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hollyrinny
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Birthday: 12/27/1981
Interests: Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
-Langston Hughes, from "Theme for English B"
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Member Since:
2/25/2005
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| I'm done. I'm moving.
www.hollyrinny.blogspot.com
Don't even bother reading the post below. It's edited at the other place. | | |
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What do you assume when you see the cooks from the fancy restaurant on the first floor of the building dipping water out of the fountain with a cooking pot? I assumed that they were not cooking with it. It was a sunny day – one of the warmest in a long time – I assumed that they were cleaning something. But there they were, young men in their medium-tall white chef hats lugging this huge 30-gallon pot between them. They dipped with efficiency, and without a second thought, avoiding the pipe system laid in the center of the narrow bed.
Last week I received a Valentine’s themed package from Rhoda and Jill. They sent me stupid kids things circled “Made in China” on the back of every package. I’m glad they did, because my friends here always look at the label and point it out and I’m not sure what they’re thinking when they notice it, but I know that it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve never been to a factory in China, but I’m sure there are some shady ones. China passed Mexico last year to become the exporter of most goods to the US. Yay, we win!!!
On a related note, I like it when Mom sends me stuff from Ten Thousand Villages – intricate paper reed Christmas ornaments and the rolled newspaper potholder - and my friends here ask if she made them herself.
I had to walk a half an hour or so to get to the post office, down some streets I’ve never gone down before. On the way back on a whim I turned up an alley before I got back to the main road. It pointed in the right general direction, and Todd says that there’s always a way out of the twists and turns of China’s back alleys. It was mostly true. I was less than a block away from busy Shanghai Road that I walk every day to and from the office, but it was a completely different world.
I wove between the “bread loaf” vans waiting to take passengers from the long distance bus station, stopping to wait for three-wheeled carts coming threading through, clanging their metal-on-metal warning. There were dirty little noodle shops with three tables, young women squatting over piles of slightly wilted green vegetables. I bought some raw peanuts from a vendor with feed sacks rolled open at the top and pleasantly full of oatmeal, tiny dried round green beans, dried peas turned white and cracked open, cracked corn.
The alley rose slightly, and narrowed, and was suddenly a fully-residential area, and mostly old buildings – three or four stories - and far enough from tall buildings that the sun was slanting in everywhere. People were strolling about in the sunny afternoon; a few were on the purple exercise machines in the tiny cement park area. I wandered. Some tall bamboo, and a few trees had been knocked over by the snow and still lay leaned against a brick wall. Green onions in a tiny raised garden bed were bent and brown broken tipped, but still alive. Beyond the wall I could hear and see the top of the other city, the one where my coworkers waited in the cold office on the twentieth floor.
February 24, 2008
Sunday morning I walked ten minutes down the road to the Mochou Church for the 9:30 service. My body, I remembered (and this after phone conversations until past 1:00 in the morning), can’t sleep much after 8:00. I’ve decided that between the weird theology and how Chinese people are not allowed in, I’m done with the international church. It’s so much easier when I can’t understand the content of the sermon or the songs I’m singing and can just enjoy that vaguely pleasant feeling of unity that comes from sharing a hymnal with an old woman.
Turns out the service started at 9:00, though I was far from the last one streaming in through the gates at 9:20. It was the first time I’d been to this church since September. Innocent little me stumbled into the main sanctuary and the prayer was just ending and the ushers wanted to ask some old women to scoot closer together, but there wasn’t really room enough for me. The place was completely full. I’ll sit outside, I told the usher. It’s too cold! she protested, but outside there were other ushers to direct me into another building and an elevator headed to the fourth floor. The elevator was packed, and I was afraid there weren’t even enough seats in the overflow when we walked through one room completely full and there was another branching off to the left. But I found a place directly beneath the TV in the middle of the room so I could still see the TV in the front of the room. I thought about how if I had gotten here early and not had a chance to sit here with hundreds of others in the overflow section, I wouldn’t have this sense of bigness that I have.
The pastor – a middle aged, round-faced woman, was preaching about the three things Christians are called to. The scriptures were Ps 27:4, Luke 10:42, and Mark 10:21. So there were those things, and I’m pretty sure she was saying, “It’s not about what you eat, right?” but then at the end she still talked about how Christians shouldn’t eat blood (Acts and Leviticus), which is a real issue for many Chinese Christians, especially here in Nanjing where duck blood noodle soup is a local specialty. When church ended and we all surged out of the gates and down the street, and I joined a bunch of others to wait in line for “Soup-bag” snacks (which are somewhere between jiaozi and baozi, with sweet pork juice that bleeds out when you bite into the little steamed balls) . . . and I wondered if any of us there who’d just listened to the sermon were going to order duck blood soup, ‘cause they were selling it in the same shop.
While I was mixing up bread dough in the afternoon, I re-listened to the Speaking of Faith program with Karen Armstrong, “Freelance Monotheism”. She talked about how we should take as much care with our theology as when doing poetry, and as much care in performing our religious rituals as when doing theater. She talked about how the thing that different faiths have in common is not doctrine but the call to practice compassion which then transforms us, the individual. A kind of alchemy, she laughs.
I think about how easy it is to love my roommate, who loved me first. I think of how hard it is to love others, who seem so fine on their own, buoyed up by their own ego and beliefs about the way the way the world is. She sleeps all day. Really. And watches TV. I realize I’ve grown when the guy all self-righteous about his habits (“I don’t watch TV ‘cause it’s a waste of time) on the Chinesepod “World Cup Soccer” lesson sounded silly and narrowminded to me. Or maybe I already had decided since he said soccer was just “跑来跑去(pao lai, pao qu).”
I've had a REALLY hard time opening this site to post. I'm not paranoid, but I almost feel like they're watching . . . ME! Aaaah! Probably not, but it's annoying. A related (and really good) article can be found here http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall And I'm going to start posting on www.hollyrinny.blogspot.com . . . 'til that gets blocked too. At least for now with blogspot I can put pictures up. Sigh.
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What do you assume when you see the cooks from the fancy restaurant on the first floor of the building dipping water out of the fountain with a cooking pot? I assumed that they were not cooking with it. It was a sunny day – one of the warmest in a long time – I assumed that they were cleaning something. But there they were, young men in their medium-tall white chef hats lugging this huge 30-gallon pot between them. They dipped with efficiency, and without a second thought, avoiding the pipe system laid in the center of the narrow bed.
Last week I received a Valentine’s themed package from Rhoda and Jill. They sent me stupid kids things circled “Made in China” on the back of every package. I’m glad they did, because my friends here always look at the label and point it out and I’m not sure what they’re thinking when they notice it, but I know that it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve never been to a factory in China, but I’m sure there are some shady ones. China passed Mexico last year to become the exporter of most goods to the US. Yay, we win!!!
On a related note, I like it when Mom sends me stuff from Ten Thousand Villages – intricate paper reed Christmas ornaments and the rolled newspaper potholder - and my friends here ask if she made them herself.
I had to walk a half an hour or so to get to the post office, down some streets I’ve never gone down before. On the way back on a whim I turned up an alley before I got back to the main road. It pointed in the right general direction, and Todd says that there’s always a way out of the twists and turns of China’s back alleys. It was mostly true. I was less than a block away from busy Shanghai Road that I walk every day to and from the office, but it was a completely different world.
I wove between the “bread loaf” vans waiting to take passengers from the long distance bus station, stopping to wait for three-wheeled carts coming threading through, clanging their metal-on-metal warning. There were dirty little noodle shops with three tables, young women squatting over piles of slightly wilted green vegetables. I bought some raw peanuts from a vendor with feed sacks rolled open at the top and pleasantly full of oatmeal, tiny dried round green beans, dried peas turned white and cracked open, cracked corn.
The alley rose slightly, and narrowed, and was suddenly a fully-residential area, and mostly old buildings – three or four stories - and far enough from tall buildings that the sun was slanting in everywhere. People were strolling about in the sunny afternoon; a few were on the purple exercise machines in the tiny cement park area. I wandered. Some tall bamboo, and a few trees had been knocked over by the snow and still lay leaned against a brick wall. Green onions in a tiny raised garden bed were bent and brown broken tipped, but still alive. Beyond the wall I could hear and see the top of the other city, the one where my coworkers waited in the cold office on the twentieth floor.
February 24, 2008
Sunday morning I walked ten minutes down the road to the Mochou Church for the 9:30 service. My body, I remembered (and this after phone conversations until past 1:00 in the morning), can’t sleep much after 8:00. I’ve decided that between the weird theology and how Chinese people are not allowed in, I’m done with the international church. It’s so much easier when I can’t understand the content of the sermon or the songs I’m singing and can just enjoy that vaguely pleasant feeling of unity that comes from sharing a hymnal with an old woman.
Turns out the service started at 9:00, though I was far from the last one streaming in through the gates at 9:20. It was the first time I’d been to this church since September. Innocent little me stumbled into the main sanctuary and the prayer was just ending and the ushers wanted to ask some old women to scoot closer together, but there wasn’t really room enough for me. The place was completely full. I’ll sit outside, I told the usher. It’s too cold! she protested, but outside there were other ushers to direct me into another building and an elevator headed to the fourth floor. The elevator was packed, and I was afraid there weren’t even enough seats in the overflow when we walked through one room completely full and there was another branching off to the left. But I found a place directly beneath the TV in the middle of the room so I could still see the TV in the front of the room. I thought about how if I had gotten here early and not had a chance to sit here with hundreds of others in the overflow section, I wouldn’t have this sense of bigness that I have.
The pastor – a middle aged, round-faced woman, was preaching about the three things Christians are called to. The scriptures were Ps 27:4, Luke 10:42, and Mark 10:21. So there were those things, and I’m pretty sure she was saying, “It’s not about what you eat, right?” but then at the end she still talked about how Christians shouldn’t eat blood (Acts and Leviticus), which is a real issue for many Chinese Christians, especially here in Nanjing where duck blood noodle soup is a local specialty. When church ended and we all surged out of the gates and down the street, and I joined a bunch of others to wait in line for “Soup-bag” snacks (which are somewhere between jiaozi and baozi, with sweet pork juice that bleeds out when you bite into the little steamed balls) . . . and I wondered if any of us there who’d just listened to the sermon were going to order duck blood soup, ‘cause they were selling it in the same shop.
While I was mixing up bread dough in the afternoon, I re-listened to the Speaking of Faith program with Karen Armstrong, “Freelance Monotheism”. She talked about how we should take as much care with our theology as when doing poetry, and as much care in performing our religious rituals as when doing theater. She talked about how the thing that different faiths have in common is not doctrine but the call to practice compassion which then transforms us, the individual. A kind of alchemy, she laughs.
I think about how easy it is to love my roommate, who loved me first. I think of how hard it is to love others, who seem so fine on their own, buoyed up by their own ego and beliefs about the way the way the world is. She sleeps all day. Really. And watches TV. I realize I’ve grown when the guy all self-righteous about his habits (“I don’t watch TV ‘cause it’s a waste of time) on the Chinesepod “World Cup Soccer” lesson sounded silly and narrowminded to me. Or maybe I already had decided since he said soccer was just “跑来跑去(pao lai, pao qu).”
I've had a REALLY hard time opening this site to post. I'm not paranoid, but I almost feel like they're watching . . . ME! Aaaah! Probably not, but it's annoying. A related (and really good) article can be found here http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall And I'm going to start posting on www.hollyrinny.blogspot.com . . . 'til that gets blocked too. At least for now with blogspot I can put pictures up. Sigh.
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| There was a college student who tried to ski home on highways closed by the snow. The police stopped him. It thought it was a great idea though. I'm more and more enamored with the idea of slow travel. Though a total of almost seventy hours in the stale air of a sleeper bus on WINDY mountain roads between Kunming and Vientiane, Laos was a little much. (To clarify, there were two different trips separated by eight days.)
Someone parked a tandem bike beside the round cement picnic tables in the courtyard of our guesthouse in Vientiane. Later I learned it was a Korean couple biking around Southeast Asia on the thing. People who live in Korea say "couple shirts", among other "couple things" are all a craze. Shoes and bags and stuff. They literally call in the morning and plan the matching for the day. I am always reminded of how my friend Miki threatened to shoot (as in, with a gun) the next guy he sees wearing one half of the Chinese-style couple shirts. If the guy's not doing it willingly (and deserves to die), he says, he's being forced into it by the girl (and wants to die).
The "v"s in Laos the language come from French transliterations of the language and are actually pronounced like "w". It has six tones to Mandarin's four, and would be fun to learn, I think, though I didn't get very far during our seven days there. Vientiane is the capital of Laos, but possibly, we thought, the world's smallest capital city. It took us about five minutes on our rented bicycles to get out to the river, and bump along dirt paths between playing children and shabby houses.
During our two days in Vientiane, when I wasn't on a bike getting burnt, or drinking on tap Lao Beer, I was mostly in the guesthouse courtyard, reading Thomas Merton or the book about China's soft power. It was sweet to read that book, which included lots of examples of how China is cultivating and using China-friendliness in Southeast Asia, while traveling in Laos. There must have been fifty tables at the New Year's Eve party in front of the huge "Culture Center" downtown Vientiane. The large building was built by Beijing. A lot of the "aid" that China gives goes toward Chinese language or cultural study or stipulates contracts with Chinese businesses. The overall message was China's soft power is growing, and that of the US is shrinking, and this is making and will make a difference in the future. I kept saying, to myself and others, "Why isn't the US smart like China is smart?" ZhaoXing's father said it's not like that. The US is still great, he said. Almost every conversation we had ended up in something related to China-US politics. He's well-read, and smart. ZhaoXing says he's also growing wise, though still too pro-West for his son's taste.
One scary thing is that China is damming the Mekong without real environmental impact assessment. The great Mekong was mostly muddy mostly everytime we saw it, but the Namsong River, which runs through HUGE tourist destination TINY Vienviang, was clear and cold and we went swimming there. ZhaoXing and his father (and lots of others, they said) fled Hanoi because of the cold. So we went to Laos, which is the least popular destination for Chinese tourists. There still were lots though, quiet funky couples from Shanghai, and the loud, middle-aged of "car clubs." They were very cute with their identifying magnetic stickers, though I didn't think the big boxy SUV/jeep thing number A09 in the caravan - was very cute. I had a bit of culture shock when I came across a big group of Chinese tourists clustered around the banana pancake (a Southeast asia tourist food staple) stand. They were shouting at each other in such a way that if I didn't understand what they were saying, I would have assumed they were all angry and fighting. But they were just saying normal things like, "Who's pancake is this?" "How many did you order?" "This isn't mine, this is that foreigner's." (An innocent European man had somehow ended up there among them and his bewildered expression was almost as predictable and amusing as the how the Chinese people were identifying him, but not themselves, as "foreigners".)
On Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) Eve, a gang of boys in matching bright red and green t-shirts excitedly prepared a truck for a parade. It was a big heavy truck, with metal gates and thick green tarps for sides. I went out on the little side street outside our guesthouse to look for water. It wasn't yet midnight, but late. The boys - mainly teenagers - were just standing around, but you could feel their excitement, so I sat down to watch. Suddenly, as if at some signal, they turned and bent and faced the knots of the ropes that held the tarp cover in place. The worked for ten minutes or so to undo it all, flip and pull the sheets over the top, fold them up, throw them in the back. They crawled up the ladder of the metal railings, and then into the back. Someone worked to get the cab open, then started and revved the engine. All the boys wore red sashes draped over their matching t-shirts. It took me awhile to make the connection to the holiday. . . at first I thought they might be preparing for a demonstration, or an athletic competition of some sort, the excitement was so great, and why in the middle of the night? When they'd finished and all climbed in and arranged themselves around the edges, bouncing and moving like boiling, they drove off. They pushed against the bars and did slow chin ups in their enthusiasm. One of them waved as the truck drove past.
The next morning they were there on the streets, and another truck or two, too, driving around with cymbals and drums making Chinese celebratory music. I heard them go past at least three or four times, then later we saw them out in front of a small business - was a it a tour agency? - on one of the main streets doing a traditional dragon (or are they lions?) dance. Leaping and twisting at every shout of the music. There was a leader with a whistle who cut them off by closing his fist, like a real band leader. I wondered if they were a club that studied Chinese culture. They didn't look ethnically Chinese. Dan wondered if they were a professional dance club hired out for the first day of the festival.
People in China celebrate by watching the big televised "performance" party. Minority dances, love songs, live comedy, etc. Thin women, glittery costumes, and lots of famous people and lots and lots of warm fuzzies. Some of them are really good. Some of them make you want to stick your finger in your mouth and gag yourself. All of them are well-rehearsed and smooth. The show lasts for hours and hours and everyone who is not out playing mahjong all night watches it. Luckily, they also play reruns, so last night I caught up on some of what I missed. My favorite of the dozen or so performances I saw last night was a reading, set to fake falling snow, sappy music, and a background of footage from the recent snowstorm, about how beautiful was all the humanitarianism that it revealed. They had ten or twenty recognizable faces - mainly actors and news anchors - reading (with emotion, everyone now!) about how it was cold, and people were stuck, but the leaders went to visit, and other people gave food, and there were pictures of soldiers pushing snow with scrap wood. Aaahh. How touching. ZhaoXing says when he watched the CNN report during the storm it was just as skewed to the negative as the Chinese national one was to the positive. | | |
| Grumble, grumble. When I try to follow a link from ZGbriefs.com, I get a white page that says in black letters across the top, "Not Acceptable". Not even the ambiguous, "Problem Loading Page" that pops up when most of the websites are blocked (and then I can get to them using a proxy site). No, no, this is "Not Acceptable" and that's the end. In the past, I've also gotten something about "Access Forbidden." It's slightly unsettling to realize that somehow they can even see through the proxy that I'm using.
Anyway, I love ZGBriefs for China news (thanks Todd!). They deliver a weekly condensation of lots of articles, and most of them good. This article was one of the most exciting I've read in awhile. China getting through modernism (I dream of it) and starting to embrace all the wisdom that they now seem to mostly just pay lip service to (though my coworker Zhang insists it's hidden deep in every person as a part of the collective unconcious). I agree with the author about China being amazinly experimental and can't wait to learn more about the stuff of this Whitehead philosophy.
Here's the article:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id=eda8b7ee-6843-498b-9b6f-125f6c70b513&k=14896
I found my toothbrush this morning, while packing, in the bottom of my backpack. I left it there, and thought, it's actually sort of appropriate that I've been using a complimentary hotel toothbrush for these two weeks I've been at home sandwiched between these other weeks of being awayl. I am thrilled to be going out again. We have a week of meetings and retreatish time in Kunming. I get to meet others from my organization and talk about why we're in China. Sing hymns, gossip into the night with Catherine, cross-stitch with Carol, laugh alot. Then I get to go even warmer, to Hanoi, where I'll meet ZhaoXing and his dad for another week of vacation. Mmmm. | | |
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