Yesterday, I decided to make a nice little tomato/onion/egg curry, but I didn't have turmeric. It's not exactly common in this part of China. I figured, however, that my curry past probably contained turmeric, so I just kind of doubled the amount of curry paste the recipe called for. (I didn't do it just for the turmeric; I also happen to love the taste of spicy curry.)

The result was fantastic, but enormously too hot for human consumption. I love it! (I tell Ma Lei that if I'm crying while I eat, I'm happy.)

She came in and wanted a taste of what I'd made. I told her it was a little warm, but I guess I sort of forgot that she's not as much a fan of the hot as I am. She tasted it, moved it around in her mouth, pronounced it really delicious — and then the napalm effect began to grow, and grow. She drank some Diet Coke to cut the pain, then left the room. A minute later she came back into my office to hit me on the shoulder really hard.

I said "Hey! That hurt." She pointed to her mouth and said "so does this!"

In culinary terms, I really should have gone to spicy Sichuan, in the far southwest of China, rather than meat-and-potatoes Dalian in the far northeast. They eat a lot of white rice in both places, but for very different reasons. In Sichuan, they eat it to quell the agony of red-pepper fire; in Dalian, they eat it because they think white rice tastes good.

Just last week, I had lunch with a very well-dressed North Korean guy who was super-nice. We'd met over lunch the week before, and he was very interested to meet a native English-speaker.

When I'd told him I was American, though, he was visibly deflated. "I can't be your friend very much," he said, "because our countries are enemies."

Nevertheless, he invited me to lunch at a fantastic spring roll restaurant near his university. I rolled in on my bike a minute late, to find him waiting for me in the traffic circle. I was sweaty and dressed in lycra; he was clean and dressed in a tuxedo shirt with brilliantly-pressed trousers.

The last time I met a North Korean was on a bullet train from Shenyang to Beijing, when this guy with his Chinese business partner accosted me and my then-girlfriend with friendly hellos. He'd been born in North Korea, he explained to us in quite adequate English, to ambassador parents who'd brought him to various African nations during his youth. In adulthood, he'd been living in China for 14+ years, so he presumably had see at least some world news.

That guy seemed very normal, but he turned out to be — in technical psychological terms — bat-shit crazy.

The second we climbed onto the bullet train, he pulled me to the food/beer car at the front, along with his Chinese business partner. My American girlfriend at the time didn't care to join us, so she stayed back in the train car missing all the fun.

Upon our arrival at the front  car, my Korean friend spent three increasingly drunken hours (he was an enthusiastic but unskilled beer drinker) explaining to me, 1) how America and North Korea should be friends; 2) how North Korea is planning to make war against China; then, 3) how North Korea would actually win that war, because 4) Kim Jung Il (who was still alive at that time) had personally invented a nuclear fusion device that would kill all 1.3 billion Chinese at a stroke; and 4) if only the fucking United States (his expression) and the fucking China (also his expression) would allow them to do so, the North Koreans would prove to the world that they had the most efficient and productive system. And then, 5) North Korea will nuke the whole United States with one single bomb that Kim Jong Il personally invented and that can kill all people in North America at a stroke.

As George Will might say... Well!

Let me remind you, that man had lived 14+ years in China, where he presumably had some access to world news, unlike in North Korea. That didn't help.

In the past three years or so, I've encountered not one North Korean who led me to believe that bat-shit-crazy was anything but the norm in their country. So when my nattily-dressed lunch partner confessed to being from that country, I was skeptical. But he seemed to be very nice, and his English was barely peccible, so I agreed to join him for lunch.

Within minutes, significantly before any of our food had arrived, my friend accosted me about America's attitude towards North Korea. "What do you think about my country?"

Fuck, man! I don't want to talk about your bat-shit crazy country. I want a damned spring roll. But okay, I for some reason, in a moment of weakness, agreed to this lunch, so here I am.

I told him, as I tell taxi drivers who want to know about America's relationship with Japan, that this is ultimately none of my business and I'd rather know about their feelings. That's more interesting to me.

"You are American, you like having a gun, right?" He asked me, a first since I'd been in Asia. Of course I had to say yeah, though I don't personally own guns I like the idea of them. "If you are North Korea, don't you want to own gun?"

You know, there were a whole lot of things I could have said at that point. I could have pointed out that communism is a ridiculous way to respond to the economic tensions of modernity; I could have told him that absorption into China would work better than crazy foreign policy; I could have told him that his nation's leaders should be locked into loony bins. However, I backed away from all of those possible answers, because none of them would have been particularly fruitful for me.

Instead, I just nodded and said "yeah."

The spring rolls at this restaurant, by the way, were extraordinarily good. I'd almost have promised world peace for another plate of tofu skins with green onions draped across the top, with barbecued pork strips. Ah! God, if you've not had that experience, you need to get to an Asian restaurant where they serve true spring rolls. It will make your life worthwhile.

My friend's Chinese friend, a skinny little guy in a gay pink shirt, begged off from lunch quickly. He is apparently involved in import/export business, and hence is essential to the business my Korean friend is engaged in.

At the end of lunch, with the Korean guy paid for — 230 rmb, akin to perhaps a $100 dinner back in the States — my new "friend" asked me to put him in touch with someone from England or Australia or New Zealand. "I want to work on my English," he explained, "but I can't be friends with an American when you are my country's enemy.

Well, that's sweet of you... Ahem... I'll try really hard to rustle up a friend for you who won't be an offensive American, because you're too loyal to your bat-shit crazy leadership to be friends with an American. Yeah! Tcheah.

The guy was really nice, so I'm going to give him a text message in a week or so and ask him to join me for lunch on my tab. If he can't do it, then that's on his nationalistic bullshit, and I don't really need to introduce him to a Canadian friend.

After a shockingly bad performance in my Chinese tutorial last Thursday, I've finally had time to hit the books again. 

And by "shockingly bad," I mean if it had been a quiz, I'd have gotten maybe 2 out of 10. Not for the vocabulary, because I did okay on that part. But the grammar — of which I've been assured China has none — I got almost completely wrong. "Choose a suitable word for each blank," where the two words are lao and jiu, two Chinese words for "old." Less than 50% right. "Read the following dialogue and answer true or false." Right at 50% right. "Answer the following blindingly easy questions about the dialogue." 100% wrong. (Okay, the instructions didn't say "blindingly easy." I interpolated that part.)


And of course, in the middle of a performance like that, the badness just gains momentum. By the end of it, I couldn't remember simple sentence structures. (Should it be jin tian xue zhe bu hao, or jin tian bu xue zhe hao? Or are both of those wrong?) I felt like Descartes after the evil demon but before the cogito.


One nice thing about studying Chinese. It makes me a lot more sympathetic to my struggling students in English class!

The Interrogation

Yesterday, Ma Lei was out with the dogs when an elderly neighbor approached her, friendly-like, to ask about the dogs. "Is that Mimi?" She asked. People always remember the white-haired dog, with her tresses long like snowy silk. I prefer Qizai, the black-and-white papillon dog with inquisitive butterfly ears, but shallow Chinese think pure white is automatically more attractive than mixed black and white.

The old woman, whom Ma Lei didn't know, told her she'd seen "your boyfriend" out with the dogs. Though that might seem like an innocent mistake, Ma Lei's fierce indignancy was instantly activated.

When a Chinese person, especially of the unworldly class (including all of the elder generation and the rural population, as well as many others), sees a foreign man with a Chinese woman, she makes many assumptions. None of them are good, but the worse burden of those assumptions is borne by the Chinese woman. The foreign man isn't seen with great moral admiration, but nothing like the low status of his Chinese partner.

When the man is my age and carries himself with an air of prosperity or  class, chief among these assumptions is that he's surely got a wife and family in his foreign country. The Chinese woman is surely the foreigner's xiao san — "little #3" — i.e., mistress. 

But "mistress" doesn't fully capture it, because this type of mistress expects payment for her regular love-service, and for the fact that she is forgoing her own family prospects and completely losing "face" with her own family and friends. Hence, xiao san is really a species of prostitute, albeit a long-term, single-customer prostitute. 

Automatically assuming that Ma Lei is my xiao san implies a not-very-flattering view of this woman's fellow Chinese woman, but that's how it is in this country. China, like all collectivist societies, carves its people into disharmonious factions who struggle for money and social status. Then they pile on the propaganda about "social harmony," hoping to avoid the inevitable consequences of their own socially-corrosive collectivism.

Ma Lei quickly corrected the woman: "He's not my boyfriend, he's my husband. We married almost a year ago."

The old woman's crocodile smile didn't break a bit as she responded, "Oh, how come he didn't take you to America to meet his parents?" 

Note: Ma Lei hadn't told the woman that I haven't taken her to America, as in fact I have. The woman assumed it, because of course I haven't, because of course I'm hiding my Chinese wife from my American family.

Ma Lei, hating it, smiled just as broadly as the old woman. She told her "he did take me to America for more than two months at New Year time. His parents had already come over to China for our wedding, so I knew them well."

The old woman was adroit. She found the next vulnerability, and complimented Ma Lei on her English. That might be a legitimate compliment, but in this context it was a stab at her as a traitor. 

Ma Lei responded that she has no English. "My husband speaks excellent Chinese," she exaggerated.

"Oh, that's great," the woman came back. "Did he buy you a condo?"

Damn! This woman was fuckin' good!

To the uninitiated, this seems like an innocuous question, indeed an irrelevant one. To the Chinese, however, it's a twist of the knife. You see, it's the mark of a well-intentioned husband that he buy a home for his fiancé before they tie the knot. Without your own home, however humble it may be, to the Chinese you are not tied down; not grounded; not real. You could take off at any moment, leaving your wife and presumably your children destitute. Pianzi — "faker" — is the term for a man who tries to get a woman to marry him without first buying his own home. Sadly, there have been more than a few pianzi in this country.

Ma Lei feels the cultural impetus to buy a condo as well, and many times she has tried to convince me to do so. It's not that she doesn't trust me — her trust in me has been tested too many times for me to doubt it — but she would feel more viscerally stable if we were living in our own condo. Not to mention, in her very Chinese way she sees only two things as valid stores of value: bank deposits and real estate.

It doesn't make good financial sense to buy a condo, though, because I don't know how long I'm going to be in Dalian. I don't have much confidence in the Chinese real estate market, but it's impossible to convince a Chinese person that housing prices could tumble here as they've tumbled in the States. I haven't convinced Ma Lei of any of these concerns, so we're in a state of truce on the issue of buying a condo. Fortunately, she owns her own condo out in the Development Zone, so she doesn't feel rootless.

Ma Lei's standard answer to strangers' questions about why we haven't bought our condo is that we will probably be going to America soon, and anyway she already owns her apartment in the Development Zone. That makes people shut up, but it doesn't make them agree. She knows, and is maddened by the fact that, people talk about her behind her back. She's the dumb Chinese xiao san whose foreign boyfriend won't even buy her a home, and whose ill-intentions are made conclusive by the fact that...

"Your husband is very handsome," said the old woman slyly. "You would have a  very beautiful baby."

Beautiful babies are the summum bonum for the Chinese. Not "intelligent babies," though excelling at studies is also essential to the Chinese. The Chinese still assume that beauty is a sign of virtue and future success, and they also believe that Chinese/Western hybrids are automatically more beautiful than uniracial babies.

Ma Lei accepted the compliment, knowing the hammer would fall: "Why haven't you gotten pregnant yet?"

That's a clincher for traditional Chinese people. We've been married for almost a year, yet Ma Lei isn't pregnant, as far as we know. To most Chinese elders, that's inconceivable (so to speak). What's the point of getting married, if you're not going to start popping out puppies?

Then the woman truly nailed it, when she asked Ma Lei whether I, or my mother, would demand a divorce if Ma Lei "can't give me a baby." And by the way, like the wives of Henry III, that imperative mostly demands a male baby.

Let's pull back and note the progression here, all of it connoted by indirection, none of it denoted by direct assertions.

First: Hello, Ma Lei, allow me to introduce myself and tell you I think you're a whore.

Second: Oh, you think he doesn't have an American family, what a pity you're so deluded.

Third: It's a shame that your husband doesn't care to take care of you in the only reasonable way, by buying you a condo.

Fourth: in two mutually-exclusive parts. A) If none of the rest of this has convinced you that your husband is a pianzi, the fact that he hasn't given you a baby proves that he is. B) Your husband will surely dump you like yesterday's trash if you can't give him a baby.

We foreign teachers sometimes bitch about our Chinese students, because they seem to have no ability at logical thinking. On the contrary, I think, the rank-and-file Chinese have an acute facility for a certain type of highly corrosive reasoning. It's a form of reasoning with a foregone conclusion, such as "Foreign men are evil," which seems to have been supported by some degree of evidence, whether or not it integrates with all the relevant evidence. If it fails to fit, then the evidence must be adjusted, perhaps repeatedly, to fit with the foregone conclusion.

RG

Little altercations

Here's a story I'd planned to blog about when it happened, but I never got around to it.

Several weeks ago I took a taxi in to work on a fine Monday morning, one of the first beautiful ones of the spring. The cabbie was in a good mood, and we spent the ride chatting away about the weather, traffic, recent changes in Dalian, etc. 

As we approached my destination, the driver finally got around to asking me what country I'm from. I told him America, and his demeanor completely changed. He suddenly started using some words I don't know. (I mean that literally, not being coy: I don't know the swear words in Chinese.) He shouted something to the effect of "You bastards are the ones protecting the F*ing Japanese! Get the hell out of my car!"

Well, as it happened it was time for me to do that anyway, but as I handed him my money I took the time to point out to him that it's the US *government*, not the people, backing the Japanese government. I don't give a jot whether the islands end up in China's hands or Japan's.

My argument didn't mollify him very much. As he took my money and drove off, he was still insisting that China should kill both Japan and the US.

I know that anti-Americanism is rising here because of the tussle with Japan, but I seldom see it reach that feverish level. I don't think it's quite time to invest in a Canadian flag lapel pin, but that time could come very quickly if the conflict ever goes "kinetic," as the military guys say.

Ma Lei's parents watched her little doglets while were in America, and on the strength of that experience they, who had never particularly cared for critters that wouldn't eventually end up on their plates, decided it would be nice to get a dog. They recently acquired one who, I am told, bears a passing resemblance to QiZai, our sweet yet problematic black-faced papillon.

Ma Lei's father wanted to name the dog DuoDuo, a very common name for dogs in China, which I think means something like "much aplenty." (I haven't seen it written out, but I assume that's the Chinese meaning. One can't really know until one sees the characters.)

The trouble is, "DuoDuo" is pronounced exactly like "Dodo," as in "dodo bird." I had laughingly explained this to Ma Lei after the second or third "DuoDuo" dog we'd met, and I showed her the pictures of dodo birds, and let her look up the various Chinese websites that explained in great detail the tremendously stupid demise of the dodo bird.

As it turns out, that name might have been appropriate. The dog seems not to be among the brightest of the species.

One day last week, he got into a cabinet where Ma Lei's parents store food. He set to work lapping up a huge bowl of oil, apparently failing to realize that the oil was infused with hot red peppers. By the time they found him, he'd drunk probably a pint of the stuff, and he only realized it was deadly-hot AFTER they'd chased him away. He spent the better part of an evening writhing around on the ground, coughing and hacking.

But the DuoDuo name was secured in my mind about two days later. On that day, Ma Lei's mother was cooking on their giant wok, which is fueled in the standard way, by a fire-chamber filled with flaming corn stalks  underneath the wok.

The dog apparently saw her feeding corn into the little door to the fire chamber, so he figured there must be something really interesting in there. While she wasn't looking, he bounded in eagerly, before he discovered he was in a fire chamber.

The dog bolted out, his face black as coal, his whiskers singed down to little melted nothings, his eyes wild and dumbly frightened.

Now herein lies the cultural difference. I responded to these two stories by saying the dog should definitely be called DuoDuo, but Ma Lei had the opposite reaction. "If you give someone a name," she said, "that will make it so." She went on to explain that if someone has a tendency to stupidity, you must give that person a name that implies intelligence. If a person is unhealthy, you must give him a name that implies health.

So a dumbass dog canNOT, under any circumstances, be given a dumbass name. This is not because it's impolite, or because the dog will lose face, or any of those other things one might expect about Chinese culture. But rather, at a metaphysical level, giving a stupid dog a name suitable for stupidity will cause him to be stupid.

This is why I love being here. On a philosophical level, I come to understand so many things that I could not possible have imagined back in America!

On first read, I thought this article must be fake, because there's no way a Chinese official would go so far "off the reservation" as to say religion can be a force for good in China. However, one must understand the Chinese art of rhetoric. In any controversial issue, the Chinese typically lead with what a nod to they DON'T believe, as a way to be polite, and to disarm opposition.

In essay-writing, it's considered rude — almost barbaric — to have a clear thesis statement and defend it in a linear way. Rather, polite Chinese writers circle around an issue within the envelope of acceptable beliefs, occasionally nudging gently in one direction, and the reader is expected to figure out the author's thesis by understanding those elegant little deviations from standard views.

It is true, as I've seen in my teaching, that more Chinese are thinking about religion than I had expected before I came here. My wife's 94 year-old grandfather is a devout Christian who scratches out long passages from the Bible in beautiful Chinese characters on any scrap of paper or cardboard he can find. Many Chinese students seek out Westerners for information about Christianity, while others are turning to such traditionally Chinese belief systems as Taoism and Buddhism. Islam is strong in China's western provinces, and the guys who run the barbecue stands on sidewalks all over Dalian are mostly Muslims from those areas. (Supposedly, though, their version of Islam is very relaxed, and only the government's suppression has led them to become more overt about their religious identity. I don't know for sure about that.)

In sum, religion is on the rise in this country. So why? And what does Minister Wang intend to tell us about it?

The question of Chinese modernity has been: what went wrong? How did China fall so far from its position at the zenith of human culture, which it held through most of its history?

While I personally view the lack of religious belief as one of China's strengths, I can't fault a young Chinese student for thinking perhaps this is what brought China down. This is a common view among those who are turning to Christianity for answers.

Others complain that China under Mao lost its way. The old Chinese value systems were destroyed, traditional culture cannibalized. Thus I have a number of students who have turned to Taoism and Buddhism to form their value-identities.

Note also that the Minister's comments dealt with religion and superstition. Religion, per se, does not entail superstition. What the Minister was cautioning against was superstition, and I actually tend to agree.

All religions involve some form or other of superstition ("this wafer will turn into the body of Christ," or "I believe a man 2000 years ago walked on water"), but a particular religious believer may not have integrated that superstitious belief into his or her thinking. They may be very rational/scientific all week long, then they go into Church on Sunday and talk about a guy walking on water, and that's just a fun story to them. They don't really think in superstitious terms on a daily basis.

So I would say that, although the West is the seat of Christianity, and Americans in particular are largely religious, superstition is very low in the West. In China, on the other hand, superstition is quite normal even as overt religious belief is small. So if I were somehow to be named head of the State Administration of Religious Affairs, what would I do? Probably much the same as Wang Zaoan.

Superstition is rife here, without any particular religious basis.

As I've mentioned before, the germ theory of disease has not penetrated the Chinese day-to-day thought process. If you get sick to your stomach, the Chinese are likely to tell you it's because you drank cold water. If you catch a cold, it's because you slept with the window open.

On the other hand, it's completely normal for someone to make a giant, demonstrative HOAWRCH sound and spit a massive loogie on the sidewalk. It's completely normal for someone to cough, open-mouthed, right out into your face while you're in a public space. It's perfectly normal for someone to sneeze on you. Some people might object, but their objection is seen as being in terms of wen ming — politeness — not the potential for deadly infection.

And yet, when there's a limited outbreak of disease, such as the last couple of bird-flu outbreaks, the Chinese collapse into paranoid solipsism.

Once, when I'd first come to China, I traveled with what I now recognize as a foolish level of unpreparedness — I'd planned to book hotels along the way, which is not usually possible in China at holiday time — but I lucked out, because there was an outbreak of some form of the sniffles which kept the Chinese cloistered in their family homes. In fact, I got some of the best deals I've ever seen on Chinese hotels and travel packages.

So when the government spokesperson in charge of religion says religion "could be a force for good in... China," take that as his initial sop to the religious among his audience. He doesn't really mean that religion could be a force for good, he means that he doesn't plan to crack down on religion at this moment.

Then when he says specifically that the government needs to help people "scientifically" deal with "birth, aging, sickness and death, as well as fortune and misfortune" he's naming precisely those areas in which the Chinese public are the most superstitious.

People will tell you straight-out that if you want to have a boy child (which all Chinese do), you should conceive on this-or-that-day of this-or-that month. If you were born in the year of the this-and-that, you will live to be 100. If you were unlucky this year, it's because you got married on an inauspicious date. Etc.

Note that the foreign reporter immediately wanted to "cut to the chase," such as "what happens after the exiled spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism the Dalai Lama dies, testy relations with the Vatican, or controls of Muslims in the restive Xinjiang region in the west." But to the Chinese, these are stupid and impertinent questions. They don't cover what matters. What matters is that the official in charge of religion has reassured the people that they can follow their religion (as long as it's officially sanctioned), and he has warned people about superstition.

So here's a classic case of "East meets West." The Chinese haven't yet quite gathered the nerve to tell us foreigners to F' off, but they're just about ready to do so.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/21/us-china-religion-idUSBRE93K02D20130421?utm_source=Sinocism+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e45872a8a3-Sinocism04_22_13&utm_medium=email