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KGSM Student Radio द्वारा प्रदान की गई सामग्री. एपिसोड, ग्राफिक्स और पॉडकास्ट विवरण सहित सभी पॉडकास्ट सामग्री KGSM Student Radio या उनके पॉडकास्ट प्लेटफ़ॉर्म पार्टनर द्वारा सीधे अपलोड और प्रदान की जाती है। यदि आपको लगता है कि कोई आपकी अनुमति के बिना आपके कॉपीराइट किए गए कार्य का उपयोग कर रहा है, तो आप यहां बताई गई प्रक्रिया का पालन कर सकते हैं https://hi.player.fm/legal।
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Subterranean Homesick Blues
Manage episode 156023562 series 1174111
KGSM Student Radio द्वारा प्रदान की गई सामग्री. एपिसोड, ग्राफिक्स और पॉडकास्ट विवरण सहित सभी पॉडकास्ट सामग्री KGSM Student Radio या उनके पॉडकास्ट प्लेटफ़ॉर्म पार्टनर द्वारा सीधे अपलोड और प्रदान की जाती है। यदि आपको लगता है कि कोई आपकी अनुमति के बिना आपके कॉपीराइट किए गए कार्य का उपयोग कर रहा है, तो आप यहां बताई गई प्रक्रिया का पालन कर सकते हैं https://hi.player.fm/legal।
I’ve intentinoally been spending as much time alone as possible this week. Initially it was because I was homesick for the first time since my arrival and I thought I needed some space from the noise and commotion of my normal affairs here. It’s given me time to reflect on this experience, which is now a third finished, and how it has helped me as an individual. After Chinese class on tuesday I had a secondary goal, to practice my Chinese.
My Chinese class moves quickly, like everything here, and I sometimes find myself lost in the tones, fumbling helplessly to write down a phonetic pronounciation while the rest of the class presses forward with the rest of the lesson. There are a few phrases Ican say with almost total confidence: my introduction devotees will remember from a few weeks ago, counting and forming complex numbers, handling money, and how to call a waiter, place an order, and ask for the check; oh yeah, and the all important “ganbei!” which serves a clever and crucial role in getting myself and anyone else at dinner mercilessly drunk on baijiu (rice wine). I can also do this rad tongue twister that goes like this: 四是四,十是十, 十四是十四, 四十是四十。 Which translates to 4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40. I’m impressed even if you aren’t.
As far as practical skills go, I can order food, yes, but I can’t actually read the menu. When the convenience store clerk asks for ba kaui wu, I know he wants 4.50 yuan, but if I wanted to tell said clerk I thought he missed something, I’d have to foolishly point and gesture at whatever it was until he got the picture; or if all I had to pay with was a 100 kuai note I wouldn’t understand when he told me I needed something smaller. I recognize a few characters, but not enough to read the sign telling me the power in the dorms will be off between 9AM and 6PM tomorrow. Luckily I have kind roommates and helpful friends.
It was partly because of these sumblings that I wanted to spend more time alone. I wanted to try fending for myself and mostly I wanted to feel like an individual again. I wanted the satisfaction of proving my ability to live here on my own, to prove that if I had to I could get by on my own. After four weeks of clinging to my friends to interpret menus for me I was ready to cut the cord and take some control back.
As it turns out I am doing better than I thought. It’s surprisingly easy to get by with pathetic gestures and broken chinese. I get the impression that it’s almost expected that I will know about as much as I do and little more. This gives me some comfort because at least I’m living up to their expectations , but upon further recflection I realise just how high the expectations are for foreigners back home, and ho much lower it is here. Back home there may be a menu in Spanish, and a few chinese joints that have menus written in Chinese but the general sentiment is that if you’re coming to the US, you’re going to communicate with us in English. Surprising for a country with so much diversity, it reinforces my long held conviction that the WASPy majority in the United States deserves absolutely nothing: no pity, special treatments, or any other kind of “helping hand” in the United States.
This is not to suggest that China may not have it’s own problems with its ethnic minorities in relation to the majority population. I have not learned much about the subject, only that China has over 50 ethnic minority groups living peacefully together as one Chinese nation (which fact nearly every student here knows and quickly and energetically recites for me at every opportunity). I am merely making the simple point that it is probably easier for someone who does not know Chinese to live here than someone who doesn’t speak english to live in America.
All of this is coming into focus just as the election is winding down. This American Life ran a story about a week ago now about democrats who can’t justify voting for Barack Obama for the simple fact that he is black. The story was a bit upsetting and I’ll admit I coulnd’t take it all in one listen. Here were voters who were willing to sacrifice their entire political agenda to vote for a white man. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I lost a lot of faith in America after listening to that show, and then I realized it was October 23, a day that will forever live in infamy for me.
If anyone who knows me has ever wondered where my cynicism comes from, it is from this day. Six years ago on that day Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. A part of me died that day when I was sitting in my world geography class, wearing my Wellstone! T-shirt and holding campaign materials related to a massive rally the following Tuesday, and heard the awful news. After the memorial service and the ensuing fallout from Rick Kahn’s eulogy in particular, I became fixated on the negative aspects of American politics. Politics became revolting and uninspiring. Wellstone left a void in the political landscape that I had yet to see filled. 2008 was different. Both candidates for the Presidency were people for whom I had a great deal of respect. The moderation of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign combined with his POW experience gave me some sense that McCain was concerned about his country and really wanted to do something about the old school of American politics. David Foster Wallace probably put it best in his profile of McCain for Rolling Stone when he described McCain’s spirit as a politician. Barack Obama looked like a product of the American dream, someone working hard to achieve his dreams. His speech at the 2004 DNC was among the most inspiring political speeches I had heard since Wellstone died two years ago, but the 2000 and 2004 elections on the whole convinced me that American politics was dead. The Bush campaigns’ portrayals of “liberal” ideas as anti-american sent me the message that the United States was closed for business, unless you were already doing business. 2006 six recovered but none of the new leaders from Minnesota or anywhere else were at all inspiring. Attorney General Mike Hatch’s attempt at challenging the Pawlenty administration was a dismal failure, but even worse, it was the third DFL attempt to take back St. Paul that had failed this dismally. It seemed like since 2002 the DFL had lost its ability to put up candidates like Humphrey, Mondale, Wellstone and so many other politicians over the years that were able to captivate voters and instill confidence in American democracy. This year’s election was the first time I felt the passion of Wellstone’s politicophilia on the national stage and the moment I realized this, homesickness set in.
I missed my family for sure, and my friends at school. I’ve been living away from home for the last three years so apart from the distance, it wasn’t much different. I call them through skype instead of on the phone because it’s so much cheaper, and I can’t get in my car to go home, but apart from that missing family and friends back home hasn’t been much different for me. What has been different is all of the connections I had to my life back home. The places I went to, the culture I consumed, my daily routine, all of these fundamental parts of my lifestyle and my identity that I have almost no access to here.
I’ve been worried for a while now about how I would handle being away from Minnesota for four months. I think I probably have a stronger connection to Minneapolis than most students at Gustavus. It isn’t that there are any deeply rooted parts of my childhood in the city; my grandparents lived in Columbia Heights and my Great Grandmother lived the last years of her life in Northeast, and aside from occasional visits I have no failial connection with any part of the cities outside of Burnsville and to some extent Stillwater. I certainly don’t have any urban roots to speak of. It’s more that there is so much to appreciate about Minneapolis. It’s the culture, the arts, and the almost nationalist pride I feel whenever I shop at the Electric Fetus or see an Atmosphere show at First Avenue. I feel a little cooler whenever I see people here using post-it notes because I know that they were serendipidously invented by a 3M employee, and I know what 3M stands for and where it’s corporate headquarters are.
All of that pride mostly disappears when I realize I am the only person here who cares. Why the hell should the Chinese care about where post-it notes come from? Why would someone living in Zhuhai, where iPhones and Black and Decker toasters and a whole plethora of other products much cooler than a sticky piece of yellow paper are manufactured? Why should any of the people here care that I’ve walked on the floor of the club Prince filmed the ending of Purple Rain in, or that I could easily take them on the “Fargo” tour of Minnesota. Suddenly having a signed copy of the new Doomtree album doesn’t seem so cool anymore.
This loss of status, loss of identity makes me even more homesick. I miss 2 for 1s at Liquor Lyle’s, biking the greenway from Uptown to the Mississippi river and the rest of the grand rounds. I miss the lake, the clean air, the parks, the people. All of these things define me back home and none of it has any meaning here. I wear my South Minneapolis t-shirt with pride, but know that most of the students I interact with here have no idea where or what “south Minneapolis is.” Every once in a while I’ll spot a student wit han “I heart duluth”or a Gustavus shirt of some kind of apparel from one of the summer programs UIC sends, and I smile and remind myself that I am going home eventually and somehow that helps.
Music: All music featured in each episode of this podcast is by Minnesota artists with the exception of a few ambient background tracks produced by Nine Inch Nails. This episode features: Subteranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan Apple (Instrumental), Atmosphere; Gotta Lotta Walls (Instrumental), Atmosphere; Ghosts II, Nine Inch Nails; Always Coming Back Home To You, Atmosphere; Say Shh, Atmosphere
73 एपिसोडस
Manage episode 156023562 series 1174111
KGSM Student Radio द्वारा प्रदान की गई सामग्री. एपिसोड, ग्राफिक्स और पॉडकास्ट विवरण सहित सभी पॉडकास्ट सामग्री KGSM Student Radio या उनके पॉडकास्ट प्लेटफ़ॉर्म पार्टनर द्वारा सीधे अपलोड और प्रदान की जाती है। यदि आपको लगता है कि कोई आपकी अनुमति के बिना आपके कॉपीराइट किए गए कार्य का उपयोग कर रहा है, तो आप यहां बताई गई प्रक्रिया का पालन कर सकते हैं https://hi.player.fm/legal।
I’ve intentinoally been spending as much time alone as possible this week. Initially it was because I was homesick for the first time since my arrival and I thought I needed some space from the noise and commotion of my normal affairs here. It’s given me time to reflect on this experience, which is now a third finished, and how it has helped me as an individual. After Chinese class on tuesday I had a secondary goal, to practice my Chinese.
My Chinese class moves quickly, like everything here, and I sometimes find myself lost in the tones, fumbling helplessly to write down a phonetic pronounciation while the rest of the class presses forward with the rest of the lesson. There are a few phrases Ican say with almost total confidence: my introduction devotees will remember from a few weeks ago, counting and forming complex numbers, handling money, and how to call a waiter, place an order, and ask for the check; oh yeah, and the all important “ganbei!” which serves a clever and crucial role in getting myself and anyone else at dinner mercilessly drunk on baijiu (rice wine). I can also do this rad tongue twister that goes like this: 四是四,十是十, 十四是十四, 四十是四十。 Which translates to 4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40. I’m impressed even if you aren’t.
As far as practical skills go, I can order food, yes, but I can’t actually read the menu. When the convenience store clerk asks for ba kaui wu, I know he wants 4.50 yuan, but if I wanted to tell said clerk I thought he missed something, I’d have to foolishly point and gesture at whatever it was until he got the picture; or if all I had to pay with was a 100 kuai note I wouldn’t understand when he told me I needed something smaller. I recognize a few characters, but not enough to read the sign telling me the power in the dorms will be off between 9AM and 6PM tomorrow. Luckily I have kind roommates and helpful friends.
It was partly because of these sumblings that I wanted to spend more time alone. I wanted to try fending for myself and mostly I wanted to feel like an individual again. I wanted the satisfaction of proving my ability to live here on my own, to prove that if I had to I could get by on my own. After four weeks of clinging to my friends to interpret menus for me I was ready to cut the cord and take some control back.
As it turns out I am doing better than I thought. It’s surprisingly easy to get by with pathetic gestures and broken chinese. I get the impression that it’s almost expected that I will know about as much as I do and little more. This gives me some comfort because at least I’m living up to their expectations , but upon further recflection I realise just how high the expectations are for foreigners back home, and ho much lower it is here. Back home there may be a menu in Spanish, and a few chinese joints that have menus written in Chinese but the general sentiment is that if you’re coming to the US, you’re going to communicate with us in English. Surprising for a country with so much diversity, it reinforces my long held conviction that the WASPy majority in the United States deserves absolutely nothing: no pity, special treatments, or any other kind of “helping hand” in the United States.
This is not to suggest that China may not have it’s own problems with its ethnic minorities in relation to the majority population. I have not learned much about the subject, only that China has over 50 ethnic minority groups living peacefully together as one Chinese nation (which fact nearly every student here knows and quickly and energetically recites for me at every opportunity). I am merely making the simple point that it is probably easier for someone who does not know Chinese to live here than someone who doesn’t speak english to live in America.
All of this is coming into focus just as the election is winding down. This American Life ran a story about a week ago now about democrats who can’t justify voting for Barack Obama for the simple fact that he is black. The story was a bit upsetting and I’ll admit I coulnd’t take it all in one listen. Here were voters who were willing to sacrifice their entire political agenda to vote for a white man. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I lost a lot of faith in America after listening to that show, and then I realized it was October 23, a day that will forever live in infamy for me.
If anyone who knows me has ever wondered where my cynicism comes from, it is from this day. Six years ago on that day Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. A part of me died that day when I was sitting in my world geography class, wearing my Wellstone! T-shirt and holding campaign materials related to a massive rally the following Tuesday, and heard the awful news. After the memorial service and the ensuing fallout from Rick Kahn’s eulogy in particular, I became fixated on the negative aspects of American politics. Politics became revolting and uninspiring. Wellstone left a void in the political landscape that I had yet to see filled. 2008 was different. Both candidates for the Presidency were people for whom I had a great deal of respect. The moderation of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign combined with his POW experience gave me some sense that McCain was concerned about his country and really wanted to do something about the old school of American politics. David Foster Wallace probably put it best in his profile of McCain for Rolling Stone when he described McCain’s spirit as a politician. Barack Obama looked like a product of the American dream, someone working hard to achieve his dreams. His speech at the 2004 DNC was among the most inspiring political speeches I had heard since Wellstone died two years ago, but the 2000 and 2004 elections on the whole convinced me that American politics was dead. The Bush campaigns’ portrayals of “liberal” ideas as anti-american sent me the message that the United States was closed for business, unless you were already doing business. 2006 six recovered but none of the new leaders from Minnesota or anywhere else were at all inspiring. Attorney General Mike Hatch’s attempt at challenging the Pawlenty administration was a dismal failure, but even worse, it was the third DFL attempt to take back St. Paul that had failed this dismally. It seemed like since 2002 the DFL had lost its ability to put up candidates like Humphrey, Mondale, Wellstone and so many other politicians over the years that were able to captivate voters and instill confidence in American democracy. This year’s election was the first time I felt the passion of Wellstone’s politicophilia on the national stage and the moment I realized this, homesickness set in.
I missed my family for sure, and my friends at school. I’ve been living away from home for the last three years so apart from the distance, it wasn’t much different. I call them through skype instead of on the phone because it’s so much cheaper, and I can’t get in my car to go home, but apart from that missing family and friends back home hasn’t been much different for me. What has been different is all of the connections I had to my life back home. The places I went to, the culture I consumed, my daily routine, all of these fundamental parts of my lifestyle and my identity that I have almost no access to here.
I’ve been worried for a while now about how I would handle being away from Minnesota for four months. I think I probably have a stronger connection to Minneapolis than most students at Gustavus. It isn’t that there are any deeply rooted parts of my childhood in the city; my grandparents lived in Columbia Heights and my Great Grandmother lived the last years of her life in Northeast, and aside from occasional visits I have no failial connection with any part of the cities outside of Burnsville and to some extent Stillwater. I certainly don’t have any urban roots to speak of. It’s more that there is so much to appreciate about Minneapolis. It’s the culture, the arts, and the almost nationalist pride I feel whenever I shop at the Electric Fetus or see an Atmosphere show at First Avenue. I feel a little cooler whenever I see people here using post-it notes because I know that they were serendipidously invented by a 3M employee, and I know what 3M stands for and where it’s corporate headquarters are.
All of that pride mostly disappears when I realize I am the only person here who cares. Why the hell should the Chinese care about where post-it notes come from? Why would someone living in Zhuhai, where iPhones and Black and Decker toasters and a whole plethora of other products much cooler than a sticky piece of yellow paper are manufactured? Why should any of the people here care that I’ve walked on the floor of the club Prince filmed the ending of Purple Rain in, or that I could easily take them on the “Fargo” tour of Minnesota. Suddenly having a signed copy of the new Doomtree album doesn’t seem so cool anymore.
This loss of status, loss of identity makes me even more homesick. I miss 2 for 1s at Liquor Lyle’s, biking the greenway from Uptown to the Mississippi river and the rest of the grand rounds. I miss the lake, the clean air, the parks, the people. All of these things define me back home and none of it has any meaning here. I wear my South Minneapolis t-shirt with pride, but know that most of the students I interact with here have no idea where or what “south Minneapolis is.” Every once in a while I’ll spot a student wit han “I heart duluth”or a Gustavus shirt of some kind of apparel from one of the summer programs UIC sends, and I smile and remind myself that I am going home eventually and somehow that helps.
Music: All music featured in each episode of this podcast is by Minnesota artists with the exception of a few ambient background tracks produced by Nine Inch Nails. This episode features: Subteranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan Apple (Instrumental), Atmosphere; Gotta Lotta Walls (Instrumental), Atmosphere; Ghosts II, Nine Inch Nails; Always Coming Back Home To You, Atmosphere; Say Shh, Atmosphere
73 एपिसोडस
सभी एपिसोड
×K
KGSM Student Radio
The end of an era, tune in for the thrilling conclusion to two great radio shows. Thanks to special guests Zach and Collin for doing the weather, and to Dr. Wood, Mat, and Ari for stopping by and helping out with the show. We couldn’t have done it without all of you.
K
KGSM Student Radio
Aural Fixation and The Humpday Meltdown say goodbye to their loyal listeners and fans for all these years in this two part episode. Thank you all for your support, and please, continue to support KGSM.
K
KGSM Student Radio
This week Spencer Broughten, Greg Boone and Conor Bennet will say their farewells to KGSM during a two hour end of an era show. Join us on Wednesday from 7-9 for our final sign-off. In the meantime we thought we would let you listen to the final episode of Spence’s first show on KGSM Zach and Spence in the Morning, At Night with Zach Walgenbach (’08). Tonight Zach says goodbye to KGSM and Gustavus Adolphus College, ending two years of fantastic radio with a bang. Tonight we learn Dr. Wood’s true identity in a very special All About Wood, and we hear from our candidates Ari and Matt one last time before jumping into the chopper for Zach’s final weather broadcast, this time with an actual weatherman accompanying him. Hopefully he doesn’t crash the chopper.…
Aural Fixation recently hosted a story slam as part of the Firethorne Literary Magazine’s Spring Release. We hear from story tellers Alex Messenger, Ahna Gilbertson, Marie Bushnell, Joel Carlin, Ethan Marxhausen, Mary Cooley and Jenna Chapman. After winning a slam off with Alex Messenger, Joel Carlin—Professor in the Biology Department—won the contest. Here is the audio so you can judge for yourself.…
Welcome to Aural Fixation the podcast for this final episode from Zhuhai. The story is a bit shorter this week than you are used to, but it summarizes what has been one of the semester’s slowest and most relaxing weeks. The new year is here, and in many ways a new year can symbolize a fresh start, a clean slate, for different parts of our lives. For me it will be returning to the United States with a fresh perspective on the world, and a better understanding of humanity and myself. Tune in next week for the first, and only podcast of this series, produced outside of China. It will likely cover my experience with reverse culture shock and readjustment. Enjoy, and thank you for listening. It seems only appropriate that the tropical storm of rain and humidity that welcomed me to China would be bookended by a spell of cold, biting wind and rain on my way out. The rain this time is not nearly as torrential nor brutal as that which welcomed me but remains, nevertheless, rain and brings with it the same mess of mud and similar dangers as usual; my shoes are not caked in mud but the Student Hostel Cultural Village’s unpaved driveway-turned-mudslide still cases me to leave shoe prints all over the freshly mopped dormitory floors. This is my last weekend in China and to celebrate mine and Cynthia’s imminent departures from Zhuhai we gathered our friends together for some spicy and magnificently delicious Sichuanese food at Lao Sichuan, a restaurant in Zhuhai’s Xiangzhou District. Apart from Sichuanese food, Lao Sichuan specializes in the high art of Kung-Fu-style Ba Bao Cha whereby each person is given a small cup with eight different ingredients inside and a lid—used both to keep your tea warm while it steeps and to prevent you from sucking down one of the herbs giving your tea its sweet flavor—into which a professional shoots water from what looks like an oversized watering can from across the wide round table; it’s difficult to put into words what exactly happens during this exquisite preparation exercise or what makes it so much fun to watch; perhaps it’s the brilliant accuracy of the artistic server’s ability to position the device’s spout inches from the tiny cup and spray a concentrated and high pressure stream of boiling water while holding the canister upside down, behind his head, and arching his back so that the whole device doesn’t hit the ceiling once he finishes pouring a perfect cup full of water and promptly snaps his wrist back to bring the instrument back to rest without soaking anyone in his audience in scalding hot water; it is, to be sure, a spectacle to behold. The food is served in the traditional “family style” wherein the group orders and consumes all of the dishes which are served en masse atop a rotating platform in the center of the table, which circular buffet allows just enough room for each person’s table setting:a small bowl and saucer, chopsticks and spoon and the aforementioned tea cup—with a little extra room for a bowl of rice, should you request one. The food is served as it becomes available and a good meal is one where everyone is surprised by the seemingly endless encore of culinary delight, and leaves feeling satisfied, stuffed even, while not having actually eaten an entire, singular, meal. It’s like thanksgiving dinner. We were celebrating with Dee, Jack, Nicole, Ann, Nancy, Tommy and Alex. Like any or most attempts at organizing an outing in China, we invited 15, expected 20, and got nine; the only difference, logistically, was that we were only 15 minutes late instead of the customary 30 (on a good day) to 120 (on a not-as-good-day) minutes. During the bus trip on the way out the Xiangzhou we swapped various accounts of our respective New Year’s Eve adventures and reminisced about the semester rapidly nearing its end. At some point I stared out the tall windows of the bus’s rear door lost in thought, as I often am on bus trips, as I watched the Zhuhai cityscape pass by for what was likely one of the last times ever. I started remember my first encounters with people like Tommy and Nancy, appreciating their generosity and helpfulness the first few weeks while I was Growing Up, if you will—learning how to get money, food, soap, and other things—and reflecting on the parts of China I will surely find myself nostalgic or wistful for in the near future: the food, obviously; the language, which, while I did not learn much of practically, continues to intrigue me in it’s grammar and tonal structure to this day; the history and culture or, rather, the sense that in China I have felt part of such a long and vibrant narrative of dynasties, communism, and today’s quasi-capitalist neo-communism, a story beloved, owned really, by all the people I have called friends for the last three months; the imported culture, for better or worse, borrowed from the so-called western world and reinterpreted with Chinese characteristics; while simultaneously thinking about how great it will be and how ready I am to get home and be back on familiar soil once again. It’s been interesting saying goodbye to my friends here, their first question is often related to when I will be back and when I tell them it will not be for a while many of them do not seem to understand just how long it will be before I return and assume that “not this summer” means I will never return. There is, however, a lot of reason to return. I have yet to see Yunnan Province’s beautiful stone forests and everlasting spring, the Three Gorges Dam, or the Terra Cotta Warriors to name just a few of the many attractions both historic and touristy that will one day bring me back to China. It seems unrealistic to spend three months of my adult in a place and not have this drive to return sometime when I have more money and time to explore and appreciate the scenery and aesthetic power of the country. That trip, I’m afraid, will have to wait a long time. This has been a production of the Gustavus Department of Communication and Marketing in association with KGSM Radio and for the final time, this podcast was recorded at United International College in Zhuhai, China. My name is Greg Boone and this is Aural Fixation the Podcast from China. Thanks for listening.…
K
KGSM Student Radio
“It’s safe to say that Charlie Brown would probably find Christmas in China the most vulgar and offensive exploitation of the holiday imaginable,” was my first thought after watching the timeless Christmas feature in which he stars on a brisk—but far from cold—Christmas morning just before calling my family on Skype. The expat bar called “Ryan’s Bar” owned by an irish-canadian transplant in Zhuhai’s Xiangzhou district was hosting an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner event this Christmas Eve for 140¥ (or a little under $20) I thought I was slated to attend with my roommate and some friends of ours. The plan was to leave UIC around 7:30 putting our arrival somewhere in the 8 or 8:30 range depending on whether we took the public bus, a cab, or one of those faux taxi mini-busses; a perfect time to eat my only real meal of the day, I thought. When my roommate, Tommy, and I arrived at the bus stop and met up with our friends the plan slowly and mysteriously changed. My first clue that something was going awry was when Tommy told me the bus I was prepared to board would not go to where we needed to be for the Christmas party. For a little background, I had been to Ryan’s the previous night and took the same bus I was not being told would not take me there as my mode of transit. When my companions began negotiating prices I managed to pick up on enough of the conversation to know they were trying to get to Jiuzhoucheng and not Xiangzhou (where Ryan’s is located) and at that point I knew that where I thought we were going and where we were actually going were in fact two very different places. “Stop,” I shouted, “Where are we going?” When it finally came out, I learned we were not going to Ryan’s but were instead spending Christmas Eve in a KTV or karaoke club called “Seven Eight Nine” at which point I became irritated; I felt deceived and I was still hungry—and getting hungrier the longer we spent negotiating with the minibus drivers * to get a price that was not outrageous—and beginning to realize that my Christmas dinner would be neither satisfying nor delicious. While in transit to the KTV I found myself day dreaming, trying to stay optimistic and take my mind off of how hungry, famished really, I was, and—as I foten do—watching the driver and bracing myself for any and all possible varieties of traffic accidents; I am really looking forward to getting back to road traffic that does not pose such imminent and realistic threats to my life on a regular basis, among other things. The best case scenario, I decided was ending up in Xiangzhou anyway and convincing everyone to go to Ryan’s instead of this mysterious Seven Eight Nine place—“did you know,” someone interrupted my train of thought, “if we had gone to the Seven Bar it would cost us 1,800¥?” I had no idea where this was coming from, Seven Bar was the site of the incredibly over-the-top party I went to back in November where the drinks cost 50¥ for the cheap stuff, we weren’t going there were we? “What are you talking about,” I asked with an air of confusion and irritation in my voice, “we aren’t going to Bar Street are we?” I didn’t know what I wanted but I knew that Bar Street food was expensive if existent and that cheaper food would mean leaving the party for a jaunt into another part of town, “no, we are going to the Seven Eight Nine.” Well that’s helpful, I thought. We were greeted with a red carpet and an entourage of Chinese “Pretty Girls”—young women hired by the club for the sole fact and purpose of looking pretty—in Santa Hats and red coats who blew party horns and popped party poppers all while welcoming us and wishing us Shengdan Kuaile (圣诞快乐)or Merry Christmas. Inside the door is a life-size mechanical Santa singing Christmas songs surrounded by a more and similarly dizzying exhibition of cliché ornamentation putting me into a state of intense sensory overload. It’s worth mentioning here what exactly is meant by KTV or karaoke club, which terms are used interchangeably throughout to describe a multiplex building usually with some kind of discotheque style dance club with hallways of independent karaoke rooms flaking the dance floor which rooms may be rented out for the night to host private karaoke parties separate from the club’s complete with a karaoke machine, tables and two microphones. One of the things that makes karaoke a fun thing to do at say, Patrick’s or any other bar anywhere else in the world I’ve ever been, is the mutually assured ebarrasment among yourself and everyone else in the room, as well as the anonymity of yourself to both the people you’re laughing at and the people laughing at you; in China there appears to be a completely different motivation at work wherein you are in the room to show off and compete your superior singing abilities, against everyone elses, in conquering the most difficult or famous pop songs. Most places have English tunes in their libraries, but not the ones you might expect. Absent from Seven Eight Nine’s lbrary were some of the karaoke standard classics like “Sweet Caroline,” “Beat It,” “Thriller,” and the all important “It’s Raining Men,” as well as the lesser classics from the likes of Steve Miller, Journey, Neil Diamond, and (in my case) The Beastie Boys. There was some Michael Jackson and Price and other favorites or popular karaoke artists. The only thing close to a classic song was John Denver’s “Take me Home, Country Roads,” which I performed, substituting Minnesota for West Virginia—naturally—with extra gusto on the refrain. The penultimate moment, the catastrophe up to which this entire drama has thus far been building, was at the stroke of midnight when this Christmas Eve party—which already felt more like a New Year’s Eve party—erupted in a torrent of celebration for the final arrival, the moment we had all been waiting for, of Christmas Day. The karaoke machine shut down and suddenly the projector was turned off and all I remember hearing was “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” seemingly endlessly repeating over the room’s sound system while the lights changed to red and green strobes and lasers darted around the room; meanwhile the “pretty girls” came back and sprayed glitter infused silly string across the room, popped more party poppers and passed around glasses with which we toasted to the new year—I mean Christmas; I felt like I should have someone to kiss and half expected Auld Lange Syne when, as if it wasn’t bad enough, the DJ began playing an awful, eardrum rupturingly bad techno version of Jingle Bells complete with that awful overdriven high frequency synth so common to Chinese electronic music; I felt my ears just to make sure they were not bleeding. Plans have changed like this on me before, it’s pretty common actually and with two weeks left I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens again, but never before have I felt as much like a bait and switch victim as I did on Christmas Eve. All in all it was a fun night—funny even, in an absurd sort of way—in retrospect, that probably would have been a lot easier to handle if I weren’t so hungry and expecting Christmas dinner. Looking back on it several hours later I have come to the realization that, like Charlie Brown, I believe there is more to Christmas than rampant commercial- and consumerism, something that cannot just be imported into a culture the way Christmas exists in China—dropped, like a child orphaned on a cold winter night in front of a complete stranger’s house—even if you do not celebrate Christmas, the holiday season which may generally be known as “Christmas Time” is an expression of the spirit of a people taking a moment out of their lives to do something, to show their own form of generosity or kindness to another person. Christmas is anonymous donors forking over $1 million to the hundreds of victims now homeless from the tragically untimely apartment fire in Burnsville, or simply taking time to slow down and intentionally appreciate the company of family and friends, or seeing the kindness of others manifest itself in volumes of stories, pictures and memories compiled for a tired friend struggling from cancer during the holidays; these things are quintessentially Christmas. They are the things that make the holiday more than just a celebration day for the devout and pious, rather a holiday that transcends these artificial boundaries of race, gender, politics, even religion and a host of other social constructions, to a higher plenary existence and reverence I wish I could say I experienced first hand this year. * Part of the endless internal debate I have is over the real value or savings of these fake cabs or minibusses, there are some obvious benefits—they are cheaper than a standard taxi, and quicker and more comfortable than an ordinary city bus—but also have their disadvantages—the drivers do not always know where they are going and they are illegal, meaning if they take me to Guangzhou and leave me on some street corner it is my own fault and no one could be held accountable—and what I fail to understand about them is why it usually (or at least seems to) takes a half an hour to negotiate a proper rate among several different drivers, usually settling on the one we started with in the first place. Tommy later tells me the reason we could not take the bus was that the bus would take “maybe one hour” to get to where we needed to go, but when we spend half an hour negotiating the price and it still takes at least half an hour to get where we need to go (often longer as the minibus drivers are not always the best of drivers and [as mentioned supra] often do not even know where they are going in the first place) we are really paying several times a standard bus fare for comfort, which, to me, is like driving to your mailbox instead of walking because driving hurts your feet less.…
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KGSM Student Radio
Welcome back to Aural Fixation the Podcast from China loyal listeners, after a two week hiatus while I was in Beijing we are back with a new episode that I wrote while sitting in one of the Hong Kong Airport’s fine dining establishments and the China Ferry Terminal’s Starbucks. It’s getting close to the end of my semester abroad, and while Gustavus finishes up its final exam schedule, I am just beginning to prepare for mine. There are only three more episodes after this one, and only two more I will write while enrolled as a student at United International College. I am finding myself a bit exhausted from all the traveling and am looking forward to getting back to the old routines and established order of normalcy back home and this episode is a reflection on the last two and a half months I’ve spent here in China in attempt to dissect and identify the overarching ideas that have constituted this adventure, and without further ado I give you Fear and Loathing in Zhuhai, the eighth episode of Aural Fixation’s special China edition. It’s strange to still be wearing sandals so close to Christmas time but Zhuhai weather is a lot like parts of California in that it rarely rains or drops below a brisk 55ºF; the buildings do not have heat, the dorms are not even insulated which makes for some chilly nights and mornings waking up on the rock hard ply-wood board I call a bed because even in the coldest months of the year the weather is still, generally speaking, pleasant to gorgeous everyday. Whenever I check Minnesota Public Radio’s website or see a Twitter update conveying some kind of snow or cold related distress—like road closures or people’s eyelashes freezing together on their way to a final exam—before strapping on my Birkenstocks, I am reminded of just how great being here really is. As with any great adventure though, there comes a denouement point where the novelty of being away gives way to the harsh realities of what was left behind; I’ve begun to realize in the last two and a half months just how important the people, places, and things I left behind are in my life, and have grown to realize just how much I take it all for granted back home. A close friend of my family is sick with cancer and her condition recently progressed to the point where the doctors said there was nothing more they could do to lengthen her life or cure her cancer, and I feel stranded and powerless to give her family and other friends the appropriate support—and while she still has the love and support of her other friends and family, I wish I were not in China right now just so I could see her smile and give her a hug, and the news of her condition came with an amplified effect as a consequence of my remoteness. It is moments like these that make study abroad so valuable. Time and again I am reminded of just how much of an individual or anomaly I really am. It is not just my white skin and blue eyes, nor my superior command of the English language and my funny American accent (all those things set me apart in a more apparent and obvious day-to-day way) rather it is my memories, my personality and experiences that give me identity unique from everyone around me: driving across the barren expanse of parched soil and sagebrush that is the Eastern Colorado wilderness leading, finally, to the majestic snow-capped summits of the Rocky Mountains; walking across the Mississippi River’s Headwaters at Lake Itasca; the fact that I am one of a handful of people in this country who care or even know who Al Franken and Norm Coleman are, or have any—if scant—memory or knowledge of Bloomington Minnesota’s pre-Mall of America days; it’s humbling, in an ironic way, to have these claims to uniqueness. It forces a certain pride or appreciation for what was previously taken for granted—what I assumed or presumed would never have any further significance or semantic value beyond good family memories or a few points for Minnesota History nights at Patrick’s Trivia—while also reminding myself that these mundane feats of life or esoteric circumstances of being Minnesotan have analogues in everyone’s life and how important it is to take pride and ownership in the place I call my home. In all three years of my Gustavus education I have taken classes in math, philosophy, religion, political science and many other fields outside my major, and all of these, in addition to, and to a far greater extent, the courses in my major, have all featured the so-called “aha-moment” where the essence or the bigger, deeper, idea of the course is suddenly revealed through the process of academic discovery, but never in the course of these three years have I learned so much about myself, about what it means to be an individual in a world of 6.5 billion people; never have any of these courses had as much power over my entire concept of reality and sensory perception as the cultural immersion of the past almost three months has had on me. I have always loved traveling—ever since my brother and I first flew to Arizona with our grandparents, seeing new parts of the world and revisiting old destinations to make new discoveries has been a central part of my life—and I have been fortunate enough to see many corners of the world—from Ixtapa, Mexico and Lubbers Quarters and Hope Town in the Bahamas to Antwerp, Munich and Prague and most recently Zhuhai and Beijing, China (to name a few just a few destinations)—but never before have I felt the sensationally uncomfortable culture shock I feel here—handicapped from effective communication with anyone, finding and accessing money, asking for directions and understanding the answers, even basic tasks like reading transit maps are challenging to the point of impossibility and the nearly complete lack of western-style empathy when things suddenly or randomly go awry renders my capacity for self-sufficiency or self-guidance to a state of total nonviability. It’s a terrifying realization to discover you are not invincible but rather are simply unable, and need help in the form of a 24/7 companion, to get a bite to eat or find a bank that will accept your foreign Visa card. It robs you of your spirit and eventually makes you long for that self-surviving personal autonomy you spent the better part of your twenty-something life developing. That simple task of walking to the grocery store or a restaurant and buying or ordering what you need—which you can no longer do because you cannot read the labels or tell the staff what you are looking for, leaving you to surrender yourself to pictures and those products that are branded in your foreign language—suddenly becomes one of the most desired or coveted skills you could ever want at this point; it’s a hard but important lesson to learn that, contrary to what you were told throughout primary and secondary school, you cannot do everything and that in fact to nearly a quarter of the world’s population you are not only dumb but functionally illiterate; it’s a lesson that no amount of classroom instruction, dialectic or so-called formal education can even breach the possibility of preparing you for. It is simply implausible to feel this out of your element, robbed of personal autonomy, without being immersed in an environment so at odds with what you know as real or normal that you cannot function on your own. Studying abroad is not a vacation—much like how sabbatical is not just “time off” for faculty—for students, it is a capstone of a well-rounded education: the self-reflective component of a liberal arts experience, the ultimate exploration of life, humanity and the existential Truths of the world that higher education institutions like Gustavus strive to endow upon their graduates year after year; it is an experience so powerful that it should be required for graduation. I leave China in just over three weeks—leaving behind a country and community that has changed my life in just over three months to go back to the United States, to the real Americana I have so genuinely missed here—with a renewed, refreshed, and regenerated sense of self, ready to take on whatever life throws at me next. I have my final housing placement for the spring now—in Rundstrom and it should be a good home for my last semester—and now am starting to fell that it is just time for me to get out of here and back to normal life, be done with all this; I’ve had the time of my life but now I’ve learned all I can learn, and done everything there is to do here and am ready to get out and get home: drive my car, eat some home-cooked food, drink some milk that isn’t condensed milk, grab some Summit Winter Ale and most importantly fall asleep—really put myself into a deep and healthy sleep—in my own soft, not-made-of-plywood bed with my own blankets that don’t smell of construction debris and humidity and wake up, on my own schedule, warm and cozy in the comfort of home.…
K
KGSM Student Radio
I’ll let the hosts fill in the rundown.
K
KGSM Student Radio
In an oddly serious show, Spence and Conor discuss FCC v. Fox a Supreme Court case argued this week in history, a case which dealt with fleeting explitives. Those with children in the room be aware, this show contains fleeting explitives. Tune in, and enjoy the show.
K
KGSM Student Radio
Here is the audio from last week’s podcast. I apologize for the delay, I was a bit ill and did not have quite the vocal stamina to maintain the podcast. As a result watch for another one later today, as I’ll be recording an episode about Thanksgiving in China. It’s a bit of an injustice to talk about environmentalism or construction and infrastructure development in China without mentioning the Three Gorges Project, for which China has been widely criticized both internally (for a while) and to a much greater extent by international environmental and human rights organizations. The topic, however, is strictly off limits from public debate and at the risk of saying something that might get me deported, I’ll leave it to you the listener to determine the environmental impact of this project. I will note that Peter Hessler’s River Town contains an in-depth exploration of the subject told from his perspective during his two years in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze. A few weeks ago, the construction crews were tearing apart the paver-stone path that runs from the new dormitories to the campus. At first it was just a small square hole, barely wide enough to fit a person in, but each day it got longer. By the end of the week, the hole ran about thirty feet from the construction site at the top of the hill, down the path nearly approaching another, smaller, hole near the campus’ entrance. The dirt dredged up from the hole probably a few feet deep, was piled onto the remaining pathway thus causing a significant disruption in the students’ abilities to walk to class, bottlenecking traffic down to about eight feet of path space for two directions of traffic. The annoyance was easy to get past, but trying to figure out what exactly was going on in the hole was intriguing. Why was it getting bigger, and why was it being dug so deep? Around wednesday this started to make more sense. The construction crew had some kind of runoff stream running through a series of stepped streams down the hill through this tunnel. The stream appears to be coming from the living quarters of the cosntruction site and it seems to be a steady stream. There aren’t many reasons for this consistent of a stream running from a bunker like this, and given the smell surrounding the path, it seems appropriate to conclude it was sewage. There is a similar stream running down the other side of the hill where the sewage runs through a series of channels and tubes, eventually spilling into a pool at the bottom of a short cliff near three manholes and Block One of the dormitories. At the other end of the path there is another construction camp and, running parallel to the driveway leading from the road up to the dormitories, a similar stream running into a giant pool next to the road. The smell on this side of campus is overwhelming to the point where you often need to hold your breath or cover your nose as you walk by. All of this causes some curiosity about China’s environmental policy which, as near as this reporter can tell, has very little regulation. A Gustavus student who was in Shanghai last spring wrote a paper regarding the topic and described it as a problem of enforcement, rather than of policy. According to him, China’s policy has, historically been very strong, and often progressive, on environmental issues. It’s first policy was implemented during the Xia Dynasty some four millennia ago, and modern environmental policy dates back to the 1930s, and since 1971 China has an active record of environmental protectionism, at least on a national level. The problems, however, come about when the implementation and enforcement of these policies is left to the local government agencies. The local agencies are usually dually interested in both upholding the policy and in not enforcing it at all. As a general rule, the municipal government owns, or has a good stake in the health of, the local businesses: and we’re talking big businesses like factories, here. If the new policy, like a pollution or emissions regulation, will adversely affect those businesses, the government is likely to look past or only partially enforce the regulations at play in the law. A good example of this is the recent plastic bag ban which adds an additional fee to any purchase delivered in a thin plastic bag, the kind you might get at a grocery store. The plan is similar to Ireland’s recent ban, and, if successful, could eliminate a significant amount of waste and pollution in the country. Putting this well crafted policy into place, however, has apparently been a bit more difficult. It is definitely the case that when I go to the supermarkets in town I am charged an additional fee of 5 jiao, about seven cents, if I take a plastic bag. I didn’t notice it at first, mostly because I didn’t know how to find prices on some items, but have started paying more attention recently. If I don’t need the bag, I wont take it. But it hasn’t taken hold everywhere just yet. Most places, in fact, will give you a bag without thinking about it, sometimes two. There is a bakery on the BNU side of campus. It is small and crowded, like most places, and bakes all kinds of delicious things including Pineapple bread, sweet bread rolls, and breakfast pastries. I went there one day to pick up a light lunch during my hour off between classes. I picked out an interesting looking pastry with bits of sausage baked into the bread, and a can of Coca-Cola. Most bakeries I have been to offer either a piece of tissue paper or tongs with which to grab your tasty treat, but this bakery had only plastic bags on top of the bakery case that I could use to grab the pastry I want. I found what I wanted and then grabbed a coke from the fridge. I paid my 5 kuai and then the clerk put the coca-cola and the bagged pastry into yet another bag. Apparently the clerk assumed I could not carry both a bag and a coke between my two hands. Consequently I got two free bags out of the deal. Unfortunately these plastic bags are exactly the kind of bag that the ban is attempting to eliminate. These bags have little if any use to most people as they are too small and fragile to carry anything but a small pastry, and so the bags are thrown away because they cannot be recycled, and make me inadvertently part of the problem. This indifference to the environment is counteracted with a seemingly strong environmentalism movement on-campus. There may be a campus policy relating to the matter—most of the policies here are written in chinese and your author would not be able to read it if it were posted somewhere—but there is also a strong movement among the students to reduce waste by turning off lights, printing on both sides of the page, turning off your air conditioner, and other similar acts of conservation. In addition to all of these measures, all of the lights on campus are either compact or standard fluorescents and the students are especially energy conscious because they all pay their individual power bill. (A fact, I should note, I was not aware of until my roommate asked me to pay him 40 kuai for the power.) We recently shut off our air conditioner, and I turn my power strip off when I’m not using it in order to help reduce the impact, and save myself some money. In spite of all this conservation and waste reduction, it seems like there is a significant amount of irreversible damage done to the environment from the projects described above, causing me to calculate the potential net impact of the campus’ environmental policy around zero or lower, it’s as if the school took two steps forward and one step back. In addition to the raw sewage running through the ground, garbage and recyclable material is often littered across the campus, and the construction site has something resembling a small landfill flanking the path and the sewage run-off. The green liquid pooling at its base, dripping down from the heap of garbage bags, clothing, food, styrofoam and likely a plethora of other hazardous wastes above, is unsightly. Several similar pools are scattered in various locations around the construction site, the noxious smell becomes increasingly salient closer to these and their mere presence informs any curiosity as to groundwater quality here. Another landfill lies near the other construction site, and on the side of the road there is a daily exhibition of the emptying of barrels of organic waste into the street, creating a particularly strong and unappetizing odor on the way to the restaurants for lunch. Environmental problems are not exclusive to the campus, and if anything, the campus is doing a better job of controlling it than the rest of the city simply by the fact that the school is at least taking two steps forward. Zhuhai has some of the cleanest air in all of China, but there is still a light haze hanging over the city, the street lamps and city lights have a glow around them, giving the Macau and Zhuhai skylines a sort of halo effect. There is no coal dust clinging to the buildings and visitors from America are not likely to cough up black phlegm on a regular basis, but it is still a little bit harder to breathe, especially on hot days, and looking out from the roof of the campus building the haze is thick and sometimes covers the building tops. In addition to air pollution, the sea is so dirty here that people go to the beach, but no one dares swim. The water in the runoff-stream-fed artificial ponds on campus is not blue, but a brownish color, and this reporter often wonders where the water comes from. Like many things that fall victim to severe pollution, these ponds would probably look nice if the water was clean, but instead are merely an eyesore.…
“Mr. Boone, you are asked to join Professor Kwok, along with Professor Holbrook, Professor Joyce Pfaff and her Husband, and Pat and Bill this evening at 6:30 PM. Please meet them here at 6:20 to take a bus to the restaurant.” I looked up upon hearing my name—I was reading outside of the library on this particularly beautiful day, waiting for Cynthia to go to lunch—to see Jasmine standing just left of center in front of me, “Please invite Cynthia as well.” The whole scene felt like it was out of a movie where the protagonist hallucinates people who tell him to go to certain places for meetings with other hallucinations that convince him to inadvertently do awful things; I felt like I was the protagonist in that movie and this imaginary person was tricking me into going somewhere where I would spend all of my money on a really expensive dinner for 8 that I would end up eating myself. This hallucinatory feeling was made even stronger by the fact that the sun was at a perfect angle to perfectly silhouette her face, making any attempt at seeing her blindingly impossible. Once I got over the surreal effect of feeling like I was in some kind of movie I realized how much of an honor it really is to be singled out for a dinner with the president of the college, and felt, once again, like a celebrity. Six weeks into my time here I still feel very much like a celebrity. There have been a number of odd occurences that have transpired in the last few weeks that reinforce the notion that a tall American guy my age is a rare sight around here. As an example of what I mean by this: I was out buying some things I needed a few days ago and as I was walking back to my dorm a group of high school aged kids stopped me outside of a restaurant and asked me to help them with something. I saw a camera and assumed they wanted my picture, because most of the time that’s all it is. It is still a little odd having people randomly asking for my picture around here but that is not what these kids were after. Their request was actually pretty simple they wanted me to stand there and stare at one of the girls in their group for two minutes while they recorded it on the camera. It had to have been the longest two minutes of my life. Though I can understand why they wanted a video of the only American they’ve ever seen, why they would just have me stand there, motionless, emotionless, and expressionless, is still a total mystery. On the plus side you can probably find a really awkward video of me staring at a chinese girl on the internet somewhere. The dinner went from being at 6:30 to being at 7 and back to 6:30 again by the time we left. Cynthia and I weren’t entirely sure where we were going, except that we had a business card for the place that Bill gave us to give to the driver. We were riding in the back of a minivan, with Professor Holbrook, our translator, riding shotgun and the Professors Pfaff riding in the middle. The trip probably took a little over a half hour, landing us, finally, at a restaurant somewhere near Junco, the giant all-in-one supermarket department store, like Super Target but bigger. We stepped out of the van and into the restaurant, which looked more like a small calligraphy gallery, and made our way up the stairs to the dining room, which felt more like a conference room than a restaurant. The room was a small room, but big for a Chinese restaurant dining room, with a round table in the middle, a mahjong table behind that, a flat-screen television and a computer tucked away in the corner. It had a private bathroom, and there were various pieces of art on the wall. A window looked out over the street below, which fact could only be derived based on the geography of the building as the drapes were pulled shut, and I spent a good amount of the time we were waiting for the rest of the party to get there, and while Holbrook ordered the tea, admiring the décor of the room. The tea was called gongfucha, which roughly translates to Kung Fu Tea (yes, like the martial arts) and is apparently a tea unique to Fuzhou and a couple other provinces. I had it once on a similar outing, and one of the fascinating aspects of drinking tea in China is that it is not just dried leaves in water. That is a significantly inaccurate and possibly disrespectful characterization of Chinese tea in general, but gongfucha in particular. Preparing tea is an art form. Gongfucha in particular has an intricate preparation process that involves pouring the tea fro ma kettle into a cup filled with tea leaves and then pouring the tea into several smaller cups, giving them a sort of “tea bath” like the kind we wash our dishes with at some of the restaurants near campus, and eventually pouring the tea, cup by cup, into a small carafe. It is served in the tiniest cups I think I’ve ever seenand each cup has a small square wooden coaster onto which the cup is placed. The tea tastes good, but I am not sure I could order it again, as its name was something like “Tea for Gazing into the August Moon,” which probably sounds a lot more elegant in Mandarin. As with many things at this restaurant, it wasn’t the taste, it was the experience that made it a great meal. Professor Kwok and his enotourage arrived ten minutes, maybe a little more, behind us, and just after introducing himself, launched into a rich and vivid Chiense history and culture lesson that began with the art in the dining room. Behind us was a large sheet of rice paper on which was inscribed the chinese characters for metaphysics and reality—among oldest characters in the chinese lexicon these characters have a deeper meaning in this work. Metaphysics, professor Kwok told us, stands for the daoist principle of ying and the yang—the same that informs meditation and tai qi practices of balancing fullness—one circle split in two, one side dark, meaning full, and the other light, meaning empty. In the full part of the circle there is a spot of empty, and in the empty a spot of full. It communicates a life in balance, where when you are full, you still have room for emptiness, and when you are empty you have a space for fullness. The other character stood for reality, meaning that this balance, or this work towards balance is an inescapable phenomenon such that when taken together both characters formed a basis for daoist theory. He then turned to the adjacent wall where another sheet of calligraphy hung above a painting. This we were told, was a poem. It was an ancient and beautifully romantic poem about the Yangtze river, and how life is a journey taken much better with a bottle of wine. The painting below it was a beautiful mountain river scene, presumably somewhere in Fuzhou province, where the water approached the cliffs of the mountains and fisherman dotted the water with their boats. The gorges in the mountain were filled with what was either clouds or mist, and a small waterfall emptied it’s contents from the top of a cliff down to the river below. The painting was another example of this harmonization of ying and yang, with parts of the canvas painted and others empty, and its style was similar to other eastern paintings I had seen. The thing that struck me most about the artwork in this restaurant dining room was how rhetorical it was. For full disclosure before going forward I will note that I am not, nor do I claim to be, any kind of any kind of expert on western or eastern art and linguistics; I have been exposed to both and appreciate both but have no training of any kind on either subject. The calligraphy stuck me as particularly because it was turning words into art in a visual way that has no western parallel. In part this is because there a very few words in English that can be written with two brushstrokes but also because of how English functions linguistically compared with Chinese. A single character has no meaning in English except relative to the other characters that together form words, sentences and arguments. A single word could be taken to represent an argument or an idea, but rarely does a single character possess any kind of intrinsic meaning. In Chinese words are embedded into the character and may be recalled and written in this brilliant style simply out the concentration of a lifetime of training in philosophy. Seeing the calligraphy and learning about its meaning was a powerful experience that is difficult to adequately describe. By learning to understand the meaning embedded in the character, they ceased to be words and transformed into ideas with which I could identify, albeit on a liminal level. I felt as though I were being exposed to privileged information, that I was some kind of insider to a piece of the culture that most westerners are not given access; which feeling was further strengthened when our lesson moved from the private dining room and into the museum-like main room of the restaurant. In this room there were several sculptures all carved from solid blocks of jade. Professor Kwok taught us how to evaluate the sculptures, he told us to notice whether and to what extent the stone appears wet or dry, the higher quality sculpture will look wet, he told us. It is difficult to describe in vivid detail what he meant by this, except to say that some of the sculptures appeared to be soaking wet; it was as if they had just come out of the wash, or rescued from a torrential downpour and then placed into this display case, only they were not dripping, nor were they sitting in a pool of water, but somehow the looked genuinely wet. For dinner we had some pretty typical chinese food, I tried duck for the first time but apart from that didn’t try anything too exotic or new, but the food was not what drew us together, it was the conversation. Throughout the meal we discussed American politics, chinese history, contemporary chinese politics and in more depth than I’ve ever been able to discuss it before, the role of the party in the management of economic and political policy. This latter was another point in the night where I felt as if I were privy to elite information. The opportunities for most people my age to learn this kind of information is rare. The most I ever learned about the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, and Deng Xiaoping in high school was that Mao made them happen, and Deng was instrumental in fixing the resulting problems. Distilling Deng Xiaoping’s role in China’s modern development down to simply fixing the problems of the cultural revolution would be like saying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped a few people in the 1960’s. It doesn’t get at the essence of what he did which was transform a country away from a broken and disastrous marxist system into a quasi-capitalist system, putting China on the path to what it is today. His transformational leadership 30 years ago with the “Opening Doors Policy” set the precedent that allowed China to open a western style liberal arts college like UIC in 2008. Would Mao have ever dreamt of this kind of college in China? Definitely not. 30 years ago, would Deng Xiaoping have imagined a school like this? Probably not, but it the link between his leadership and schools like this is clear and undeniable. Hearing this lesson on Chinese history and culture told from Professor Kwok’s perspective—someone who lived through the great leap forward, the cultural revolution and is a participant in China’s emergence to world prominence over the last thirty years, and someone who cares deeply about China past, present and future—carried with it an intensely personal feeling; as if he is opening up to us exclusively, as if we were now part of an elect few who had access to this knowledge, armed with this knowledge apart from the rest of the world, in a league of our own. *** Hearing someone like the president of a college speak is always an interesting experience, especially for an insider to the college. One of the requirements for a President is to have a clear sense of the institution and a strong enthusiasm for its goals. Listening to Professor Kwok speak about the school was like listening to the school itself speak. He spoke about the schools problems, like working with both the local administrative government and the central government, as well as the school’s academic potential as a premier institution in China, which he articulated almost as if it were a dream being realized at long last. Professor Kwok believes in UIC, he believes in the idea of having a premier liberal arts institution in South China and I got the feeling sitting there with him that he believes UIC is a living manifestation of the future of Chinese higher education. It took 30 years for China to transform it’s education away from the ruins of the cultural revolution to what it is today, and it may take another 30 years to go from it’s present state to a system where UIC is the norm. Considering the rapid rate of cultural change in China, however, it is not only possible, but entirely believable that the education system will get to that point sooner than anyone can anticipate. In the mean time, UIC and the education system more generally, has a long way to go before the idea is perfect in practice. Break for Music One of the themes in this series so far is time: everything from massive construction projects to unexpected meetings and the rapid growth of the UIC campus, time continues to challenge me here. Part of the time factor is due to how new the school is. The school opened three years ago, and it’s first class will graduate in spring 2010. The school started with a handful of students, around forty I think, and has grown to a school slightly larger than Gustavus in the last three years. This is the same growth that spured the massive dormitory construction project. It’s arguable that this kind of growth for this kind of institution is good: it’s a good for China to have students going to colleges like this, and this college is a thriving model of the future of Chinese higher education. But a similar argument could be made that this college is, like so many other parts of China, growing too fast. It seems like a good number of decisions around here are made in a haphazard fashion, and that the administrative departments and parts of the academic program have not been able to appropriately mature to meet the needs required of their goals and their constituents. In general it seems like the college has a lack of a clear, singular, institutional vocation—the college’s purpose—and therefore is unable to approach these questions in a more orderly fashion. It seems like some teachers have a different idea of what the course work is supposed to be like than others and some parts of the college have a different understanding of what it means to be an “international college.” Many of the professors seem to have a different sense of the college’s goals, and the students are stretched absurdly thin between eighteen hours of classes, hours of mentor and tutorial work and other commitments around campus, and are almost constantly tied up with homework as a result. Dr. Michael Fitzhenry is the professor of my Aesthetics of Film class which compares with the Video Art course at Gustavus, but with an emphasis on theory and no film production. He’s been teaching in China for the last three and a half years, but before that he was a professor at the Sydney University and did a significant potion of his graduate work in Japan, making his time in the far east pretty significant. I spoke with him about his perspective on the fast paced world that is United International College. “There’s a lot of rhetoric about the pioneering nature of UIC, but in actual fact it really is pioneering. It pioneers an international environment that you can’t get in any other institution, especially an institution in china. It’s also pioneering to the extent that it’s growing on the liberal arts tradition. That’s quite foreign to China, foreign to Asia, I never saw anything like that in Japan.” Fitzhenry is motivated by the school’s foundational beliefs, and he sees some unique opportunities he’s glad to be part of the faculty here, but thinks that the school may be moving too quickly to keep up with its own goals: It’s not that I have a high opinion of it, its more that I’m enthusiastically engaging with it, and if I didn’t have that kind of enthusiasm it really wouldn’t make it worth my while teaching here. I would be looking to move. From my perspective, I’m the first program coordinator, and…the facilities in it are the things we are developing and the opportunity to do that from scratch that is quite attrctive…. Build a TV studio for example…I could live my entire career in a Film department and never be involved in questions concerning the very detailed development of facility. It’s good. And also, I was the first staff member employed in the program,which meant that everyone else in the program was employed with my participation, which is good because I had an idea about all the other staff which means that everyone else was employed with my participation. That’s quite rare as well, it’s not essential, and its not necessary, it’s not that I knew the people before they came here, but the particular skills we can put together and create kind of a local flavor in the CTV program, that’s a good thing, about it being so new. Those are all things that are very attractive, but there are huge challenges, and some of the institutional goals are a bit awry. There are too many tentacles out, I think some of them will be lopped. That sort of happens when any organization starts from an idea and just explodes very rapidly, there are so many ideas emanating out of it and so many things trying to happen that some things just can’t be done. I guess if there’s a complaint to be made it’s that there’s not quite enough forethought. So, OK, all of the ideas are definitely worth trying, but whether there is enough planning involved in it is questionable in some of the things that I’ve seen. Even with the programs themselves; they’re handpicked, these programs not those programs, but whether or not we can develop quickly enough to develop our own syllabus, is in question. It’s a huge financial outlay to build the kind of facilities we need and the reason why we need them is because we are teaching particular kinds of subjects…we’re just recently being asked to look at our curriculum, develop our curriculum. One of the implications of developing our curriculum might be to make the programs a bit more cost effective. The curriculum aims toward a level of professional professionalism, producing graduates that are almost entry level professionals in the film and lighting industry. In order to do that you have to have professional equipment, if you drop that as a design feature of the curriculum, to produce that professionalism, if you redesign the curriculum you could soften all of that, and produce people who are knowledgeable about, and to some extent able to make bits of media but without being professionals. This is a much cheaper option. And more in line with a traditional liberal arts tradition too? It’s what most major universities do, its only specialist film schools that produce on a major level. At some point that aim to be a liberal arts college was articulated but not before. There are good reasons to have a film school in south China, there isn’t one. But there are enough people around here, and enough people interested in film , certainly enough TV stations and there are a couple of film studios operating down here, and to do things with Macau and Hong Kong is always a possibility when we’re so close to them, geographically proximate. To run something on that professional level is a good idea if you can afford it. The question now, at least in the short term, is can we afford it. It’s not a good idea not to be optimistic. I’ve seen some people lose their enthusiasm. When this happens they basically move on. Another manifestation of this is in the students’ schedules. A full-time, degree seeking student takes six courses for a total of 18 hours each week, plus mandatory tutorial sessions and an entire Wednesday afternoon of mentorship through the whole person education office. Absolutely, and that’s another aspect of that curriculum development and also the tentacles. Those ideas, so the idea of whole person education as its articulated through particular kinds of programs that the students are required to engage in throughout the whole four years of their study, adds something into the curriculum that takes away…the thing it’s traded off for is independent study. The ability for independent work, the ability for them to produce something independently from an early stage, or even through out their whole undergraduate study, is dimished because they are caught up all kinds of activities related to whole person education or the general education ethos. We’re still adjusting there. That big load…is common in china. We have our mentor carrying programs and whole person education; in China they have a whole level of also required civic kinds of courses: political science courses or things geared toward the party, the communist party, that are equally time consuming, and then the programs that they do are just as top heavy in terms of contact hours, and independent research goes out the window there as well. Where it meets with the idea of the tentacles is: you have to question, is whole person education as its currently articulated, a tentacle that’s going to get lopped in five year’s time? Or is it something it is going to grow from strength to strength. It appears it has benefits, it has benefits in terms of institutional branding, and because it’s unique in china. That whole person education draws on some rather archaic western university traditions, such as the high table. Again theres that kind of analysis that has to go on, and I’m not the one that’s doing that analysis. I rue the fact that my students don’t have the opportunity to explore independently. As a consequence of this rapid growth, the college has a wide variety of teaching styles, and with teachings coming from both academic and professional backgrounds, a variety of different kinds of teachers that handle their classrooms in a variety of different ways. Fitzhenry comes from an academic tradition, and approaches his classroom the way he thinks his students should expect him to: I have an idea engrained about academic standards. And we are offering undergraduate degrees and, in fact, soon to be offering graduate studies as well. So academic standards is one reason, but the other thing, and it’s the main thing, and I think there is an expectation on the student, when they come to an institution such as UIC, and in any case that when they are taught by foreign faculty…that they are entering a foreign classroom, and I think that it would be dishonest to present them with anything but an English language classroom, because a lot of them have selected, at Zhong Shan, or they’re enrolled, here at UIC, in my courses, because they require the English classroom as a kind of training for their ambition, which for many of them is to go abroad to study. We don’t have such stringent entry requirement, as they would have to enter an American institution or a British one, but if we cheated them also on the English language classroom, by the time they turned up to the other institutions they really wouldn’t be prepared. We aren’t a preparatory school, we’re not preparing, it’s not our rationale to prepare our students for an English language institution—that would be like a foundationary study or some type like this and there are plenty of programs that have that as their mission—but I’m quite mindful of it, and it’s an expectation that I’m quite prepared to live up to. It just fits well with my..I’m from a tradition, in fact I represent a tradition in China—it’s not the American one, it’s the British one—and if I didn’t do that properly, I wouldn’t be the academic I’m supposed to be. He says that if he were to dumb down the material, or have lower expectations it would be cheating the students in a way that parallels with how the professors are meant to discourage their students from cheating. He doesn’t believe in it, and believes it is academically important to pitch the lesson to the top of the class: I just don’t believe that dumbing down classes is a good approach, I think it’s a cheat, in all the senses of that word its a cheat, the thing that we don’t want our students to do. So if they see their professors cheating then it’s a bit rough to pull them off for cheating as well. Anyway, I try, and I think it’s worth trying, worth purusing…. Syndney university is actually a very prestigious university, it’s a world renowned university, it’s an elite university, and one of the implications of it is that it pitches everything to the top student. Of course you can breeze through and pass course at Sydney University just as you can everywhere else, but it’s not where everything is pitched to, most things are pitched to the top 10% of the class. You have to have something for very bright students, otherwise the course is pap. If there’s nothing there, then you are pandering to the students who, and this is true of any institution, may be otherwise motivated. In some ways this may sound harsh. It is very likely that in some cases the students are simply struggling; it’s not that they aren’t trying to be successful, it’s more that they are genuinely interested, but simply having a difficult time with the material. But if you listen to his statement carefully, there is a sense that those student in fact are the top 10%. They are the ones who will ask the questions and seek help outside of class, and they are the ones who will inevitably make the effort to do well in the course. This certainly seems to be the most effective model for running a higher education classroom. Not every professor here relies on this model. It’s hard to say whether they are dumbing down their material, but they do have lowered expectations for the Chinese students in terms of their English ability. Assignments here are expected to be done in English, but the thought of having a second year student writing anything longer than a couple pages is right out for most of the professors. It is difficult to call this a premier international higher education institution when so many professors have such low expectations for their student’s abilities. The college must begin thinking more critically about its goals: adjusting the curriculum and loping off some tentacles to really figure out what its place is, what its purpose is, and what of all the things they are currently doing are important for achieving those goals in order to maintain its relevancy to international education programs in China and around the world. This is something every college in the world that’s worth its salt will struggle with, and it’s something every college needs to struggle with, and I am quite honestly not at all surprised by the struggles facing UIC at this time. It was something I anticipated I would struggle with coming to a school so new, and growing so quickly. I share Dr. Kwok’s belief in UIC, and I share Dr. Fitzhenry’s enthusiasm, and I have no doubt that UIC will someday overcome these struggles.…
K
KGSM Student Radio
Room 409 in Block 4 of the new dormitory complex at United International College is a cozy room sleeping two; the building is so new that it is not even finished yet. It is substantially finished, meaning it will not fall over, and the fundamental pieces of its construction are complete. The windows shut, the doors lock, and all the furniture is installed. The walls are scuffed, however, because a paiting crew has not been around to paint them, and the tile floor in the hallway needs to be finished. The floor in room 409 is finished, but appears as if the college finished construction the moment before moving in the students. The furniture is assembled, but the drawers in the desk, armoire, and under the bed still have woodchips and other construction related debris lying on the bottom. The floor in the room needs a good sweeping as construction worker footprints can still be seen on the tile, and large piles of concrete dust and tile grout sit on either side of the armoire. In short, the building may not look sharp, but it is livable. The room is small and crowded, and with three beds and desks. The other new buildings are still under construction so 409 has an excess of furniture because some of the rooms need to house three instead of the customary two. Two of the beds are bunked and sit opposite the window and balcony door. The two desks perpendicular to the bunked beds are separated only by a water cooler, the kind that might be found in an office, which serves up the only drinkable water in the room. Against the window is another desk and bed that looks into the adjoining room, 411. The concept of adjoining rooms doesn’t work very well as the excessive furniture blocks any and all movement between the two rooms. There is no open flow of traffic betweent the two rooms.411 is a mirrored image of room 409 and all of the furniture is made from the same maple-looking particle board, except the bed, which is really not much more than a sheet of plywood made up with blankets and a mattress pad bolted atop a cabinet like fixture with three drawers and two magnetic doors. Another desk sits outside on the balcony, apparently 411 decided to put their extra desk out there, and it will make for a great place to do homework or talk on skype while the rest of the room is asleep. The bathroom is the first thing seen when entering the room. A frosted glass door separates the bathroom from the rest of the room, and a metallic latch on the inside keeps it closed. Contents of the bathroom include a lockerroom-style shower stall, but with a better showerhead, separated from the toilet and sink by a sheet of the same frosted glass as the door. No curtain, no door, only a sheet of glass just long enough to keep the shower water from spraying all over the sink and toilet. The sink is a plain looking stainless steel basin with a simple faucet. It seems pretty standard and reasonable for a dormitory, but when turned on it yields only a slow trickle of water, if anything at all. The floor in the bathroom is even dirtier than that of the actual room. Made from blue tile, there is a think layer of sandy soot: a mixture of grout, concrete and a myriad of other mystery dusts, covering the entire surface. A large basin sits attached to the wall above the showerhead with highly insulated hoses jutting out from the wall into it. On the front face of the basin there is an oblong shaped object that looks something like a gas gague and a dial on the side with one end marked with a snowflake and the other marked 75°. It is turned all the way to the 75° mark. Apparently this is where hot water comes from. Part of the things still apparently on the list to complete in the building process is getting the water supply working properly. Until Saturday the shower barely squeezed out any water at all, and on Friday it was entirely shut off. Going into monday, the sink’s water pressure still hasn’t really kicked in. Looking out the window presents a picture of the massive construction project that is blocks four and five of this complex. The whole scene contrasts sharply with any kind of construction project in the United States. The site begins right outside the entrance to block 4 and spreads all the way to the hill behind the dorms and is a massive expanse of high piled stacks of lumber, and piles of steel beams and rebar scattered around a large temporary building with a steel roof situated in the center of the commotion. There are maybe a hundred wheelbarrows tainted a greyish color from the cement they are designed to haul. Workers are running around this site, moving wood from one pile of lumber to the other, handing off wheelbarrows and other odd tasks. A buzzing noise can be heard from beneath the central site and a glance in its direction reveals a hardworking construction worker busily welding something. It is difficult to tell what exactly is being welded, but the flash is blinding, even from this distance. The construction method described supra is typical of the work being done around this complex of dorms. The road leading up to the complex is also under construction and there is a high volume of life threatening activity giong on down there including more roadside welding, high pressure spray painting, and trench digging, presumably for the college’s sewage system. For most of these activities the workers are wearing the appropriate protective equipment, welding shields, face masks for painting, closed toed shoes for working with brick and shovels. The casual passersby do not have such luxuries, however, and walk through these areas completely unprotected, unshielded form the noxious fumes, bright flashes of light and flying brick. All of this construction seems haphazard and spur of the moment; as if someone suddenly told the supervisor there needed to be a sewage trench running across the path and that the crew needed to tear up the paver-stone path they just finished lying down to add it. The path running up to block four has been paved, torn up and repaved several times within the last two weeks and the path running from the complex to the campus has been torn up in at least a half dozen different places at various times this week. All of this construction generates a genuine sense of appreciation for the regulations and safety precautions taken back home. Suddenly the idea of slowing down and diverting traffic down to one lane to fix some part of the road is no longer an inconvenience; neither does the idea of having a construction site completely blocked off, and higly secured seem exclusive and mysterious, even things as trivial as “wet paint” signs, alerting the possibility of paint-to-clothing or paint-to-face transfer, or “watch your step” signs, cautioning against immediately changing or uneven surfaces, have a renewed appreciation. China answers the question of why these things exist back home. It is not because people are stupid that “watch your step” signs are put, it is because when casually walking around, say, a college campus, it is easy to simply not notice a storm drain jutting out of the path, or a few missing paver stones amidst the rest of the path. Construction is finished before opening a road because it’s less inconvenient to keep a road closed than to bottleneck traffic through random parts of the road for extended periods of time. Jackhammering slabs of limestone out of the ground is not done outside of a place where people live because the dust wafting into people’s rooms is unhealthy to breathe. The haphazard and hasty manufacture process exhibited at the construction sites is prototypical of the planning and management style at UIC (and possibly China in general?). This week a massive scheduling debacle in the Academic Registry’s office led to the Chinese class for international students to undergo a major rescheduling that involved comparing timetables and figuring out a time that worked for everyone, which, once agreed upon needed to be thrown out yet again when one of the students’ other classes had a similar scheduling conflict. It’s unclear how a scheudling problem like this occurs in the first place, and even more unclear how it isn’t caught until the end of the second week of classes but by the end of the day Sunday, the Chinese class, at least, is still unsure whether it will have one or two hours of class, if any at all, on Monday. Monday rolls around and the Chinese class is interrupted when a sudden barrage of teachers from many different disciplines who apparently are supposed to have a meeting in that room. Ten minutes after class the teacher announces that for the rest of the semester class will be on Monday and Thursday, not Monday and Friday, as was originally the case. Class will be in the same classroom both days, which is helpful as most classes not only meet at different times, but also different places from day to day. The entire concept of time is worlds apart from the American concept of time. All students are expected to be in class, and on time, but meetings outside of class may not be announced until hours before they start, and sometimes are cancelled and rescheduled at the last minute. *** Everything from cosntruction projects to meeting schedules seems to move quickly and randomly here. An article in The New Yorker suggests that this may be a distinctly Chinese style of infrastructure development and not unique to this college. The article, “Fobidden Cities,” written by Paul Goldberger describes the history of Beijing’s urban development. An architecht he spoke with said that “Beijing is incredibly strong in its ability to completely override its own history and yet not surrender its identity.” He describes new construction projects in the city in terms of how it reflects the changing culture of the city, rather than the historical qualities of the city. Old Beijing, he writes, was designed to cater to pedestrian and bicycle traffic. Getting around Beijing in the 1930s, for example would have been difficult by car because Old Beijing “has turned out to be a bad framework on which to construct a modern city.” In stead of trying to adapt the city, or leave it the way it is, as many cities in Europe and the United States do, and protecting the historical layout of the city, Beijing tears up half the city. An article in the most recent issue of the Chinese equivalent of National Geographic shows this kind of development by way of aerial photographs going back fifty years. In many ways, the highly centralized government is the reason things work this way. City planning is a lot easier when you don’t have to deal with the beuraucratic hassle of republican government. When you do not need hours of mind-numbing debate to agnoize over the placement of a new freeway, or the construction of the world’slargest hydro-electric plant, it is a lot easier to get the greenlight to build them. At UIC this means that four dormitories housing several hundred students allowing the school to grow it’s population at an incredibly fast rate were built in just one summer (the plan was six, but four is still better than any school of this size back home). To the uninitiated, a walk around UIC probably doens’t resemble a school that is only three years old. The school has over 3,500 students, and will graduate its first class ever next spring; the rapid development of the college is due to its direct public funding and ability to build quickly. Whereas a similar school in the US might need to raise funds and petition the various constituencies at the college before building, UIC can just build. Update (11/7/2008): On my way back from lunch this afternoon there was a loud explosion coming from the direction of a highway tunnel dig located near campus. I’m pretty sure the people would have been notified if something was going to explode in their neighborhood back home. It’s definitely a learning experience.…
K
KGSM Student Radio
I’ve intentinoally been spending as much time alone as possible this week. Initially it was because I was homesick for the first time since my arrival and I thought I needed some space from the noise and commotion of my normal affairs here. It’s given me time to reflect on this experience, which is now a third finished, and how it has helped me as an individual. After Chinese class on tuesday I had a secondary goal, to practice my Chinese. My Chinese class moves quickly, like everything here, and I sometimes find myself lost in the tones, fumbling helplessly to write down a phonetic pronounciation while the rest of the class presses forward with the rest of the lesson. There are a few phrases Ican say with almost total confidence: my introduction devotees will remember from a few weeks ago, counting and forming complex numbers, handling money, and how to call a waiter, place an order, and ask for the check; oh yeah, and the all important “ganbei!” which serves a clever and crucial role in getting myself and anyone else at dinner mercilessly drunk on baijiu (rice wine). I can also do this rad tongue twister that goes like this: 四是四,十是十, 十四是十四, 四十是四十。 Which translates to 4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40. I’m impressed even if you aren’t. As far as practical skills go, I can order food, yes, but I can’t actually read the menu. When the convenience store clerk asks for ba kaui wu, I know he wants 4.50 yuan, but if I wanted to tell said clerk I thought he missed something, I’d have to foolishly point and gesture at whatever it was until he got the picture; or if all I had to pay with was a 100 kuai note I wouldn’t understand when he told me I needed something smaller. I recognize a few characters, but not enough to read the sign telling me the power in the dorms will be off between 9AM and 6PM tomorrow. Luckily I have kind roommates and helpful friends. It was partly because of these sumblings that I wanted to spend more time alone. I wanted to try fending for myself and mostly I wanted to feel like an individual again. I wanted the satisfaction of proving my ability to live here on my own, to prove that if I had to I could get by on my own. After four weeks of clinging to my friends to interpret menus for me I was ready to cut the cord and take some control back. As it turns out I am doing better than I thought. It’s surprisingly easy to get by with pathetic gestures and broken chinese. I get the impression that it’s almost expected that I will know about as much as I do and little more. This gives me some comfort because at least I’m living up to their expectations , but upon further recflection I realise just how high the expectations are for foreigners back home, and ho much lower it is here. Back home there may be a menu in Spanish, and a few chinese joints that have menus written in Chinese but the general sentiment is that if you’re coming to the US, you’re going to communicate with us in English. Surprising for a country with so much diversity, it reinforces my long held conviction that the WASPy majority in the United States deserves absolutely nothing: no pity, special treatments, or any other kind of “helping hand” in the United States. This is not to suggest that China may not have it’s own problems with its ethnic minorities in relation to the majority population. I have not learned much about the subject, only that China has over 50 ethnic minority groups living peacefully together as one Chinese nation (which fact nearly every student here knows and quickly and energetically recites for me at every opportunity). I am merely making the simple point that it is probably easier for someone who does not know Chinese to live here than someone who doesn’t speak english to live in America. All of this is coming into focus just as the election is winding down. This American Life ran a story about a week ago now about democrats who can’t justify voting for Barack Obama for the simple fact that he is black. The story was a bit upsetting and I’ll admit I coulnd’t take it all in one listen. Here were voters who were willing to sacrifice their entire political agenda to vote for a white man. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I lost a lot of faith in America after listening to that show, and then I realized it was October 23, a day that will forever live in infamy for me. If anyone who knows me has ever wondered where my cynicism comes from, it is from this day. Six years ago on that day Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. A part of me died that day when I was sitting in my world geography class, wearing my Wellstone! T-shirt and holding campaign materials related to a massive rally the following Tuesday, and heard the awful news. After the memorial service and the ensuing fallout from Rick Kahn’s eulogy in particular, I became fixated on the negative aspects of American politics. Politics became revolting and uninspiring. Wellstone left a void in the political landscape that I had yet to see filled. 2008 was different. Both candidates for the Presidency were people for whom I had a great deal of respect. The moderation of John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign combined with his POW experience gave me some sense that McCain was concerned about his country and really wanted to do something about the old school of American politics. David Foster Wallace probably put it best in his profile of McCain for Rolling Stone when he described McCain’s spirit as a politician. Barack Obama looked like a product of the American dream, someone working hard to achieve his dreams. His speech at the 2004 DNC was among the most inspiring political speeches I had heard since Wellstone died two years ago, but the 2000 and 2004 elections on the whole convinced me that American politics was dead. The Bush campaigns’ portrayals of “liberal” ideas as anti-american sent me the message that the United States was closed for business, unless you were already doing business. 2006 six recovered but none of the new leaders from Minnesota or anywhere else were at all inspiring. Attorney General Mike Hatch’s attempt at challenging the Pawlenty administration was a dismal failure, but even worse, it was the third DFL attempt to take back St. Paul that had failed this dismally. It seemed like since 2002 the DFL had lost its ability to put up candidates like Humphrey, Mondale, Wellstone and so many other politicians over the years that were able to captivate voters and instill confidence in American democracy. This year’s election was the first time I felt the passion of Wellstone’s politicophilia on the national stage and the moment I realized this, homesickness set in. I missed my family for sure, and my friends at school. I’ve been living away from home for the last three years so apart from the distance, it wasn’t much different. I call them through skype instead of on the phone because it’s so much cheaper, and I can’t get in my car to go home, but apart from that missing family and friends back home hasn’t been much different for me. What has been different is all of the connections I had to my life back home. The places I went to, the culture I consumed, my daily routine, all of these fundamental parts of my lifestyle and my identity that I have almost no access to here. I’ve been worried for a while now about how I would handle being away from Minnesota for four months. I think I probably have a stronger connection to Minneapolis than most students at Gustavus. It isn’t that there are any deeply rooted parts of my childhood in the city; my grandparents lived in Columbia Heights and my Great Grandmother lived the last years of her life in Northeast, and aside from occasional visits I have no failial connection with any part of the cities outside of Burnsville and to some extent Stillwater. I certainly don’t have any urban roots to speak of. It’s more that there is so much to appreciate about Minneapolis. It’s the culture, the arts, and the almost nationalist pride I feel whenever I shop at the Electric Fetus or see an Atmosphere show at First Avenue. I feel a little cooler whenever I see people here using post-it notes because I know that they were serendipidously invented by a 3M employee, and I know what 3M stands for and where it’s corporate headquarters are. All of that pride mostly disappears when I realize I am the only person here who cares. Why the hell should the Chinese care about where post-it notes come from? Why would someone living in Zhuhai, where iPhones and Black and Decker toasters and a whole plethora of other products much cooler than a sticky piece of yellow paper are manufactured? Why should any of the people here care that I’ve walked on the floor of the club Prince filmed the ending of Purple Rain in, or that I could easily take them on the “Fargo” tour of Minnesota. Suddenly having a signed copy of the new Doomtree album doesn’t seem so cool anymore. This loss of status, loss of identity makes me even more homesick. I miss 2 for 1s at Liquor Lyle’s, biking the greenway from Uptown to the Mississippi river and the rest of the grand rounds. I miss the lake, the clean air, the parks, the people. All of these things define me back home and none of it has any meaning here. I wear my South Minneapolis t-shirt with pride, but know that most of the students I interact with here have no idea where or what “south Minneapolis is.” Every once in a while I’ll spot a student wit han “I heart duluth”or a Gustavus shirt of some kind of apparel from one of the summer programs UIC sends, and I smile and remind myself that I am going home eventually and somehow that helps. Music: All music featured in each episode of this podcast is by Minnesota artists with the exception of a few ambient background tracks produced by Nine Inch Nails. This episode features: Subteranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan Apple (Instrumental), Atmosphere; Gotta Lotta Walls (Instrumental), Atmosphere; Ghosts II, Nine Inch Nails; Always Coming Back Home To You, Atmosphere; Say Shh, Atmosphere…
This week’s podcast will focus on the remakable differences in social behavior I have noticed in my now three weeks here in Zhuhai. I was standing in a supermarket, the one near the bank I use here, a couple weeks ago. I was looking for a few things, including a cheap pair of chopsticks for your room, some peanut butter and maybe some bread. I wasn’t totally sure where peanut butter might be kept or even if I would find any at all in China. I knew it is not a friendly taste for many people outside of the united states, but wandered around trying to find it anyway. Suddenly, right as I grabbed a 1 kuai pair of chopsticks, I noticed a student standing next to me, staring at me. “Hello,” he says nervously, and looking almost starstruck, “where are you from?” he asks. “Mei guo,” I replied, noticing the smile on his face. “You go to UIC?” “Yes,” I told him and then asked, “do you?” “No” he responds, and struggles to find the words to tell you which of the three colleges in the area he attends. “BNU?” I offer. “Yes, yes, BNU. Year one?” “No, I am year three,” “You in Zhuhai, three years?” “No, I have been here only eleven days, I am an exchange student, here until January.” “Oh, ok, see you later,” and he departs, off to continue his own shopping adventure. My interaction with this BNU student is a prototype of my social interactions here in Zhuhai more genearlly. It seems like everywhere I go, people are excited to see me, almost overly excited, to get to know me, learn about me, my home country and what I am doing in China. How long have I been here? When am I leaving? What is my major? Do I play sports? Which question is always followed up with “Basketball?” regardless of how I answer. A whole barrage of questions come down upon me with nearly every person I meet. A high school student this week bumped into me at a restaurant, and did a double take when he noticed I was definitely not chinese, rather I am a 6 foot 4 white guy, probably from America. “SORRY” he almost shouted at me, and the proceeded to leap up and down comparing his height to mine. Earlier this week, I ate lunch with a contingent of first year students from Yunnan Province. There were probably about twelve of them, all around 18 years old, and were standing in a pack at the bottom of the driveway leading away from campus to Stadium Road. I met my friend Rhea at the library and walked over to this group. When the students saw us coming it was as if they had seen the most spectacular sight of their lives. Many of them hid behind their umbrellas they use to shield themselves from the sun, and some of them averted their gaze away from us, and when Rhea introduced us as her friends, a hushed “woah!” could be heard from the crowd. As we walked to the Guandong restaurant Cynthia and I led the charge-even though we weren’t entirely sure where, exactly, we were going-with the crowd a good fifteen feet behind us; as if getting too close would in some way be taken as a sign of disrespect. It’s hard for me to imagine why these particular students are behaving so much differently than everyone else we’ve met thus far. Perhaps it is because of how many of them there are, the crowd creating a groupthink mentality that the Americans are best left undisturbed. Maybe it is just the awkwardness of being 18. Regardless of the reason, the whole situation carried an unexpectedly high level of reverence toward the waigouren, the foreigners. I know many international students at Gustavus, but find myself trying to recall any that are given this kind of instant celebrity status back home. Are there clubs that actively seek out international students because they think they will be more popular to everyone else? Looking back on your experiences, it seems like the international students at Gustavus just sort of fade into the background, as if they are just like any ordinary student on campus. Gustavus easily has more international students per capita than UIC, by a wide margin, and it seems like the average student takes that for granted. It seems like we take it for granted that in any given class we can have the perspective of students from Nigeria, China, Sweden, France, Malaysia and a host of other countries from around the world. I wonder if the UIC students there now are having the same kind of social experience as I am here. Yes, Gustavus does have the international festival each year, and yes, Gustavus does have the Crossroads program, the Sweedish House, ACC, PASO, ICC and the DLC does excellent and commendable work fostering the diversity on campus. But how often do Gustavus students open up their group of friends to complete strangers from the other side of the world. How often do Gustavus students attempt to learn something outside of these formal structures about the lives of the international students on campus? During classes, how often does every single student stop and turn to listen intently to the international student speaking? Perhaps it is happening more than I can see it, or perhaps it is something I will notice more once I return, but in my experience, international students are taken for granted. As if, just like there will always be domestic students, there will always be foreign students. It’s difficult for me to decide which is better, the UIC style celebrity treatment, or the Gustavus style. On one hand I am glad these students have accepted me as one of their own. It certainly makes eating at restaurants easier for me as I have someone to say “fu yu wen!” to flag down the wait staff and get the bill, or order some food. It makes living and making friends at this college much easier, and without them I would probably feel an incredible sense of lonliness with only one other student from my college and a total of 7 other foreigners. On the other hand, being isolated as a foreigner, left to my own devices to actively make friends and draw my own crowd would certainly be less invasive. If I had to join the basketball club, for example, to tell people I liked basketball, I would be opening myself on my own terms, instead of on their terms. In some ways I think I would experience the culture of Chinese higher education better if I were taken for granted, if I did just blend in with my surroundings. I certainly would be experiencing a lot more culture shock than overeating at restaurants because I don’t know to just stop eating if I’m not hungry if I were just another number expected to live up to the Chinese cultural expectations more than I am presently. I would be forced to learn the language on my own, to learn how to get by without any knowledge or help whatsoever. * * * One part of being an American at UIC I am still adjusting to is my ability to draw a crowd. Peter Hessler, in his book River Town discusses the subject of crowds at some length throughout the book. When he first arrived he drew a crowd everywhere he went, introducing himself at nearl every assembly and any other social environment because it was the only way to bring the audience to attention. The crowds, he writes during a discussion of the Three Gorges Project, are “exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average…resident [appears] to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups.” He gives several examples of how this manifests itself in Fuling, the Sichuan city where he was teaching English, and this same concept can still be seen ten years later in the insulated environment of the college campus. There is a sense in which the campus has many cliques, among which there is little interaction. The college really is not much larger than Gustavus, (though it is among three other schools for a large, overall, student population) and yet, it is entirely conceivable to only know about twenty people. My roommate, for example, rarely associates with the students who came to Gustavus this summer, many of them are in the same class and have no idea, or only a fleeting notion of who he actually is, many know him simply as my roommate, and have never seen him and probably do not plan to ever introduce themselves unless it’s through me. My existence here, in some ways functions as a force of unification. My friends are more open to meeting new people if I am bringing them along. Devotees will remember that my roommate claimed his group would be the most popular on campus, simply because I offered to copy edit his blog. This kind of uniquely Chinese group mentality causes me to wonder, however what might happen once I leave. If a mixed cliqué group goes out the a KTV, or to one of the hip bar street clubs, and becomes a regular crew while I am here, will they continue to function this way once I leave, or will I be their only common bond? Is it possible, I find myself wondering, to merge cliqués and form a larger community? This podcast was brought to you, as always, by the Gustavus Communications and Marketing Department, with production support from KGSM Radio. You can also catch my column in The Gustavian Weekly, titled “Letters from Zhuhai,” which contains excerpts form this and other podcasts. My name is Greg Boone and this podcast was recorded right here at United International College in Zhuhai, China. Music this week from Atmosphere and The Plastic Constellations. See you next week. This podcast is now available for subscription in the iTunes store, just click here…
K
KGSM Student Radio
Con-Dawg and Spence-Bruff came back from Fall Break with a vengeance and with some words to say to their massive, worldwide audience. On tap tonight were topics ranging from crazy sports press conferences, prison shanks, signed photos from that a-hole Hitler, and the Radiohead cover band playing next door during the show. If none of those topics grab you, well then, you’re obviously un-American. Enjoy! Biz n’ Bruff…
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