As with all things in China, the linguistic landscape is changing at a frantic pace. Mandarin has increasingly come to dominate the public space, as it is the mandated language of business, media, government, and education. This has led to the decline of the regional tongues, some of which have rich histories and distinct cultures that are fading along with their dialects.

One regional language that has received a lot of publicity is Tibetan. There is a lot of concern that it is being slowly erased because Mandarin is taught in the classroom, but in fact from the time I’ve spent this summer in Tibetan regions the language seems alive and quite healthy. Signage in Tibetan regions is universally bilingual, and there were plenty of people including storekeepers or hotel staff who had little if any Mandarin language skills, for better or worse. Interestingly enough, the Mandarin of the monks that I encountered was usually much better than that of the laypeople.

What seems significantly more endangered are regional forms of Chinese, such as the Wu language that is native to my city of birth, Suzhou. The first time I visited Suzhou it was almost impossible to hear anyone on the streets speaking Mandarin, but 15 years later it is more likely that someone will address you in Mandarin then Suzhou-ese. Especially in stores and restaurants, it seems that a large portion of the staff is from other parts of China, so the lingua franca becomes Mandarin. This is a pity, since the Suzhou dialect is often considered the standard form of the Wu language, and has a rich tradition of spoken poetry and opera associated with it.

It seems that Suzhou has become the victim of its own success. Since it is one of the wealthiest parts of the country, it has attracted migrants from all over the country, and since those migrants don’t speak the local language they default to Mandarin. Since the locals also speak Mandarin, which is how school is taught, it then becomes a habit for everyone to address each other in Mandarin, at least until they figure out where their interlocutor is from.

In contrast, since Tibetan regions are still unfortunately relatively impoverished, there is relatively little migration towards those regions (despite what the pro-Tibetan independence press would like you to believe). And even for those few migrants or tourists to communicate with Tibetans, Mandarin is frequently not an option because a large fraction of Tibetan children do not receive sufficient schooling because of poverty or because they lead nomadic lifestyles. Paradoxically, this poverty may be one of their best defences against the cultural pressure of assimilation.

If I were ask to make a prediction, I would say that Tibetan has at least 100 years before it may become endangered, while languages such as Wu may be extinct within 30 years.

I’m not sure what the origin of this rule is, and from what the hotel staff have told me it has always been in place, so I guess that the fact that this is the first time I’ve run into it is just a coincidence.  Maybe we just always happened to stay at “international” hotels when I traveled with my family before (though I don’t think this is true), or maybe because when I traveled with my family the hotel staff figured that it would be OK since we look Chinese enough.

In any case, this time it has been excruciatingly tedious to find hotels because 80% of the places that we check out are not authorized to take foreigners.  This rule has been bent once or twice by kind (or shrewd) hotel staff, but especially in the big cities like Xi’an and here in Luoyang where we are right now, no one seems to be willing to bend the rules for us.

The upshot is that we waste a lot of time looking for hotels (about 3 hours and 5 bus trips today in Luoyang), and we are often not able to stay in the hotels that perfectly match our price point and desired criteria (location, cleanliness, etc.).  For example, there is a very cute old town in Luoyang with a pedestrian street that is located inconveniently far from the train station.  We wanted to stay there, but all the hotels in the region were either too expensive or did not accept foreigners.

I am really curious why the government insists on this archaic system when China is today so thoroughly open to foreign travelers.  I get (though don’t terribly like) the government’s need to keep a tab on foreign visitors, but couldn’t it do so and at the same time make travelers’ lives easier by just allowing all the hotels to accept foreigners, with the provision that they take the same information that the currently authorized hotels take now anyways?

Since this is the last stop on my trip before heading to the safety of Suzhou, I guess I won’t have to deal with it again.  But for all the people out there thinking about backpacking through China or just traveling without thorough planning, be prepared!

I’ve never gone as far in America by train, simply for the fact that it’s impractical and exorbitant. Even by car the farthest I’ve gone is maybe 9 hours, which gets you basically from Boston to DC. For comparison this is roughly the distance from Lanzhou to Jiayuguan.

One feels this vastness even more when visiting the Great Wall in Jiayuguan. It’s incredible to think that this wall stretches all the way to Beijing and beyond, that man could build something so vast. And then one realizes that many sections were built over 2000 years ago and the vastness of the history also comes into the picture.

Train travel isn’t necessarily convenient here though. The ticket system is a little archaic and does not work as well (for the technologically savvy) as say the SNCF does in France. The tickets can only be bought through official sales points, and not all the sales points have access to all the tickets. There is no discriminatory pricing for tickets so they tend to sell out very quickly, especially during rush periods like right now (the summer vacation season). Tickets only become available 10 days before the trip (sometimes 20 for high speed or express trains) and can sell out right at the moment when they become available. I hear this has a lot to do with scalpers (黄牛) buying them out right away. Anyway the ticketing system might make sense since lots of people might not be able to buy things online, but still there must be a way of implementing tiered pricing so you don’t get the kind of drastic shortages like there are now.

The trains themselves and the train stations are by and large comfortable and sometimes ultramodern. I took the Beijing-Tianjin express, which leaves from the new Beijing South Station and zooms along at an average speed of 300+ kmph to reach Tianjin in half an hour. This broke the world record for highest average speed for a regular passenger train service when it opened in 2008, and I think remains as of 2010 the fastest (along with the new Wuhan-Guangzhou line). I’m really looking forward to when the high speed lines are all finished, at which point one will be able to go from Beijing to Shanghai in 5 hours by rail.

This summer, my train from Beijing to Lanzhou was slower, taking about 17 hours, but this was fine because I had a bed. From Lanzhou to Jiayuguan we had a hard seat overnighter, which turned out to really suck becaus already it’s hard to sleep upright, but then we were also next to this big pack of loud obnoxious people who stayed up pretty much all night making noise and smoking. The last segmen from Jiayuguan to Dunhuang might have even been worse because we got a train without numbered seats, so we had to stand for the first hour, but luckily enough people got off so that we could sit for most of the ride. Altogether I guess I’ve probably already spent about 30 hours on the train so far, probably with many more hours to go.

In Dunhuang we’ve frequently relied on people from random book sellers to the bus ticket collector to our hotel receptionist to give us advice on where to go and how to get there. They don’t always know everything, but when they say they don’t know you can be pretty assured that they really have no idea, rather than just being too lazy or apathetic to find out, as is often the case in Beijing or Paris.

We spent a fun afternoon in Huyanglin (胡杨林), a garden of huyang trees, talking to the people who worked there and even learning a card game from them. Granted this had a lot to do with the fact we were pretty much the only visitors there for the afternoon, but still it was very nice that they were so open and friendly.

The most generous gesture that we experienced here was when we made the miscalculation of trying to walk back to the hotel from the Overhanging wall (悬壁长城) in Jiayuguan, and after about 1 hour on the deserted road it turned dark and we were in risk of getting lost. We saw a cab go by and we tried to wave it down, but it turned off a small road before reaching us. Strangely, the cab stopped but no one got out. A minute later the cab started moving again, this time coming towards us. When it reached us we could see that there were maybe 7 people inside (it was a sedan!) and the 4 people in the back got out and offered it to us. I think they were all a family heading home, and the grandfather and a baby stayed in the front seat to be dropped off after we got dropped off. The driver offered to drop us off, then the grandpa and baby, and would then go and pick up the rest of the people, who would just stand and wait for however long. We almost didn’t take the cab because we felt bad about them waiting there in the middle of nowhere, but they insisted. In the end it saved us maybe another hour of walking, and since it turned out that I had suffered a heat stroke that day it was a good thing we took them up on their offer!

My biases come from the fact that it is commonly known (or maybe believed is more accurate) that Gansu is one of the poorest provinces in China. But maybe all of the government stimulus money has been used here to clean things up and make them more friendly for visitors?

There was a big push in the last decade to speed up the development of the Western regionsand maybe the modern looking cities are the product of that. On a related note, things are not much cheaper here than in Beijing either.

One thing along the way is this formation (click through to see the satellite photos) on Google maps, which looks like a huge valley, but it does not turn up on any searches about the surrounding cities.  Definitely gonna check that out…

Any suggestions for things to do after this part of the trip?  We’re thinking about going to Henan and seeing Luoyang, Kaifeng, and the Shaolin temples.  Anyone know if there other things in that area or in Shanxi/Shaanxi that are worth visiting?

The synopsis of the story is that a late-middle-aged Japanese man goes to China, where he’s been set up with a Chinese woman in her early 30′s.  They meet and after a few days, the man asks the woman’s family to take her back to Japan.  In exchange, he gives family 5 million yen to buy a new house, and promises to take good care of her, that he’d quit drinking and they’d live a comfortable life together.  Turns out when they get to Japan that he lives in government housing (though I don’t think it has quite as bad a connotation as the projects here) but in any case he’s not rich and he doesn’t quit drinking.  So they live together and for the first few years things are a bit strained because of the language barrier and their financial situation, but bit by bit they start to understand each other.  They have a baby and he does live up to his word about taking care of her and the baby.  He even goes out of his way to help Chinese workers/visitors in Japan who are lost, appreciating how hard it is for them to be in a foreign country.  Here’s the last paragraph:

“希望两岁了，少珍将儿子送入托儿所，自己开始在盒饭店打工。“看看，我爹娘住上了新房子，我们倒住得像贫民窟。我们总也要买自己的房子呀。”少珍笑眯眯的 开始一边照顾儿子一边打工的生活，骑着自行车去盒饭店的时候，少珍感到日本春天的风很柔和，像从前在上海骑车去上班一样。不过现在她心中更安定而温暖，知 道这里有她的归宿，知道她与丈夫间满是关怀的感情。虽然那可以与爱情无关，但足够他们养育希望，过一生了。”

“After Xiwang (the son) turns two, he starts going to kindergarten and Shaozhen (the wife) starts working at a restaurant.  She thinks, “My parents are now living in a new house, but we’re still living like paupers in a cave.  We need to buy a new house too.”  Shaozhen goes about her days happily, sending Xiwang to school, going to work at the restaurant.  She enjoys the soft breeze of the Japanese spring as she rides her bike to work, just like how she once rode her bike to work in Shanghai, except now she’s more content and at peace, knowing that her home is here and that she and her husband will take good care of each other.  Even though it isn’t really love, it’s enough for them to raise Xiwang and live together for the rest of their days.”

It’s a beautiful piece but what was really shocking for me is how different it is from the Western point of view.  I think my first reaction was “poor people”, living a loveless life, just fulfilling society’s expectations and their duties to their parents.  But then again, maybe what we’re taught to value, namely love (of the Romeo and Juliet variety), happiness (often by way of material things), and fulfillment (of the tree-hugging, earth-saving kind, or even the democracy-spreading, Iraq-invading kind) are just as empty and hollow as how we view the values espoused in this story?

I think as outsiders we view the values in this story as coming from (a) tradition, (b) poverty (at least on the wife’s part), (c) lack of better opportunity (on the husband’s part).  But let’s turn the lens on ourselves, where do our values come from?  My guess would be (a) the media, (b) the belief that somehow everyone else is happier than we are, (c) affluence.  The media reinforces this notion of “happily ever after” that seems just within our grasp, even though it has nothing to do with reality; we’re conditioned from childhood to think that it’s possible and indeed that the very definition of happines is to find your own happily ever after.  This reinforces the second point, which is that we see others who have (or look like they have) what we want and we think that “well if they can have it, why can’t I?”  But we do this without taking into account that nothing is as it seems on its surface, and that those we envy or admire really don’t live fairy tale lives either.  And of course being a rich society, we have enough time and leisure to worry about all these (frivolous?) things; maybe we’d all actually be happier if we were a little more appreciative of the simple things in life, like being able to put dinner on the table.

Thoughts?

• Friends!
• Fairway!
• People know how to dress.
• Clear skies.
• Boys work out here.
• All-night subway.

The minuses:

• $7 beer?  What?!?!
• It’s dirty.  And that’s in comparison to Beijing!
• Food.  At least food that doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg.
• Less bike-friendly.
• People are snobs.
• Less exciting architecture.

Much of the park is dedicated to sponsors’ exhibits.  Now I know people complain and complain about how commercial the Olympics are becoming, but some of the exhibits were actually pretty cool.  I especially liked the GE pavilion, where they had a water fall that had tiny individual jets that could draw designs in the falling water.

The star of the show however was of course the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube.  Walking inside the Bird’s Nest is equally impressive as seeing it from outside; all the stairs are open and the glowing red is just as beautiful inside as it is eery outside.  I didn’t get a chance to go in the Water Cube but got some nice shots of it from outside.

As for the athletics themselves, the show was long but ended with a bang.  The last event of the evening was the men’s 10000m race, and after 8 boring laps around the stadium the competition picked up.  In the last 3 or 4 laps the runners kept on passing each other; first an Eritrean duo was leading, then a Kenyan, but finally in the end the Ethiopian runner Bekele came up from behind and snatched the gold.

On the way to a late-night snack, we saw a bunch of Ethiopian supporters in the subway, and started chanting “Go Ethiopia!” which quickly turned into “Ethiopia jia you (加油)!”  When the Chinese people in the subway started looking at us funny (Who were these crazy laowai screaming things in the subway at 12 in the morning?  I was kind of mortified…) we just started chanting “中国加油!” (Go China!) and they started chanting with us.  See, the Olympic spirit is alive and well; it just needs a little translation sometimes

My first stop was the Chinese Art Museum (中国美术馆), which hosts a collection that spans much of China’s history.  On display on the ground floor were works from the “Beijing Biennial”, someof which I found pretty cool.  One work I liked in particular was the “Finger-guessing Game (石头，前子，布)”.  I could understand two of the dates, but the rest were a mystery.

Here are some other works that I found interesting there:

Next was the Capital Museum (首都博物馆), which is a beautiful building west of Tiananmen Square.  They were holding a temporary exhibition called China’s Memories (中国记忆).  The museum mostly houses works that were found or composed in Beijing, though some are brought in from outside.  The temporary exhibition had many works from all over the country.

Last was the Today Art Museum (今日美术馆), which obviously is a contemporary museum.  The main building was closed when I got there, but the second building was housing an exhibition on Sports and the Olympics.

The palace took about 150 years to build, and were in fact continually expanded right up until their destruction.  Even though I’d read about it in books before, I had no idea how truly massive the palace was.  It takes about an hour to walk from one end to the other!

What happened to the palace itself?  During the Second Opium War, the British and French marched into Beijing and burned down the entire complex as “punishment” for the torture of some of their soldiers.  All this seems very abstract if you’re not familiar with the history, but basically the only similar situation I can think of in Western history is when Hitler ordered Paris to be demolished when it became clear that he was going to lose the war.  Of course, Paris survived due to one general with a conscience who decided not to flip the switch; but the Old Summer Palace had no such savior, and it burned for 3 days after the British and French set it ablaze.

There’s a famous letter by Victor Hugo (also in French)who chastised the French general responsible for the destruction.  The most famous line in the letter compared the act to “‘Two robbers breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures; one of the robbers is called France and the other Britain.”

There’s a museum inside the ruins detailing the history of the palace and its destruction; not surprisingly, it’s only in Chinese with no translation in English.

For foreigners who want to better understand the national psyche of the Chinese people, I would recommend a visit to the Old Summer Palace.  Walk around, enjoy the beautiful views which have been restored, and imagine what it must have been like when the bushes and weeds were covered by splendid pavilions, halls, bridges, and walkways.  Then imagine the entire place burning for three days and three nights while British and French soldiers loot whatever is convenient to carry and throw the rest into the fire.

This image, I think, is at the crux of Chinese nationalism.  It is not just about being abused and humiliated by foreign powers.  There are better examples of that, such as the Rape of Nanjing or the bombing of Shanghai.  Rather, what really twists the dagger is that China was a land of splendor, wealth, art, and learning, yet it succumbed to such vicious attacks by countries whose main prerogative was to hook the Chinese on opium.  Clearly the Chinese government was at fault as well; complacency and arrogance played their role in their downfall.  But how can you expect the Chinese to look at this history and not feel a bit of anger and vengeance?  I mean, imagine if Colombia attacked America so that it could force a treaty on it legalizing cocaine.  Being completely ridiculous notwithstanding, that’s basically what Britain, France, and the other Western powers did to China in the 19th century.  And to add insult to injury, many of the looted relics are sitting today in the British Museum and the Louvre, and Britain and France have never even apologized for their actions.

I want to use this image to explore two things: one is the Olympic games, which are a huge huge HUGE deal here. This is because the Chinese people feel like they have finally moved beyond the history of humiliation and can now stand proudly before the world again.  This is not a trivial thing; Americans are not used to even second-guessing their own importance, but the Chinese are keenly aware that they are still second-class citizens in the world, and the Olympics represent one step towards becoming a first-class citizen.

Second, this image also helps explain why China (and Chinese people) are so easily offended by criticism from the West.  How can the West criticize China for things that it barely understands (the situation in Tibet and Taiwan, for example), when it hasn’t even apologized for the heinous acts that it perpetrated on China?

I’m not saying I agree with all these points, but I see their basis.  It would be nice if the West stopped lecturing and started learning a bit more about the history before dishing out censure.

As a little background, Japan and China in the 20th century were mortal enemies.  Between its victory in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 and the end of World War II, Japan perpetrated endless incursions, invasions, and atrocities on China in its quest for Asian domination.  The most famous of these is the Rape of Nanjing (南京大屠杀), but there were also biological and chemical warfare and experimentation in Manchuria and the indiscriminate aerial bombing of Shanghai and other cities, among other things.  And that’s only in China; ask any Korean and they’ll tell you equally horrific tales of Japanese occupation.

After its defeat in WWII, Japan has been (forcibly) pacified by its American-written constitution, and since has established peaceful, though often uneasy, relations with its Asian neighbors.  But unlike Germany and France, which are now the best of friends and partners, Japan has never fully re-integrated into Asia.  Part of this is because Japan is far richer than the rest of Asia, but part of it also is that it has never fully apologized for its actions before 1945.

The two most cited examples of this lack of remorse are the white-washing of history in textbooks and the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by former prime ministers.  The first is probably more serious: some (though not all) Japanese textbooks gloss over its war crimes during its imperial age, and frame World War II as a necessary struggle for natural resources that was caused by the West’s monopoly on things like rubber and oil.  It’s a load of bullshit and frankly I’m not surprised that America isn’t more outraged by these lies.

The second thing is that former prime ministers used to pay their respects to Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine that honors Japan’s war dead, but includes in its list of honored dead the war criminals Hideki Tojo and others who were the masterminds behind Japan’s atrocities.  Imagine the furor that would be caused if Germany’s chancellor paid his respects at a monument that honored Adolph Hitler!  Fortunately the current prime minister has had more sense and has stopped this tradition; despite the fact that this only has symbolic value, this act has already caused a tangible thawing in relations between Japan and its neighbors (especially China and Korea).

So what have I seen so far here?  Yesterday in Shibuya where I ran into a demonstration that blocked off traffic for several blocks..  Although I didn’t understand most of what they said, I caught something about “boycott Olympics”.  I’ve posted some pictures showing the signs the marchers were carrying, and I’ve translated as much as I can… mostly they say things like “Sino-Japanese friendship is a fantasy” and “break relations between China and Japan”, as well as stronger statements like “Overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.  But the whole tone of the protest made it pretty clear that it was the “Chinese” part of CCP that they had a problem with, not the “Communist” part.

The sentiment in China is probably even harsher; if the government didn’t hold back protests then things would be much worse.  The West often criticizes the Chinese government for stamping out demonstrations, but I don’t think they realize how strong anti-Japanese feelings are in China… if the government didn’t intervene things could easily spiral out of control.  I’m not sure how strong the corresponding hatred is here, but at least on the surface it seems to be much more subdued; the protest today was probably only 100-people strong, and most of the people I’ve met so far have been very nice (although I have to admit I usually tell them I’m American and not Chinese-American).  But then again, it only takes a small vocal minority to take the country’s foreign policy in a dangerous, confrontational direction.  In fact this is the second such protest I saw; there was another on in Kyoto that I ran into, although that one was just a truck driving by broadcasting slogans.