Asia trip part 1: China

Celebrating the 4th of July in Boston has generally been a hit or miss experience for me.

My first one was pretty bad. I was trying to show my friend Katie*, visiting from New York City, that we patriots in Boston, well... we do things big here. I knew there were fireworks on the Charles River at night and an elaborate outdoor concert before that, so I obviously took her there. What I didn't know was that everyone in a 500 mile radius has the same plan, and they all generally want to sit in the same 16 inch square of geese-poop-ridden grass that you managed to scout for yourself because you were too ignorant to get there at 8am. Katie was about as traumatized as I was by this experience, and we had to resort to going to one of Boston's few dance clubs to drink away the distress. This culminated in us spilling out of the club and Katie demanding pizza, finding a place open at 2:30am, then Katie hitting on a 16 year old boy who worked there ("I LIKE IT SAUCY!!!"). I managed to save him by pulling her away as I gasped for air from laughing so hard and we ate our pizza on the lid of a street trashcan. Someone driving by yelled "Hey Oscar the grouch!" and we didn't have much to come back with. Let's call that one a miss.

*names have been changed to preserve the dignity of certain individuals

The next year I was dating a doctor who had fancy rich friends, so I watched the fireworks from a rooftop penthouse overlooking the river on Marlborough street while sipping $400 champagne and eating all the food because apparently that crowd had too much tact to shove me away from it. Hit.

THIS time, I did the most unpatriotic 4th of July thing I can think of: I went to China.

I went with a group of 14 masters and doctoral students, plus a wise Chinese professor from my PhD department. The trip was mostly comprised of meetings and presentations to justify the degree credits I was getting for it, but they also allowed us a precious few touristy outings, including visits to Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City, The Great Wall, and the Summer Palace.

Some initial "whoa this is not America" moments:

1. The smog is no joke. It was very hard to tell if it was about to pour rain or just a high pollution day. Apparently it gets exponentially worse in the winter, when the coal plants kick on to provide energy to heat the cities. I wore my pollution mask pretty religiously, even though most of our group gave up on the concept because it's also HOT (imagine being hot and sweaty and covering half your face in cloth that you then exhale your hot humid breath into). 



sup

2. The toilets: I knew that toilets weren't great in China. But I didn't know how awful they were. The squatty potty element is fine once you are used to it (not going into details here, but let's just say one word: aim). The real problem is, you don't flush ANYthing down the toilet. Not even toilet paper. The vast majority of bathrooms have no toilet paper at all, which raises some very serious personal hygiene questions for me. We had been forewarned so we brought cute little personal toilet tissue packs, but what did Chinese people do? Just not wipe? I'm so confused. Now, where do you put the tp (and any other female products) when you're done? You can't flush it. So there is an open trash can in each stall. WITH USED TOILET PAPER IN IT. Now is also a good time to mention that there is no AC anywhere except the fanciest hotels, so these cans just sit there all day in 100 degree heat. I am not exaggerating when I say that I am shocked the whole continent hasn't dropped dead from Typhoid fever. Bathroom visits were not the girls' event they are in the US: go in a group, chat, refresh your makeup... no. They were like entering a war zone right before your side gives up. Or Dante's Inferno. 
3. The manners: ah, the real reason I kept my pollution mask on. There was no sense of courtesy when it came to personal habits. People sneezed into the open air in front of them, coughed on whoever was in their general vicinity, passed gas with alarming volume and duration. I had to seriously fight my impulse to scold people like a schoolmarm. I wanted to ask, rhetorically, how a country with the biggest population in the world could ever succeed with everyone sneezing on each other. Instead I put my mask on and kept it on. 
4. The t-shirt slogans. English is big here; understanding it, not so much. One middle-aged woman was wearing a shirt that said "Punch me in the face," and I'm relatively sure that's not what she actually wanted to happen. A little girl was wearing a shirt that said "You f*'n a*hole," which prompted one of our group members to pose for a picture with her. This led to one of the most controversial moments on the trip: eventually the girl got suspicious of all the attention and someone in our group asked our translator to explain why. He did. The girl started crying. Our group tried to console her but the damage was done. Where did this go wrong? Should we not have said anything and let the poor thing wear that shirt without knowing its expletive-filled meaning? She certainly would have been happier that way and may have never had any issue with it in the future. I'm still not sure of how that should have been handled. 

But if you think you can manage that, China makes for an amazing trip. 

Tiananmen Square

I was only 3 years old and far from Beijing when Chinese students demonstrated for human rights in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Still, I grew up with periodic reminders of the tragic end to that peaceful protest. Even in America, there were intermittent references to and reprints of “Tank Man,” the anonymous protestor bravely yet casually standing unarmed in front of a government tank that day. 

Time.com

Magazines like National Geographic and Time elevated the photo to icon status, drawing comparisons between current events (such as Ieshia Evans standing peacefully for the Black Lives Matter movement in front of Louisiana state troopers in riot gear in 2016). It was humbling to be in that exact place in Beijing, but also a sobering reminder of the power of the government: an enormous portrait of chairman Mao still presides over the space, and surveillance cameras record visitors’ every move. 

It’s clear that the fight for freedom of expression in China has not made great strides since 1989. Indeed, there is no mention of the protests in that well-known square, even though they were and continue to be significant on a global scale. The "great firewall of China," means that online searches for any references to Tiananmen square, tank man, or similar events lead to blank pages. I have Chinese students in Boston who said they had never known the protest existed until they left China. (Fast forward to a later part of the trip: I ask a Chinese teacher who is about my age what she thought of the death of Liu Xiabao. She didn't know what I was talking about. We thought it was a translation issue so she gave me her phone and I typed in his name. Nothing. It was absolutely eerie.). 

I was floored when several Americans in our group asked what the significance of the place was, though. Now that I think about it, I guess we didn't really learn about modern Chinese history in school. 

The Forbidden City

Built to house the Ming dynasty in the 1400s, this place was home to emperors until the very last one (Puyi, duh) peacefully stepped down to make way for the Chinese revolution in the early 1900s. Walking unchecked throughout the palace is even more impressive when you stop to consider that entire areas of the city were accessible only to the emperor less than a hundred years ago (hence, "forbidden" to commoners).  As such, elaborate stairways and fountains that may in the past have only been closely seen by the most powerful man in China are today climbed on by adventurous children and featured in countless tourist selfies. 

So this is an imperial palace but it does really come off as more of a city, with separate villages for servants, businessmen, and concubines. From village to "village," there are humongous gates. Each gate has a huge (like, 30 feet tall) central entryway with intricate carvings in it. Then off to each side of the central gate, there is a smaller, basic gate. In some of the royal houses (not the FC but in ones I saw in South Korea and elsewhere), the side gates are only about 4 feet high. This is a manifestation of a Confucian ideal which stresses "respect of authority." Which means that the emperor goes through the central gate and everyone else (old, young, pregnant, whatever) stoops to go through the other gates. Because you have to inflate the fragile ego of a king. So that was how I lost my western wonder and veneration for Confucius.

If you're wondering why someone Chinese was named "Confucius," it's because he wasn't. The English name is a latinization of Kǒng Fūzǐ (孔夫子), which means "Grand Master Kong". But again, he's a jerk, so who cares? "Life's too short to deliberately build gates that people have to stoop to get through." - little known quote from Grand Master Amanda.

The Great Wall

Speaking of gates... When you mention that you’re going to China for the summer, people ask what you are most looking forward to. My answer was simple: getting typhoid fever. Kidding! It was the Great Wall. 

When the Han tribe (now 92% of the Chinese population) overthrew the Mongols, marking the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), they were worried about the Mongols retaking their old territory. So they built a wall, starting in present day North Korea and ending near the Gobi desert on the western side of the country. 

From https://sites.google.com/site/mrvailsclass2/great-wall-of-china, this is the current wall. You can see progress through the centuries at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Map_of_the_Great_Wall_of_China.jpg which shows the full extent of the former wall.

When exploring the wall, you can mark your progress by counting the watch towers you pass through. I forget how far apart they are, but it took a *cough* pretty fit *cough* person about 8 minutes to get from one to the next, speedwalking. Guess how many watchtowers there are? Over 25,000. But the ones you can access from where we were in Beijing are limited to about 50.

In between watch towers in full sun and 100 degree heat, feeling totally spry and not holding myself up on the wall at all.

There are lots of slopes and uneven stairs to deal with between watch towers so I don't recommend running. Even if, hypothetically, you are trying to maximize the surface area you cover in a short time,  the tourists who like to cut in front of you and then stop to take pictures of like, a bug on the wall will just see it as an additional challenge to get in the way. I seriously saw a tourist take a selfie and you could only see her face and the inside of her umbrella. There was no indication whatsoever in that picture that she was currently on one of the wonders of the world. But I digress. You will probably only get to exactly 12 watchtowers. 

The Summer Palace

The summer palace is an enormous compound, the majority of which is comprised of a man-made lake. This place was the summer retreat of the imperial monarchy, which is evident in the luxury of the buildings and walkways that look out over the water. In the present day, thousands of tourists stroll on the elaborate sidewalks on land and zip across the lake in intricately carved, colorful dragon boats on the water.

Dragon boat!

I'll spare you the details of the education portion of this trip, and sum it up with the commentary that Chinese schools are making huge progress to shed their reputation of being military-like factories. They are finally embracing the inclusion model for special ed students and focusing on "STEAM" instead of purely "STEM," adding Arts to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math." However, they still have high stakes testing (as do we) and video cameras in classrooms (we only have them in hallways... for now). I asked why the cameras were in the classroom and the first answer was predictable ("safety") while the second one was jarring ("to ensure academic honesty on high stakes testing days"). It made me reflect on the similarities between the supposedly liberal, expressive and free American institutions and the unapologetic security state in China, especially as it manifests in the monitoring of children as young as kindergartners.

All of these places were accessible from Beijing. We also went (by train) to Nanjing, where I presented at an international education conference(!), and Shanghai.

All in all, China was fantastic. But it also set an amazing foundation for me to really appreciate what was up next: South Korea and Japan!

Book for this part of the trip: She's come undone by Wally Lamb. Hard to read subject matter but the writing is incredible.