Beggars and BMWs

I have money on my mind today. There are a number of reasons for this.

One, my ‘to do’ list tells me that I need to go to the bank soon and wire some more money home if I want to be able to pay my student loans at the end of the month.  This is a fun activity, involving a trip to the bank, a long wait (because there is always a long wait at the bank), a long form, a couple more forms, repeated assurances to the teller that you know your bank doesn't have a swift code and yes, you know it's entirely your own fault if the money disappears in transit, and finally, the fun on knowing you get to do it again, because you're only allowed to transfer 500 USD per day.

Two, I’ve been asked four or five times what my plans are for after my contract ends, and I haven’t really decided yet. It honestly depends on whether I have a job lined up for next year (and what that job is). If I do, then I might feel comfortable blowing some savings on traveling. If I don’t, then I want to find the cheapest route home as soon as possible and get cracking on the job hunt. So I was idly looking at plane ticket prices last night. Then, I saw that Cathay Pacific is having a summer sale on business class fares. So I checked out the price of a Hong Kong to New York ticket, just out of curiosity, and perhaps because it’s been a life dream to someday find out what it’s like to fly business class [because let’s face it: first class is a myth, like Atlantis. You “know” it’s up there in the front of the plane somewhere, but you’ve never seen it, and you don’t know anyone who’s ever been there]. Well, it was the cheapest business class fare I’ve ever seen, only about three times the price of economy, but still somewhere in the neighborhood of ridiculous. Then, I read all about the amenities of business class. Lay-flat seat, normal plug-in for your laptop, an “amenity kit” full of helpful things, like lotion to combat airplane dry skin and a toothbrush and toothpaste, creatively described food, a storage cupboard for your book, glasses, mp3 player, etc, a privacy screen in case you want to pretend you’re alone on the plane, and (best part) a sticker you can stick to your privacy screen that says “please don’t wake me” if you just want to sleep and not be bothered by offers of hot towels or champagne. Seriously (well ok, I made that last bit up. Not any of the component pieces – the Do Not Disturb sticker, hot towel, and champagne all exist in business class, but I don’t think they really occur as in my scenario). So, while the price is still ridiculous, I can’t help but sigh like the protagonist in a dime-store romance at the thought of 15 hours of that, instead of the glowingly described ‘six inches of recline and four-way tilt headrest’ of economy class (disclaimer: I flew Cathay Pacific to get here, and of my five flights between the US and China, I think it was the most comfortable. And the personal TV screen with choose-your-own viewing options is nice). Oh, and for the frugal traveler out there, I found the cheapest business class fare on Turkish Airlines. Yes, you have to change planes in Istanbul.

Three, I tried to help a new coworker get internet set up at her apartment yesterday (alas, it was not successful. My Chinese was enough to figure out the problem, but not enough to solve the problem. She needs someone who can argue with pushy salespeople. That’s not really in my English skillset). While we were in China Telecom waiting for a free salesperson, I glanced at the display of smartphones. Several of my coworkers have recently bought the Galaxy tablet phone, or whatever it’s called, and part of me is a little jealous. It’s so slick and shiny and multi-functional and twenty-first century.  On the other hand, it costs upwards of 3,000 yuan, which is about what I just spent on a week’s vacation to Hainan. Also, I’m not sure it would work back home, which would make it a really bad deal. Part of me is seriously considering a tablet computer or a smart phone. I would like the convenience of extremely portable computing. On the other hand, I fear the brain-rotting effects of touch-screen stupid games. Also, I don’t want to compose long written works with my fingertip or a touch-screen keypad, nor do I want to carry around an external keyboard (rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it). So I remain indecisive. I predict I’ll make a decision sometime in 2014 (if the world doesn’t end first).

Four, and this is what my brain keeps coming back to whenever I take out my wallet or think about the ridiculously expensive things that I could buy, easily or with a little saving effort, a couple weeks ago, local coworker friend of mine was telling me about a friend of hers who manages a Subway. During our conversation, she happened to mention that the employees at the Subway make 5 yuan per hour, and that this is a pretty standard wage for fast-food workers. Let’s put this in perspective, shall we? At 5 yuan/hour, working 40 hours/week, your weekly paycheck (ignoring all taxes) would come to 200 yuan. Assuming you work year round with no vacations, you will make 10,400 yuan per year, or, put another way, about 1645 USD. That’s less than I make in a month. Now, I realize that there is a wage gap between the income of a fast food worker and a teacher in the US, but let’s compare. A fast food worker making minimum wage in Maine ($7.50/hr), working the same amount of time and also ignoring any taxes, would make 15600 USD.  Google tells me that the average salary of a teacher in Maine is 45110 USD. This means, where a Subway worker in Guangzhou makes about 8% of a teacher’s salary, a Subway worker in Maine makes 35% of a teacher’s salary. It’s a much smaller gap. Of course, this data is skewed, because I’m not just a teacher. Local teachers make much, much less than I do. I’m a “foreign expert,” employed by an international private company which caters to an extremely wealthy clientele. I don’t have any definite data on local teacher salaries, but based on estimates from my local coworkers, I’d imagine we’d we looking at a fast food worker:teacher ratio of about 15-25%. And fast-food workers are hardly the low point of the scale, just as teachers are hardly the high point. What is the significance of this extreme income range? I don’t know. But, it’s very interesting to think about, isn’t it?

My new coworker (I actually have four new coworkers this week, but only one has the desk next to mine) is from England. We were chatting about our homes, and when I mentioned I was from small town New England, she asked if it was really like it was in the movies and on TV. So while I was telling her about the beautiful lakes and lighthouses and pretentious ivy-covered colleges, I also told her about rural poverty and heat assistance and the free and reduced price lunch program. You know, the parts of daily life in Maine that don’t make it into the quaint New England towns of television. I’ve never been poor. I’ve never not had something I’ve needed. I’ve rarely not had something I wanted. Still, I’ve grown up close to it, and while I wouldn’t say I’ve been entirely successful, I feel like I have something of an appreciation of the value of money. My students here are from wealthy families. They see beggars in the street and eat hamburgers that represent half a day’s pay to the person who made it. I wonder if they will someday know what money is worth.

Sun, Sand, Waves ... Relaxation

So that's what a holiday feels like.  I'd begun to forget.
I spent the last week on Hainan Island, in and around the beach resort town of Sanya.

This describes my mood all week.

Now, given the abundance of signs like this one:

Simplified Chinese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Russian, and English

I can forgive you if you think Hainan Island must be up near the Russian border. But, no, it's just a very popular vacation destination for Russians. I lost count of how many times I had to blink stupidly at waitresses, vendors, or hawkers and say "I'm sorry, I don't speak Russian" in Chinese. Actually, i only chanced upon two other English-speaking couples/families in my week on the island. Also, I resisted the urge to ask my Russian deck-chair neighbors their thoughts on Putin's re-election. No one wants to think about politics on holiday, after all. I, for one, am very strongly not thinking about the voting results out of North Carolina. Actually, Hainan is about as far south as you can go in China, diving the South China Sea from the Gulf of Tonkin.

It's like Canadians flocking to Key West.

Anyway, I did a lot of things, and had a lot of fun, and did a lot of relaxing (despite never  sleeping later than 8am). During all of that, I took about 170 pictures. So, rather than talk you to death about it, please enjoy this video slideshow of events. If for some reason the embedded video is not working, you can view it here.

I had a lovely time and I am very happy I went. My sunburn isn't all that bad, considering how hot and sunny it was and how much time I spent in the sun during the heat of the day (interesting note: Sanya's latitude is 18*15'12" N, making it the closest I've ever been to the equator). Now that I am back in Guangzhou, I am staving off the post-vacation blues with reruns of Hawaii Five-O and the comforting (and terrifying) knowledge that my work here in GZ ends in just 9 more weeks. And, as the Tolkien quote on my wall says, wither then? I cannot say.

Length of time left in China < Time it took the Mayflower to cross the Atlantic

This is a Rolling Stop Post

Not much time to write this week, as I head out tomorrow morning for a week-long vacation to Hainan Island. You'll be hearing all about that next week, though.

This week was all the fun of a usual week, with one extra day off. Yesterday was Labor Day, but as Tuesday is our normal day off, we had Friday off instead. The kids, of course, had to go to school on Saturday to make up for their missed weekday, so our classes moved to Monday ... well anyway, it was the usual mess of a shifted schedule which all worked out in the end. Also at work, we've finally gotten two new teachers to replace ones who have finished their contracts and left. We haven't had anyone new since January and we've been rather desperately understaffed. One had to immediately turn around and go to Shanghai for processing, like my incoming group did back in July, but the other is being processed here and so has been observing classes and completing induction training at the center. My flatmate and I dragged her over to Taojin for some falafel last night. Yum, falafel. I'd say I'm going to miss my Mr. Shawarma, but didn't I read an article about a falafel maker in the Portland Press Herald last week? One can only hope.

Dim Sum. It's what's for breakfast.

On extra-day-off Friday, a group of us went out for dim sum for breakfast. You may not know this, but dim sum is apparently supposed to be breakfast food. I wholeheartedly approve of this, but what this probably just means is that I will eat dim sum at any time. I think it was actually an outing of the beginner-level EF Chinese class that I managed to get invited to/invited myself along to, so we practiced our basic Chinese, learned how to properly prepare and serve tea, Cantonese style, and discussed the history of dim sum (supposedly it dates from the Qing Dynasty) and learned what it means when a Chinese person taps twice on the table with two fingers (here's a hint: it does not mean 'hit me').

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. (just kidding. It's not Earl Grey.)

After dim sum, I did a bit of shopping (sunscreen. some new sandals. the usual weekly necessity of food). Then, as I walked back toward the most convenient bus stop, I saw this:

It's 1:45pm.

I picked up my pace a bit, and you know what? I almost made it to the station. I was maybe 100 meters shy when the skies opened up. Of course, the morning weather had been fine and I hadn't planned to be out too long, and I left my little collapsing umbrella at work and I didn't want to carry my long one around all morning so ... I didn't have an umbrella.

Also, I need to clean my camera's lens.

Luckily, some nice women working in a shop of some sort (high end skin care/makeup, I think. A Japanese brand, maybe?) dragged me in as wet-cat me sidled passed their door. I was trying to get closer to my goal by hugging the shopfronts, underneath the slight overhang of their overhead signs, but the gaps between buildings were double strength rain+drip. They were very nice ladies, and gave me a stool and a cup of water and discovered I spoke Chinese. They insisted I couldn't go out in the rain, chided me for not carrying an umbrella in Guangzhou in the Spring, and interrogated me with the usual questions. Where are you from? When did you get to China? Where did you learn Chinese? Do you have a boyfriend? Are you looking for a Chinese boyfriend? What's your type? How tall are you? What do you weigh? How old are you? What do you do?  I answered them all, except my weight and my ideal boyfriend type. Then they tried to teach me to sing along to the Chinese pop music playing on the radio. I really can't sing in any language. Eventually the rain lightened up a bit, and I thanked them for their hospitality, then managed to hot-foot it to the bus stop and get home.

Seriously, 2:00 in the afternoon.

That's it for this week, except to say gosh, I hope it doesn't rain all week in Sanya.

Sturm und Drang

It’s been an uneventful week here in Guangzhou. I can think of only ere only two things of note. One, the weather has been delightfully bad, with the skies going pitch black at three in the afternoon and serving up a deluge worthy of Noah, if it lasted more than a couple hours, complete with thunder, lightning, and gusting wind. I’d show you a picture, but it turns out to be quite challenging to take good pictures of a storm. I have a whole new level of respect for storm photographers. Come to think of it, it’s getting unusually dark outside as I type this. Perhaps we’re in for another spat of rain. And, it’s warm rain. You hear about this warm rain in books and movies, but growing up in Maine you don’t really experience it much – rain is rather cold, for the most part. Down here below the Tropic of Cancer, though, we’re well into what I consider hot weather (90 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, 88 today) and it’s humid on top of that. So, when a storm moves in, it doesn’t bring in cold air (the only thing blowing cold air is my air conditioner, bless it), and the rain falls through warm wet air and voila. Warm rain. Now I really need to invest in some galoshes.

Hmm. These galoshes are cute.

Two, I finished reading the Old Testament this week. I’ve been reading since August 1^st, at a rate of approximately 3.1 pages per day. Interesting fact: did you know the Old Testament is just over ¾ of the whole length of the Bible? Anyway, I’m on schedule to finish the whole book by the end of July. It’s very exciting. Not so much the text, although there are some pretty exciting bits (also a lot of horrifying bits), but the idea that I’ll have actually read the whole thing. I calculated what I’d read before beginning this project, and it amounted to less than 1/5 of the book (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Genesis, and Ruth). Hardly a sound foundation, now is it? I credit the read-through plan to Reverend Langworthy at United Parish in Fort Fairfield. She mentioned in church one Sunday that if you divide the Bible into 3 to 4 pages of reading per day, you can read it in a year. That really stuck to me, because reading the Bible feels like a monumental, nearly unconquerable task. On the other hand, reading 3.1 pages a day is the work of 10 minutes before bed. That’s nothing. Still, I expected to have given up by now, much like I half expected to have given up on regularly updating my blog by now. I haven’t quit either, though, which is personally satisfying.

Look in the lower left window quadrant. See the green and yellow?

It’s amazing what you can do in a year. What have you done this year? What do you want to do? Break it down into manageable chunks, and I think you’ll succeed. This is all I’m going to write today, after torturing you all with last week’s magnum opus of rambling. I’ll leave you with two pictures, to show what the construction workers outside my window have accomplished in the 9 months that I’ve lived here.

It got bigger (I think this is the final height, but I'm not sure).

A Matter of Perspective

I don’t write much, if at all, about my work here. Honestly, my classes aren’t usually that interesting. But, today’s topic has its origin in one of my classes, so I’ll take a moment to tell you about what is it I do with the bulk of my time.

I teach English to students ranging in age from four to seventeen, in levels from basically a beginner to functionally fluent. Classes are two hours long and are English-only immersion, although honestly the bulk of “misbehavior” in my classes is students speaking Chinese. There are usually around 5-16 students per class, and my students are predominantly from wealthy families and attend one of the schools within a 30-minute commute of our center. Many of the teenage students attend Monday through Friday boarding schools. I teach eleven different classes, which is on the low side of average for our center – because we often co-teach (alternate weeks) classes, you can theoretically have up to eighteen or twenty classes.

So, last Sunday I was teaching my Sunday morning high-level class for teenagers. This class has five students, all of whom are fourteen-sixteen years old. The topic of the day was education, specifically educational systems and their differences in different countries. Sadly, this is one of the more interesting topics in that particular level’s textbook. We spent the first hour of class discussing the US and Chinese schools systems, whether or not tracking and entrance/exit exams are good things, and going over some vocabulary of areas of study. The second half of the class, according to my lesson plan, was going to be a quick reading about homework in high school, followed by a semi-formal debate about the usefulness of homework. But, right before the mid-class break, one of my students derailed the train entirely.

He asked me if I’d seen “Kony 2012.” I said yes, and the other four students said no. Then he asked if we could watch it over the break. I often let them watch videos/listen to music on the computer during this ten minute breather, so I said yes and found it on the net. I know it’s 29 minutes long, but I figured they’d lose interest by the end of break. Well, I was wrong. They watched quietly and intently for the entire time, so I let the video play through to the end. Then, I asked them for their reactions. It was both a way to get them talking (the entire purpose of my class, after all) and because I was genuinely curious. I know my own reaction to the video (as a white, middle-class, college-educated socially liberal American woman between the ages of 18-30), and I was interested to see how their reactions would be different.

Well, they hadn’t known who Kony was before watching the video. After watching the video, they said they felt motivated to do something. They agreed that he should be stopped, but didn’t feel the timetable (by the end of 2012) was realistic, especially considering the small number of committed troops. I believe they asked me how long it took us to find Osama Bin Laden with an entire army as a comparison. Then I asked them if they felt the video was speaking to them. We talked about this for quite a while, and the general consensus was no, not really.

So what I want to talk about today is why I feel the Kony 2012 video is a representative sample of modern activism that purports to speak to a worldwide community but actually displays a Western bias and unconsciously perpetuates many of the problems of the current political leadership’s attempts to address global issues. If this sounds like I’m about to write a college essay, fear not. While it would make a great topic for such a paper, I’m not going to do any research or cite any outside sources or attempt to write formally. This is my opinion, expressed hopefully logically. If you’re bored already, I won’t blaming you for leaving now and going to play Sudoku while catching up on season five of The Guild (do it! Nathan Fillion, Grant Imahara, Kevin Sorbo, Colin Ferguson, and Brent Spiner all guest star as themselves. It’s hilarious.)

Okay, first things first. Have you seen the Kony 2012 video? If you have, I’m willing to bet serious money that you watched it on Youtube. I’m willing to bet 90% of the videos you’ve watched online in the past week were on Youtube. Perhaps you heard about it on Twitter. Or read about it in a blog hosted on Blogger or Wordpress. Then you joined the Facebook community.Well, if you are living in mainland China and don’t have access to a VPN, then you haven’t done any of these things. Youtube, Google, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, and Facebook are all blocked in China (although you can access Google Hong Kong). Oh no! What do Chinese people do? Well, clearly, they have their own versions – Weibo is a blog/microblog platform, Youku is your source for cute cat videos, and Baidu not only searches the internet but also is your convenient source for free music downloads.

Secondly, even if these sites weren’t blocked, they are still all in English. While many people study English in China, and many are functionally fluent, not everyone is, and even if you are, you have to make a conscious effort to enter the English sphere of the internet. So any video or website that claims to speak to an international community, but is solely accessible or searchable by English speakers is actually limited to the English-speaking world. One of my favorite xkcd comics is #256, the Map of Online Communities. It’s funny (not just because Myspace is bigger than Wikipedia[it’s from 2007]), but it’s important to remember that it’s not a map of the Internet, it’s a map of the English internet. Like a map of the US that blurs out Canada and Mexico and omits the entire rest of the world, we must remember that this vast, limitless internet that we work and play in every day is just a small, monolingual slice of what’s actually out there. (Chris Harrison also has some interesting maps of internet connections using 2007 data).

There are an estimated 400 million Chinese internet users. That’s more than the population of the US and Canada combined. So it is hard to see Kony 2012, an English language video on a blocked video site, as speaking to them. The video talks about the global community while ignoring a huge part of it. But, we watched the video in class, right? So clearly it is available. We found it on a Chinese video hosting site, and someone had gone to the effort of subtitling the entire video in Chinese. It’s potentially interesting to note, however, that the subtitles were written in traditional characters, which are predominately used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese communities and not on the mainland. Still, this makes the video available to the Chinese internet community.

Kony 2012 isn’t just an internet movement, though. The video exhorts viewers to be involved in physical ways, from speaking to political leaders and sharing the video through word-of-mouth to donating money and helping hang posters and cover the (physical) world with awareness posters on the night of April 20^th.  I don’t think I’ll be seeing any posters on Saturday morning here in Guangzhou, but I’ll let you know if I do. Tellingly, the Kony2012/Invisible Children website is also blocked here. I doubt you could order an action kit and actually get it through customs. And even if you could, we’re back to the language problem.

Now, the biggest issue with the video is that it’s very US-centric. The organization is US-based and seeks American government intervention. On a personal political level, I question the idea that it’s the US’s place to go hunt down Kony. This continues the post-WWII trend of American interventions in foreign countries that seem to follow the logic that because we have the ability to do it, we should do it. Personally, I’d like to see this go through an international body (say what you will about the ineffectiveness of the UN. Maybe that’s the problem we need to fix first). This is where the video is perpetuating some of the political beliefs that are causing international friction, that are really at odds with the idea of united global activism. When things like the current unrest in Syria happen, China and the US and everyone else often divide on opinions of what should be done. We can choose to view this as political antagonism and posturing, or we can do an more nuanced reading of cultural beliefs and standards which inform major decisions. What we absolutely cannot continue to do is act as if other country’s opinions are something to note and then ignore in favor of our own decision. We are not the world’s mother. We don’t get to make decisions based on our own moral/economic/military/political superiority (semi-related note: you know why Iran wants nukes so badly? Because thanks to the UN Security Council, we have a de facto policy of only listening to people with nukes. Way to go, people tasked with protecting world peace!)

The second biggest (and related) issue is that it assumes that capturing Kony will solve the problem. Yes, just like deposing Saddam Hussein fixed Iraq and killing Bin Laden has put an end to our worries about terrorism. As much as Africa isn’t the heart of darkness that Westerns tend to see it as (just as China isn’t the corrupt Communist dangerland that it get portrayed as), Africa’s got a lot of problems. Kony is one of them, yes. As the Kony 2012 video points out, he’s abducted 30,000 children into his army through the years. And yet, that many children die each month from hunger and related problems, many of them in Africa. Catching Kony won’t solve Africa’s issues related to food, education, disease prevention, and economic opportunity.

The Kony 2012 video feeds into the same core belief held by many in my generation that if you just care hard enough – if you really, truly believe – then things will change. This is the belief that got Obama elected, and this is why so many people feel betrayed by him. We believed so hard, you see, we cared so much about change, but Obama went on to be a decent and human president, when he clearly should have walked on water and returned us to a boom economy in one fell swoop (a fell swoop, apparently, being less than three years). So this youthful activism encouraged by the Kong 2012 video tells us that if we hang enough posters and wear enough bracelets and send enough letters to our senators, then Kony will be caught and our efforts will be validated and we can all feel good about ourselves for solving the problem. In fact, the only way that group enthusiasm will capture Kony is if we all fly to Africa, link hands, and walk through the jungle in a brute-force search. I’m not saying enthusiasm and activism are worth nothing. Sometimes, though, I’d like to see some pragmatism with my idealism, you know? It means there’s a smaller opportunity for your opponents to say ‘I told you so’ when your results are human-scale, not godlike miracles.

I do quite a bit of reading in my daily online life about privilege. We experience privilege every day without being conscious of it – but if we’re going to be activists, I think we need to take a deep look at ourselves and understand the ways in which we’re privileged. This isn’t so that we can thus feel guilty (or challenge each other to the Oppression Olympics), but so that we can thus reach out to different people without unwitting condescension or offense. The Kony 2012 video assumes you have internet access, speak English, live in an uncensored society, have time and/or money to spare, and believe that first-world countries have a duty to intervene when horrible people do horrible things, regardless of where it’s happening or who it’s affecting. It assumes that good intentions will result in good actions that will help the greater good. Is that wrong? Maybe not. But it is a simple and narrow way to view the world, and one that we need to modify if our generation is really going to change the world. 

"I think self-awareness is probably the most important things towards being a champion."

Billie Jean King