Chinese internet censorship and the big picture

A friend of mine was complaining about Dropbox being blocked in China and drop.io being bought up and deactivated by Facebook, leaving him no available large-file storage sites that he could use in China and America. After thinking for a minute, I sent him the following. Please note that when I say "China" it is a metonym for the Chinese government and Chinese business leaders, not the Chinese people, Chinese culture or Chinese tea, all of which are wonderful for many reasons.
___

I just figured it out. I think that the government started blocking foreign sites like Facebook and Twitter with the stated intention of halting civil unrest, which most people here were able to swallow pretty easily. Those brown people are twittering scooters to blow up and facebooking mass stabbings with AIDS-infected needles. And Youtube hates China with their pro-Dalai Llama promoted content. What they're actually doing is creating a Chinese intranet where Chinese people only use Chinese products. Baidu will forever be ahead of Google here because that's where you can get free movies and mp3s if you want them. No need to block them, really. But who needs Youtube? Tudou has more locally-targeted content and everything has subtitles. Renren basically negates the usefulness of actual Facebook as everyone here has it. You can get news in English from the Global Times. Blogspot? Pfffft put that shit on a BBS. QQ will probably eventually displace MSN and Skype once it figures its stuff out.

Everything I Know About Teaching ESL, Part 1: Know Your Audience

Captive audience via peruisay

Within a week of arriving in China I was teaching my first class, an hourlong "fun" lesson offered as a perk to students already signed up for normal courses. The topic was up to me. I wouldn't know the ability or exact ages of the kids ahead of time (anywhere from six to thirteen, which is a huge spectrum), and I was terrified. Before I came to China I had almost no experience with kids, especially not the Chinese kind; I didn't know how to talk to them, what they were interested in, what they needed to learn. I quick skimmed a few books on teaching theory, making note of different styles of teaching and lesson planning, possible games to play, things to watch for in students. I spent an hour prepping for the class, although one book specifically mentioned such a time investment is a waste of time. I had two full pages of notes and activities suggested by other teachers.

Needless to say, I bombed. The kids were all over the place; one near-fluent eleven year old was sitting next to a six-year-old who couldn't remember his colors. I ran out of my carefully prepared material within the first fifteen minutes before leaving (running out of) the classroom to catch my breath and begging anyone and everyone in the teachers' office- staff, students, desks, the ether- for ideas to fill the rest of the time.

Many of my first classes went this way. Students staring, doodling. Assistants looking at me with "Where did they dig up this fucking foreigner?" looks on their faces. The whispering in Chinese made me paranoid. The stench of boredom followed me from classroom to classroom. I thought I knew what I wanted to teach (English, of course), but I had no idea where to start.

The solution came in a short introduction to teaching written by a colleague: "Problem- Students don't find the class interesting. Solution- Be more interesting."

Hmm. Couple of things.

I've been blogging for a few years at different places, but for some reason I couldn't get the jump to work when I started this thing, so sorry for the long blog is long design. Maybe I'll work on that again some other day, but since no one's actually reading this all I have to say is: piddlewax farthing hopscotch limbo.

Thing the second: this is a personal blog dedicated to the too many things I'm working on, so posts can range from what tea I'm obsessing about to the little fart boy student disrupting my class last Thursday to my pathetic epiphanies about the Chinese language. I've tried to include helpful tags for each post, so if you're interested in further reading on anything I'm writing about (but why should you be?), just click on a tag and voila or something. Along those lines, as much of a grammar and punctuation nazi as I may be, my computer lacks a number pad, so diacriticals are fucking out.

Also, if you'd like to send me a giant wedge of delicious cheese, please email me at gcdonohue@gmail.com and I'll send you my shipping address here in China. I really miss cheese and the selection at the foreigner supermarket is pedestrian and inconsistent at best. We're talking Land'o'lakes on the top shelf here.

Fartsmuggler.

Chinese Talk Like a Pirate Day

The official TLAPD has come and gone in China, but I'm going to assume that it's today on the lunar calendar. This is the one time I can use the lunar calendar to my advantage as I have no grasp of how the damn thing works. I'm starting to think that no one else does, either; I'm convinced it's just a means for the government to justify their lack of foresight in planning official holidays

"So, Hu, Spring Festival. Biggest holiday in China. Country's gonna shut down for a month. Mind if I take a look at your day plann...."

*Looks at TV guide in lap, notices monthlong Prison Break marathon starting on...* "February 6th. Inform the masses."

and a convenient way for people to make you feel guilty about forgetting "important" things like birthdays and court dates.

"But I thought your birthday was in November!"

"Yeah, but on the LUNAR CALENDAR it happened...yesterday. Now empty your wallet."

But we're here to talk like pirates, not argue about dates. Talking like a pirate in Chinese is pretty easy. All you have to do is strategically replace certain words ending with an "n" sound with an "r" sound. Sometimes you'll see it written in pinyin as "n'r," but this is demonstrably retarded. Yes, there is a character for this sound, but the pronunciation is more of a regional affectation (I hear it all the time in Henan, but oh my god Beijing taxi drivers lay it on thiiiick) best confined to spoken Chinese. I've seen it used in newspaper headlines and it's the equivalent of plastering "Obama Ain't Gittin'r Done Yayt" at the top of a serious business op-ed column.

Now, the proper way to turn your n's to r's is to turn your mouth sideways and overpronounce.

It works equally well with street food,

yangrouchuan -> yangrouchuaRRRRRRR

waitresses,

fuwuyuan -> fuwuyuARRRRRRRR

and cherished symbols of Chinese cultural identity.

tian'an'men -> tian'an'meRRRRRRRR

Now, a disclaimer: if you choose to participate in CTLAPD, you will get funny looks from people, and you MAY be called a 农民, or nongmin. This loosely translates as "land pirate" or "badass," and it may be said with what you hear as a tone of disdain. In fact, it's pure unadulterated awe, fear and, depending on the sex of your conversant, lust, much in the way a typical wench three or four hundred years ago would say, "roguish highwayman." Nongmin, or should I say...nongmiRRRRRR.

Red scarf bandit via peruisay

Off the grid and through the alleys

A friend once told me, "Greg, the difference between you and me is that when I drink I stay at home and watch TV. You go on adventures." I wish I could say that I'm that interesting (I'm not), but there's something to be said about going on a jaunt to parts unknown just to see what you find. The right amount of alcohol, daring and happenstance sometimes make me feel like I'm reliving the events of Ulysses and has bulked up my collection of mini-epics to tell over drinks with company both polite and rough.

Living in China, The Land of the Entirely Too Permissive Drinking Culture, has added quite a few stories to my portfolio. The time I mistook a hospital wall for my apartment door. The time a friend and I wandered to all corners of Beijing to all manner of places looking for a simple bed for the night. The endless seafood and beer corners of Qingdao. Nighttime rambling is when I'm at my most comfortable, my most reflective, my most aware.

Zhengzhou provides plenty of stimulation for a party-seeking drunk. Start at the bars, which can only be described as bars, then circle out to the garish, loud, gaudy karaoke club mazes and proceed to the flashing, superficial dance clubs, all layered with mirrors and young men hawking carafes of Ballantine's spiked with sugar water. Club girls playing their dice games, girls to help you belt out the songs in the KTV (or more if you're a businessman or government official). It's all flash and no substance, the appearance of fun without any of the epiphanies.

Now that I haven't been drinking I've been wandering around a different sort of after-hours China, a place beneath the quicksilver veneer of luxury and modern living that supposedly distinguishes this city from the less "cosmopolitan" urban districts of China. During the day, Zhengzhou is loud, crowded, smoggy, a clogged artery of a city, but once the clock strikes nine most of the normal people with normal families and normal lives (by normal standards at least) go to bed and what's left is the acute character that makes living here so great.

Outdoor restaurants spill into sidewalks, parking lots and intersections, serving grilled everything on a stick or heaping plates of fried this and that (noodles, crawdads, bread). The other night a friend and I stopped at a night-only food market and bought an entire Beijing duck with all the fixins for three (including spring onions, wraps and duck sauce) for all of 26 yuan. The woman offered to throw in the carcass for free, and I might take her up on it next time to boil up some duck soup at home. I try to go to the places where I'm least likely to encounter a foreigner, far away from major roads, fast food restaurants and western style "coffee shops. Some people pride themselves in finding the closes thing to a Starbucks latte; last night I found a place that serves giant plates of spicy rivercrab.

What I love most about this late-night Zhengzhou is that it is the perfect snapshot of China as it stands: a country-in-progress. Half-finished luxury skyscraper shells jutting out from old, twisting neighborhoods. Incandescent lights strung above people gathered around squat tables brimming with food and beer and liquor and shouts of serious recreation. Hazy alleys littered with small stores selling any fake ware you can imagine. Small fruit stands neighboring pink light massage parlors neighboring fluorescent-lit beef noodle restaurants. Quiet, dusty streets hosting small caravans of old trucks and farm equipment. The smell alternates between wafting piles of garbage and grill smoke. Distant generic pop music. Nothing is fresh, left to be admired; it's all chaos and action and improvement. The fleeting nirvana of constant change.

Photo of 三门峡 by peruisay.

Brewing 信阳毛尖茶 (Xinyang Maojian Tea)

No math updates, no school updates, but I thought it was time to write a useful post, so here's how I make Xinyang Maojian tea at home. I try to visit the nice people at my favorite store in 北茶城 (North Tea City) every week to practice my Chinese (tea merchants make for great conversation), drink awesome tea and, most importantly, learn step by step the art of making a delicious cup of Maojian. Every time I go I pick up a new tool or technique that improves my home batches just that much.

Maojian is a refreshing, bitter green tea. The best analog I can think of for the flavor is "like drinking the smell of fresh-cut summer grass." It comes from the city of Xinyang in southern Henan. I drink maybe fifteen cups a day, depending how much time I spend at home. At work I

stuff my bottle with various types of Pu'er because all you need to make a decent cup of Pu'er is hot water and hotter water. Maojian's a little more delicate; if the water's too hot it'll burn out all the flavor in the first cup, but if it's too cool you're left with warm, clean tasting water. Not disgusting, but not the desired effect. What you want in the cup is cloudy, pale green goodness with the tea leaves resting comfortably at the bottom of the glass. It should last for five or six pourings, depending on how much tea you use. I drink a lot of the stuff, so I tend to use less; it has a milder flavor I guess, but you can really use as much as you like. Experimentation is important.

So here's my ramshackle tea setup. The cutoff bottle is for excess water or first brews of non-Maojian tea. The big clear pot is for cooling hot water. I use the little brown pot with white varnish for filtering and the pilsner glasses for drinking. The tongs are for

picking up hot glasses and getting floating leaves off the top. Everything else I use for Pu'er, so forget it's there.

To make the Maojian, I first put a few big pinches of tea in the bottom of a pilsner glass while I boiling a big pot of tea on the stove. Once my water's hot, I pour it into the big clear tea pot to cool off. It's cool enough when you can stick your finger in for a few seconds without burning it; it's a dangerous rule of thumb, but I lack a thermometer. The lady at the tea house says the water should be between 70 and 80 degrees celsius.

When it's cool enough, I fill the glass about halfway. Some of the tea leaves will float to the top so pour the tea into the smaller brown tea pot through the funnel filter and then back into the pilsner glass. The tea leaves should settle to the bottom of the glass, but sometimes you might have to filter it once or twice more to get rid of excess floating crap. Finish by filling the pilsner glass up with water from the big clear pot, let it settle for a minute and enjoy. Refill with hot water when the tea is level with the top of the settled tea leaves. It should look something like this:

加油 Tibet!

In August, after summer classes are over, is a two week lull where students are visiting their hometowns and squeezing in last-minute vacations before the start of school (I'm sure many of them will go to the Expo). That and the few weeks around the Dragon Boat Festival in late April/ early May are the best opportunities I have to travel in China, and I have no class and they don't coincide with national holidays like October 1st and Spring Festival.

Last year I spent a couple of eventful days in Beijing, and after guiding my parents around the city a few months later I'm pretty content to avoid it. Beijing is like the Orlando of China; it's very clean and orderly and there are lots of impressive cultural things to see (the Great Wall, Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace), all swathed with a veneer of fresh, post-Cultural Revolution paint. It's brimming with foreigners, fancy restaurants, good shopping and lots of English speakers for tourists. I'm not really interested in any of that, and it doesn't have any of the nitty-gritty or wacky things that make China such a cool place to travel. I was thinking this year I'd make a trip to Qingdao to drink beer on the beach, but last night my friends invited me to go with them to Tibet.

It's two days each way by train on a hard sleeper, with seven days of a closely-guided tour. I believe there's a police escort. We found out that for only 300 kuai extra we could buy a package with only two sales stops instead of eight (the worst part about tours in China are the sales pitches they make you sit through, especially when it's at the expense of sleeping in a little or enjoying the sights you're seeing). I know very about the itinerary so far (it's all in Chinese), but I'm getting really excited. I want to drink some yak butter tea and pass out from altitude sickness. I'll supposedly leave in two weeks.

Basi Guangnian is Chinese for Buzz Lightyear

I've cut back severely on my drinking during the past month, which has left me with a lot more time, energy and money for useful, productive things. I have lots more energy, especially in the morning, and the massive amounts of tea I've been drinking have helped my creativity. That being said, it was a pretty bad idea to mix four different liquors (beer "啤酒," red wine "红酒," baijiu "白酒" and the previously uncharted jinjiu "金酒," which tastes kind of like brandy) on the one night I set aside for going out. I paid for it today. No amount of forty-kuai tea could help me get through the still unsolved math problems and I haven't looked up any new graduate programs. Nor could it find the location of the hidden rebel base.

I'm not even going to mention my lack of progress on working out because this week has been hot and humid, and I want to forget that it even happened.

I have spent a lot of time practicing my Chinese, which actually isn't that hard to do. I'm pretty introverted, but all I have to do is A) leave my house and B) start talking to someone I don't know. Chances are they speak Chinese. The people working in North Tea City are the best for this as they aren't servers (I'm pretty ace in a restaurant) and spend most of their days sitting around drinking tea and talking about tea. Renato told me that they like hearing funny stories about our foreigner friends, so we went in and made fun of people we knew for an hour or so. I can tell some mostly coherent stories about foreigners saying or doing funny things. It's a good way check how intelligible I am because Chinese people will laugh at almost anything remotely funny that foreigners do or say. Chinese people practice their English by watching Friends, I practice my Chinese by talking about the time Joe and I went to a massage place and they stole our socks. The bastards.

Here's a list of things that have diverted my attention this week:

-Toy Story 3, in Chinese and 3D. Watching American movies with Chinese dubbing is great; since there's a lot of cultural disconnect between English and Chinese, the language is toned down to the point where I can catch maybe 80% of what's being said (except, strangely, for understanding the motivation of the villains; I had the same problem with Avatar and Up). Also, I lost my shit when Buzz started speaking Spanish and everyone in the theater was staring at me. Same for the awesome Star Wars reference. I got a lot more out of the visual gags as the jokes in the dialogue went right over my head.

-Make a cheap DIY smoker out of ceramic pots. Almost all of my cooking in China is limited by space and lack or expense of common cooking appliances from back home. Every time I see something like this, I add it to my imaginary culinary thunderdome, which I will erect on an ancient Indian garbage pit upon my return.

-Why Chinese is so damn hard by David Moser. Great read. Spoken Chinese is actually kind of easy to pick up once you can understand the phonetics. There are very few English cognates, but the grammar is very logical, especially for constructing tenses and asking questions. But you have to learn characters at some point and the only way to do it is through rote memorization. There are few useful tricks for untangling the phonetics or meanings. Take one of the ways to write "police." It's "治安" or "zhian." The second character is a "女" or "nu," meaning woman, with a roof over her head. So sort of like protection for vulnerable people, I guess. It's pronounced "an," which is close enough to "nan," but nothing in the character suggests how the pronunciation should change with the addition of the radicals. And someone told me that in this case, it's actually read right to left, so "anzhi." The first character is a something with a water radical (the three lines to the left), although now that I'm looking at it it's two lines with a person radical underneath them. 不知道. People have been pushing for years for the adoption of a writing system that makes logical and phonetic sense, but that will never happen. First of all, national pride or something. Second, characters are essential for conveying meaning in a language as linguistically diverse as Chinese. They not only help differentiate between the thousands of words in Mandarin that have similar pronunciations with vastly different meanings, they also make communication possible for people speaking the hundreds of dialects of Chinese.

And in case you're wondering, I suck at reading and writing characters. I get almost all of my characters from Google translate. I'm going to install a pinyin input one of these days, but most of you could do this at home.

-Random quote from Linda, our marketing manager, of the day: "Joe, he can't be a gay. He showed me his dance moves and they were excellent. Also, he dresses very well."

Dirty Tea Towels

I guess Wednesday is as good a day as any to engage in a little self-flagellation and record my progress. Excuses abound for my dismal performance this week.

I've given up on drinking full time and have cut down drastically on my social life, but the quality of my work isn't really something I can sacrifice to accomplish the rest of my goals. Summer teaching started yesterday and I'm still tackling it with tea-fueled fury. I drank four cups of 信阳毛尖 tea before class this morning and unleashed a barrage of devastating Expo English on my unsuspecting second-graders. Oh boy we had fun. Two more hours with them tomorrow, and on top of planning for that lesson I have a Life Club tonight (sort of a "teach whatever to whoever shows up" class). My weekday first-grader class has double for the summer, so I have to write two lesson plans for them a week and I still haven't planned my six classes this weekend. The elephant in the room is the huge pile of ungraded papers (starting from a month or two before I went back to Denver) that I need to burn through with a red pen before my impending parents meetings. Monday I decided I was going to stay in the office and work through lunch on Tuesday. I was hungry on Tuesday so I went home to eat, telling myself I'd get cracking on Wednesday. Today I went to Renato's house and went home for lunch again and I really have no honest idea when all of this is going to get done. Probably Friday, which sucks because it's my only day off and that's when I wanted to get to all of the other stuff I'd been procrastinating.

It's been hot as hell this week, so I haven't lifted or ridden my bike or even done much walking. Just crossing the street turns my head into a sweat hydrant. The lazy fat kid voice inside of me is convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with working out with the air conditioner on and the human side of me refuses to turn off the air conditioner. It's a nasty little impasse.

I did get to some math on Monday and I spent a lot of yesterday picking up useful Chinese and practicing using my modals, so not all is lost. Tomorrow I do actually need to get ahead on work work so I can spend Friday looking through schools, catching up on some international dev. reading, mathifying (still stuck on that one problem) and drinking borderline unhealthy amounts of tea.

Photo by peruisay

Summer Fun

Today I started teaching a new intensive summer class. Instead of meeting for two hours once a week, we have class for two hours every day. For many teachers the name of the program, "Summer Fun," sounds like gallows humor. Our class load is doubled, we cram six months of classes into six weeks with leaner teaching materials. On top of that, we only have one day off and overtime requirements go up, so we aren't paid more. Last year I had two two hour classes four weekdays a week...with teenagers.

Well, I lucked out this summer. I get 6-11 year olds, and boy are they cute. They're also have a lot more enthusiasm than anyone should have at nine in the morning. Here's Jerry, imported from one of my weekend classes. Sometimes Jerry's so excited to answer English questions that he falls out of his seat.

Before class, one little boy's grandfather had an English map of the Shanghai World Expo splayed across the boy's desk. He was telling everyone and no one in particular that his grandson was there to learn "世博英," or "Expo English." All of the kids are super cute and well-behaved (so far). We talked about the World Expo, played some games and made passports. I have a good feeling about this summer. Maybe it's the ten cups of 信阳毛尖 tea I drank today. Whatever. It's better than adderall. Now I just need to stop making excuses for not working out, but it really is too hot today.

There's a mission statement in here somewhere

Welcome to my blog. Hopefully it's longer lived than the last few I've started and abruptly stopped. One constituted semi-drunken rants about things that pissed me off in China (mostly foreigners). My good friend Renato and I were going to start a blog dedicated to making fun of foreign journalists and their awkward attempts at covering China, but we got stuck on coming up with a good name.

This blog isn't really dedicated to anything specific, which might just give it some legs. I'm going to use it as a way to publicly collect my thoughts and keep track of the projects I've started now that I'm in my second year teaching in China. Among them:

-Researching graduate programs in international development, economics and development economics.

-Reacquainting myself with higher math, specifically what I'll need in an econ grad program.

-Improving my Chinese. I want to become semi-literate (at least reading and typing) and more conversational.

-Working towards a healthy body and healthy mind. Insane amounts of tea and my trusty weight machine are my starting points.

Along the way I'll also be discussing the ups and downs of the newfound more sober me, China, development, teaching, my awesome bike (it's awesome...you'll see), cooking and whatever else crosses my mind. Comments and feedback are way welcome.

Also, anyone interested in ESL teaching in China should check out Renato's awesome blog.

Math Homework of the Day 1

Fifteen to twenty-one year old me hated math. It was a function of me liking things that came easily, like English and French and politics and primate diversity (fuck yeah monkeys!), and I'm sorry to say that it took two or three years working for a living for me to understand the value of hard work. It's pretty embarrassing, but now I've changed. I swear. It's sort of the reason I started this bloggy thing: to keep tabs on myself and my productivity.

It's sort of like the three years in college where I tried to convince myself I was too punk rock to follow any sport other than European futball. Thank FSM the Broncos sucked then, but I missed out on some great sports moments (save for me playing NFL ambassador to a packed pub of British students for Super Bowl XXXIX) in the name of commiserating with my one futbol friend about the (once) awesome blackness of Thierry Henry.

The main difference is that I took a three-year hiatus from following sports (something I loved) because I wanted to be cool, but an eight year break from math (minus a required undergrad algebra module) because I hated it and convinced myself that it was worthless for my future career as a writer. It's the reason that architecture appealed to me when I was younger: I could make cool stuff and not bother with hard math, right? But somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to go into development studies, and some time after that I decided that an economics PhD was the best route. After some quick research, I realized that I have almost no credentials to get into an econ PhD program, but am pretty well qualified for an MA or MS program in development studies, and can cross-study in econ while there.

Thus, one of my new projects is learning Mathematics for Economists by Carl P. Simon and Lawrence Blume, all nine-hundred or so pages of it. I never made it past trig in high school, so this should be a fun adventure, and I'll be posting any successes and [probably more of my] failures. It's like learning a new language, only with more mental blocks and fewer applications in my (current) daily life.

So, with that lengthy introduction, here's what I'm currently stuck on:

In economic models, it is natural to assume that total cost functions are increasing functions of output since more output requires more input, which must be paid for. Name two more types of functions which arise in economics models and are naturally increasing functions. Name two types of such functions that are naturally decreasing functions. Name one type that would probably change from increasing to decreasing.

(Simon & Blume 15-16)

Hmmm....can't cheat with Google. This isn't economic, but according to my future doctor friend Paul, lifting weights longer than forty minutes to an hour per session can cause your muscles to start breaking down and cannibalizing themselves. So maximum output would increase until forty minutes where it would start to level off and start decreasing after an hour of lifting. I imagine the graph wouldn't be a perfect x^2 asymptote, but something like that. I just tried to write it down and only managed to confuse myself. I'll give this another college try tomorrow, armed with more tea.