Shanghai Shenanigans

I just returned from a 5-day trip to Shanghai. I had planned to meet another friend from Weihai there, but my dates kept getting pushed back because of a little thing called "a total lack of communication between myself and the university." Ask any foreigner living in China, and he or she will almost certainly say the biggest frustration he/she faces is the lack of communication between his/her employer. I'm not sure if it is intentional or just reflects a lack of planning, but either way it's frustrating. For instance, when the Foreign Office threw a Mid Autumn Festival party for us, they told us about three hours before it was to start. When they planned a Christmas dinner, they changed the time the night before the party. This time, I had been able to pry a little information from them about entering our final grades into the computer, which of course turned out to be wrong. Originally they had said we could do it one Monday morning, so I planned on buying a ticket to Shanghai for Monday night or Tuesday morning. Luckily, I remembered how nothing ever works out as planned in China and decided to wait until I had actually entered my grades. Monday passed with no communication from the office, and Tuesday night I got a message that we could enter them at 9am the next morning. Great. Good thing I didn't already have plans. So, we went to enter our grades, which was an incredibly frustrating experience that took about 3 hours too long since they only had one computer available for the foreign teachers, while the computer room with multiple computers across the hall for Chinese English teachers was empty. After I finished that nightmare, I went and bought my ticket to depart Thursday night, and a few hours later I got a call from my friend saying he would be departing Shanghai the same day I arrive. Great. Thank you English Department for being totally inept and completely ruining my plans. So now I needed to find some people to meet up with in Shanghai so I didn't go crazy. I quickly logged onto couchsurfing and made a few contacts, including the girl I'd be staying with, and the next day I took off for Shanghai, but not before the English Department could display its patheticism one more time. I get a text at about 10am saying I need to be at the office at that very moment to sign the final versions of the grades. Could we not have done this the day before WHEN I WAS ALREADY IN THE OFFICE? I must say, this was the first real time I have been completely frustrated with being in China. All the little things that get on my nerves, like ineptitude, arbitrariness, stupid rules, hierarchies, and problems arising from a simple lack of communication, came together for one horrific experience. Little did I know my next breakdown would come just a few days later.

I arrive in Shanghai, and luckily my couchsurfing host is cool and has a sweet apartment with an extra bed and really comfortable couch. We chat for a while the first night and then we both head to bed. Unfortunately my host had to work a lot, which meant I'd be exploring the city by myself, but which would also lead to me watching about 15 hours of LOST during my stay. I had hoped Shanghai would be significantly warmer than Weihai, but the weather turned out to be complete rubbish, as it was still pretty chilly and rained almost everyday.

Rain doesn't mean any fewer people are out, though:



SO, the next day, after visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art (which was too small), I purchased a sweater and then stopped to put it on in a park. As I was doing that, three young Chinese girls approached me and started speaking in English. After a while they told me about a "tea festival that only happens every three years" in Shanghai and invited me to come along. I thought it odd that I would not have heard of such a festival, as Chinese do festivals to the extreme, but being alone, I said why not and went along. They led me to some small tea house in an out-of-the-way shopping mall, and I was a little surprised to see that the price of a cup of tea was about 50 RMB, or 6 dollars. I almost decided then not to have any, because I can't tell the difference between tea anyway, don't particularly like it, and certainly didn't want to pay that much for it, but I wanted to be polite since they had invited me. The xiaojie, or young girl who performed the tea ceremony, came in and told us, or so I thought, that because it was the time of the three-year festival, we could try all the kinds of tea that were on one section of the menu, for the price of one cup. So, seven tiny cups of tea later, each about three sips, and only one of which I really liked, the bill comes. 1400RMB, or almost 200 dollars. I am half expecting the three girls to pay, since they had invited me and this would have followed Chinese customs, but then one of the girl suggests I pay it. My suspicions were aroused again, but again I attributed it to a possible language misunderstanding. My suspicions were again aroused when I noticed I was the only one pulling money out, but one girl did get up and leave the room, so I had to assume she was paying for the rest with her credit card, which would still have been unlikely because Chinese almost never use credit cards, and paying 1000RMB for your friends is quite a nice gift. I was still shocked by the total cost and didn't want to offend anyone, so I just paid my 350RMB (almost 50 dollars) share of the bill, which left me with less than 50RMB in my wallet. It takes me almost four days to earn 350RMB, so you can imagine how upset I was when I realized I'd be giving it over for about half a litre of TEA. I quickly decided I'd better not spend any more time with these free-spending girls and took the metro back to my host's place, where my LOST addiction began. The whole way home and for the rest of the night I replayed the events back over in my head and realized almost immediately that all my little suspicions had added up into one big resounding SCAM: the unknown festival, the remote tea house, the inconsistencies in their stories (they said they had been learning English for only a year, though they were far better speakers than any of my students), them knowing perfect translations for the more intricate parts and words of the ceremony, the fast speed of the ceremony, the fact that the xiaojie didn't use all of the ceremony utensils, and the paying of the bill. Everything was further confirmed when I got back to my host's place and told her the story. Turns out, two days before two of her other surfers had been taken for the same ruse and had been asked to pay 1200RMB! I was infuriated but even more embarrassed that I had been taken for a ride. For one, I live in China, so I should be aware of potential scams, and two, I live in China, which means that I don't make a lot of money. The thing is, they have practiced their scheme down to every detail. They concentrate on foreigners, of course, and then act as if they just want to practice English. They hold very polite conversation and compliment the victim at every chance, making him/her feel at ease; they repeatedly complimented by big nose, which is seen as attractive in China. They invite the victim to spend time with them, and not wanting to offend, the victim obliges. They try to put the entire bill with the victim, and again, not wanting to offend, he obliges. Then they take pictures with the victim, either as a sort of trophy or because they really like to have pictures taken with foreigners, and then get ready to seduce another victim. They do it every day, so the procedure, and their stories, are almost flawless. Most of their victims never even realize it, but because I don't make a lot of money, I thought long and hard about it and picked apart all the inconsistencies, and the next day I paid the tea house another visit.

As soon as she saw me coming, the xiaojie closed the door and stood like a coward behind the reception desk. I'm guessing they don't have too many repeat customers with the amount of money they make people pay, so she definitely knew I wasn't there for another cup of tea. I had come back to try and retrieve 300 of my stolen RMB, and right away the manager threatened to call the police. I told him to go ahead, figuring he'd have more to explain, and to lose, than I did, and this quickly changed his mind. I told him he and his cronies ought to be ashamed at their total lack of human decency and self respect, and he tried on his acting clothes and acted as though he were shocked and offended by my accusations. He told me that his practices were fair and that I had just misunderstood, and at he first refused to give me any money back, but after I made it clear that I was not going to move and would thus prevent him from doing any business that afternoon, he started to talk with me and call me "friend", though I quickly reminded him that we were not friends since friends don't steal one another's money. I was ultimately able to take back 100RMB from him, which is much more than he originally offered, but didn't want to push it any further since he wasn't obligated to give me anything back, but now that I think about it, had I stuck with my plan of ruining his business for the day, perhaps he would have given me a full refund. I also sent lovely emails to my "friends" who had invited me the day before, but I have not heard back from them ;-) Needless to say, I avoided any other young Chinese girls who wanted to speak English with me and just pretended that I was German.

Ultimately, though, the event just reminded me of the nature of humans. Some are worse than others, like those involved in this incident, but all have their faults. I started thinking about how the managers of the stores from which I stole ninja turtle kleenex and every flavor of tic tacs as a kid probably weren't too happy, either. I was still angry at the operators of the scam, but after thinking about it, I understand how it happens and how and why they are capable of it.

Though this event only consumed a few hours of my time, it will be what I remember of my trip to Shanghai, if not also because Shanghai is lacking in the cultural department in which Beijing thrives. Shanghai is simply a young city, so there's not much to do or see. The museums I visited were either unimpressive or in the middle of rotating their exhibitions, and besides museums, one is mostly left to wander around the city. The architecture is much cooler than that in Beijing, though, and the mix of modern skyscrapers and imperial British and French structures provide for quite a fantastic dichotomy. And similar to the hutong Beijing, the Old City leaves one wondering how people can still live as they did 200 years ago in a city approaching 20 million people with such international significance.

The Old City in Shanghai:



A butcher in the Old City:



Just a 15-minute walk away, a view from the Bund of the Pudong section of Shanghai:



Next up on the traveling itinerary is south China, more specifically Yunnan Province, which borders Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. I head up to Beijing on Monday to meet Tyler, and from there we fly to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, and then train and bus our way around for a couple of weeks from there.

Classes!

I just thought I'd give you an idea of who I've been teaching this semester. These are my five classes:

Beijing, Visit Two!

I'm back from another trip to Beijing, hopefully just stopping off for enough time to proctor and grade exams (and get sick again), before moving on to Shanghai and Hangzhou with a couple of friends from Weihai.

My primary purpose in going to Beijing again was to meet up with a friend from Vanderbilt, who was in Beijing half-way through a 12-day orchestral tour of China, but I decided if I was going to pay for the flights to and from Beijing, I might as well go a few days early and have my first go at couchsurfing.

I arrived late Friday night and was a little nervous after I received a text from my host that sounded like he had completely forgotten that I was coming. Everything worked out, though, and I met up with him and some of his friends at a Japanese restaurant before heading to a club for a little dancing and a few drinks. This was definitely the most international experience I've had since being in China, as his friends included some other Frenchies (he's French) and some Swedes, Japanese, Indonesian, Chinese, and Americans. Since he was busy with schoolwork, the next day I headed into Beijing with another couchsurfer, an American who introduced Barack Obama at his graduation ceremony, and walked the hutong (small back alleyways) of Beijing. It's incredible that areas like this still exist right in the middle of a city like Beijing, which has almost 20 million inhabitants, but they are fast disappearing as land developers realize their incredible value and push out the families that have lived in them for generations.

A meat shop in a hutong:



Some propaganda in a hutong:



The next day, New Year's Eve, I did a little shopping in Beijing before getting ready to party the night away. We had dinner in a Japanese-Italian fusion restaurant; I was expecting pizza wrapped in seaweed and sushi with pepperoni, but really, the only fusion that occurred was that dishes of both types were on the menu. Alas! Afterwards we went to a relaxed bar, where we hoped to chill before heading to a dance club, but unfortunately the club was too packed by the time we went and we were left with nowhere to celebrate the countdown. So, I yelled Happy New Year/Xinnian Kuaile in a cab with a French guy, a Chinese girl, and a Swedish guy at midnight. It was a little anticlimactic and disappointing to say the least. Being in Beijing, I had hoped for a party much better than I could have gotten in Weihai, but things don't always turn out as expected or hoped for. We headed to "Bed Bar" afterwards, which, as you can guess, is a bar where the seating consists of beds, but perhaps it is best that we didn't party too hard that night, for the next morning I had to wake up to meet my friend Ellen when she arrived at her hotel!

She was originally supposed to stay two nights in Beijing, and I had planned a full itinerary for the two days, but I knew full well not to really expect everything to work out, as it never does in China. She ended up with a couple of hours to eat lunch on the first day, and then the majority of the next day, before she had to fly out to Inner Mongolia. We went to an Indian restaurant for lunch, and then I dropped her off at the Great Hall of the People (on Tian'anmen Square!), where she would perform that night. I showed some of the tour chaperones around Beijing and then watched the Flag Lowering Ceremony at Tian'anmen before making my way back to the Hall for the concert. The sound quality wasn't great, but the experience of seeing a performance in such an important place was incredible. We had planned to go out dancing after the concert, but we were so exhausted we just went to bed.

Flag Lowering at Tian'anmen:



Concert in the Great Hall:



The next morning we awoke at 4:30am to be ready to leave at 5:30am for our day-trip to Simatai Great Wall, the same section I visited in October. It really is supposed to be the best section near Beijing, and this time I wanted to see it with some snow around it. Unfortunately not much snow was left from the previous few days' of snow, but combined with the near absence of smog, there was enough to make it even more beautiful than before. The drive to the Wall took three hours, and after a three-hour hike and the trip back, we had enough time to do a little shopping and collapse from exhaustion before she headed off to Inner Mongolia.

A funny sign at the Wall:



What an office!



Ellen and I on the Wall:



After Ellen and I parted ways, I made my way back to a different Couchsurfer's place and promptly went to sleep. I have thought a little about moving to Beijing next year, as there are so many exciting things to do, but this trip really reminded me that it is a large, exhausting city, and I have the same misgivings about it as I do about NYC and Berlin. The next day I slept in and met up with yet another CSer before catching my flight back to Weihai.

Like I said earlier, I hope to be off to Shanghai in a couple of days, and I'll even be back in Beijing in two weeks to meet up with Tyler. I will without a doubt have exhausted Beijing by the time I leave, as I plan to go at least two more times to meet up with other friends coming to China, and by that time it will surely have exhausted me as well.

I'll leave you with some more snowy Great Wall pictures.

Cultural Differences

As I've noted before, one of the hardest things to get used to here was the differing level of cleanliness when compared to the Western World. I have already seen children peeing and pooping on the sidewalk here (they have slits going from the front to the back of their pants specifically for this purpose), but never before had I seen it in a restaurant. After I finished my final exams on Friday, Allyssa and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, a Korean one that serves a great curry dish and an Italian-inspired one with noodles. This also happens to be the cleanest restaurant of which we know in Weihai. Well, near the end of the meal, a little boy (but one that was old enough to be walking around and climbing onto different objects) started motioning that he needed to go to the bathroom, and instead of using the one at the back of the restaurant, the mother pulled out a paper cup, pulled down the boy's pants, and held the cup as he urinated into it. She then stepped outside to dump it onto the sidewalk, though she almost tripped on the way, which would have sent urine flying all over the inside of the restaurant. Allyssa and I looked at each other dumbfounded.


A less disgusting difference I have noticed lies in the method used to draw stick figures. Chinese draw them as seen below, sort of like a big snowball on top of a house,


while Americans draw them like this:



I was trying to think over what the difference might mean.

Do Chinese people have no necks? Is this why they are shorter? Are their legs attached directly to their arms?

Are Americans perpetually happy? Or frustrated and clueless?

Perhaps the Kiwi way is the best:



Finally, after reading through my students' final evaluations of my teaching and the courses I taught, I realized that the many Chinese attribute dissatisfaction or unhappiness to themselves and their own actions, and less often to external factors or someone else. Some of the students wrote that at times the class was boring, but instead of writing of ways I could improve it next year, they wrote that perhaps they should participate more in class and work harder. I remember some awful classes and professors at Vanderbilt, and when evaluation season rolled around, we couldn't wait to criticize the teacher and the class. Rarely did we reflect on how we could have made it better ourselves. Similarly, I attribute most of the students' unhappiness here with their own efforts and less with myself. I feel somewhat justified in this though, because I did work each week to alter my lessons and make them more interesting, and pretty much only one class by the end of the semester wrote of the lessons being boring, and as expected, they were the ones that made the least effort to participate in any class activities and discussions.

I wonder if this difference results from the pressure placed on each student to succeed at every level of schooling. As the high-performing students are continuously pared down through examinations and they become closer and closer to reaching the ultimate goal of acceptance to university, their lives come to involve little more than studying. If they ultimately fail to achieve acceptance to university, they and those around them conclude that it is only because of their efforts, or lack thereof. Perhaps this is a formula for creating a responsible society, but it also results in one so competitive there's little room for enjoyment of what the hard work has brought. Once students begin university, their weekend nights continue to be occupied largely with studying, and those who don't follow this trend are accused by their peers of wasting the opportunity they have. While this process is also at work in the Western World, I think it has been tempered a bit by becoming comfortable with success. Here, though, every step toward success also offers a possibility of straying from the path, and students are so wary of being left behind that they stop at almost nothing to achieve that success. Many of them plagiarize papers and cheat on exams, and in most circumstances it goes unpunished. While this doesn't always enable them to get ahead of the pack, it does assure them of not falling behind it. In any case, it certainly doesn't do anything to improve China's reputation abroad as being uncreative, something the students are fully aware of, as they often woe the fact that China has never produced a Nobel laureate. For the time being, though, with all the pressure placed on students to succeed, it doesn't look like anything will be changing soon.