East-West Station

Good title? I think so and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is a popular science work by the travel writer Bill Bryson. As the title suggests, it’s a book about life, the universe and everything…from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens.

As the man himself says, “This is a book about how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” It has potted histories of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics, and more, and some greatly entertaining snippets about the great and the good of the scientific community. How about this one from the life of Charles Darwin? Apparently after coming back from his famous voyage on the Beagle, Darwin opted to let his notes and observations (later to become The Origin of Species) sit in a draw for almost ten years instead of publishing them, as he knew they were bound to cause a storm. What did he do during those years?

Darwin fathered ten children and devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles (’I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,’ he sighed, understandably, upon the work’s conclusion). (p467)

Bill Bryson is a funny man, and a deservedly popular writer. “A Brief History of Almost Everything” is a bit of a departure from his normal genre of travel writing, but it works very well and deserves all the hyperbole on the blurb, and I couldn’t put it down. Well, actually I could. I put it down when I finished it. I’m not still clutching it in my clammy mitts, you understand? But when I had finished it and had thought a bit about it and was about to allow it to slip from the front of my focus to let my back brain masticate on it in a more leisurely fashion…something struck me. It’s a well known affliction for the long term expat: almost everything you read or hear or experience that is non-Chinese sooner or later gets put through the “and what does this say about China?” processor.

And I realised that Old Billy Boy’s Big Boffins Book has almost nothing about China in it. No Chinese names, no Chinese scientists mentioned, and not even any mention of compasses or paper or gunpowder! And no Indians or Indonesians or Thais or Japanese come to that.

The story in this history is of a succession of clever westerners wrestling with all the problems and questions that beset the curious, and triumphantly solving almost all of them. As befits the subject matter, Bryson is more concerned with what gets solved than with who solves it, but he does have a knack for the bringing to life the personalities behind the science too…and in his account they are all westerners.

There are a couple of references to China, but they are rather unflattering ones. There’s a brief mention that as China is now opening up, western scientists are at last able to travel unimpeded and do some proper research on dinosaur remains. Here’s the other one:

In China, a gifted Canadian amateur named Davidson Black began to poke around at a place called Dragon Bone Hill, which was locally famous as a hunting ground for old bones. Unfortunately, rather than preserving the bones for study, the Chinese ground them up to make medicines. We can only guess how many priceless Homo erectus bones ended up as a sort of Chinese equivalent of Beecham’s powder. The site had been much denuded by the time Black arrived, but he found a single fossilized molar and on the basis of that alone quite brilliantly announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis, which quickly became known as Peking Man. (page 527)

Well, if I were a Chinese nationalist reading that, I might be forgiven for sniffing out some condescension. A not completely unfair paraphrase of the above passage might run as follows:

The silly old Chinese were buggering everything up with their blundering half-baked beliefs, but luckily a proper western scientist got there in the nick of time and made a great discovery for the benefit of the enlightened scientific community…which doesn’t include Chinese by the way!

Anyways, it’s not so much what Bryson may or may not be implying about China, it’s the omissions that are more serious, I think. As the recent piece over at Frog in a Well shows all too well, China contributed a lot to scientific understanding over the years, and although this didn’t translate into a modern scientific/industrial revolution it is a big gap if you claim to be writing a history of nearly everything. Though to be fair, he did say nearly everything!

There was a time when the Chinese were considered to be scientific trailblazers and here is a nice quote from a review of a recent book about the life of Joseph Needham “The Man Who Loved China” , a book that is getting a fair bit of attention in the English language Chinese blogosphere these days.

“Four thousand years ago, when we couldn’t even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today,” wrote French philosophe Voltaire in 1764. But if today in the West we widely acknowledge those words to be true, that’s largely due to an Englishman.

That “largely due to an Englishman” sounds a bit smug, doesn’t it? And did he have to mention that Voltaire is French, it’s kind of superfluous.

Well, anyhoo, Needham was he of the notorious “Needham question”, namely “Why didn’t the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution?” especially since they led the field for so long. My guess is that the answer lies in an unwillingness to learn from other nations and too much thought-policing by strict authorities. But the Chinese are a competitive bunch these days, and hungry for scientific knowledge and international prestige, and you gotta wonder if they’ll start being innovative and trailblazing once again. One thing is for sure, the first Chinese to win a Nobel for science is going to be a MEGASTAR.

But that kind of nationalistic fretting and pettiness really should be beside the point. Science, among other things, should help us to overcome our nationalistic blinkers and celebrate the achievements of Homo sapiens and not just Caucasian man, or Sinanthropus pekinensis. When I was reading “A Short History” I forgot that I was living in China and the “what does this mean for China” question only occurred to me after I’d put the book down. And that is as it should be, basically. Although it’s interesting to compare cultures and to look at science from different angles, nationality is insignificant whenever we start to consider the big picture.

“I love babies, but I couldn’t eat a whole one”, said someone once. Some grumpy old man I guess, but I couldn’t find out who, even on Godgle. In any case, it used to be my attitude more or less, and until very very recently I found it very hard to imagine myself as a Daddy or much less as a (shock horror!) kindergarten teacher.

Having been an English teacher for donkey’s years, I used to get asked from time to time to teach children and my answer always used to be, “I don’t do kids”. But about 5 months ago when I went with my wife and 1 year-old baby to a nearby swanky kindergarten to inquire about prices and lessons etc, I was again offered a job and on very good terms. I only had to teach weekend mornings for a couple of hours and my baby daughter could go to the kindergarten for free anytime she wanted, and on top of this they’d pay me a hundred an hour. I told them I had never taught kids before (and only just resisted saying that I never want to) but they shrugged this off and said I should just try it out…so I did. This kindergarten is a franchise of a well known Australian brand, “Kindyroo!”, and they teach all their “lessons” in English, with a Chinese translator. All the foreign instructors apart from me are Filipinos, and the Chinese management was keen to have “a white face” at their school, to appeal to the daft and rather racist idea that a proper “外教 waijiao/ foreign teacher” shouldn’t be asian looking. Ho hum, good for me I guess.

The lessons turned out to be surprisingly easy and enjoyable. I have only ever had to teach the “cooking class” and so on weekend mornings I help the little darlings to make tacos or cookies or cupcakes or burgers or whatever. It’s a “language and culture” cooking class, so we introduce them to western food and teach them some polite phrases “Yes please, thank you very much, it’s yummy etc” and run through the list of ingredients in English and get them to repeat. And I usually get to sample the fares, so what a great job! And the kids are lucky because I don’t actually do any of the cooking, we have a proper chef who does it. Lessons would be deserted and the school would be forced to close were I the chef.

The age range is 2-6, and they pay 190RMB ($26) each for this particular class, which makes it rather pricey. As I said before, the school is very nicely designed and decorated, and the staff are well trained and good at their job. Apart from me that is, I’m just some big-nosed joker who turns up and tries not to scare anyone… and as I have to do a bit of singing and dancing every lesson, that’s not an easy task.

And I have found that teaching kids in short spells is not too bad, but it’s tiring and I wouldn’t want to do much more of it than I do now. It takes a sunnier temperament than mine to “keep up with the kids” and although they are mostly deeply cute and well behaved I just couldn’t hack it as a full time job. Most of the staff at Kindyroo are there because they love kids and while most of them are also well-adjusted adults, there are a few who have “the look”. This “look” is a kind of glaze to their features that radiates the unfazeable radiant cheerfulness of the terminally baby-besotted. (And, sorry, but it is an exclusively female trait.) Maybe these types start to revert to normal if you take them far away enough from kids but as I’ve never met them outside of work, I wouldn’t really know.”The look” is not so obviously a bad thing of course, but it reminds me of the “Stepford Wives” or “Brave New World” a little too much for my comfort.

Maybe the most positive thing to come out of all this is that I am able to be unabashedly warm and fuzzy in my feelings and reports about Chinese kiddies. We have all read in some papers, I think, that because of the one-child policy China is bringing up a nation of rottenly spoilt “little Emperors”…but my findings are quite to the contrary. This is an expensive school we are talking about and the well-heeled mummies are clad in designer clothes and accompanied by nannies and so there is a fair bit of potential for pampered little brats. But they are not; they are charming and well behaved and lovable and…ayah, I am becoming a big soppy baby softy.

Oh yes, and the best way is to boil gently for half a day or so, depending on weight. I found that roasting and frying leaves the meat a bit too tough. Add salt according to taste. Yummy!

The Japanese were in Dalian for a fairly long time (1905-1945) and left their mark. And that, for me, is part of the place’s charm, especially when it comes to architecture. The Japanese built the tramway and some quaint old-style trams still run. Some of the buildings, such as the redbrick Railway Hospital, are well known amongst architecture buffs in Japan. And certain districts and certain buildings have an antique European (and dare I say “colonial”) charm that stands out starkly from the overwhelming majority of modern Chinese “shoebox” tower-blocks. A very small number of these buildings are Russian, and there is a well known “Russian street” in Dalian, but actually the great majority of this antique looking, European-style architecture is Japanese.

Now, I lived in Japan for 3 years and I never saw any Japanese houses like these, and it is of course slightly odd that Dalian’s European-style buildings should have been built by the Japanese. But then again the Japanese have a certain reputation for copying and this is maybe another manifestation of that. It could even be argued that Japan went into a kind of national trauma at finding out how technologically and militarily superior the Western powers were (famously initiated by the July 8, 1853 incident when Commodore Perry’s black ships steamed up to Tokyo and scared the bejaysus out of the natives) and that this trauma worked itself in an aping of the despised-yet-admired western powers. Hence the ultra-quick modernisation of Japan, hence the Japanese adoption of western habits (business suits etc) and western institutions, hence the launching of an ill-fated “Japanese Empire”, and hence the Japanese European-style colonial houses in Dalian.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese have a slightly more ambivalent attitude towards reminders of the Japanese occupation. Colonial charm is often lost on the colonised. When I was teaching a visiting banker from Beijing last summer she told me that her 14-year old daughter would be coming for the weekend and asked me what I would recommend seeing in Dalian other than the zoo and Xinghai square, coz they’d already been to those places. I thought for a while and then came up with the suggestion that it might be interesting to look at the old Japanese houses, as they really were different and curious and of historical interest. She looked appalled at this suggestion and shook her head and said, “No, no, no”. When I asked why not she just shook her head again and said “Not good.” I was pretty sure I knew what she was thinking (shame for China etc) so I didn’t push it.

And here in Dalian most of these wonderful old houses are almost completely neglected. In England, the English equivalent of “period houses” like these would be highly sought after and expensive. They would be owned by upper-middle-class owners who would renovate them and refurbish them and treat them with loving pride. Here in Dalian the locals don’t want to live in them. They are often occupied by garbage collectors from the countryside and so are rather decrepit and surrounded by piles of rubbish and rubbish carts.

Some are in slightly better nick, but they are still rather undesirable and run-down, as this flickr photo and accompanying comment shows,

This is an old residential area from the Japanese era..I think the houses are nice but poorly maintained..they told me the poor people live here

But actually I suppose we should be thankful that there are any Japanese buildings left at all. The Chinese could have easily and understandably demolished them all and thus gotten rid of a reminder of oppression. I heard that ex Dalian mayor and all-round good guy Bo Xilai was largely responsible for ensuring that a lot of these old Japanese buildings survived - cheers Bo!

And I shouldn’t finish this post without mentioning the strictly-for-tourists “Japanese street” in Dalian, which was trying to piggy back on the success of the “Russian street”, I guess. This surreal and silly street is lined with large modern buildings which were built by Chinese to look like Japanese houses and which end up looking bland and somehow western. I’ve been there a few of times and it’s always empty, and I’m really not sure what it’s for or who it’s aimed at. Don’t go there.

When I went to live Hungary in 1991, it was not that long since the fall of the Berlin wall, the lifting of the iron curtain, and all the consequent changes to the region. And so there was still a fair bit of talk about “the bad old days” and my curiosity about what life under Communism had been like was satisfied by normal conversations without me having to be overly nosy about it.

And people at the time still told “Communist jokes”. These were largely concerned with how inefficient Communism was (or rather had been) or how stupid the police/soldiers/politicians (enforcers of Communist doctrine) were. And often they had an anti-Russian slant to them.

Some samples…

A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he’s had enough. He turns round to his friend and says “That’s it. I’m going to kill that Gorbachev,” and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” replies the other, “there was an even longer queue over there.”

Capitalism stands on the brink of the abyss. It will soon be overtaken by Communism.

Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”

And there’s even an Olympic related one…

Brezhnev reads a speech at the Winter Olympics “O-O-O-O-O.” “No,” his aide whispers to him, “that’s the Olympic logo.”

Well, we live in a Communist country here in China, don’t we? And have I ever heard any Communist jokes here? No.

I can only guess at the reasons really, but the first thing that springs to mind is that while the Soviet Union was presiding over an unconcealably crumbling and risible economy during the 1970s and 80s, China’s economy under the stewardship of those Commie bastards has quite obviously been on the up and up since the death of Mad Mao. (Maybe it was an ironic joke to put him on the banknotes?)

And so a fair few of the kind of Commie jokes told above simply wouldn’t be applicable for modern China, and so would not be funny.

But if it is true, as one pundit has it, that “The Communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist—because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda” then there should have been jokes-a-plenty during the years of Mao’s misrule, where the gap between reality and government propaganda was more than yawning, it was gaping and gigantic…it was sound asleep. But I have never heard or read any jokes from the Mao era. Perhaps everyone was too shit scared or starving hungry to tell jokes. Political jokes are dissent and dissent was deeply dangerous during Mao’s murderous reign. Or perhaps I have just missed them somehow because they never got translated from the Chinese and published in places I might read.

But another reason I don’t know any Chinese Communist jokes is probably because the Chinese don’t actually make as many political jokes as Europeans. After all, this Soviet Union era joke would certainly apply to China today…

When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, “Go ahead, choose your wife.”

Now, credit where credit is due…since Mao shuffled off his mortal coil China has progressed a lot in several ways, not simply economically. And the CCP has to be given some credit for that. But the government in China needs more jokes to be told about it. It deserves some satire and some jibes for locking up decent people like Hu Jia, and for censoring anything it doesn’t agree with, and for treating its adult citizens like children (not least by refusing them the vote), and for trying to erase or alter its sordid past.

Not to laugh at the CCP would be laughable.

Anyone know any good Chinese Commie jokes??

We looked at Wilfred Owen’s well known WW1 poem Dulce Et Decorum Est in class today, and I tinkered around with things a bit to get the discussion going.

Before I explain my tinkerings, here’s the original poem:

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I didn’t show the students the full poem straight off. I chopped off the last 4 lines…the ones with the “message”…which just left the graphic descriptions of the horrors of war.

I then asked students to decide whether it was, broadly speaking, an anti-war poem or whether it was designed to make readers feel pity for the poor English soldier and so hate the Germans/the enemy more, and thus, broadly speaking, a pro-war poem.

Most thought it was an anti-war poem, so then I surprised them by showing them these “last 4 lines”, baked earlier by me:

My friend, you would not then deny our cause is best
Or try to teach our children that humanity is one.
Here is the truth: Dulce et decorum est
To kill the Hun.

I had to explain that “the Hun” was a derogatory term for Germans during WW1, but after that they were all agreed that it was a patriotic poem aimed at stirring up raw passion against those who would gas “our boys”.

All of which is nonsense of course, and I admitted it and showed them the original ending and after some discussion we agreed that the original is more powerful/profound/humane etc. But the vastly different interpretations caused by the tweaked ending does indicate the ambivalence that can result from mere depictions of war.

And, yes, here comes the inevitable Chinese slant on this…I don’t watch CCTV that often, but when I browse through the channels here it’s pretty much odds on there’ll be one showing evil Japs doing despicable things to brave Chinese. I don’t watch these films/dramas so I can’t comment, but am I a cynic/pessimist for expecting that the “message”, the semantic tweak to depictions of war, is more along the lines of “Chinese are great and Japs are vicious scum” than “War is a disaster”?

Can anyone confirm/disprove my hunch?