Exhibit A: A New Privacy Wall

Commentary:

(Pre-existing rebar-reinforced concrete railing) = (nearly forgotten yet deeply sublimated Confucian/Taoist/Buddhist patriarchical tradition) + (3000 year history)

(Hastily piled, poorly fired red bricks with copious slip) = (post-dynastic political confusion) + (shortsighted infrastructure planning) + (nepotistic favor system)

(Concrete stucco façade) = (all important “face” expressing (unity + modernism))

This structure will not withstand an earthquake, or a few strong men swinging hammers. For its purpose (screening apartment windows from the road), it is Good Enough. It will stand a few years before being partially demolished at great effort for swamp fill. The remaining structure will be incorporated into a superhighway for Segway scooters leading into Huweishan Park.

Exhibit B: An Open Pit

Across the road from the wall pictured above.

October, 2006 Someone was in a gobsmacking hurry to open this pit. A small army of peasant laborers (assisted by pneumatic hammers) worked literally 24 hours a day for about a week and a half to carve it up. In the process, they exposed an unretained, loadbearing dirt wall, atop which ran a road. They also removed the basement rock underlying the structure immediately adjacent (which also lacked a loadbearing wall on the pit side). Someone delivered a few loads of bricks, and then they eventually retained the wall under the road. About a week later, the workers literally set their tools down and walked away.

April, 2007 In the intervening five months, the only activities at the site have been the looting of the rusty tools, and the occasional dumping of concrete waste from the high-rise construction across the road.

Exhibit C: Old and New

I took this photo about 200m east of the road flanked by the wall and open pit described above. To the left are some older farmhouses, the remnants of a long-gone peasant farm built along the hillside. To the right are the new, unoccupied highrises. The old farm buildings house rusty handtools, construction debris, and about a dozen peasant laborers. They skim the construction site for electricity.

Refer again to the mode of construction described in Exhibit A. The farmhouse and highrises differ very little in their essential mode of construction. The farmhouse is red brick filling a timber frame. The highrises are red brick filling concrete frames. The highrises have a ceramic bathroom tile façade. From this angle you can’t see it, but on the farmhouse the side facing downhill (i.e. toward town) has a plaster stucco façade.

Exhibit D: (Contrast)

Typical scenes of the Balinese built environment.

For a Balinese worker, to build a thing carelessly reflects poorly not only on oneself, but on one’s family, caste, and nation. It also offends gods and ancestors. The act of making a thing is a small sacred act, a contribution to the world shared by all Balinese. Balinese bricklayers abhor mortar. They strive to lay brick in such a way that mortar is unnecessary. Balinese shopkeepers align their products neatly, with all labels facing out. Balinese fishermen regularly repaint their boats, which have names and personalities, and would be offended by poor treatment.

I believe China may have had a similar attitude once. Chinese people still hold in great reverence their ancestors and history. But in the modern Chinese aesthetic, cheapness and disposability trump all other concerns. In the face of this overweening ethic, the ancient reverence has become a form hollow of substance. I don’t know where it went, or what made it go away, or when it will come back. I don’t know if other nations (viz: Japan?) went through similar transformations during their periods of rapid modernization. But an absence of respect for things makes China a difficult place to like, especially for a design fetishist like myself, who has made a personal cult of engineering, durability, sustainability, usability, and re-usability.

On the American West Coast we say “Gung Hay Fat Choy” but that’s apparently Cantonese. In Mandarin you say “Gong Xi Fa Cai.” You write it the same either way. It means something like “Happy New Year,” I guess. Although “Happy New Year” is actually (literally) “Xing Nian Kuai Le” (性年快乐). So I don’t know what Gong Xi Fa Cai means at all. You can say either one.

We’re back in Xiamen from our far-too-brief trip to Bali. There’s a lot to digest about Bali, and our experiences there. The trip itself was an exercise in contrast. The hard part about leaving China knowing you’ll return is that China is going to suffer in the comparison. For example, Balinese bricklayers work methodically and lay lovely straight walls with nicely square bricks. They like their brickwork so much they leave it exposed. You will never see this in China. When you travel to a place and you find yourself saying to your spouse, “they do much nicer bricklaying here than back home,” you can bet there will be other things they do better Here than Back Home. Like cooking food, picking up trash, refraining from spitting on the sidewalk, and being polite to strangers. They drive worse, though, and that’s saying a lot. There will be two or three more Bali-related posts, by the way.

Anyway, today is Chinese New Year and everything is closed. This is indescribably eerie. For example, right now it’s about 6 pm and we can hear birds chirping in the forest behind our building. Almost no traffic noise, and absolutely no construction noise. This is literally the first time—and I mean the first timespan greater than 10 or 15 minutes—in which we have not heard the racket of construction from our apartment. This includes the night time hours, by the way.

The plane from Singapore to Xiamen was packed with Chinese; I think we were the only foreigners. Our fellow passengers drank copious amounts of free international flight beverages. We had the bad luck to be sitting one row from the toilets; at all times there were at least five people in line waiting for the toilet. After the first couple of hours it stopped being annoying and started being amazing. They never stopped peeing. Our fellow passengers would drink and drink (this was a 7 am flight, by the way), and then get up and take all that liquid ballast to the back of the plane. I wonder if some point of national pride weren’t at stake. Because the Silk Air stewardesses are not idiots, they didn’t serve enough to get anyone drunk; they rotated in orange juice and soda. So this wasn’t a drinking contest so much as it was a urine production contest.

Last night, Jenny and I were in the kitchen washing dishes when we both smelled something burning. So we started looking around the kitchen: along the stove, at plugs, etc., looking for a short, or for something pressed up against a hot burner/toaster/microwave, etc. I stepped into the living room to find that my sleeping bag was on fire.

We had been watching TV while we were eating, and Bismarck was wrapped up in my sleeping bag. (Our apartment, as with most buildings, is not heated, so when we’re at home we usually keep our two space heaters running, and wrap ourselves up in our expensive REI down sleeping bags.) Apparently B had jumped off the couch, dragging the sleeping bag with him. It had caught on the front of our small-but-powerful open-element space heater. There’s a steel grille in front of the element, but it usually gets too hot to touch. So the sleeping bag had melted onto the heater and the feathers had ignited. The apartment was filling with a pale bluish smoke.

I kicked the bag and heater out onto the balcony where the cold air quickly put out the fire. We rushed around the apartment to open all the windows and air the place out. It smelled like melted nylon and burning geese. So, altogether, crisis averted. If we’d have waited another minute or two before checking on the burning smell, it’s likely the rug or curtain would have caught fire, and we’d have had a much bigger problem to deal with. But that didn’t happen, so all’s well that ends well.

This episode points out, in a subtle way, how very cheap human life is in China. First, there’s no way you could buy a heater like this in the First World. It’s simply too dangerous: basically a hotplate set vertically with a steel grille in front of it. Second, our apartment, like every other building in China, has no fire alarm, fire escapes, or smoke detectors. We do have a fire hose out in the hallway, so we’re not totally defenseless I suppose.

Chinese construction workers frequently work without helmets, in their flip flops, fifteen or twenty stories up, without guylines. Our school has no fire alarm or evacuation plans. No one wears bicycle helmets, ever. Seatbelts in taxicabs are usually non-functional. Buildings are constructed without seismic reinforcement, or fire escapes, or often even stairways. This is not because Chinese people have a reckless regard for their own safety. I think it’s symptomatic of a larger social attitude in a place where the one resource in abundance is human beings. If a construction worker plunges to his doom, or severs his foot, or suffers a traumatic head injury...well, there are literally half a billion other men waiting to take his place. (This also explains, indirectly, why Chinese labor is so inefficient. Efficiency is only necessary when labor is expensive.)

Every so often I read a piece on the Internet about movements in wealthy countries against genetically-modified lettuce, or computer monitor radiation, or mercury in vaccines, or fluoridated water. If these are the gravest dangers you face, consider yourself lucky. The Chinese people are collectively grateful for sewage treatment and anaesthesia. The wealthy ones can afford cars with seat belts. All of them breathe air that would be illegal in North America or Europe, and drink water that we’d consider unpotable. Their daily lives would be considered unacceptably risky in our world; the lowest U.S. sweatshop is safer and better-run than most Chinese businesses.

And, globally speaking, the Chinese are the lucky ones. My salary at the school, which I was told is a “high local salary” is US$4500/year. According to the Global Rich List, I’m among the top 14.5% richest people in the world. At my last job in the U.S. (a pretty typical office job), I was in the top 0.88%.

There’s no big message here. I don’t want my friends in Oregon to quit eating eggs from cage-free chickens or shopping at American Apparel. Neither do I want them to sell their cars and live in boxes. I can only speak about my own, limited experience: I live at the top of the global totem pole. I come from a society of such unaccustomed luxury that the largest physical dangers I faced were related to how many carcinogens I could avoid. This was not due to any decision I ever made or any skill I ever possessed; I just won a lottery when I was born. I’m grateful for winning that lottery, and I try to keep a sense of perspective about it. My Oregon lifestyle choices (bicycle commuting, sustainably-raised organic produce, sweatshop-free clothing) weren’t saving the world, and they weren’t making me appreciably healthier. Their primary benefits were not material, but psychological. I’m not belittling those benefits, but I do try to keep them in perspective.

Sharon Astyk at the Energy Bulletin summed my attitude rather nicely in her essay, the Theory of Anyway.

OK, so it's been, what, two weeks now? I have excuses.

The day after Christmas Axoplasm.com stopped working. In China. Everyone else on Earth can see it. After a little digging I'm 99% certain the site has been placed on the official list of banned websites. No, I don't know why and no, there isn't anything I can do about it. Government action in China is like the weather: uncaring and unpredictable.

That night we had the earthquake. OK, Taiwan had the earthquake but we felt it here. Jenny and I were having dinner with friends and talking about local wines when our host shouted "Earthquake!" Everyone thought this was a brand of Chinese wine (and it would probably be an accurate brand name) but then we noticed the Swaying. The room and everything in it moved in broad, slow circles. It was gentle and kind of exciting. About two minutes later we got an aftershock: stronger and nastier, with much rattling of plates and windows.

The quake did no lasting damage in Xiamen but plenty of damage to the seabed just south of Taiwan where, coincidentally, someone keeps all the major communications cables connecting Asia to everywhere else. Taiwan, Korea, southern Japan, and China all had major outages. So even if the gummint let me see Axoplasm, I couldn't have updated it anyway. It's taken a couple of weeks but we have some (most?) of our connectivity back, although it's still broken in many baffling ways. Upstream traffic, for example, is still bad: thus can't upload photos to Flickr.

On New Year Eve day I caught an intestinal bug. Life just keeps getting funner! Ironically, the only restaurants we ate at that day were spendy Western places. Other than some minor Montezuma's revenge-type stuff back in August we've been blessedly free of G-I distress. But this thing I had this time...it was bad. I'll try not to be graphic but what was coming out looked a lot like what was going in. That ain't right. On the third day I went to a nearby Western clinic (with an English-speaking doctor) who basically said, yep, you ate something bad.

Luckily my plumbing was groovy by last Wednesday, when Jenny's sister Michelle flew in from Portland for a visit. We spent the end of our vacation in Hong Kong, about which I'll write in the next post.

Cool and clear, mid-50s F, windy. Pollution levels are near zero, especially after the heavy rains last week. Altogether it feels very much like a mid-autumn day in the high lattitudes, except that after the intense heat of summer and early autumn (and given that most buildings are a] concrete and b] have no heating whatsoever) it feels much colder. Somehow this is not helping my allergies, go figure.

I handed the school my resignation this week. This actually triggers a two months “escape hatch” in my contract, so my last day at XIS will be before the break for Lunar New Year (early Feb.) After that I’ll be leading the web work for a locally-based international clothier.

Sorry there aren’t any profundities or funny stories here. It’s just very very nice to have some freaking sunshine for a change. I put some pics of the nice weather and a recent shopping trip on flickr, so take a look there for Life in China thrills.

Ooh wait here’s something fun to think about: the cold, dry weather has given me a wicked case of chapped lips. I seldom get chapped lips and never ever use lip balm. I used to use it all the time when I was working outdoors (doing archaeology) and somehow my lips never healed. So I quit cold turkey and miraculously, after about three painful days, my lips were better forever. I will thus testify:

Lip balm is counterproductive and addictive. It makes the chapping worse but temporarily relieves the pain, prompting you to use yet more lip balm. Which makes the chapping worse. And so forth and so on.

I am not alone in this opinion.

For the past 10 years or so, if I get chapped lips, my only remedy is to not lick my lips. Somehow, in about two or three days, my lips heal themselves.