Hello again, dear readers. It has been a long time since I updated. I wasn't even sure if anyone still checked this website, but the statistics page told me otherwise. There were 8 different people that checked this site a couple weeks ago. 8! I have been back in the Shiz since the end of August, so this post is a bit tardy.
I've been trying to figure out what to do with this blog. At first, each thing about China, even those things that were the same as back home, was interesting purely because of novelty. Now things aren't new anymore. It's surprising how used to things I've become. A street smelling like human waste no longer causes much surprise, nor does air quality so bad you can only see 50 yards out from your window. Of course, those are two examples to illustrate the unsavory aspects of living here. And that is precisely the problem with continuing this blog: I only think about the undesirable parts of living in China now.
It's not that there are only undesirable parts. I still have students that are super-cool-awesome-sauce who seem to make any class interesting. The food continues to do it's darnedest to make me fat. The people I actually have interactions with tend to be really nice; there are some absolute jerkwads over here too, though. Don't worry, readers, assholes are everywhere.
I have since realized that this blog can serve as a very personal news-about-China website for those of you who actually read. I will try to update every now and again with things that will help those of you who range between familiar with some aspects of China to all-Chinese-people-look-the-same-doesn't-matter-if-they're-Korean-Chinese-or-Japanese-Chinese-or-even-Chinese-Chinese. Sad to say, but there are certainly people on the latter end of the spectrum.
Without further ado:
Spring Festival is coming up once more...like it does every year.... Now the typical western explanation is rolling into one: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year. "How can this be possible?!" you ask with horror. "What sort of Communist black magic could possibly combine the celebrations of three, THREE, holidays without collapsing the entire space-time continuum?!"
1) You, dear readers, need to stop using both a question mark and exclamation mark in a single sentence. One or the other will do.
2) Communists don't use black magic, but red magic.
3) Take the gift(s) from Christmas (people are given red envelopes with money by older relatives), the abundance of food from Thanksgiving, and the idea of new beginnings from New Year. Mix it all up in an imported-from-China bowl from IKEA. Steam it in your bamboo steaming basket. Sprinkle a healthy amount of fireworks on top. Enjoy your Chinese Spring Festival.
Now, some of you may be hearing about all the trips via planes, trains, and automobiles that the collective Chinese people will make this holiday season. Bussinessweek is giving an estimate of 3.6 billion, with a B, passenger trips this year. That's a bit nuts. That's not within a calendar year, but within about a 40 day span, at least that's what I've seen other places reporting as the window of travel.
This statistic is staggering, yeah. The number is just so huge, and most of us don't come from countries of about 1.3-1.4 billion people. Maybe my Indian readers can relate, all none of them. It'd be so cool if I had some though.
What tends to not make headlines during this time, because let's face it China is only a headline when it comes to financial news or potential threats to American hegemony, is the number of people who are making that trip to go see their family they left behind.
Migrant workers are a huge issue in China. There's the discrimination they face for being perceived as outsiders (parallel to immigration issues in the U.S.? No way, we don't discriminate since like 1968, wait, 2001, wait, when was the last time we poured money into ridiculous border "protection" for all of those extremely dangerous people looking for menial jobs?). There's the whole problem of residence registration; where you are born and registered dictates where you can travel, where you can go to school, where your kids can go to school. There are a lot of problems, let's just put it that way.
You see, migrant workers are people who are born in the countryside, farmers and peasants (I bet you didn't think we could still use the word 'peasant'), and they leave their family to go work in the more prosperous cities. We're not talking about your daily commute to work. We're talking about hundreds of miles to go live in a totally different city where you eke out a living because you're sending your money back home, probably for you kids, or your wife, or your parents. For most of those workers, they don't have the cash to be buying tickets for the type of train that gets me to Beijing in an hour and a half including stops (a trip of about 300 km, or 180 miles), so the trip is usually by a much slower means. This in turn means that they don't have the ability to go home on weekends like all of you college kids.
It's hard to imagine the life of a migrant worker in China. In the U.S., we have workers that cross international borders, but in China they sometimes don't even leave their provinces. Take a look at this article to get an idea of what it's like for those people who stay behind in the country.
So the next time you hear about the growth and robustness of the Chinese economy, just remember that it's built upon 200 million people who leave home to make a pittance more money. I bet the U.S. economy would be booming too, if we had about 1/6 of the population who would work for next to nothing in all the jobs we don't want to do.
Until next time, dear readers.
I've been trying to figure out what to do with this blog. At first, each thing about China, even those things that were the same as back home, was interesting purely because of novelty. Now things aren't new anymore. It's surprising how used to things I've become. A street smelling like human waste no longer causes much surprise, nor does air quality so bad you can only see 50 yards out from your window. Of course, those are two examples to illustrate the unsavory aspects of living here. And that is precisely the problem with continuing this blog: I only think about the undesirable parts of living in China now.
It's not that there are only undesirable parts. I still have students that are super-cool-awesome-sauce who seem to make any class interesting. The food continues to do it's darnedest to make me fat. The people I actually have interactions with tend to be really nice; there are some absolute jerkwads over here too, though. Don't worry, readers, assholes are everywhere.
I have since realized that this blog can serve as a very personal news-about-China website for those of you who actually read. I will try to update every now and again with things that will help those of you who range between familiar with some aspects of China to all-Chinese-people-look-the-same-doesn't-matter-if-they're-Korean-Chinese-or-Japanese-Chinese-or-even-Chinese-Chinese. Sad to say, but there are certainly people on the latter end of the spectrum.
Without further ado:
Spring Festival is coming up once more...like it does every year.... Now the typical western explanation is rolling into one: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year. "How can this be possible?!" you ask with horror. "What sort of Communist black magic could possibly combine the celebrations of three, THREE, holidays without collapsing the entire space-time continuum?!"
1) You, dear readers, need to stop using both a question mark and exclamation mark in a single sentence. One or the other will do.
2) Communists don't use black magic, but red magic.
3) Take the gift(s) from Christmas (people are given red envelopes with money by older relatives), the abundance of food from Thanksgiving, and the idea of new beginnings from New Year. Mix it all up in an imported-from-China bowl from IKEA. Steam it in your bamboo steaming basket. Sprinkle a healthy amount of fireworks on top. Enjoy your Chinese Spring Festival.
Now, some of you may be hearing about all the trips via planes, trains, and automobiles that the collective Chinese people will make this holiday season. Bussinessweek is giving an estimate of 3.6 billion, with a B, passenger trips this year. That's a bit nuts. That's not within a calendar year, but within about a 40 day span, at least that's what I've seen other places reporting as the window of travel.
This statistic is staggering, yeah. The number is just so huge, and most of us don't come from countries of about 1.3-1.4 billion people. Maybe my Indian readers can relate, all none of them. It'd be so cool if I had some though.
What tends to not make headlines during this time, because let's face it China is only a headline when it comes to financial news or potential threats to American hegemony, is the number of people who are making that trip to go see their family they left behind.
Migrant workers are a huge issue in China. There's the discrimination they face for being perceived as outsiders (parallel to immigration issues in the U.S.? No way, we don't discriminate since like 1968, wait, 2001, wait, when was the last time we poured money into ridiculous border "protection" for all of those extremely dangerous people looking for menial jobs?). There's the whole problem of residence registration; where you are born and registered dictates where you can travel, where you can go to school, where your kids can go to school. There are a lot of problems, let's just put it that way.
You see, migrant workers are people who are born in the countryside, farmers and peasants (I bet you didn't think we could still use the word 'peasant'), and they leave their family to go work in the more prosperous cities. We're not talking about your daily commute to work. We're talking about hundreds of miles to go live in a totally different city where you eke out a living because you're sending your money back home, probably for you kids, or your wife, or your parents. For most of those workers, they don't have the cash to be buying tickets for the type of train that gets me to Beijing in an hour and a half including stops (a trip of about 300 km, or 180 miles), so the trip is usually by a much slower means. This in turn means that they don't have the ability to go home on weekends like all of you college kids.
It's hard to imagine the life of a migrant worker in China. In the U.S., we have workers that cross international borders, but in China they sometimes don't even leave their provinces. Take a look at this article to get an idea of what it's like for those people who stay behind in the country.
So the next time you hear about the growth and robustness of the Chinese economy, just remember that it's built upon 200 million people who leave home to make a pittance more money. I bet the U.S. economy would be booming too, if we had about 1/6 of the population who would work for next to nothing in all the jobs we don't want to do.
Until next time, dear readers.