Apartment Views

I recently realized that I have put up very few photos that give a sense for everyday life in Dalian. To be fair, that is partially due to the fact that I haven’t been taking many that would qualify. There is something about moving abroad for an extended period of time that has not inspired me to take ‘documentary’ photos. I know that it has a fair amount to do with a lack of urgency to take those photos. On foreign vacations, everything is new and exciting. You take a lot of photos in case you don’t get another chance to do so. For me, I don’t take photos of the kids I teach because I am all too aware that they will be back a week later. I don’t take photos of where I live because, well, I live there. It loses it’s novelty pretty quick. It is easy to forget that people at home might want to see what has become mundane or routine for me.

To begin fixing this problem, I took some photos of the various views from my apartment. I hope that these will also help to fight the derth of Dalian images. Googling images of this city will bring up plenty of pictures, however, they either focus on the same places (the government buildings in People’s Square are not nearly interesting enough to support their internet bandwidth) or they give stunningly little perspective. To be fair, most of this city just doesn’t inspire great images. Dalian is very good at appearing like it could be any city, so there really isn’t any reason to document most of it any more than there is to document [insert mid-sized city in a developed country here].

With that, this is what I look at every day!

This is a southeast view from my bedroom window.

It takes about ten minutes walk from my apartment to the prominent building in the photo above. It would take twenty-five to thirty minutes to walk to the distant blue building.

A view to the southwest from my bedroom.

The three buildings in the background with sunshine still hitting them are about five blocks from Shane English School. It would take me about twenty-five minutes to walk to them and five minutes to get there in a taxi.

A view to the east from our living room.

Trader Zhou’s

It is pretty well known that since China has opened up to the west, Chinese have become ardent consumers. However, their approach to consumption is certainly different from the approach of their western counterparts. To understand the Chinese brand of consumerism, imagine how a starved dog would behave when set loose in a butcher’s shop. Whether presented with a premium filet or the sordid leftovers, you can be sure that it would indulge with equal fervor. Similarly, the Chinese are so excited by the prospect of anything remotely western that they don’t really care whether it is real, or even good. They actually don’t even seem to care if it is western or not, as long as it looks western. The thing is, they only seem to care about looking like they have enough money to buy expensive things. Whether something is expensive or not is beside the point as long as it looks like it might have been.

Also beside the point is why something might be expensive in the first place. Ignoring the fact that most luxury goods are also selling the name, they usually have better design and quality to support the name. However, the Chinese are certainly not concerned about that. Nope, they’re just worried about the status symbol. The only thing is, everyone knows that everything is cheap and fake, so there is no way that anyone actually thinks anyone else’s ‘Armani’ T-shirt is authentic. Fortunately for the knock offs, they’re still more expensive than they would be without the labels, and thus, owning an expensive cheap knock off is the sheik thing to do in China. In the US, there is a popular resentment towards the name brand mark up. Here, that name brand mark up is exactly why people spend their money on those brands. Even more extreme, they seem to want to pay the mark up because they want to prove that they can. The same could be said of US consumers, however the difference is in the pervasiveness of the mentality.

The result is a huge population of people wearing Louis Vuitton knock offs, treating Pizza Hut like an upscale fine dining establishment, and talking on cheap cell phones that are designed to look expensive in that way only cheap plastic shit from Wal-Mart can. All this in an effort to emulate what the Chinese perceive as western or ‘American’, when if they did the same thing in America, people would just laugh at them. I still can’t help but smile at the irony.

And now we get to the most wonderful bit of Chinglish I’ve seen to date and the inspiration for this post, Trader Zhou’s:

Trader Zhou's, selling premium wines since...sometime after Trader Joe's was started.

As you may have guessed, ‘Zh’ in Pinyin (the phonetic spelling of Chinese) is pronounced like a ‘J’ in English, and upon seeing, this I nearly wet myself. It’s just a little too absurd. They even came close to the right font, and there is no way that Trader Joe’s is recognizable enough in Dalian that this store benefits significantly from the name, much less the font. There is a Trader Joe’s in Beijing, but given that Beijing is massive, and very few Dalian tourists would have found it, I’m betting that no one in Dalian has heard of it. So, the fact that this store exists is a testament to how absurdly committed to emulating western culture the Chinese can be. Even when there is no benefit from it, people go for the western rip off. That, or the owner has an awesome sense of humor and a very select audience. I hope for the latter considering that this is a wine store conspicuously lacking in Two Buck Chuck.

Ulanhot

After drinking alone at home, travel is one of the cheaper things you can do in China. So when I found out on Sunday that I had three days off, my coworker’s imperative advice, “Go somewhere”, inspired me. Now, while three days off does lend itself to a lot of travel options, it is still short enough that every moment counts. Recognizing this, I began a half hour scramble after work to figure out where to go, how to get there, and what I might do when I arrived. My eyes were set on Inner Mongolia. Why? Why not. If for nothing else, the name conjures fantastic visions of squat, heavily bearded Mongolians riding horses, living in yurts, and inspiring legendary defense structures. Besides, I also wanted to get out of the city for a few days and camp in some grasslands.

I settled on Ulanhot. Located just inside the boarder of Inner Mongolia, this small city actually lives up to its reputation of small with 280,000 people. You might as well call it ‘As Small As It Gets, China’. Of course, the train was leaving in an hour, which gave me just enough time to pack and catch it if I ran.

Needless to say, I caught the train, however, for the next 16 hours, I was not as optimistic about this as one might expect. Because I don’t speak Chinese very well, and I rarely even recognize when someone says something I do know, I use a lot of deductive logic to infer meaning. For the most part, this strategy works out well, but every system has its flaws. For example, upon indicating that I wanted a bed on the train, the ticket clerk told me they were sold out. Unfortunate, but I wasn’t going to let a little discomfort keep me from my first real trip in China. Of course I assumed that buying a train ticket in China meant that, at the very least, I would have a seat on the train. A nice, cramped airline coach style seat I could call my own for the next 16 hours.

Now, for those of you who might ever get on a train in China, read closely: Buying a train ticket in China does not carry the inherent meaning of a place to sit.

Upon boarding the train, I was a little disappointed to see that I would not be sitting on a luxuriously cramped airline coach style seat, but the equivalent of a high back diner booth, sans padding. I then went from disappointed to worried when I saw that all of those soon to be coveted high back booths were taken. I finally realized that my ticket did not entitle me to seating when I asked a man where I should go and he pointed to two Chinese characters on my ticket and simply said, “no seat”.

I decided to get off the train, and at the same time, the conductor decided to pull out of the station. I should mention that there were only enough seats for about half the people in the train car. This meant two things. First, there was no way I was going to work my way past the sea of Chinese people in time to get off the train, and second, I was not getting a seat any time soon. Any time soon turned out to be eight hours. It would have been much longer if it were not for a kind student who diligently scoured the seated masses for someone disembarking at an upcoming stop. I spent the following eight hours grateful that the large man with whom I shared a seat, left enough room for one cheek.

It seems appropriate to mention at this point that pissing into a squatter toilet on a moving train is remarkably similar to playing the carnival game where the handheld wand cannot connect to the moving spiral obstacle. It’s doable, but instead of a beep, when you screw up you have piss all over your shoes and legs. That’s not to say that there isn’t already piss all over you shoes, a byproduct of a system one step removed from pissing directly on the floor, but at least your legs have hope. When you go in, you just have to accept that everything will be wet and pretend that it’s from one of the crude periodic cleanings administered by the train staff. These bathrooms really bring the term ‘water closet’ to a whole new level of blunt literal meaning.

Upon arriving in Ulanhot, I set my sights on ensuring my return trip would have a bed. And after fending off the most well dressed, yet persistent beggar I’ve ever seen, I walked victoriously out of the station with a ‘hard sleeper’ ticket to see what Ulanhot had to offer me. Turns out, not a lot. Stepping out of the train station in Ulanhot gives a surprisingly accurate snapshot of the city as a whole, and the city as a whole does not have a lot to offer. The wide streets are lined with the type of monotonously utilitarian buildings unique to industrial cities, and given that the most exciting thing for the locals was me, I didn’t have a lot of hope for the underlying cultural scene. That may sound rather self centered and narrow minded, but when entire neighborhoods vacate the buildings to watch a foreigner walk down the road, you can’t help but get the sense that life in Ulanhot is pretty dull. I will grant that there is a temple I did not visit, but something about a monument to Genghis Kahn built in 1940 just doesn’t evoke awe.

I walked around long enough to let the city prove my gut reaction wrong, and as soon as it was clear it couldn’t, I turned toward some distant mountains and walked straight out of town.

Luckily for me, the surrounding countryside is exactly what I expected from Inner Mongolia: grassy mountains, prominent rock outcrops, and goat herders. I set up camp on a hill that overlooked the city to the north and a wide basin to the south, and spent the next two days reading, aimlessly hiking around, taking pictures, and studying Chinese. Natural settings are just as rejuvenating and rewarding on the other side of the world as they are at home.

The most amusing part of the countryside was how the farmers and ranchers barely gave me a second glance. Compared to the city, where I could have set up a freak show and paid for my entire trip, no one I met in the hills seemed to pay me any more attention than they would a local. Any odd glances I did get seemed to have more to do with my camera and tripod than my hair color.

As compared to the beginning of my trip, getting back to Dalian was rather dull. I drew more attention on my way back into town than I did on my way out, if that is possible, thanks to my dirty and disheveled presentation, and the train ride was relative paradise compared to the previous one, thanks to a bed. Though, the other passengers were certainly perturbed by my odor. Finally, the whole trip culminated in a 1 kilometer sprint from the train station to my apartment so that I would have a prayer of getting to my class merely fashionably late. No one will ever say that I didn’t milk those three days for every minute they were worth.

Friendliness

Most of the people here love Americans. And as a young, recent graduate from a progressively oriented liberal arts college, this surprised me. It still does. Most international news does not focus on pro-American sentiment, and it is pretty easy to believe that the world hates us. And on top of resentment from abroad, a reasonable portion of Americans openly oppose most of our country’s actions in the 21st century and express embarrassment for their association with them.

So with all this in mind, I came to China prepared to face strong resentment, but I never stopped to think of any particular reasons why Chinese people might hate us. We have not forcibly meddled with their government, invaded their country, or offended any minority or religious groups. And even if we had somehow offended a Chinese minority group, the Chinese government is too efficient at squashing rebellion for that dissent to take any roots. Just look at the current situation in Urumqi or previous unrest in Tibet. We support Taiwan’s independence, but thanks to the highly efficient state run media, I highly doubt that most Chinese people know about that. You might expect some people to resent the American economic driving forces behind poor working conditions and pay, but for the most part, they don’t seem to make that connection either. Instead, people are to be happy to have jobs and contribute to a growing economy. They seem pleased that things are getting better rather than frustrated that they are not better already. And if they are frustrated, they don’t seem to blame the American consumers on the other end of the rope. Instead, as I said before, people seem to love me precisely because I’m American.

It’s certainly not because of how I look. I’ve been brushed aside and marginalized a few times because people mistook me for a Russian. Blond hair and blue eyes tend to lead to that assumption in Dalian since wealthy Russians come here for the summer and do a good job of garnering ill will. However, once I tell people that I’m American, frowns turn upside down, the sun shines, and my shit smells like roses. On occasion, I can even detect a sense of awe and reverence in people’s voices. It sounds trite and self centered, but its there and it’s actually kind of unsettling. If you are wondering, I am not mistaking Chinese tones for awe and reverence.

Andy, one of my Chinese tutors, explained to me that many Chinese view America as a ‘better’ country. It doesn’t have anything to do with personal freedoms or national philosophy, so much as the opulence of our lifestyle. Most Americans have cars, houses, and various other goods that only very wealthy Chinese people have. Therefore, in their eyes, America must be a better country.

Now all this could be linked to my earlier post about Chinese culture and logic in that they only see the immediate problems and not the driving forces behind them. It could also be that the government does a pretty good job of controlling public opinion, and anti-American sentiment could only hurt the Chinese economy. Whatever the reason, my experiences in Dalian, and briefly WuXi, tell me that Americans are well loved in China. That’s over a billion people who simply don’t care about our massive wealth accumulation, dubious foreign policy decisions, or rampant consumption. Of course, it would be a bit hypocritical of them to judge us on those last two. In any case, it is comforting to me to know that at least 1/6th of the world will welcome me with open arms.

Peng You