China in Transit

Hangzhou

Spring break and I'm in Hangzhou, China (jet lag's going to be hell when I get back). Well, I was when I wrote this. God knows where I'll be when I get wifi again, if I'm even able to post this on that. Guess I should get used to using Baidu instead of Google.

Hangzhou is bound by a large, gleaming lake (west lake, in Chinese) and a set of low mountains. Every inch of it is stuffed, trees packed around the towering buildings, little markets tucked in the alleys, cars crowding the roads and throwing up a ruckus of honking. The view from the mountains would be lovely if it weren't for the gray cloud that has settled in the city, giving off a dull reddish glow where the sun's light refracts off the particles. We came during one of the better times, too; it was possible to see the sun, and the sky at the very top was faintly blue. High rise buildings clutter most of the space, now, but there are faint remains of Hangzhou's past, and it is possible to imagine the village that would have once existed. 

At night, outside the hotel, standing on the corner of the street, Hangzhou has a decidedly modern air. I am hardly the best judge, as Washington DC is generally not afforded that appellation, but even New York didn't have quite that feeling of newness. Hangzhou, lit up by vehicles stuck in traffic, is a city with its knees bent, poised to spring forward, despite the ragged street stands and the laundry hanging to dry on balconies many meters from the ground. It's the traffic lights, I think, LED boards that flashed words as well as the standard red, yellow, and green, and the sleek high speed trains that sped over rails, and the trees in raucous bloom under store signs in bubbly fonts, and the occasional steel and glass building, and the elementary school with a playground on its green-tiled roof.

It helps that the dark masks the wear of some of the buildings, and makes the ubiquitous air conditioning units--few buildings in China have central heating--less obvious. Nothing can alter the fact that there is too little parking for too many cars. But then, maybe the excitement of darting across roads and trying to drive on a street that effectively only has one lane adds to the feel. The bicycle lanes, at least, were inviolate, blocked off by a low fence. I say bicycle, but that gives a misleading image, as motorcycle riders are common among all demographics in China and make up a significant fraction of the lane's traffic.

We don't stay there long, just enough to rest and see some of my mom's old friends. Much of the city looks like any overcrowded American city, which is what registers first, but a closer look reveals plenty of differences. It will always be a bit of a shock to see an ashtray in front of a "No smoking" sign. The hotel room we stay at has twin sized beds (or something like that) and provides, in addition to the usual toiletries, toothbrushes, toothpaste, hair combs, bathrobes, and slippers. Even better, the shampoo and soap aren't that individually packaged stuff (usually rubbish) I normally see, but actual shampoo and soap that were probably bought from nearby stores. There is also a heat lamp in the shower, which I personally really like. Public toilets are the strangest. I actually support having what amount to porcelain-covered holes that you squat over, since never having to touch a seat or a flush with your skin is more hygienic, but they really could provide toilet paper. Really.

They also never give disposable chopsticks, unless everything else is disposable, which led me to realize I have always been given disposable chopsticks in America (which is, when you think about it, an odd idiosyncrasy.)

It's the most arbitrary things that remind me that I'm a second generation American. Slippers in Chinese hotels, and sweets that aren't too sugary, and the unanimous understanding here that "I'm on my period" means no ice cream. I toy with the idea of living in China for the coconut milk, but it isn't worth the overpopulation.

We end up spending most of our time there stuck in traffic, driven by Didi (the Chinese Uber) drivers who are paid astonishingly little, especially since they are prepaid based on the distance. It seems every hour is rush hour; what should be a fifteen minute drive turns into a one hour one. It's a relief when we get on the train and speed off without interruption at 350 kilometers per hour.

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Huangyan

My parents have no past waiting for them when they visit China. Huangyan, my father's hometown, is the China-under-construction, all new houses and railroads being laid. His childhood has been torn down, the pieces placed in museums for strangers to point and stare at. When we go to Yuhang Museum, he reminisces excitedly with my cousins, and pulls me to each exhibit. Look, he says, eyes sparkling, those are the games we used to play. My sister died operating a water pump just like that. I always used to follow behind my father using that plow and pick up small fish to feed the ducks. It required technical skill to operate that plow, so he always drove it.

I look at my father under the dim lighting of the museum, as he laments the limited preservation of his childhood toys, and try to imagine him in the place of the fake people. I can't. (How could I? He exists in my present.)

Huangyan is an amalgam of old practices and modern conveniences. The high school I visit has neither air conditioning nor heating in an area where temperatures range from 0 to 40 degrees Celsius, but a shiny new promethean-like board stands in the corner. Fingerprint recognition technology releases students and clocks out teachers, but the toilets are essentially a long pit that water rushes down to flush periodically. There is heating at my cousin's house, where I'm staying, but they rarely turn it on--in fact, they're uncomfortable when it's on--and I eventually get used to wearing my coat inside. They wash their clothes--which are as good as mine--by hand, in stone sinks facing their garden (leftovers of a farming past). It's a small village, where we get barbecue lamb kebabs off the roadside and doors are left open during dinner.

My cousin is a teacher at one of the schools, which is how I got admission to that high school for a day. The students there have stereotypical stereotypes about Americans. They bombard me with questions: Do you have a gun? Do you often see guns? Is everyone tall there? Do you have a boyfriend? Isn't school a lot less stressful there?

Everyone, especially the teachers, have a blanket assumption that America has "freer", less difficult schools, a stereotype we also hold. But, though we don't have such stringent uniform requirements and we don't stand to answer questions, I wouldn't really say they were that different. The students talked when the teacher wasn't, laughed when the teacher fumbled with the hi-tech board and went up to help. When I was brought in, they gasped loudly, and made comments during my short introduction before one of the students, Cai Pingping, claimed me. The vast majority of the students copy their homework. It had but the trappings of being more orderly; there was, I think, less class discussion, and less walking about, and the students did classroom chores. (And it might be fair to say elementary schools, which are about as orderly as the high schools, are more stringent than ours.)

Their schools are structured somewhat differently from ours. They have about twelve required classes and several elective periods (most of which amount to watching TV), some of which they only have once a week. Class sizes are much worse than ours--forty to fifty people are squeezed into each classroom. The students stay in the classroom, where their piles of workbooks rest, while the teachers rotate, so that they are left alone whenever there isn't instruction. They start the day with morning exercises and then have forty five minute periods followed by fifteen minute breaks. Lunch is three vegetable dishes and one meat dish shared between two friends, plus soup and rice provided at a central station. After lunch, they have an hour and fifteen minutes of nap time.

Yup, nap time. When I ask, surprised, about this, my seat mate asks, "How do you concentrate in class after lunch?"

(cough we don't cough)

Most high schools are boarding schools. The paradigm for building schools seems to be to surround a courtyard with the classrooms (I didn't learn where the students slept). This means every classroom has windows on both sides. Speaking of things classrooms should have, each has a water cooler (which is also a water heater) in the front.

I was gratified to discover that their foreign language abilities were worse than mine, though to be fair, the best students and even second best students went to different high schools, so I wasn't seeing the cream of the crop. Still, it's nice to for once not be blown away by other people's English abilities.

Despite being fluent in Mandarin, I often had my own language problems. Everybody in Huangyan speaks the regional dialect most of the time, even the children, though they are educated in Putonghua. It's one of the last things remaining, and even that is a dying language, strange though it is to speak of a language so many people use as "dying". But it is, and they know it, because Huangyan dialect shows have cropped up in recent years.

Thousands of years of history are slipping out of their grasp, and it left so quickly that now that people are beginning to miss it, there is little remaining for them to hold onto. Only a single street has not been torn down, and is now being fixed up for display. Out of the windows, lines hang with drying clothes, where a couple residents still linger.