you see.  I offered to Yokelin a demo of my own to teach him a lesson. By then we had finished our drinks, and I had stashed Yokelin's paper cup into mine, so I whispered to her, "Why don't I reach overand shove the used paper cups in his seat pocket?"  I thought she would have been so proud of me -- such a clever husband, taking revenge so pointedly.  But no, all I got was, "Don't you dare!".I mulled over that, and then I began chuckling.  Yokelin: "What is that about?" Me: "Please dare me to piss that young man off."  YL: "NO!!" Me: "Please .."  YL: "What are you thinking of doing?"  Me: "Not much.  I'll just take my vomit bag and pretend I am airsick -- I can make some really disgusting noises to simulate stuff being regurgitated -- then I will seal the bag, and then I will shove it down his seat pocket."  YL: "You are really sick, you know, DON'T YOU DARE!!".  Ah well, it was a good try.  Funny thing is that whenever I chuckle to myself, she always wants to know what I am thinking, then she gets upset.  You'd think she'd learn after 35years of hanging around me :-).

China 6

I thought you might be interested in why I think the Party is neededto control these glorious citizens of China for a long time -- or they can import the PAP from Singapore to fix the social attitudes  here.  I am not talking about the academics I hang around; they are an unusual lot and hardly matter in the large scheme of things. There were interesting experiments done years ago with mice and the effects of over-crowding.  Previously nice mice became selfish aggressive arseholes when the level of crowding exceeded a certain level.  Now, while one should always be very careful not to extrapolate mouse behavior to humans (Koestler parodied this as the "ratomorphic view of mankind"), I am convinced the over-population in China and the consequent struggle for simple resources has to be a big factor on why people here have so little civic consciousness of any kind, and so little regard for public hygiene.  Here are examples. The intrepid Mr Liu whom I told you about yesterday, the dare-devil driver, kept tossing litter out of the car as he drove -- used tissues, advertising leaflets, used lunch boxes, etc.  In our hotel, guests have found yet another use for the cigarette extinguishers I mentioned (the other function being spitoons) --they are now litter bins too, with people being too lazy to use the hole on the side. Guests leave their room doors wide open and turn on the TV loud.  If I am waiting at the reception desk to ask something, people constantly jump the queue -- until today I got fed up and became rude, not in Putonghua which I cannot speak but loudly in Cantonese.  This startled them.  I thought, "Goodie, I bet they think I am some gangster from Hong Kong".  In the streets, the "rule of law" would be a concept completely foreign to these folks.  The game they play here is intimidation.  If you have a big 4-wheeler, you own the road.  If you are a brave pedestrian, you just walk nonchalently into traffic, daring car drivers to kill you.  People treat waiters and waitresses, and service people in general, very rudely.  The notion seems to be if you pay for a service, you need have no consideration for thefeelings of the people who serve you. We sometimes dread going to breakfast in the morning after we see a bunch of the nouveau riche check in, as their behavior is so inconsiderate that I am tempted to swear at them in Cantonese.  Eg, they dirty the tables unnecessarily, take more food than they can possibly finish (there is no limit on the number of times one can go back for more, so I cannot understand the waste!), shout, smoke (prohibited, but do they care?), and this is the limit -- some come in their pajamas and bedroom slippers.  We are convinced some of these people flush all manners of things down the loo, as this is the second time the hotel staff had to unblock our toilet.

For years, the Party tried to change attitudes, but I think it has given up.  It hopes that the new capitalism will bring enough wealth quickly so that people will simply become better as the economic pressures on them reduce.  Not impossible, but I think highly improbable. Today we saw the ultimate blasphemy.  Belowhe gigantic statue of Chaiman Mao in the main park is a huge Wal Mart (underground!).  Wal Mart is infamous for its poor treatment of workers in the U.S., but here it has found paradise.  90% of all non-food goods Wal Mart sells in the U.S. is made in China, so I have been told (Pinky, Annie, correct me if I heard wrong). Chairman pins out of control in his mausoleum :-).

China 5

Today Yokelin and I visited the largest cave in China, the Zhijin cave.  It takes 4.5 hours to get there from Guiyang where we are currently based, not because of distance-it is only 150km away - but because the second half of the journey is in the mountains, with narrow roads and hairpin bends.  Prof Zhang, my host, kindly supplied a university chauffeur, Mr Liu, to dirve us in a university car, model "hongzhi" (red flag), actually a Japanese car made in China. He also supplied an English speaking graduate student, Wang Yi Sung, to accompany us.  What he neglected to tell us was that Mr Liu must have graduated from the school of "chicken driving".  He took hairpins in death-defying tests of the car's road-holding ability, and he overtook trucks near blind corners.  Sometimes he would overtake a car despite seeing a truck heading  toward us, and poor me and Yokelin just shut our eyes after a few narrow misses! On the way home he happily did 150kph on a 120kph limit expressway.

So, was the cave worth it?  Not while we were going there as we thought we might not make it!  But once there, the experience was great. 

It is indeed huge.  We have never seen such enormous columns in any cave, and the volume of the cave itself is breath-taking. I never thought, on the way back, that we will live through Mr Liu's driving to report this to you! I have saved the best part for the end, like some of you surely did when you were served with dinner when you were kids :-).  I refer of course to the art of spitting that seems to be universal in China.  I have already told you about the well-dressed men in our hotel who nonchalantly spit into the pebble-lined cigarette extinguishers next to the elevators.  After raucous throat clearing of course.  They do likewise in  the streets, out of cars, on pavements, ...  And today I heard and saw the limit! In the cave, our group had a WOMAN and several men doing it!!  This blew Yokelin's theory that only men practise this art.  I was delighted to point out to her that this woman was in  fact the most productive of the spitters-in the old days I might have nominated her to the Party for a "productivity medal".  Now, to add to the drama, can you imagine what happens to the sound of loud hawking when one is in a huge chamber of a cave?  The chamber is a perfectexample of a "resonant cavity", a gigantic echo-chamber!  Wow!! When these chaps, and the sole chappess, did their throat clearing in preparation for the launching of a lump of precious bodily fluid, the whole cavern amplified and echoed it!  El magnifico!!  Yokelin was disgusted.  Me?  Heh, heh, I naturally thought, "Yet one more report to freak out my relatives". So there! But think about it.  No one in our group except us thought that such behavior was a bit off. 

I hope I do not find another spitting story to top this one.

China 4

This is one of several rambling commentary on our experiences during our visit to Southwest China in September-October 2005.  I am here as a professorial guest of the Guizhou Academy of Science. It is routing me through several universities, including Guizhou University and Guizhou Normal University in Guiyang (the capital of Guizhou), and Chongqing University and Southwest China University in Chongqing, which is also the name of the new capital province of which it is the capital.  Chongqing province was spun off Sichuan province a few years back, designated as one of four capital provinces in China -- two of the others are Beijing and Shanghai, I forget the third.  Today is 30 Sept.

Yokelin is with me.  She aptly summarized the socio-political state of affairs in China thus: "Chairman Mao must be spinning in his grave".  I chuckled at that, but remembered with a start that his embalmed body still attracts millions of visitors revering his memory, but obviously only in the way that millions of Christians go through the motions at weekends in church revering Christ and his Father, and come weekdays they defile the sermon on the mount by way they conduct themselves.  Same with the Chinese.  In both Chongqing and Guiyang, filthy rich people can be seen spending their money ostentatiously, yet people still beg in the streets.  We saw the same in Guangzhou a few years back, but thought at that time it was corrupted by proximity to Hong Kong and Shenzhen.  So this new capitalist China is for real, and economic inequality is on the rise.  The Party is not about socialism any more; it is about control.  It no longer controls movement of people, but it controls the right of mass assembly and organization.  If you see how people dress and behave in the streets, Yokelin's remark on Mao is spot on.  Chongqing and Guiyang rival the most modern cities in the world in amenities and affluence.  My hotel room in Guiyang has broadband, and the cafe downstairs serves an acceptable espresso with great pastry.  Street vendors in the evenings are like the ones in SS2 near KL.  Yokelin hurried me past the ones who offered porn vcds and dvds.  The nearby Parksons department store stocks all the expensive Italian and French stuff which I have never even thought of buying any time in my life due to severe lack of purchasing power.  But they do not lack customers here!

A new Pizza Hut franchise opened in Guiyang yesterday and there is a queue to go in from 9am to midnight.  Yokelin saw a BBC documentary(yes, that is a channel in our hotel room tv) showing a Chinese lady entering a department store in Shanghai with a suitcase of money.  She looked at things like handbags, and did not even bother examining them, pausing only to ask, "Is that Italian?".  If the answer was "yes", her response was, "I'll buy it", and she dished out cash from her suitcase.  Holy smoke!  Mao spins again.

Crossing streets is a hazard.  The cities here will soon end up like Bangkok -- permanent gridlock -- if the planners do not put in efficient metro systems.  There are crossing lights but neither the cars nor the pedestrians observe them if they can get way with with it.  Guiyang has "crossing cops" at its most busy intersections, usually middle-aged women appointed for their ability to blow whistles at transgressors.  We saw one berating a couple of PLA officers who jay-walked, and the two men looked sheepish.  The cars ignore the women cops.  The rule simply seems to be this.  There are lights that stop you from going straight, or allow you to go straight.  But if you are turning, as long as you are not crossing traffic that is goiing straight, you can do it any time.  In theory you have to give way to pedestrians if they have a green crossing light, but in practice it is a game of pedestrian vs car/bus/truck chicken.  We never thought we had the guts to play such a game, buttonight after eating chicken at the KFC nearby (just to satisfy our curiosity, you understand) we were emboldened.  We out-chickened asmall van.  The safest method seems to be to join a large crowd of pedestrians who cross en mass to challenge the cars.  The worst divers, as in most parts of the world, are the 4-wheelers, many of whom I think have erectile problems from the way they behave behind the wheel.

It is said that the girls in this and the immediately neigboring provinces (e.g., Sichuan, Chonqing, Hunan) are the prettiest in China.  Empirically I think this is true, as I also have observed data from Hong Kong and Malaysia (hence Guandong and Fujian, mainly) whose girls are not as pretty.  I say this without fear or favor, having married a girl whose ancestors came from Fujian.  Then something stirred.  There is an unacknowledged prejudice among the Chinese against people of darker and/or rougher skin.  Yokelin drew my attention to the frequency of ads on CCTV (it has over 15 channels, including an exclusively English language one) for lotions that lighten and soften skin.  And naive me, I simply thought it was the prevalence of exaggerated almond-shaped eyes, higher noses, etc. that made these southwestern girls more attractive to Chinese men.  No, it is the fact that this area has a lot less sunshine to darken and roughen the skin!  I checked with one of my professorial hosts, and he confessed to me in a moment of candor that this is indeed so.  Then he let me in on a dreadful secret.  In his youth he lived near a Tung minority village, and the Tung girls were renowned for their pale and smooth skin.  He lusted after these girls.  His wife is Han.  Oh, in case you did not know, Han means mainstream ethnic Chinese, or at least accepted by other mainstream Chinese as one of them.  Isn't this a wonderful fixed-point definition?

Just like the definition of a Malay in the Malaysian constitution.And for most of my relatives, you aren't quite Han, our male ancestors having diluted their ethnicity with Malay blood.  But not to worry, so many of our children and grandchildren are, or will be, at most half-Han any way.

Which brings me to the fate of the minorities in China.  Well, in Guangdong and Fujian from which our ancestors originated there have not been any minorities for over a thousand years.  But here in the Southwest minority peoples still have their own villages.  I think the largest group in Guizhou are then Miao who number around 3.5 million.  They may be the group that has the best chance of preserving their language and culture.  I feel a bit sad about most of the others.  An anecdote suffices to illustrate the odds they face. Yokelin and I went on a Three Gorges cruise from Chongqing to Yichan last week, a private holiday of 3 days.  In the penultimate off-cruise boat we went by ferry up a smaller gorge, then upstream the rapids in Shen Nong River on sampans rowed, later pulled, by minority Tu people.  The girl providing the English commentary was also Tu. Later she told us she could not speak Tu, nor could her mother. Nor could she even sing and dance in the Tu tradition.  Both her parents are ethnic Tu.  But both parents, and her, went to standard Chinese schools, and I can infer she is now to all intents and purposes a Han, albeit a bit darker, like many Malaysian Chinese. The Tu do not have a written language, and unlike say Cantonese or Hakka, its grammar is different from Chinese.  Hence it is not a dialect.  The grammar of Cantonese or Hakka is identical to Mandarin, and they are mutually intelligible if written as it is one script-- the achievement of the first emperor to unify China, Qin Shi Huang Di, the builder of the Great Wall.  Pity his dynasty was one of the  shortest on record, he backed the Legalist philosophers against the Confucianists -- big mistake, the latter are still riding the Chinese mind today.  But back to the minorities.  While I do not sense any resentment by the minority people against the Han, surely they must have some regret at the passing of their culture?  But then who am I to judge, having lost so much of my Chineseness that I feel like an alien here in a way I do not in England or Greece?  I do not resent the people responsible for my de-tribalization.

China 3

This is too good to keep to myself, so let me share it with you. In Guiyang when I was working on my laptop in our hotel room Yokelin often put away her book on the horrible Nanjing atrocities -- it
really affected her, reading the stuff -- and watched CCTV instead. One night she exclaimed, "Come see what they are advertising!"  I stopped working and looked.  It was an amazing ad.  A guy dressed like a medico showed some pills and did a lot of talking -- this guy is white, but they dubbed his yakking in Putonghua -- with an impressive laboratory in the background.  Then the scene shifted to a miserable-looking Chinese girl of about 20.  A medico, Chinese this time, put a tape around this girl and measured her chest -- bustline,so to speak -- and what do you know, not in metric but in imperial inches! It showed 28".  Then a sequence of videos showing her taking the pills daily, and at the end of that the medico returns and measures her again -- it is 34" this time!

The price of the pills for a 2 week course? 370 yuan, about a week's wage for the average worker, so its about dollar for dollar.  Another ad, for the same pill, in a different channel of CCTV, showed the lucky girl getting married after a miserable time earlier on when her chest was like a landing strip.

Another kind of ad is about skin whitening creams, not quite as expensive as bust expansion pills, but bad enough.  Now, the model used in this ad is not dark-skinned, in fact I did not see the point
in advertising this in south-western China where the girls were so fair that many looked anemic -- not a heap of sunshine in these parts.  It was explained tome by Fangzhen (the HK prof) that pale skin was a Chinese (female) obsession, and merely being fair is not enough.  He put it more crudely than that -- he said the Chinese were among the most racist in the world as far as skin color was concerned.  In marriage partners for their children, they prefer in descending order: Han people (Chinese); then the neighbors who look Han (Koreans, Japanese,Vietnamese, the Chinese minorities); then equally, fair-skinned south-east Asians and white people; then northern Indians (fairer, you see), then the others who are almost unmentionable.  The idea that one's child would marry an African is completely unimaginable, outside any Chinese ontology. Today, with the economic dominance of the white nations, it has become acceptable to have white sons-and daughters-in-law, almost as good as Han. As you go eastwards in south China, the girls become darker (more sun).  This correlates well with the common belief that girls in south western China are prettier -- I think because they are fairer.  I heard a prof in Guizhou (west) say in jest that whenever married men from Guangzhou (east) come to Guizhou and see the girls there, they always regret marrying too early.  But in so jesting I sense they have a smug superiority about the alleged beauty of their women. 

China 2

Poor public health seems to be a legacy of centuries of over-populationand poverty.  Loud hawking and spitting is an awful national habit. In our hotel, one of only two four stars in Guiyang (there are no five stars) well-dressed men spit into the pebble-lined cigarette extinguishers next to the elevators.  The condition of public toilets is best left to your worst imagination.  If H5N1 mutates into a deadly pandemic virus, this country is one of the prime sites for it.  With over 2 billion people, the density is ideal for person o person transmission.  The BBC TV news had the Asian head of the WHO say that the estimates of how many people will die from a pandemic if it happens is between 5 million and 150 million, depending on how prepared the world was to respond quickly.  Scary.

Yokelin drew my attention to the fact that almost every child below the age of three that we see is a boy.  The Chinese obsession with having a son, coupled with the one-child policy, easy access to ultrasound and abortion, is the best explanation.  The university students I have met told me that there is already a huge social problem with the gender imbalance in their cohort group.  A fewdays ago in Chongqing airport we saw for the first time two openly gay men.  They caught the same plane as us.  One had lipstick and walked with a womanly gait, and the other was his partner.  I askedone of my hosts whether the Party was worried about this, and the answer was that the Party could not care less.  Hmm, I guess this is one solution to the bad shortage of women here!  Oh, how did we find out that  one- or two-year olds are mainly boys?  Simple.  These kids wear special pants that do not cover their bottoms!  This makes it easy for them to go to the loo, I suppose, but it begs the question of what happens when they have "accidents".

I have 4 days on my own before the next technical meetings, which is good as I need to read a few papers and think about a number of algorithms I have been exploring.  Yokelin and I fell victim to common cold, and we feared the worst.  Thankfully it was a short episode -- the massive vit C doses may have helped.

China 1

[This and the following reports on China were  sent to our sons Kerwyn and Lyndon a week after we arrived in Guizhou where I was hosted by the Academy of Science. - Sept to October 2005]

Here is our tentative schedule in SW China.

Sept 21: Fly to Chongqing.
Sept 22: Give talk at Southwest China Uni, CSD.
Sept 23: Give talk at Chongqing Uni, Math/IT Dept.
Sept 24: Visit Three Gorges Museum in Chongqing.
Sept 25-28 Go on Three Gorges (Yangtze River) cruise.
Sept 29: Fly back to Guiyang
Sept 30: Give talk at Guizhou Academy of Science
Oct 1-7: (Chinese National Holiday) visit a fewplaces, three days away from Guiyang, including Zhijing underground cave, Tenpu town (Ming dynasty stronghold), ancient Qingyue town.
Oct 8:  Give talk at Guizhou Uni.Oct 10: Fly to Shenzhen, take bus to Hong Kong.

They are giving us a lot of time to do things on our own.  So I haveime to think and mom is doing her needle work. When we get back to Guiyang, we will be staying again in this Royal City hotel

http://www.sinohotel.com/hotel/hotel.html?hid=1336

which we are told is one of the two 4 star hotels in the city, there being no 5star hotels.  The rate you see in the web page is higher than what the Academy of Science is paying -- the special rate for our stay is RMB380 per day. [I later found out that the average wage for a week is around RMB400, so my guilt set in ... ] It is very comfortableand clean, and has broadband that I am using now.  The hotel has 28 floors above ground (3 under, for parking) but the top floor is numbered 30 because there is no 13th or 14th floor.  The former is a concession to westerners and the second is to the Cantonese tourists, 14 being a bad luck number for them.

We spent the last weekend in Zheng Yuan, a town built 2350 yearsago, and went on a river cruise near it. The views were magnificent.The real China was in that town and the surrounding villages.  Thehotel we stayed in overnight before the cruise was, shall I say,very basic.  The day we got there after a 5 hour train trip wevisited the restored ancient houses, three enormous family homesbuilt into a cliff and hillside, dating back to the beginnings of Zheng Yuan which is situated in the banks of the river. One of thefamilies was the Yu family, descendants of Confucius.  The poverty today was unknown back then, but now it is a bit upsetting for momand me to see.  But we are grateful to have been shown it.  I now have a personal understanding of what drove our ancestors to leave China. Neither mom nor I have experienced any emotional surge that many overseas Chinese report feeling when they visit China.  There is too much difference between us and the people here now, and that is starkly revealed by the constant dissonance between our frames of reference and presumptions when we interact with them. But we wish them well, for a prosperous and strong China is, from the evidence of its history, is likely to be peaceful and non-expansionist. I gave a talk at the downtown branch of Guizhou Uni yesterday, and the senior faculty hosted us to dinner after that.  They were very considerate hosts, but we were clearly foreigners to them.  One ofthe professors even asked me, "Norman, do you like Chinese food?" Hmm, if I was cheeky I would have replied, "Yes, particularly thedog stew you cook so well!"  But I said we actually eat Chinese foodat home 50% of the time.