• May 30 – June 15: Bay Area
• June 15 – June 18: Marseille
• June 27 – July 1: Aarhus
• July 3 – July 8: Zurich
• July 8 – July 13: Berlin
• July 14 – July 24: Boston & New York
• August 5 – August 20: Bay Area, Santa Barbara, LA (dates tentative)

How do you undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing?

I’m pretty sure that I’m not taking this out of context when I say that this article states this goal as a given.  I didn’t see any part of the article question whether or not it’s really the right way to approach the problem.

It seems to me that trying to undo a Chinese upbringing is stupid and useless.  There are clearly some things that the characters mentioned in the article should work on; if your friends can’t tell whether or not your angry or depressed or just catatonic, then you probably have a problem.  But that problem has nothing to do with a Chinese upbringing.  Anyone who’s been to a Chinese city or a Chinese-American function can attest that Chinese people are far from being quiet and impassive.

Second, what good will erasing a Chinese upbringing do?  Is he suggesting that Asian-Americans should strive to be more “white” (whatever that means)?  First, the reaction people usually have to someone who strives to erase their own racial identity is ridicule, not respect.  It makes me think of an Asian-to-white version of the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly for a White Guy”.

Second, as I mentioned in the previous post, I think there are plenty of Asian or Chinese values that are perfectly legitimate and worth cherishing, including some of the ones that he implied were holding Asian/Chinese-Americans back.  There’s no reason to throw out those values; instead I think we should work harder to show that they are universal values, not just Asian values, and that everyone should appreciate and strive towards them more.

• The author has a lot of issues that go way beyond race.  I mean, who says,

  The first step toward self-reform is to admit your deficiencies. Though my early adulthood has been a protracted education in them, I do not admit mine. I’m fine. It’s the rest of you who have a problem. Fuck all y’all.

  Can you imagine a world where this guy would be happy with the state of things?  I didn’t think so.

• People tend to blame things on the most obvious reason.  Often, the most obvious reason is racial or cultural.  Remember, plenty of non-Asian people are shy, and plenty of non-Asian people are not natural leaders.  On the other hand, plenty of non-Asian people study hard and plenty of non-Asian people are drilled to take tests.  There is clearly a correlation, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call it causality.

  This has become more evident after living abroad. I notice that often-times I see people behave in a way that I’m not used to and I’ll think to myself “why do French people do that”?  Usually on second thought, the fact that they were doing something weird had nothing to do with being French, it was just that that person did something weird.  People do weird things in America all the time too.  Now clearly French people do things in a different way than Americans, but by and large the range of variation is the same: you have shy French people, you have loud obnoxious French people, you have studious bookworm French people, and everything in between.  Again there is some correlation, but no causality.

• When one does this stereotyping to oneself (e.g. “I’m not a good leader because my parents raised me with Asian values”), it’s a red herring to try to overcome that obstacle by distancing oneself from those values.  To be sure, “Asian values” do exist, although somewhat nebulously… I would personally put valuing education, being humble, cherishing family, and a strong work ethic under that umbrella.  Others might choose a different combination, or might include less flattering qualities such as being self-effacing.  But at least for the values that I hold, I see no incompatibility between them and being a strong leader.

  Certainly, if one looks at actual Asian societies, there is no lack of initiative and strong leaders.  Especially in China, one sees examples of bold leadership in the private sector and, I would argue, also in the government.  And not just men, but women as well; there are more self-made female billionaires in China than in any other country in the world (including America).

• Following up on the previous point, last I checked, things like humility, hard work, and perseverance are still considered qualities.  There’s no guarantee that they will take you to the top, but, in the right proportions, I don’t think these qualities hold you back either.  You can be humble, hard-working, and persevering and simultaneously be charismatic and a good networker.  I think most people would agree that there’s nothing more annoying than someone who climbs to the top by virtue of politics and ass-kissing alone.  Playing the political game is unavoidable, but (perhaps this is naive of me) in most cases someone who is actually talented and a hard worker and reasonably charismatic will get ahead of a brown-noser who offers nothing else.  I’m pretty annoyed by articles like this that present the false alternative, either you can be a leader or you can hold onto “Asian values”, but not both.

• I think he’s right about the Bamboo Ceiling, there are definitely external factors that limit the rise of Asians in America.  What I wrote in the first few points is mostly about how Asians stereotype themselves, but it is undoubtedly true that the wider world stereotypes Asians in a similar way.  I think that fortunately he’s also right that a lot of people in our generation are bypassing the Bamboo Ceiling by working outside the box, starting their own businesses and stuff.  Changing the external perceptions of Asians is just as important as changing the self-perception.

• The word Asians is still annoying.  Does he mean to include South Asians?  It’s unclear; he mentions them in the section about the Asian Playboy, but then nowhere else.  Does he mean Asians everywhere, or just in America?  Probably the latter.  And what do I mean when I say Asian?  I’m not sure.  Mostly Chinese actually, I think.  In any case, we need better-adapted vocabulary.

• I’m always annoyed when I read an article about race, and usually it just talks about black and white.  The more modern and up-to-date authors include Hispanics.  Rarely, if ever, anything about anyone else.  It turns out it’s just as annoying in an article about whites and Asians where it seems like no other races exist.

One nuance I’d like to understand better is how the nature of money changes depending on the scale at which one observes it.  At a local scale, the scale at which most of us operate in our day-to-day lives, the amount of money we come into contact with is so small that it behaves “linearly”.  One more dollar buys one more dollar’s worth of goods, and we can pretty confidently understand what our paycheck means in terms of what it buys, at least over a reasonably short time frame.

Once you get to the scales that banks, governments, and multinational corporations work with, the billions and trillions of dollars, the nature of money changes completely.  Money at this scale creates feedback that money at small scales does not, and so one needs to be careful how exactly one talks about it.  In particular, money at this scale is non-linear if we view it in terms of how much stuff it buys. This I think is a mistake that we (at least we non-economists) often implicitly commit because we assume that money behaves the same way at macro scales as it does at micro scales.

Here’s what I mean by “non-linear”: suppose that the price of gasoline today is $3 / gallon.  Then we can linearly scale this relation and we know that $300 would buy 300 gallons today.  Of course, the price of oil could change from day to day (or even second to second), but fundamentally if at some point in time the price of gasoline is $x / gallon, then C * $x would buy C gallons at that time. Similarly, if I wanted to sell gas, I know that if I sold C gallons, I could get C * $x for it.

But now suppose we want to buy $10 billion worth of gasoline.  I would argue that that makes about as much sense as $10 billion worth of unicorns.  (OK, maybe a little more sense than buying unicorns.)  ”$10 billion worth of gasoline” doesn’t make sense, because the simple act of putting out an offer to buy $10 billion worth of gasoline would immediately and dramatically increase the price of gasoline. If we had $10 billion worth of gasoline to sell, then the simple act of offering to sell $10 billion worth of gasoline would decrease the price of gasoline. Thus, it would seem that $10 billion worth of gasoline means different things depending on whether we are buying or selling it, and so it’s not well-defined.

One can extrapolate and say that $10 billion worth of *anything* doesn’t make sense, and so “$10 billion” itself doesn’t really make sense, except that we know it’s bigger than $9,999,999,999.99 and it’s smaller than $10 billion + $0.01.

What $10 billion really represents, I think, is not so much a certain quantity of stuff (where stuff can be goods or services), but rather a certain amount of ability to change how people produce stuff, because if someone buys or sells $10 billion worth of anything, the most important effect of that action is not so much the transfer of ownership of that thing, but the fact that such a transaction will incite people to produce more or less of that thing. Maybe from this point of view, the effect of money can be quantified in a linear way, and so be more easily grasped by our mortal minds?

Is there a way of quantifying things and looking at things this way, or some other way of viewing money at a macroscopic scale that is less misleading than just translating it linearly into stuff?  Any pointers to relevant reading would be very much appreciated.

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?

I was quite sure this was not a silly question. The original motivation behind my question was more economic than anything else.  A more detailed version of my question would have been, “What exactly do the people here produce so that they can enjoy a decent living?”  We all know that the Bay Area produces high tech, Boston produces brains, and New York produces financial crises, but what exactly does Bucey-les-Gy, France produce?  The answer to that question should have been obvious, since the food and wine that all those big brains in SF, Boston, NY, and Paris consume has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was the sleepy countryside that we were driving through.

But his answer also addressed an undercurrent to the question that I wasn’t thinking of at the time, but which upon further reflection is more fundamental.  What, exactly, do people in sleepy country towns yearn for?  We know that people in cities, at least the vibrant ones, yearn for success, money, power, sex, and so on.  We, and by we I mean the privileged class that I happen to be among, namely the financially secure, educated, well-traveled, upwardly mobile, professional or intellectual class, I think we tend to think of life as having a “goal”, whether it be making lots of money, doing the best research, and so on.

But taken from a different point of view, such goals seem, if not silly, then at least misguided.  After being in France for a while, where people seem less driven by such external forms of success, it has become more and more apparent to me that it’s worth asking ourselves whether we have our priorities straight.  Maybe living itself is enough, and all those other goals that we set for ourselves are not really bringing us closer to some abstract fulfillment, but rather taking us farther away from the fulfillment that comes from just enjoying each day as it is?

Not to say that we should all move to the countryside and start planting crops.  But almost by definition the desire for something more, something better seems to imply that what one has today is not good enough.  Is there a way to pursue success and be ambitious while at the same time cherishing the moment and the way things are?  And if not, what’s the right balance to strike between the two?

The kind ladies who were responsible (both for the problem and for fixing it) told me that it took over 3 months to get the original contract, so it might take another 3 months to get it fixed.  I told them that this would not work: I needed to apply for my residence permit within 2 months of arriving.  They told me they’d see what they could do.

Lo and behold a short 5 days later I had a new corrected contract, signed and all.  It goes to show you that when you put a fire under their seat the French are able to hop into action and get things done.  Now if only I could open a cell phone contract…

Midwest:

May 9 – 11: Chicago
May 12 – 13: Urbana, IL
May 14: Madison, WI
May 15 – 19: Minneapolis, MN

DC:
May 29 – June 2

California:

June 8 – 15: LA
June 15 – 21: Bay Area

Europe:

July 14 – 18: Paris
July 18 – ??: Somewhere (Dublin? Madrid? Suggestions?)

America:

August ?? – probably taking a road trip somewhere, any recommendations / offers to crash on your couch?