Jenny and I ran in the Xiamen International Marathon yesterday. I ran 10K and Jenny ran the half marathon. Altogether it was a good day. The weather was warm (upper 20sC) and humid There was a splash of rain at the start that just bumped up the humidity level.

The planners did a good job for an event of its size (more than 20,000 participants). The honeypots at the start line were the worst aspect; it’s a wonder everyone in the city isn’t crippled with dysentary right now. The city did the usual half-hearted job of managing traffic; their solution was basically to close all roads on the island, except around the port and airport (in other words, as long as the marathon didn’t hamper commerce...) Running alongside 19,900 Chinese enthusiasts provided yet another reminder that stuff we take for granted is new here, and everyone in China is just kind of making it up as they go.

Jenny and I were separated at the start because the planners sensibly staged the start by distance. The start was ungodly crowded, literally shoulder to shoulder. I don’t need to describe the smell. A CCTV helicopter kept passing overhead to the great amusement of the crowd; helicopters are really rare here. The race got a late and slow start. With that many people, almost all of whom had never run a marathon before, about half of whom were wearing thoroughly non-sporty gear like jeans and leather shoes, and most of whom had done no training whatsoever — with all that the first 1-2 km took probably 10 minutes. So it’s difficult to talk about finish times.

I missed all the distance markers so I never had a feel for how far along I was, I just kept passing people, especially on the hills. The “passing people” thing was really interesting; remember, almost none of these runners had even seen a marathon before, so niceties like “slow runners fall to the outside” and “large groups shouldn’t walk eight abreast” were unknown. I probably ran 20K in my 10K, if you count all the sidestepping and zigszagging. At all times, the race was so tight-packed that every runner was arms-reach from other runners. It meant running with your elbows. At one point, I detected a sharp smell of onions and I immediately thought, “that smells like Westerner B.O.” and a muscly clydesdale running the half-marathon brushed past me. So maybe Chinese people think we smell like onions? Do I smell Chinese (whatever that smell is?) This probably has to do with body chemistry and what foods you eat, and as we basically eat the same diet here as in Oregon, I’m guessing not.

The crowds along the course were also dense, and very inspiring. Chinese has exactly one cheer for all sporting occasions: Jia you! Jia you! Jia you! (pronounced “Jah, yo!”) It means, ludicrously, “add oil,” and is usually chanted in a “tastes great, less filling” back-and-forth manner. For once, I was glad for the attention paid foreigners. It made me feel sort of like a superstar. Groups of high school girls would should “hello hello!” and I’d smile and wave and they’d giggle. With my shaved head and plain grey HUSKERS t-shirt (just try explaining what a “Husker” is...) I know I made a martial appearance. A few times the army guys (who were basically lining the entire course, in the typical Chinese show of patriotism reserved for all large public events) saluted me. The heat and humidity combination was potent. I could feel my skin flushing, the heat radiating off my head. I poured some water over it to no avail.

All of sudden, I was about 500m from the finish, with plenty of gas left in the tank. I sprinted full out across the line. My time was 1:05 by the official clock, and somewhere between 45 and 55 minutes by my watch. Who knows what this means, given the clusterFrack at the start?

After the race, I found myself stranded across the island from our apartment, with literally not a taxi or bus in sight. I ran into two teachers from XIS and we three essentially walked across the island home.

Jenny had a harder race than I did; which sounds improbable because she’s a much stronger runner. We think it was a combination of the heat, and the fact that she only drank pure water. In conditions like that you can quickly unbalance your body salts and get light-headed and nauseous. Her time was something like 2 hours.

Not three hours after the run, the local papers had already printed pictures and stories, and released special editions. (Xiamen has several very small papers that superficially resemble “nickel ads” newspapers in size and heft. These apparently cover only local news.) The one we saw had two big stories: the cover story was that a Chinese guy won the marathon, which seemed hinky given the enormous distance the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams had on everyone else. We later surmised that the marathon officially comprises two marathons. The “Elite” marathon starts a few minutes before the “real” marathon, has the really big prize, and gets the international coverage (and pro runners). The “International” marathon is the one we (and 19,800 other people) run in. This allows the Chinese to save face by never letting a foreigner win “the International Marathon,” yet also attracts (and piggybacks on the image of) superstar international runners, who never have to worry about mixing with the (literally) unwashed masses. Interestingly, this is a pretty close mirror of the relationship between the two Ports brands: Ports 1961 is a haute couture runway brand sold outside China; Ports International is the China-only brand, and provides 90% of the corporate revenue. We use plenty of press from Ports 1961 for the International label, but never vice versa.

Jenny and I have decided next year to run the full marathon.

I can almost pinpoint the exact time this happened...I was updating the site before lunch (about two-three hours ago).

At least they could make up their minds...

I resist talking too much on the blog about Big Ideas in regards to China vs. America (or anywhere else), in part because my thoughts aren’t well formed, but also because such ideas could easily be mistaken for racism. Several long email exchanges with friends Back Home have led me to reconsider my resistance. So I’m reworking my Big Thoughts on China and putting them into a miniseries of sorts. I don’t know how long this miniseries will be or what topics it will cover. For now, I’m just editing those email exchanges for public consumption.

But first, a disclaimer:

I don’t think the Chinese mind is hardwired differently (in a genetic sense) than the non-Chinese mind. I work with a lot of expats of Chinese heritage (i.e. Chinese-Canadians, Chinese-French, etc.) whose worldview pretty closely resembles mine. But the Chinese mind definitely runs a different OS. I’m bound to make sweeping generalizations about “the Chinese mind” or “Chinese Culture” or other such artificial stuff. Generalizations like that are impossible in a country of 1.3 billion people speaking two dozen languages with 3000 years of written history. They’re certainly bound to be shallow, given we’ve only been here seven months and spent almost all that time in one city (and not a very important city at that). When I say these things, you can assume I’m being intellectually lazy, but please don’t assume I think the people of China are somehow, in some substantive sense, different from myself. <ironic>Also: “Many of my best friends are Chinese.”</ironic>

So here’s where I’ll start:

Before we moved to China, I had lots of thoughts—stereotypes, really—of what China would be like. Those stereotypes were, almost universally, spectacularly wrong. The funny thing is, I was pretty well-read regarding China. In college I studied East Asian history and read Taoist literature in translation. We started studying Mandarin before we moved here. My wife grew up in Taiwan. In the past few years I’ve been keeping an eye on news about China. I was getting a lot of my information from neo-liberal free-market rah rah press like the Economist and Thomas Friedman. I thought I was well informed. If I was wrong, my sources are wronger.

I think everyone is a little misinformed about China, probably including the Chinese people. I think a lot of commentators get it wrong because a well-run Chinese city makes a good first impression. It looks clean and shiny and modern on the surface, but scratch the surface and you’ll see how slapdash everything underneath is. (I also mean this literally, BTW. Fancy new highrises in Xiamen are actually 30 story unretained concrete piles with interior walls of fired red brick. Everything is covered with stucco and bathroom tile to make it look “modern.”). The half-finished character makes it seem all go-go, but you need to spend a little time with a place to get past those impressions. When I read Friedman it’s apparent all he’s seeing of China is what his handlers let him see from inside a proverbial limo. “Handlers” in this sense might not necessarily be government officials, but more generally people with an interest in developing a certain view about China.

When you get out of the limo, you have to live in a different world. A world where you wash soot off your vegetables, where waiters stand obsequiously at your table while you look at your menu yet are nowhere to be found when you want more water, where farmers are driven off their land by rapacious real-estate developers, where the air is yellow for weeks on end, where people who make $1 a day rub the feet of people who make $1000 a day, where someone smiles when they deliver bad news, where remote officials in the Northern Capital issue sweeping statements about reducing carbon dioxide emissions while out here in the sticks they’re laying six-lane highways and building a coal-fired power plant every day, where most drivers have had their licenses for less than two years, where people eat pizza with chopsticks and spit chicken bones on the table. Outside the limo, we get the strong sense that everyone is making this up as they go along. China isn’t playing the same globalization game as everyone else. They’re making their own rules here about culture, intellectual property, trade barriers, and the free flow of capital and information. They might be worthy rules, but they are certainly unprecedented, and probably unpremeditated.

There are a couple other blogs I read that do this better than I could:

• James Fallows
• Benevolent Misanthropy

...well, for the time being, at least. The same thing happened with Wikipedia last fall: it was unblocked for about one month then blammo! NO MORE WIKIPEDIA FOR YOU.

Think you might be homesick? Unfortunately, expatriate life in China means living with constant homesickness, so gauging the severity of this emotion is essential to regulating your well-being. We have devised the following test to help in this regard. Please circle one statement that best represents what you miss from ‘back home.’

1. “I don’t miss anything at all. Everything about China and our lives here is an improvement over Oregon”
2. “I miss items specific to our particular lives ‘back home’: my Vanilla bicycle, our Subaru Impreza, my friends and family, etc.”
3. “I miss aspects unique to my hometown and state: Stumptown coffee, Powell’s Books, long empty beaches, spruce trees, etc.”
4. “I miss generalized features of life and culture in my home country, such as American landscapes, American shopping malls, and pale American faces.”
5. “I miss exposure to any non-Chinese place or cultural artifact. For example: Croatian wine, Hungarian architecture, Singapore.”
6. “I miss the year I lived in Los Angeles.”

Scoring

The number you circled indicates the severity of your homesickness:

1. You are not homesick at all. You have probably been replaced by some kind of replicant or alien pod creature.
2. You have acute homesickness. The application of appropriate local substitutes such as Qingdao beer and Szichuan food may temporarily relieve your unhappiness.
3. You have chronic homesickness. Local substitutes may not prove effective. We recommend locking yourself in your apartment all weekend and watching giant-robot cartoons from your childhood.
4. You have terminal homesickness. A vacation away from China may provide a temporary improvement in your condition.
5. You have reverse homesickness. There is no cure for this condition other than total removal from the Chinese environment. Even remaining locked in your apartment will prove futile as you’ll realize your appliances and furnishings are all constructed in that particular half-ass way where they appear to be of a fine quality but said “quality” was applied post-manufacture, like some kind of electro-plating, and that only Chinese people would be perverse enough to make things like this.
6. Be afraid. Be very afraid.