- What: Philosophy in Action Talk Radio: Robert Garmong on Teaching in China
- Who: Dr. Diana Hsieh, with Robert Garmong, plus live callers
- When: Wednesday, 19 September 2012, 6 pm PT / 7 pm MT / 8 pm CT / 9 pm ET / 9 am 20 September Beijing Standard Time
- Where: Philosophy in Action's Live Studio
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Philosophy in Action interview
Teaching in China: Wednesday Interview on Philosophy in Action Radio
On Wednesday evening, I'll be a guest on philosopher Dr. Diana Hsieh's live internet radio show, Philosophy in Action, to discuss "Teaching in China."
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Here's how to piss off the top bosses of the Chinese Ministry of Finance and Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, without even knowing you're doing it.
Earlier today, I noticed that the long wall of poster board which is typical filled with photos of students in tee shirts with fairly bad English, along with stories in Chinese which (as far as I can tell) seem to describe them doing impressive-sounding things, had been replaced by a wall of Communist Party stories — Long March stuff, Mao stuff, Lei Fang stuff, etc. One of my students this morning told me that the Beijing Ministry of Finance was having a big-big-BIG-wig meeting in our department this afternoon, but I'd quite forgotten it. I am sometimes a ben dan — dumb egg.
Our campus has pretty frequent meetings of black-Audi-driving People More Important Than Me, but this time the PMITM's were a lot more important than average.
At an American university, if you had a giant PMITM meeting it would be discussed, perhaps debated (because there would surely be dissenters), and at the very least announced. Here, the only announcement came the night before: "Please don't use the West Gate of the building [Chinese uses the same word for gate and door], because it will be closed for maintenance." Maintenance — yeah, right.
So in all ignorance, this afternoon I rode my bike in to meet with a student who's interested in studying in America for grad school. I'd volunteered to help her and other people, so my afternoon off of teaching was to spent helping her make study plans.
As the small, little announcement had indicated, in anticipation of the arrival of the PMITM's, the main door to our department was closed off. It was festooned with a thick red carpet and gargantuan, expensive cones of flowers paid for by The People and intended to warn dumb eggs like me that Here There Be PMITMs. PMITM's love such things, but I tend not to pay enough attention to them. I just walked around to the other side of the building, uttering curses at the PMITM's.
I came in the back side, carrying my bike because I don't have a lock anymore. A Person Less Important Than Me cut halfway through it in the attempt to steal my bike during the winter holiday. In 39 years in America, no one EVER attempted to steal my bike, so I love when my Chinese students lecture me about the high crime rate in America.
When I reached the second floor, I found a huge gaggle of perhaps 20 Chinese boss-men, chatting with each other, all smoking cigarettes right in the middle of a no-smoking building. They were accompanied by a small band of beautiful college students dressed in long and body-hugging traditional-style cheongsam dresses.
I recognized one of my former students, a girl called Jessie, who is legendarily tall, elegant, and beautiful. Whenever our university has dignitaries visiting, Jessie is guaranteed to be there, wearing the requisite cheongsam and wide, friendly smile. Someone in our administration hopes she will never graduate.
I was happy to see Jessie again, but I wasn't looking for friendly conversation.
My parents instilled in me a lifelong contempt for cigarette smoke, to which was recently added a major dose of adult-onset asthma. I literally cannot safely be in a smoke-filled room anymore, or I could wind up in a hospital. So when I came to the second floor, intending to do my job, and met with a wall of cigarette smoke — in an area clearly marked NO SMOKING — I was miffed.
I asked Jessie if she could please inform these men that they aren't allowed to smoke in the hallways of our college, as is clearly marked on all the entrances. She didn't exactly say yes or no, she just… shrank. She tried hopelessly to avoid my eyes, but just before terror overtook her I felt a hand clap down on my shoulder.
This was Ming Zhao (name changed to protect the guilty) a nasty, smiling little ball of inhumanity who comes to my mid-chest in height, intellect, integrity, and all other manly qualities except for Communist Party influence. In that regard, he is a boss whom even our Chinese Dean has to fear.
Ming Zhao said, with a giant smile on his face, "It's nice to see you. Now please go out." He literally pushed me down the hall, through the pall of cigarette smoke, toward where I'd propped my bike against my office door. He didn't even make an attempt at respect or propriety, didn't give me a hint of dignity, just threw me away like the yangguizi I am. I coughed a bit, but kept my lungs mostly inside my chest as I sped down the hall like a cat flung out a window who tries to pretend "that's exactly what I wanted to do."
Ming Zhao sent a student minion after me, ostensibly to inquire after my health, but mostly to make sure that I didn't return. The student, being young and therefore not too skilled in the art of being Chinese, didn't make a very good fake at caring whether my lungs were okay. He only managed to convey that My Presence Is Not Welcome among the PMITM's.
I found my student, cleared my lungs enough that I could talk, and then found a place near a window where I could breathe outside air. You can believe I was massively motivated to help her find an opportunity to go to America for graduate studies — or for anything else, for that matter. At that moment, I would have helped anyone escape this country.
This small incident was entirely my fault. Ming Zhao shouldn't have needed to remind me that in China, the leadership doesn't have to follow the rules that everyone else follows. It's only my foolishly reflexive American perspective that makes me expect consistency, integrity, and the rule of law. Such notions lead only to disaster here in the People's Republic of China.
RG
Thursday, April 26, 2012
As it turns out, female bosses in China can suck, too, they just suck differently. And not all male bosses suck, either.
The district manager for Ma Lei's company is a man who sounds very professional. He's the one who, first week she was at work in the store, hinted to her that she's a future manager at a store with higher sales than this one, if she wants to be. The current store manager, though, is a female ben dan. "Ben dan" means literally "dumb egg," which is Chinese for dumb-ass. This particular ben dan has always been a manager, never actually worked the floor, yet she thinks she knows how to boss Ma Lei around — in short, her head is way up her eggs.
It's a long story not worth telling in detail, but yesterday the manager ordered three hefty boxes shipped, and when the delivery guy came he had Ma Lei pay him 12 yuan apiece (about $1.80). The manager-egg somehow had the idea that it was supposed to be 12 yuan for all three boxes — a preposterously low price — and she demanded that Ma Lei pay the extra $3.60. Ma Lei was incensed!
Now, I grant you that $3.60 is small change, arguably worth just sloughing off. But a) we're talking about a $225 a month job, so $3.60 isn't such small change, and much more importantly, b) this is Ma Lei, who will apologize to an ant for stepping on it inadvertently, but won't take shit for something she didn't do wrong.
This happened late in the day, just before Ma Lei was coming home. I'd been working all day, and my head was still in the computer when she came home at 6:00. I still hadn't prepared for today's class, nor had I broached my day's writing assignment, but I could see that she was in about as high a dudgeon as I've seen her in.
She kept apologizing to me for interrupting my work, but I wasn't the least bit upset. I told her I didn't fall in love with a noodle, nor did I want to. (That's the only way I knew how to explain it in Chinese.) She told me I was on my own for dinner, and then she disappeared into the bedroom to phone up her network of friends and coworkers she knew who had worked with courier companies in the past.
She wanted moral support from her friends, but more than that she was checking the facts: was there any way the manager-egg had been right, all three boxes should have been shipped for $1.80? Of course they all said "no way." I could have told her that, but she wanted to be rock-solid certain rather than do anything rash. (I love this girl!)
After a little more than hour of combined venting and fact-checking, she hit the phone to call the district manager at 7:30 at night. She'd warned me about this, and she gave me an opportunity to dissuade her, but I didn't do it: she called him, with my full blessing. If I hadn't been raised with a mom who got work-related phone calls at hours well past 7:30 at night, I might have told her to wait till the next morning, but I was, and I didn't. I wanted that district manager to hear what Ma Lei had to say.
Her friend had told her not to speak to the district manager in a loud or harsh or proud voice, but Ma Lei told her friend "why should I be a noodle? He's not Mao Ze Deng, he's not Obama, why should I be afraid?" And indeed there was pride in her voice, though also respect.
Have I mentioned that I love this girl?
I think that what she told him is the most amazing part. I understood a good bit of it, then she gave me a simplified version afterward. After explaining the facts to him, she made it clear that her problem was not the money. It was very important to her that he think well of her, and if she walked away from her job over this $3.60, he not think that she had failed or done something wrong.
He asked if she wanted some sort of payment from him, and she said no, I don't want your money. He might have been a little perplexed by that, and he asked why she wanted the job at all, if she doesn't need money. She told him. "I don't want to be a lazy bug, staying home all day. I want something to do." If, however, the job conditions are such that she doesn't feel respected, she will "say gubai" — i.e., "goodbye."
She emerged from the bedroom proud, excited, confident, yet exhausted. She apologized for not having made me dinner, which (she said) is a wife's job. "I am a bad wife," she said. I couldn't disagree more.
About an hour later, Ma Lei's phone started registering calls from her ben-dan boss, every fifteen minutes or so. This was a mistake, on the boss's part, because Ma Lei was in no state of mind to speak with this woman, but the woman nevertheless tried for a couple of hours. Then she sent an apologetic text message saying "I misunderstood," and "you didn't understand me." Ma Lei saw it, but did not respond.
It was at once an act of cruelty and of charity for Ma Lei to ignore her boss's attempts to communicate.
Of course, the manager-egg had heard from the district manager, and she must have been filled with fear and shame.
If man is indeed a rational animal, and communication is best done in clear and reasoned tones — and if the store manager wished to hear anything that might soothe her abashment — last night was not the time for her to attempt to apologize to my dear, feisty wife. As Ma Lei herself said, you can push her around a lot, as long as it's reasonable, but once you've crossed a line her tongue is like a sword that will cut you in half. (That was her exact metaphor.)
I must confess that Ma Lei took some pleasure in her boss's apparent discomfiture. Whereas the first half of the night had been spent in anger, the second half was spent in slightly choumei gloating. Neither way was she going to sleep, and indeed she kept me up an hour after I needed to be asleep before my 12-hour Tuesday marathon, but I couldn't begrudge her a minute of her little triumph. Realizing that her desire to stay up was going to kill my workday, she took a Benadryl and collapsed.
Her job doesn't matter a jot, in the grand scheme of our lives. She could quit it, and we wouldn't notice the financial difference. But she wants to work, and I want a wife who wants to work. There's freedom in work, and there's pride, and there's independence. I don't want her to have to ask me for every penny — not because I can't afford it, but because I don't want her to have to ask it — and she doesn't want to have to ask.
She's off now, at work. I've not heard a thing from her about today's experience. The boss-egg-woman is seldom in the store, so it's likely that Ma Lei didn't see her all day. Nor did Ma Lei particularly want to talk to her. I think she just wants to continue doing her job and ignore that there was ever a conflict. And in the process, let the boss-egg-lady know who's really boss.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Glad I'm not a woman in China!
Ma Lei was in line for a really good job at a financial services company. She passed two tests, and was one of two people (out of more than 100) under consideration. The job didn't pay much to begin with, only about $225 a month, but there was a steep career curve available after the first two months.
Then she got a call: for only $7500, she could have the job. That is to say — if she gives the manager $7500, he'll choose her for the job. Apparently it's not that uncommon in China to demand about half a year's salary, up-front, as a bribe to get a good job. (I imagine Rod Blagojevich would be quite jealous.)
Then a day or two later, she was headed for another job interview. She climbed on to a hyper-crowded bus, squished in front of a late-50s man. After a while, she started to feel a little "stirring" behind her at waist level. She moved out of the way, but the man followed to press his "stirring" into her again. She moved again, and again he followed her. Finally, she shouted to the bus driver to stop, saying in full voice exactly why. The old dirty old man turned red and fled the bus.
Her job interview went a lot better than the ride to get there. She was hired immediately, without having to go through the usual multiple layers of interviews. Ma Lei's friend who works at the company told her that rarely happens, so the manager who interviewed her must have been quite impressed with her.
First day of work, Ma Lei's new boss said he would like to take her out for lunch. Great. At lunch, after a little talk about the job, the people in the office, etc., he leaned forward told her she's very beautiful. Next, he asked her to go to a hotel with him. Now she's looking for Job #3.
First boss asked for money, second boss asked for sex. What's left for the third one to ask for? First-born child?
Then she got a call: for only $7500, she could have the job. That is to say — if she gives the manager $7500, he'll choose her for the job. Apparently it's not that uncommon in China to demand about half a year's salary, up-front, as a bribe to get a good job. (I imagine Rod Blagojevich would be quite jealous.)
Then a day or two later, she was headed for another job interview. She climbed on to a hyper-crowded bus, squished in front of a late-50s man. After a while, she started to feel a little "stirring" behind her at waist level. She moved out of the way, but the man followed to press his "stirring" into her again. She moved again, and again he followed her. Finally, she shouted to the bus driver to stop, saying in full voice exactly why. The old dirty old man turned red and fled the bus.
Her job interview went a lot better than the ride to get there. She was hired immediately, without having to go through the usual multiple layers of interviews. Ma Lei's friend who works at the company told her that rarely happens, so the manager who interviewed her must have been quite impressed with her.
First day of work, Ma Lei's new boss said he would like to take her out for lunch. Great. At lunch, after a little talk about the job, the people in the office, etc., he leaned forward told her she's very beautiful. Next, he asked her to go to a hotel with him. Now she's looking for Job #3.
First boss asked for money, second boss asked for sex. What's left for the third one to ask for? First-born child?
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Two Chinas, Two Americas
Our landlady called Ma Lei last night to ask if we could possibly do her a big favor and pay our next three months' rent (about $1500) a few weeks early. As it happens, I had the money available to me, so I was able to hand it over now instead of at the end of the month.
She stated the reason for needing the money early as: her son is going to study overseas, and she has to make some sort of payment post-haste. That seemed a little odd, because she surely would've known the deadlines in advance and, as a Chinese parent hyper-concerned about her child's education, saved for it assiduously. I kind of figured she was fibbing, but I didn't expect ever to find out the real truth.
To my surprise, after Ma Lei had given the landlady my money, the woman decided to tell her the real story. It's anybody's guess why the landlady felt like telling her, or what subtext she intended to convey to my wife about the evils and treachery of America.
The landlady's brother went three years ago, without a visa, to live in the States, Los Angeles, as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. A couple of days ago, the brother was killed in a robbery. The brother is in the States illegally, so the government won't do a thing about his body. Apparently it's the family's responsibility back here to foot the bill to ship him home for proper cremation. That's why she experienced the sudden need for my cash.
At the exact same time as this conversation was taking place, I was working with a lovely young student whose family has been paying me to tutor her in preparation for prep school in the States. She's a bright and bubbly eighth-grader, currently being homeschooled for the rest of this academic year. She's been accepted by a number of top-end prep schools, including one in the Chicago-area oligoburb Lake Forest.
Yesterday, she showed me with great delight the pink, shoulder-less dress her mother bought her for some imagined high school ball, a topic to which she makes an animated return almost every day in class. "Who will invite me? What if I'm not pretty enough to be invited? Will there be dance lessons before the ball? I don't know how to dance." It's as though, freed from the dreaded Chinese gaokao exam, she's now replaced it in her mind with the exalted prom.
As I learned today, she's already been to America for a two-week summer camp at — of all places — Citrus College, where my ex-girlfriend used to work. In the mornings she attended classes at the Junior College; in the afternoons, she was shuttled to places like Disneyland and Malibu Beach. At night, she stayed with a local family. Her aunt lives with a green card in California somewhere, married to a Chinese guy she met at a fancy party in the States. They have a very cute young son.
Here you have the two Americas, in stark contrast, presented to my eyes in a single day. One is built of illegal immigration, low-wage jobs, and senseless deadly crimes. In the other, green cards come up in the spring like daffodils, "It's a Small World, After All," and the biggest cause for stress is whether or not a handsome Lake Forestran prince will ask the exuberant Chinese princess to the formal ball.
We hear much about the two Chinas, the one occupied by the astronomically rich and the other occupied by everybody else, but we don't hear very much about the two very different Americas seen by these two classes of Chinese.
She stated the reason for needing the money early as: her son is going to study overseas, and she has to make some sort of payment post-haste. That seemed a little odd, because she surely would've known the deadlines in advance and, as a Chinese parent hyper-concerned about her child's education, saved for it assiduously. I kind of figured she was fibbing, but I didn't expect ever to find out the real truth.
To my surprise, after Ma Lei had given the landlady my money, the woman decided to tell her the real story. It's anybody's guess why the landlady felt like telling her, or what subtext she intended to convey to my wife about the evils and treachery of America.
The landlady's brother went three years ago, without a visa, to live in the States, Los Angeles, as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. A couple of days ago, the brother was killed in a robbery. The brother is in the States illegally, so the government won't do a thing about his body. Apparently it's the family's responsibility back here to foot the bill to ship him home for proper cremation. That's why she experienced the sudden need for my cash.
At the exact same time as this conversation was taking place, I was working with a lovely young student whose family has been paying me to tutor her in preparation for prep school in the States. She's a bright and bubbly eighth-grader, currently being homeschooled for the rest of this academic year. She's been accepted by a number of top-end prep schools, including one in the Chicago-area oligoburb Lake Forest.
Yesterday, she showed me with great delight the pink, shoulder-less dress her mother bought her for some imagined high school ball, a topic to which she makes an animated return almost every day in class. "Who will invite me? What if I'm not pretty enough to be invited? Will there be dance lessons before the ball? I don't know how to dance." It's as though, freed from the dreaded Chinese gaokao exam, she's now replaced it in her mind with the exalted prom.
As I learned today, she's already been to America for a two-week summer camp at — of all places — Citrus College, where my ex-girlfriend used to work. In the mornings she attended classes at the Junior College; in the afternoons, she was shuttled to places like Disneyland and Malibu Beach. At night, she stayed with a local family. Her aunt lives with a green card in California somewhere, married to a Chinese guy she met at a fancy party in the States. They have a very cute young son.
Here you have the two Americas, in stark contrast, presented to my eyes in a single day. One is built of illegal immigration, low-wage jobs, and senseless deadly crimes. In the other, green cards come up in the spring like daffodils, "It's a Small World, After All," and the biggest cause for stress is whether or not a handsome Lake Forestran prince will ask the exuberant Chinese princess to the formal ball.
We hear much about the two Chinas, the one occupied by the astronomically rich and the other occupied by everybody else, but we don't hear very much about the two very different Americas seen by these two classes of Chinese.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Country Living in China
I grew up in America’s farm country, Iowa and Illinois, with frequent trips to Indiana where I had relatives with a real-life farm. My hometown, Moline, is the headquarters of John Deere. Yet for all of that, my actual experience with farms mainly consists of driving past them with the windows up and my nose occasionally scrunched up in the classic, condescending grimace of a city boy smelling other people’s animals.
Those were American farms, though, at once more unobtrusive, human-friendly, and massively concentrated than Chinese agriculture. I’ve marveled at the Chinese way of farming since my first summer in-country, when I observed through the windows of speeding vehicles the tiny little carved-out spaces lush with green which seemed to spring from dusty orange clay.
Chinese farming is a paradox for me, at once phenomenally productive (filling the supermarkets of hungry Dalian every day) and desolate. The countryside is filled with the elderly, the youths having left for better-paying jobs and greater flexibility in the factory towns of China. But the young factory people must be fed by someone, and as far as I can tell it’s the old farm-hands who work the land and send their products to the factories, ironically being paid so little that their children must go off to the factories, work slavishly as laborers, and send their excess home to provide for their parents a living that the selling of farm products doesn’t. All these issues, grand and humble, came together for me when I went to visit Ma Lei’s family in the family village.
Ma Lei’s family is a demographic archetype. Her grandparents were born to local landowners, and therefore vastly wealthy by the standards of the early 1900s in northeastern China. There’s some sort of a story involving her paternal grandfather, now 90 years old, working with a bank from Hong Kong, but my Chinese isn’t up to actually following it. The parents still work the farm, though Ma Lei's father also works construction. Both Ma Lei and her younger brother have gone off to the cities for work.
I’d eat brambles to be able to hear and understand the family's stories, and I have redoubled my language studies in the hopes that I can one day commit the family story to print. I’ll have to do it before Ma Lei’s English is good enough to understand what I’m writing, though, because she tao yan’s any hint of my writing about her, or her family, or indeed about anything at all personal. She is aware that she’s engaged to a writer, and she knows that I write about stories from China, but I don’t think she has quite realized that means her.
(Tao yan, by the way, is one of those magnificent Chinese terms that means a dozen different things. It’s sometimes joked by Chinese students of English that our language has ten different words for the same thing, whereas Chinese has one word for ten different things. What’s especially interesting to me, philosophically, is that Chinese often uses the same word for opposite relationships. Tao yan, for example, can mean “very bad,” “disgusting,” or “nasty,” when it’s used as an adjective. But as a verb, it means “hate” or “be disgusted by.” Couple this with the fact that verbs are often omitted from Chinese sentences, and “Wo tao yan” can mean either “I am disgusting” or “I am disgusted.”)
Ma Lei’s family had been rich, by local standards, and had owned land rented by others. Hence they were tao yan after the Revolution and the Mao Ze Dong wenti, as they call it — “the Mao Tze Deng problem.” There was a time when Ma Lei’s father and grandfather moved far north, to Jilin province, where Ma Lei was born. There was an incident during which Ma Lei’s sweet old Yeye (grandfather) was beaten with belts by a crowd of Cultural Revolutionaries. As Ma Lei tells the story, her father tracked down the instigators of that incident and gave them an eye for an eye, but I cannot verify that story. Ma Lei’s father is an unusually good man, that much I can see from his face, but the Cultural Revolution was a time when no one stood up for anyone else, and children frequently were the tormenters of their own parents.
Be that as it may, I knew a bit about Ma Lei's family before I went out to the family farm. I was amazed, though, at the life I saw there. I thought I would find a hardscrabble existence of poverty and deprivation. Instead, I found proud people with a very comfortable life and ample provisions.
Those were American farms, though, at once more unobtrusive, human-friendly, and massively concentrated than Chinese agriculture. I’ve marveled at the Chinese way of farming since my first summer in-country, when I observed through the windows of speeding vehicles the tiny little carved-out spaces lush with green which seemed to spring from dusty orange clay.
Chinese farming is a paradox for me, at once phenomenally productive (filling the supermarkets of hungry Dalian every day) and desolate. The countryside is filled with the elderly, the youths having left for better-paying jobs and greater flexibility in the factory towns of China. But the young factory people must be fed by someone, and as far as I can tell it’s the old farm-hands who work the land and send their products to the factories, ironically being paid so little that their children must go off to the factories, work slavishly as laborers, and send their excess home to provide for their parents a living that the selling of farm products doesn’t. All these issues, grand and humble, came together for me when I went to visit Ma Lei’s family in the family village.
Ma Lei’s family is a demographic archetype. Her grandparents were born to local landowners, and therefore vastly wealthy by the standards of the early 1900s in northeastern China. There’s some sort of a story involving her paternal grandfather, now 90 years old, working with a bank from Hong Kong, but my Chinese isn’t up to actually following it. The parents still work the farm, though Ma Lei's father also works construction. Both Ma Lei and her younger brother have gone off to the cities for work.
I’d eat brambles to be able to hear and understand the family's stories, and I have redoubled my language studies in the hopes that I can one day commit the family story to print. I’ll have to do it before Ma Lei’s English is good enough to understand what I’m writing, though, because she tao yan’s any hint of my writing about her, or her family, or indeed about anything at all personal. She is aware that she’s engaged to a writer, and she knows that I write about stories from China, but I don’t think she has quite realized that means her.
(Tao yan, by the way, is one of those magnificent Chinese terms that means a dozen different things. It’s sometimes joked by Chinese students of English that our language has ten different words for the same thing, whereas Chinese has one word for ten different things. What’s especially interesting to me, philosophically, is that Chinese often uses the same word for opposite relationships. Tao yan, for example, can mean “very bad,” “disgusting,” or “nasty,” when it’s used as an adjective. But as a verb, it means “hate” or “be disgusted by.” Couple this with the fact that verbs are often omitted from Chinese sentences, and “Wo tao yan” can mean either “I am disgusting” or “I am disgusted.”)
Ma Lei’s family had been rich, by local standards, and had owned land rented by others. Hence they were tao yan after the Revolution and the Mao Ze Dong wenti, as they call it — “the Mao Tze Deng problem.” There was a time when Ma Lei’s father and grandfather moved far north, to Jilin province, where Ma Lei was born. There was an incident during which Ma Lei’s sweet old Yeye (grandfather) was beaten with belts by a crowd of Cultural Revolutionaries. As Ma Lei tells the story, her father tracked down the instigators of that incident and gave them an eye for an eye, but I cannot verify that story. Ma Lei’s father is an unusually good man, that much I can see from his face, but the Cultural Revolution was a time when no one stood up for anyone else, and children frequently were the tormenters of their own parents.
Be that as it may, I knew a bit about Ma Lei's family before I went out to the family farm. I was amazed, though, at the life I saw there. I thought I would find a hardscrabble existence of poverty and deprivation. Instead, I found proud people with a very comfortable life and ample provisions.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Visiting the Countryside
Last weekend, I made my first visit to see the village where Ma Lei’s family lives.
As you may know, going to visit a woman's family in China is tantamount to an engagement, so it was potentially a very important trip. If her mother and (especially) father disapproved of the relationship, that would be the end of it: very few Chinese girls will go against their parents' wishes.
Ma Lei was pretty nervous, but I wasn't the least bit. I figured that her family must be pretty good folks, or she wouldn't be as down-to-earth and open-minded as she is. They'd let her get involved with a foreigner thus far, so they were at least open to the possibility. And besides, there wasn't too much I could do about it either way. They were going to think whatever they were going to think, regardless of my stressing about it.
Their farm would be an hour from my university, if I were driving my own car. However, taking a bus, then another bus, then another, it was more like three hours. We rode through the town of Jin Zhou, right past the little restaurant where the pretty waitress had tried on my bike helmet, five or six months ago. In Jin Zhou, we picked up a scrappy-looking little bus through increasingly remote farm country along a road parallel to the one I took on the bike trip to Zhuang He.
Around 1:00, the bus pulled up the tiny cluster of eight or ten farm houses where Ma Lei was raised. Quick introductions were made as I was whisked into her family's house and Ma Lei distributed gifts of moon cakes and Peking duck we'd brought from Beijing. I was seated next to Ma Lei's father at a small dinner table decorated with Snoopy characters. As Chinese tradition requires, Ma Lei's female relatives quickly began filling the table with a gigantic feast — perhaps twenty plates overflowing with food for ten people.
Ma Lei's younger brother was there with his girlfriend, whom he's been dating for more than a year. They somehow didn't look
reluctant or put-upon, despite the fact that my coming to visit the family had caused him to be more or less shamed into coming, too. His girlfriend had not yet been introduced to the family, a point that their mother didn't fail to mention to him once or twice in the build-up to my visit. Ma Lei’s brother and his girlfriend were placed directly opposite me, next to Ma Lei's 90 year-old grandfather, who sat next to her father. Ma Lei's aunt, mother, and two unrelated people sat on the side of the table opposite from the two men of the house. Ma Lei was at my side, to help me with food and translations.
Ma Lei's mother is a compact, good-natured woman. With the dutiful character of a Chinese farm wife, she let her husband do almost all the speaking for her. But she keeps an immaculate house, cooking and cleaning with professional efficiency.
The father is a good-humored man in his mid-50s. Though I couldn’t understand his dialect at all, when he told stories I could tell from his body-language and from people’s reactions that he’s an excellent raconteur. He welcomed me to the house warmly and took great pleasure serving me beer and baijiu, which we drank together in ritual fashion.
When Chinese men drink together (and women almost never drink, not in a traditional family), it is a highly social experience. You are not to lift a glass on your own: you move your hand to your glass, and wait for the other man to notice and raise his glass along with you. Without looking at each other directly, you swing the glass toward your partner as if to clink a Western-style toast, then raise it to your lips, being careful to sip for about the same length of time he does. On the way down, you make a smaller gesture to your partner, then set your glasses down simultaneously. Tough luck, if you want to drink more than he does, or less. Tough luck, if you want to drink while he's got his hands on his chopsticks or while he's telling a lengthy story. It's quite rude to force someone to interrupt his eating or talking, by putting your hand to your glass. It's best to let the host set the pace, rather than appearing to be greedy with someone else's alcohol. I’d been told some of the rules of this custom in the past, but I’d never really experienced it before. I think Ma Lei’s father enjoyed having a drinking partner; there’s not much social life in their tiny little village.
The ritual is at once mildly stifling, and intensely bonding. One becomes unusually aware of the partner's behavior, his body language, his pace and rhythm of eating, as well as (obviously) how much he is drinking. Coupled with the fact that the Chinese method of sharing food at the table requires you to coordinate your eating, only reaching for what you can grab without interrupting someone else's reaching and grabbing, it gives a much more intimate connection with the other person than you get at a standard Western-style dinner.
With so much food of such variety, there is generally a quick feast at the beginning followed by a long period of socializing, storytelling, and picking at the remaining food. Northeasterners in China speak with the thickest, most incomprehensible of accents, as if their mouths were stuffed with sponges. Other Chinese people have a hard time communicating with them, so of course it’s hopeless for a foreigner. To make things even more complicated, about half of the people at lunch speak not Mandarin but the local dialect, which is significantly different. So Ma Lei had to act as a sort of Chinese-to-Chinese translator, going from her family's Chinese into Chinese I could understand and back again. We communicated some, but mostly I listened and tried to understand their body language.
After a couple of hours, Ma Lei's brother and his girlfriend left the table. Ma Lei made sure to have me take her picture with her
brother and his girlfriend before she would let them leave. Ma Lei is the one in black and white, on the right-hand side of the picture.
After the young couple left, the other local residents slipped away, leaving the four of us to go back to the table. Presently, Ma Lei's mother offered me a small bowl of noodles, which I had been instructed to accept no matter how overstuffed I already felt.
This was another tradition about which Ma Lei had warned me, but which I had never heard of before this weekend. If the family likes and accepts their daughter's suitor, after a meal they will offer him noodles. Noodles are a sign of long life, and they are typically eaten on every birthday as a way of saying "...and many more." So by offering noodles after the introductory meal, the family is wishing that the couple will stay together for a long and healthy life.
If, on the other hand, the family had decided that they didn't like me, they would have instead offered me jiaozi (Chinese dumplings something like won tons). Although jiaozi are a favorite food of China, and it seems as though the list of traditions associated with just about every holiday in China ends with "... and you must eat jiaozi," jiaozi also seem to have a kind of negative connotation. I've heard Ma Lei say "he can eat jiaozi" in the same way I might say "he can go to hell." It's perhaps akin to "let them eat cake."
So under the circumstances, I accepted a very small bowl of homemade noodles with a delicious mussel sauce. Ma Lei's mother complained that I hadn't taken enough, but I made a joke about being too fat already, and she let me get away with my small helping.
We were in the farm village for two full days, returning early in the morning of the third day. Later that evening, while I was off teaching a private class for a company in downtown Dalian, Ma Lei’s father called her up. He asked for Gao Meng (my Chinese name — it sounds a lot like “Garmong”). I don’t know why he asked for me, since we couldn’t have communicated over the phone anyway, but he was disappointed when I wasn’t there. He didn’t particularly want to talk to Ma Lei, he just wanted to know when I could come out to drink beer and baijiu with him again.
As you may know, going to visit a woman's family in China is tantamount to an engagement, so it was potentially a very important trip. If her mother and (especially) father disapproved of the relationship, that would be the end of it: very few Chinese girls will go against their parents' wishes.
Ma Lei was pretty nervous, but I wasn't the least bit. I figured that her family must be pretty good folks, or she wouldn't be as down-to-earth and open-minded as she is. They'd let her get involved with a foreigner thus far, so they were at least open to the possibility. And besides, there wasn't too much I could do about it either way. They were going to think whatever they were going to think, regardless of my stressing about it.
Their farm would be an hour from my university, if I were driving my own car. However, taking a bus, then another bus, then another, it was more like three hours. We rode through the town of Jin Zhou, right past the little restaurant where the pretty waitress had tried on my bike helmet, five or six months ago. In Jin Zhou, we picked up a scrappy-looking little bus through increasingly remote farm country along a road parallel to the one I took on the bike trip to Zhuang He.
Around 1:00, the bus pulled up the tiny cluster of eight or ten farm houses where Ma Lei was raised. Quick introductions were made as I was whisked into her family's house and Ma Lei distributed gifts of moon cakes and Peking duck we'd brought from Beijing. I was seated next to Ma Lei's father at a small dinner table decorated with Snoopy characters. As Chinese tradition requires, Ma Lei's female relatives quickly began filling the table with a gigantic feast — perhaps twenty plates overflowing with food for ten people.
Ma Lei's younger brother was there with his girlfriend, whom he's been dating for more than a year. They somehow didn't look
reluctant or put-upon, despite the fact that my coming to visit the family had caused him to be more or less shamed into coming, too. His girlfriend had not yet been introduced to the family, a point that their mother didn't fail to mention to him once or twice in the build-up to my visit. Ma Lei’s brother and his girlfriend were placed directly opposite me, next to Ma Lei's 90 year-old grandfather, who sat next to her father. Ma Lei's aunt, mother, and two unrelated people sat on the side of the table opposite from the two men of the house. Ma Lei was at my side, to help me with food and translations.
Ma Lei's mother is a compact, good-natured woman. With the dutiful character of a Chinese farm wife, she let her husband do almost all the speaking for her. But she keeps an immaculate house, cooking and cleaning with professional efficiency.
The father is a good-humored man in his mid-50s. Though I couldn’t understand his dialect at all, when he told stories I could tell from his body-language and from people’s reactions that he’s an excellent raconteur. He welcomed me to the house warmly and took great pleasure serving me beer and baijiu, which we drank together in ritual fashion.
When Chinese men drink together (and women almost never drink, not in a traditional family), it is a highly social experience. You are not to lift a glass on your own: you move your hand to your glass, and wait for the other man to notice and raise his glass along with you. Without looking at each other directly, you swing the glass toward your partner as if to clink a Western-style toast, then raise it to your lips, being careful to sip for about the same length of time he does. On the way down, you make a smaller gesture to your partner, then set your glasses down simultaneously. Tough luck, if you want to drink more than he does, or less. Tough luck, if you want to drink while he's got his hands on his chopsticks or while he's telling a lengthy story. It's quite rude to force someone to interrupt his eating or talking, by putting your hand to your glass. It's best to let the host set the pace, rather than appearing to be greedy with someone else's alcohol. I’d been told some of the rules of this custom in the past, but I’d never really experienced it before. I think Ma Lei’s father enjoyed having a drinking partner; there’s not much social life in their tiny little village.
The ritual is at once mildly stifling, and intensely bonding. One becomes unusually aware of the partner's behavior, his body language, his pace and rhythm of eating, as well as (obviously) how much he is drinking. Coupled with the fact that the Chinese method of sharing food at the table requires you to coordinate your eating, only reaching for what you can grab without interrupting someone else's reaching and grabbing, it gives a much more intimate connection with the other person than you get at a standard Western-style dinner.
With so much food of such variety, there is generally a quick feast at the beginning followed by a long period of socializing, storytelling, and picking at the remaining food. Northeasterners in China speak with the thickest, most incomprehensible of accents, as if their mouths were stuffed with sponges. Other Chinese people have a hard time communicating with them, so of course it’s hopeless for a foreigner. To make things even more complicated, about half of the people at lunch speak not Mandarin but the local dialect, which is significantly different. So Ma Lei had to act as a sort of Chinese-to-Chinese translator, going from her family's Chinese into Chinese I could understand and back again. We communicated some, but mostly I listened and tried to understand their body language.
After a couple of hours, Ma Lei's brother and his girlfriend left the table. Ma Lei made sure to have me take her picture with her
brother and his girlfriend before she would let them leave. Ma Lei is the one in black and white, on the right-hand side of the picture.
After the young couple left, the other local residents slipped away, leaving the four of us to go back to the table. Presently, Ma Lei's mother offered me a small bowl of noodles, which I had been instructed to accept no matter how overstuffed I already felt.
This was another tradition about which Ma Lei had warned me, but which I had never heard of before this weekend. If the family likes and accepts their daughter's suitor, after a meal they will offer him noodles. Noodles are a sign of long life, and they are typically eaten on every birthday as a way of saying "...and many more." So by offering noodles after the introductory meal, the family is wishing that the couple will stay together for a long and healthy life.
If, on the other hand, the family had decided that they didn't like me, they would have instead offered me jiaozi (Chinese dumplings something like won tons). Although jiaozi are a favorite food of China, and it seems as though the list of traditions associated with just about every holiday in China ends with "... and you must eat jiaozi," jiaozi also seem to have a kind of negative connotation. I've heard Ma Lei say "he can eat jiaozi" in the same way I might say "he can go to hell." It's perhaps akin to "let them eat cake."
So under the circumstances, I accepted a very small bowl of homemade noodles with a delicious mussel sauce. Ma Lei's mother complained that I hadn't taken enough, but I made a joke about being too fat already, and she let me get away with my small helping.
We were in the farm village for two full days, returning early in the morning of the third day. Later that evening, while I was off teaching a private class for a company in downtown Dalian, Ma Lei’s father called her up. He asked for Gao Meng (my Chinese name — it sounds a lot like “Garmong”). I don’t know why he asked for me, since we couldn’t have communicated over the phone anyway, but he was disappointed when I wasn’t there. He didn’t particularly want to talk to Ma Lei, he just wanted to know when I could come out to drink beer and baijiu with him again.
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