Arrived in Wuhan on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago after a comfortable soft sleeper train from Beijing. On our nifty private TVs in the sleeper car they played the Karate Kid remake with Jacky Chan and Jaden Smith. The Beijing portrayed in this movie is ridiculous — the temperature is never remains mild through month after month of training; it rains all the time; the streets are narrow and the buildings rarely more than two or three stories tall; the city is lush with trees and greenery; repair guys speak fluent English; parents can call their kids, find out where they are, drive to pick them up, then take them to the music conservatory — all in 20 minutes; and, best of all, and groups of 12-year-old Chinese mini-hoodlums roam the streets and beat up smaller foreign kids in public parks with impunity.
We arrived at the “new” Wuchang train station, which, besides being a lot bigger and having a Dicos greeting me as I exited the platform, is still pretty crappy. Apparently 800 million RMB was not enough to provide more than a dim light in the main hall or unclod the drains that prevent the taxi stand from being submerged under a giant puddle of water.
There’s a bigger shopping area inside the station, though most of the shops were for Zhou Hei Ya and or one of the many copycat brands attempting to pass itself off as Zhou Hei Ya. Surely duck’s neck is number one gift for visitors on their way home.
In the taxi over to Hankou I noticed that the flagfall has jumped from 3 to 6 RMB. Still a lot cheaper than most other cities, though. First stop was the unnamed alley between Zhongshan Dadao and Tongyi Lu for my preferred reganmian and mianwo. Then walked through a misty Wuhan rain to our normal hotel on Jianghan Lu. The entire southwest corner of Zhongshan Dadao and Jianghan Lu has been wiped out to make way for a stop on the the Number 2 metro line, due to open sometime in 2012.
This spot is already jam packed with people on most days; a subway line right in the middle is going to make it easier for thousands more to come in. Should be fun.
The headlines in all the papers were about Hu Jintao, who had just passed through the day before to stare intently at dry dirt with groups of old men. This ritual, which I think is approximately 5000 years old and invented by China, was all it took to bring the months-long drought to an end. The heavy rains started the night before, and though we only felt light rain during our two days here, it was the beginning of several weeks of major floods in and around Wuhan. On the bright side, we were spared Wuhan’s normally oppressive June heat.
Most of the afternoon was spent walking around and enjoying some of our favorite snacks, such as the spicy chicken wings at BT Wings and the bubble teas at Di Kou Le. We also went to a more recent find, Chen’s Zhajiangmian.
I hesitated the first time we passed this place, thinking that zhajiangmian was a Beijing specialty that I never really liked. But this place was packed, and the signature dish was way better than anything I’d ever eaten in Beijing. Highly recommended.
Will save the evening’s adventures for my next post.
Chicago Dan’s American English Daycare put up an advertisement in my neighborhood. Sounds like a pretty nice service for Chinese kids. Especially the part about the foreign teachers being American and white.
The neighborhood I live in was pretty remote before the Line 5 subway was built. Since my building was finished in 2006 or 2007 and the subway line opened in September 2007, it’s safe to say that the building was built in response to the newly available subway. All of which makes it puzzling why the north gate is closed.
Here’s my building:
When I moved in, both the north and east gates were open and in use. At night the north gate was often kept almost closed, so that only pedestrians could fit through and cars had to go through the east gate. Fair enough. But after a couple of years, the north gate was locked shut without warning. I asked the wuye about it and was told that there wasn’t enough money to keep a guard posted there.
Let’s do some math.
I pay approximately 4000 RMB every year in management fees. There are six building entrances, each of which holds 20-24 apartments (two doors on each floor, and 10-12 floors per entrance, depending on the location). So let’s say 136 apartments. That’s 544000 RMB per year from basic fees. There are also at least 100 cars parked inside the gates, covering almost every single inch of available space. Let’s say 300 RMB per month for parking; that brings in another 360000 RMB. So with close to 1 million RMB at their disposal, the wuye have decided it’s out of their budget to assign a skinny 18-year-old kid with a crustache and an oversized shirt to sleep in the guard box at the north gate.
The joy in this story comes not from the stupid decision by the wuye but rather by the sad and predictable effect of that decision. Because unlike me, someone was not content just to complain to everyone who would listen. This guy wanted his north gate back, and he got it back — by bending and removing the metal bars of the gate until he could fit through them. Here’s the gate now:
Even with the makeshift bars tied on, it’s easy to get in and out. There’s no guard there, so whoever was being kept out “for my safety” now has easy access. You couldn’t even open the gate if you tried, and replacing it surely won’t be cheap. All in all, a brilliantly played hand by the building management.
Here are a few more pics. Note the cars parked directly in front of both sides of the gate, as well as the graffiti sprayed right next to the guard post.
News Alert: On May 1st, United States President Obama said that earlier in the day U.S. military forces had attacked a building in Pakistan, killing Al Qaeda leader bin Laden and confirming the identity of his corpse. Xinhua News Agency
The sender was 10658000, also known as China Daily Mobile News, a paid service that sends daily news headlines and links to mobile users. I don’t subscribe, but occasionally they’ll send me particularly important updates — usually matters of obvious nationwide concern, such as natural disasters or the latest epidemic sweeping through the capital. I never received any “regular” news like this, though. It was also odd that it arrived over three hours after I had watched Obama’s speech live (or, more likely, almost live) on Chinese TV.
So, why? Here are my top four theories:
China Mobile hoped to earn money by getting millions of people to forward the message to each other or call each other. But presumably that was already happening. And besides, if they sent the message to all their users, then they would be more likely to discourage a flood of text, since everyone would already know. Which brings me to my second theory:
China Mobile wanted to tell everyone once and for all because the network was being overloaded with texts and calls. This is also unlikely, though; I doubt traffic could compare to the Chinese New Year peak period, where everyone sends good wishes to their family and friends.
Rumors and disinformation were already spreading, and the government deemed it important enough to send out an official statement to quell those rumors.
The folks at China Mobile got caught up in the Twitter-fest like everyone else and just wanted pass along the news to their (several hundred million) customers.
Of course, the correct answer is “no why” (不为什么) .
I said no, and he immediately hung up. Now I wish I had kept him on the line a bit longer. If he wasn’t from NOSC (and I don’t think he was), then what was he trying to do? Promote some sports activity for kids? Conduct a survey? Or maybe just identify mobile numbers of parents with kids in that age range?
When Yao Ming entered the third grade, he was five-seven, and Shanghai’s Xuhui District Sports School selected him for its after-school basketball program. Recently, I visited Yao’s first coach, Li Zhangming, who, like a traditional Chinese educator, spoke of Yao in completely unsentimental terms (“He didn’t much like basketball. He was tall, but slow and uncoördinated”). After our conversation, I wandered around the basketball courts of Shanghai’s No. 54 Middle School, where the Xuhui Sports School holds some of its practices. I watched a group of young girls performing basketball drills, then introduced myself to the coach, a tall woman named Tao Yanping.
“I was a teammate of Yao’s mother,” Tao said. “I went to their wedding. I remember giving them towels and thermoses—things you gave newlyweds back then. See that girl there?” She pointed out a red-faced child, the tallest on the court. “Her mother was also my teammate. That girl is in the third grade. Her mother is 1.83 metres tall, and she made the national team.”
I asked Tao how she recruited. “We go to the schools and look at the children’s height, and then we check their parents’ height,” she said.
The two-hour practice consisted mostly of ballhandling drills. Tao was attentive, shouting commands at her charges (“Little Swallow, you’re travelling! Who taught you to do that?”). At the end of the practice, tall parents materialized at courtside. Zhang Jianrong, a woman who was nearly six feet tall, told me that basketball was just a healthy activity for her daughter; the girl’s studies were more important. Like the other parents, Zhang was a basketball mom in a country that selects its basketball moms by height.
The method of early recruitment is a product of China’s inability to provide every public school with coaches and sports facilities. The system has proved effective in low-participation, routine-based sports like gymnastics and diving, but when it comes to basketball it may be China’s greatest weakness. In America, where community leagues and school coaches are plentiful, athletes emerge from an enormous pyramid of participants. Some, like Allen Iverson, rise to the top with remarkable passion and creativity—but if a recruiter had shown up at the Iverson home when Allen was in the third grade, he would have found no father and a short mother who had given birth at the age of fifteen. It’s significant that China has yet to produce a great male guard—the position requires skill and intensity rather than height. All three Chinese players in the N.B.A. are centers, and two are second-generation centers. The Chinese national team is notorious for choking in key games, partly because the ballhandling is inconsistent. Players rarely appear to enjoy themselves, and their character has not been formed by true competition; even as free-market reforms have changed many Chinese industries, the sports world is a throwback to socialism, with its careful planning and career stability. Once, when I asked Yao Ming how many Chinese would be in the N.B.A. in a decade, he said only three or four.
This seems more like the Chinese way of doing things, and it matches the anecdotal evidence I’ve heard. So if the call was from NOSC, it would be the first time a telemarketer claimed to be from a government body. I guess that’s why it seems so strange. It’s out of character, and kind of desperate in a way.
Spent some time outside in the wind without a scarf yesterday, then moved around furniture at home for a couple of hours. The pain came on last night, fast, in my neck and left shoulder. It was bad enough to wake me up just from moving around in bed. So tonight I went in and got my first baguanr done:
The whole procedure only took about 15 minutes. Nowhere near as painful as it looks, and it definitely loosened my neck up, though I’m told I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to feel the full effect.
Li Na lost in three sets to Kim Klijsters in the Australian Open Finals yesterday, and at least part of the blame goes to her own Chinese supporters:
MELBOURNE -Li Na told her coach and husband she would love him “forever” after she lost the Australian Open final Saturday, but she had little love for the “amateur coaches” in the stands who broke her rhythm against Kim Clijsters.
Fed up with boisterous shouts from Chinese fans during the tense second set, ninth seed Li marched to the chair umpire after being broken at 3-3 and asked her: “Can you tell the Chinese, don’t teach me how to play tennis?”
“There were a lot of people coaching me,” she told reporters. “It was really loud and it wasn’t just one direction, it was from all sides.
“I think Chinese people watching tennis can’t be polite … (saying) ‘Take her out!’ and other things.
When they were calling out things it was during returns, so I felt” — and here she inhaled sharply — “so tired!”
The outburst was reminiscent of her moment during her semifinal against Dinara Safina at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when she told the local crowd to “shut up.”
Flustered by the frenetic atmosphere at Rod Laver Arena, the 28-year-old from the Yangtze river port of Wuhan demanded British umpire Alison Lang order fans to quiet down and railed at flashing cameras as the third set slipped from her fingers.
Unfortunately I didn’t see the match and can’t confirm what exactly the crowd was doing or saying, but still… Obnoxious Chinese fans? Distracting camera flashes? An argumentative Wuhaner? Nothing out of the ordinary there.
Despite her loss, Li’s ranking will rise to a new Chinese record of seven and she is guaranteed a hero’s reception when she returns home, where hundreds of millions tuned in to watch the match live.
I wouldn’t say guaranteed, now that she has made Chinese fans lose face on an internationally televised event. All internet flamers aside, it will be interesting to see the official reaction here. It could be an opportunity to scold Chinese audiences into being more “civilized”, similar to what Beijingers endured in the years preceding the 2008 Olympics. Less likely but still possible is a Wang Zhizhi Situation, in which Li is deemed a “traitor” by the motherland and forced to make a groveling public apology.
The latter is unlikely, as Wang’s was a much more serious offense involving breaking his contract, and it was made against the People’s Liberation Army. For Li, the best case scenario is that they do nothing and just let her play:
The thousands of comments are even better: some expressing admiration, but most in shock that a Yale professor, or any sane person, actually believes in this sort of parenting. Instead of the Chinese patriots who overwhelm the comments sections of other China-related articles, this time we hear from Chinese-American and other Asian American grown-ups who endured this kind of childhood. Unsurprsingly, most didn’t enjoy it too much.
