Don’t cross the streams!

Just found this in Greg Reihman’s “Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy: A Reconsideration” (BJHP 2012, 1-19):

To put the point more colourfully, one could imagine feeding a manuscript of an anti-Spinozist dialogue into a Searlean ‘Chinese room’ translation device where the rules for the output have been instructed to mechanically substitute ‘li’ for any input of ‘substance’. Although Searle used the Chinese room image to argue against machine consciousness or machine intelligence, the image is apt here, not because his illustration relies on anything about the Chinese language per se, but because Malebranche’s presentation of a Chinese philosopher as a Spinozist indicates that Malebranche understood Chinese philosophy as little as the person in Searle’s famous example understood the Chinese language. Malebranche, on this view, is ultimately arguing against Spinoza and has merely constructed Confucius to play the role of the atheistic, monistic materialist facing the prospect of conversion.

It calls to mind another famous philosophical dialogue:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes)

Flying and lying, and a few moments of disbelief

Sigh. My China summer is almost over. In just over 11 hours, our plane will take off — well, the first of three planes in which we’ll spend 18 hours, not counting time spent waiting in airports. In 36 hours, we’ll be in Toronto.

The Dude and the Kid are looking forward to being home. The Dude wants to play his drums, eat steak and cheese. The Kid is looking forward to seeing her friends and hanging out in hippy cafes. And, I suppose I’m looking forward to stuff too. But unlike my traveling companions, I’m doing less pining for home than anticipatory pining for China. I’ve loved it here, and can’t quite believe that our time here is (for now at least) almost over.

Of course, we’ve been so busy actually *being in China* that I didn’t have time to do all the posts here that I wanted to. So, this is official notice that for the next couple of weeks at least, I’m going to lie a little bit. I’m going to keep writing and posting as if I were still here. Perhaps that will help a bit with the pining.

Besides, I still have much to say about Chinese toilets, and gender roles, and surprising discoveries, and the simple lesson that I learned here about intersectionality. And, once upon a time, I had a post titled “Shanghai: Part 1.” Surely, that demands a Part 2, no? And, after all, this was *meant* to be a pedagogy blog; so, there’s pedagogy stuff coming too. And food! Once I have faster internet, unmediated by a proxy server, at my disposal, I’ll be posting lots of amazing photos of our culinary adventures here.

But first, while we are still here, one last on-the-ground post. A brief one, because I only have an hour or so of premium-priced Shanghai hotel internet at my disposal; and the Kid and the Guy are waiting for their turn. If what follows is a bit choppy and laden with infelicities, it is because my time here is scant, in more ways that one.

Ok. Last time I wrote, I said that there had been a few occasions in the last couple of weeks when I thought “I cannot believe that I’m here.” Those thoughts began with our arrival August 13 in Beijing.

Before I get to the breathtaking stuff, I need to report that Beijing really felt Canadian to us. Weird, huh? Part of it was the quality of light. It turns out that light at similar latitudes is similar in subtle ways that you can’t really describe but which are, it seems to me, undeniable. Nanjing and Shanghai are very much southern towns. But Beijing (literally, “Northen capital”) is China’s great Northern city. The light and the foliage remind me very much of Ontario. And, the urban planning — the width of roads, the lot sizes, the signage — reminded us all of Scarborough. Sounds implausible, I know, but when we made the observation to fellow Canucks here, they agreed immediately. And, the dress code is more Ontario-like as well. Nanjing and Shanghai are affluent, high fashion cities, full of women in the most adorable dresses and high heels you have ever seen. Beijingers are much more likely to be attired in sweats, jeans, t-shirts. Their hair is less coiffed. They seem more like one of your neighbours. So, at first, Beijing just felt really familiar to us. Who knew that our arrival in Beijing would herald a denser series of “I can’t believe I’m here” moments than I’ve ever before experienced?

Here, typed in haste, is an annotated list of those moments (in chronological order):

Sunset on the Forbidden City
The Forbidden City was a short walk from our hotel; so we headed over to scout the location on our first afternoon in town. We didn’t actually enter the grounds until the next day, but it was the first day that, for me at least, was most striking. The Forbidden City is surrounded by a wall and a moat. Old men fish in the moat. Outside the moat, hawkers sell souvenirs and delicious fruit snacks. (My favourite was fresh plums, cut in half, threaded on a bamboo skewer and dipped in molten sugar — like candy apples only juicier. Yum!) From this area, one can see the distinctive rooftops of the buildings within the walls. Just seeing these famous roofs was breathtaking for me. But, as it happened, we got to see them in the best possible circumstance — a gorgeous blue sky and the sun just setting. Before we came to China, we were told that we wouldn’t see a blue sky all summer long. But most of our time in Nanjing and Shanghai was marked by blue skies. Still, whilst we were in Nanjing, folks told us that we wouldn’t see blue skies in Beijing. Not true. Except for one rainy afternoon there, we had nothing but brilliant blue skies for our entire visit. This first afternoon, the sky was as deep a blue as ever you’ll see. As we approached the tallest building in the FC, we wondered why there was an army of professional photographers with their very expensive cameras trained on that building in particular. Then we realized that as the sun was setting, that famous rooftop was becoming jewel-like, resplendent. The next day, we saw tons of souvenir photos of the sun setting over the FC in just this way. It turns out that, when the sky is just right, when the light is just right, the photographers shows up to shoot postcards. We were lucky enough to stroll up at the moment that Beijing photographers wait weeks or months for. And, it was great!

The Great Wall at Mutianyu
I don’t know whether I’ve ever done anything better than climb the Great Wall at Mutianyu. The countryside at Mutianyu (about an hour’s drive north of Beijing) is gorgeous. Sublime mountains and lush forests as far as the eye can see. That setting alone would be stunning. But, of course, you don’t see it on its own. You see it from the ramparts of a centuries-old stone wall that has, over the years, been worn smooth by millions of feet. The wall snakes over the mountains in ways that you wouldn’t think possible if you didn’t see it firsthand. No peak was too high, or too unattainable for those who built the wall to lay bricks there. It is huge and ambitious. Hell, forget about building it; it’s even ambitious to walk it. “Walk” is the wrong word, in fact. I used to think that one walks the Great Wall. Nope. It is a crazy, curving, topsy turvy drunken-Escher staircase that must be climbed. We arrive at 8:30 in the still cool morning air and climb for four and a half hours, going as far in each direction as we can. Even in the cool morning air, we are soon panting, our clothes soon drenched in sweat by the steepness of the climbs. By noon, we are melting. And, it is perfect. The natural scenery, the incredible feat of human engineering, the wonderful athleticism of the wall experience. Everything about it is perfect. And tons and tons of tourists have gone there, but I can’t help feeling as though I’m doing something entirely special, entirely personal as I climb and pant and sweat and feast my eyes on the unparalleled beauty of the area. It is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.

Beijing Neighbourhoods
That afternoon, upon our return, we make our way to a funky little cafe in a more-or-less residential neighbourhood. The kind of cafe that sells hippy handicrafts and keeps copies of literary paperbacks on hand for customers to borrow. A young man in a Daffy Duck t-shirt is about to leave as we arrive. The Guy loves his shirt and points at it, a look of delight on his face, at the exact moment as the young man (I’ll call him DD) points at my tattoo, the very same expression on his face. This seals the deal. And, for the next hour, he’s sitting with us, chatting excitedly, playing us music from his ipod, singing, feeding Molly bao. His English is no better than our Chinese. So, our communication is a mixture of fragments of both languages, hand gestures and drawings — like a super-intense game of charades/Pictionary. This is the longest interaction we’ve had with a Chinese person who doesn’t speak much English and who isn’t somehow affiliated with my Nanjing employer. I feel unbelievably chuffed to have a chance to break bread with this odd, lovely young man. And, I can’t quite believe it’s happening.

A couple of days later, we go on a Google maps-inspired goose chase in which we unsuccessfully seek a particular highly recommended dumpling joint. We never find the dumplings, but we do end up walking through narrow residential alleys, watching people unwind on their own doorsteps, watching the neighbourhood boys roughhouse, listening to the quiet chatting of the old men. And again, I feel touched and privileged to glimpse lives that are just as striking for their similarity to ours as for their differences from ours.

Temple of Heaven
We visit the Temple of Heaven on our last day in Beijing. We’re tired from the Great Wall, and pretty grumpy. We probably should have just stayed in our hotel room, but don’t want to waste our last day in town. So, we go to the Temple. And, the unsurpassed beauty and distinctiveness of the building cuts through our fatigue and ill temper. It is perhaps the most striking building I have ever seen, as true to its namesake as any building could be.

The Sleeper Train
We take a sleeper train from Beijing to the southern province of Guangxi. It’s a 29 hour journey. I’m grumpy because I wanted a soft sleeper compartment, which would have afforded us some privacy, but we could only get hard sleeper cots, which are in bunches of six in a car crammed with many such bunches — all of them open to each other. In retrospect, I’m so grateful it turned out this way. For 29 hours, we hear others’ chatting and laughing, smell their cooking, learn about how people live. And, inevitably, we start to make friends. We’re the only foreigners on the car. These folks — families mostly — travel this way all the time, and they never see foreigners in their compartment (the foreigners fly or take soft sleeper). So, one by one, starting with the little girls and teenagers, people start to visit us. Our bunks become the salon for the whole train. The Kid and I practice our Chinese on our “roommates”. We teach them card games, chat about music, about geography. (“Canada is large and beautiful,” they say. “Is it cold?” “Yes,” we reply, “it is cold in the winters but hot in the summers.” “Really?!” They are astonished. One man says that, ah yes, he used to know this fact, but that he had forgotten it.) The Kid practices Chinese calligraphy with her new friends, collects email addresses for future correspondence. As we finally leave the train, everyone cracks huge smiles and says goodbye to us. An old woman tells me that I have a wonderful daughter. It is the best slumber party ever.

Yangshuo
Yangshuo — or, more properly, the pretty little eco-resort 7 kms outside of Yangshuo where we stay — is the prettiest place I have ever been. The landscape is dense with limestone karst peaks — tall, skinny mountains formed as their limestone erodes. They’re getting taller with time as more erosion occurs. Have you ever seen those funny upside-down “U” mountains on Chinese scroll paintings? I always thought that the Chinese just painted really stylized rather than realistic mountains. Nope. They’re just realistically painting karst mountains. Our hotel is on a little river with gentle rapids in a karst valley. Karst peaks loom around us, shrouded in mist in the morning, glowing orange in the sunset. Holidayers float down the river on bamboo rafts as ferrymen smoking and quietly gossiping with each other gracefully conduct them forward with their bamboo poles. We go for bike rides in the countryside and are surrounded by water buffalo, mynahs, lush bamboo and palm trees, fish farms, free range poulty, an astonishing variety of food crops, little bricks villages with hand pumps, and old women in bamboo hats. The locals sell passionfruit and beerfish and flower wreaths, and are unbelievably warm and friendly. I want to say so much more about this astonishing place, but time presses. Perhaps in a future post… It’s too soon to leave it behind, this slice of heaven we found.

The Dragon’s Backbone
On our last day in Guangxi, we drive for three hours, to the north of the province to the Longji (Dragon’s Backbone) rice terraces — tall mountains improbably terraced with rice paddies (and other mixed crops). Again, there is an hour’s climb up steep, winding steps in the hot son. But the view is worth the price of admission. From the highest vantages, the terraces form a giant backbone, ribs stretching fantastically to either side. Back down at eye level, we see lizards, a snake, a giant colourful centipede, enormous butterfies, moths and other insects, fat hens climbing free. Again, from on high and from closer to the ground, the views take our breath away.

Ok. I am out of time. No time to edit out all of the sentimentality and cliches engendered by our amazing last two weeks in China. Next time I post, we’ll be home. So long, China. You have changed us irrevocably.

Goodbye, Nanjing!

I can’t believe I’m here.

This thought has struck me no fewer than four times in the last ten days. It is this week’s theme. And it reflects as much temporal astonishment as spatial.

I still can’t believe I’m in China. Still – after all this time. Every day, I recall my first tentative mention of the plan to the Guy and the Kid: “Listen, I know this is going to sound crazy, and it probably isn’t going to pan out, so don’t get your hopes up or anything, but I just got the oddest email…” Right up until we stepped onto the plane, I didn’t quite believe it would pan out. And, I still find myself amazed that we’re here. But, now, more than that, I can’t believe that we’re in our final week and will soon be heading home. The time has raced by.

As the clock sped up, so did we. The blog went silent for a bit because, with our return pressing ever closer, we picked up our pace, doing one amazing thing after another.

…which leads to the spatial – or, more properly, contextual – disbelief. But the details of that must wait for my next post because, before I get to the source of my late incredulity, I still have so much to report about our time in Nanjing.

The time in the ex-pat café spent sipping Americanos and debating Gramsci and Chinese urbanization with Steve, the big shot Berkeley prof. The repeated trips to Fuzi Miao (Confucian Temple), where we ate gorgeous street food, and haggled over trinkets and ogled classic Chinese architecture and colourful lanterns from a slow river boat. The terrifying thirty minute chairlift ride to the top of Zijin Shan (Purple Mountain) for a view of Nanjing that encompassed multiple temples – Confucian and Buddhist – dizzying skyscrapers, ocean liners on the Yangtze River, modern town houses and crowded alleys, bullet trains and nuclear power plants.

And, of course, the Yangtze River Bridge, broad and grey, with clean lines and monumental socialist realist statuary. The Russians started the bridge, but left with the plans before its completion. The Chinese completion of the bridge marked a turning point in Chinese construction – and, more importantly, in the Chinese self-conception. In the bridge museum, there is a model of the bridge, complete with tiny cars and people. The Guy finds a mummified lizard who somehow got caught in the diorama. Around it, there are overturned figures and vehicles. We imagine the lizard, suddenly rendered huge, on a Godzilla-like rampage before he finally succumbed to the lack of food and water. When we leave the bridge, there are chickens running through the bushes. The locals teach us how to say “chicken” in Chinese. The Kid takes photos.

And, still more memories from Nanjing – Kun Opera, the opera of the Wu people, the dominant ethnic group of Jiangsu Province. Kun Opera is slower and less colourful than Beijing Opera, the speaking mannered in a way we’ve never heard before, the movements astonishingly precise and acrobatic. The performance we attend has a set piece in which a student and a nun, who are flirting via their zither-playing, take turns inviting each other to sit at the instrument. “Qing zoe,” they each say in turn. And, the Kid, the Guy and I are elated because we learned the phrase in Chinese class. “Qing zoe.” Please sit. For one refrain, we don’t need surtitles.

And the bus trip to Tongli, a pretty canal town from the days when canals connected Beijing with the rest of the country, moving people and goods back and forth. We look at former officials’ homes and gardens, take a lazy boat ride along the canal, and then peel off from the group to visit the Chinese Museum of Sexual Culture. Three thousand year old dildos and Maoist propaganda cheek-by-jowl! And, then it’s a bit of shopping and a quick visit to a Chinese house of horrors – pitch black with dangling things and a costumed figure who leaps out at us periodically, scary! – before boarding the bus for the ride home.

And, the food! The spicy Hunan food with pictures of Mao everywhere! (And, overfed cockroaches too!) Mao was from Hunan. The Mao-themed restaurants always serve the spicy, fatty food typical of the Hunan region. We like it better than the mild, sweet food of Jiangsu and frequent the place regularly. The cockroaches start to recognize us. …And there’s the lovely French restaurant, where we treat ourselves after the typhoon has passed. And, wonderful hummus and zucchini fritters at the cool Turkish café. And, from a cart on the street corner, paper thin pancakes, with pickled cabbage and fried egg and hot sauce inside – cooked before our eyes and wildly delicious for all of 5 yuan (about 84 cents). And a fancy lunch with the CEO at Shanghai Min. A private room in a topnotch restaurant, and a huge lazy Susan offering up duck, abalone, shrimp, pumpkin, mushrooms, mandarin fish, beef, lotus root, noodles, soups, watermelon and mooncakes.

And cocktails on the 78th floor of the Zifeng Tower! It’s the fifth-tallest tower in the world, 2nd-tallest in China. But it’s mostly empty. The Chinese government subsidizes the construction of skyscrapers so that Chinese cities’ skylines will look appropriately modern, but the rent is too high; so, they sit empty. For $17 (100 yuan), you can take the elevator to the 82nd floor of the Zifeng Tower for a view of the city. Or, instead, for a mere $11 (66 yuan), you can go to the 78th floor and have a cocktail. Towards the end of our time in Nanjing, this becomes a regular thing for us.

The Nanjing Massacre Memorial is the most moving thing we see in our final days there. The memorial commemorates the massacre (sometimes called the “Rape of Nanking”) by the Japanese military of 300,000 Nanjing residents, mostly civilians, during six weeks, starting in December of 1937. The memorial is modern and huge, occupying a large city block. It is perhaps the most effective memorial of its type I’ve ever seen. The memorial is many things – a thorough and carefully curated repository of artifacts and archives relating to the massacre, a graveyard (In one hushed enclosure, visitors gaze on a partially disinterred mass grave, now a bone pit, adult femurs piled beside smashed infant skulls.), a meditation room and a peace park with live white doves.

Nanjing University, where I’ve been teaching, is part of the story of the Nanjing Massacre. When the expat Europeans and North Americans who worked at and around the university learned of what the Japanese were doing, the Germans among them, most notably John Rabe, took advantage of Germany’s diplomatic ties to Japan to broker a deal rendering the NJU campus off-limits to the marauding Japanese. Thus, some 200,000 Nanjing residents were saved.

After all of the galleries devoted to the atrocities of the Nanjing Massacre, we come to the section of the museum devoted to Rabe’s Safety Zone. Here, there are photos of rescued Chinese gathered, smiling, under Nazi flags. To say that it is unsettling and confusing to see the iconography of Nazism associated not with atrocity but with rescue from atrocity is an understatement. We are set off-kilter. This is more difficult for me than the naked human bones.

And, how do you go back to cheerful travel writing after a paragraph like that one? Will an ellipsis do? Probably not, but still…

[…]

And, then the exams are done and graded. And one by one the students and professors start to leave Nanjing. Warm goodbyes all-round. Promises to return, to write, to stay in touch. The things that people say to make leaving less difficult.

The Kid writes goodbye notes in Chinese to locals with whom she’s become friendly and gives them out, along with small gifts. “You’re going?” they ask in Chinese. “Tomorrow?” Her closest friend, Marku, the hotel guard, she doesn’t see until the cab is pulled up to take us away. As she says goodbye to him, they both start to cry. I take a photo of the two of them together. The lens is cold from our apartment’s a/c; the air outside is already – even though it’s early morning – hot and humid. Thus, in the photos I take, the camera too seems to be crying. Poetic sympathy.

And now, as I write this, Nanjing is a whole week away, and four times since we’ve departed I’ve thought “I can’t believe I’m here.” I’ll say why in my next post.

Typhoon

A couple of days ago, for the first time in thirty years, a typhoon made landfall in the economic region that includes Shanghai and Nanjing — a massive typhoon. I was weirdly oblivious that it was happening. With the teaching intensity of my gig and my limited access to media, it wasn’t until Chinese class yesterday when our teacher opened class by teaching us the word “tai pheng” (typhoon), along with an accompanying explanation, that I learned that our rainstorm was more than a rainstorm. Indeed, at the very same time as Nan was explaining that 2 million people had been evacuated, and that Shanghai had moved its ships up the Yangtze to Nanjing to protect them, and that homes in the lower lying areas around Nanjing had been destroyed, doors in the teaching building were crashing and windows were breaking.

We’re all completely safe, but it was a good two days of tree breaking, umbrella crushing winds, and of rains that quickly overtaxed the city’s nearly non-existent storm sewers. I got to and from work in a plastic bag, wearing flip flops so that after the slippery 20 minute walk through warm rainwater that came halfway up my shins, I wouldn’t be stuck in wet shoes all day.

Last night, we had a date with some friends to go for Hunan food and then play a few rounds at a local ping pong parlour. (Yeah, baby! We’re playing ping pong in China. I even know how to say it in Chinese — Women da ping pong! How cool is that?!) We weren’t going to let a typhoon stop us. We spent 15 minutes in gale force winds and horizontal sheets of rain trying to hail a cab — a near impossibility even in clement weather — and then gave up and, heads down, burrowed our way through the weather to the hall. We weren’t the only ones. The hall was lively with men in shorts and running shoes playing dazzingly fast, athletic ping pong. We were less dazzling. We showed up soaked to the bone from the storm and left, laughing and worn out, soaked anew with sweat.

Afterwards in our hotel room, the lights flickered but miraculously never went out. Outside the wind howled and the rain pounded.

Today, all day, even as the storm continued, crews were already busy cleaning up the broken trees and felled branches. Older men with no safety equipment climbed tall bamboo ladders leaning against tree trunks and cut dangling branches down with hand tools. On the ground, others used chain saws on whole trees. The rain kept pouring; the wind kept blowing.

And then, at last, it more or less abated.

Tonight, for a treat, we went for cocktails on the 78th floor of the 5th tallest building in the world. It’s just a littler shorter than the CN Tower and a little taller than the Empire State Building, but cocktails are affordable — about $10 each. And, there’s no age of majority in China so the Kid had a Mai Tai! We sat and looked out over the misty, rainy city. As we watched, someone set off a fireworks display in the distance. This happens all the time here. They set off fireworks for no particular reason at all. One of the waiters told us that during the typhoon they could see the chandeliers swinging the building was swaying so much!

After drinks, we and friends went to Nanjing’s one and only French restaurant. We had red wine and salads and mushroom soup and pate and assorted steaks, fish, vegetarian dishes, followed by espresso and whiskey and chocolate mousse, lemon tart, profiteroles… Such a huge luxury after six weeks of beer, stir fries, rice and chopsticks! A great way to celebrate the end of the typhoon.

Morning Commute

As I step out of the apartment, I’m hit by a waft of warm air. In our hotel and at work, there is powerful air conditioning always at work in the rooms and elevators, but the corridors and foyers are downright tropical. Amazingly, one of the elevators is on the sixth floor (as am I). Usually, in the before and after work rush, there’s a wait. (Incidentally, all buildings – and hence elevators – in China have a thirteenth floor. The Chinese hang a lot on lucky and unlucky numbers, but their superstitions don’t involve thirteen.) In the elevator, the walls are covered with ads for local electronics and department stores. One of them features Jackie Chan. A commercial plays on the monitor on the back wall. I exit the elevator and am hit by my second blast of warm air for the day. On the left, there is a couch, a coffee table with a full ashtray on it, and a guard desk. The guard isn’t there. I turn to my right to look for him. “Nie hao!” I smile. He nods, looking slightly disapproving. He’s the surly one. The chubby one, the one with the fauxhawk, and “Ma Ke” (Chinese for “Mark”) are all friendly, though. Ma Ke especially. He really likes the Kid and enjoys practicing his baby English on her while she returns the favour with her inchoate Chinese. Once, last week, when I came downstairs, the one with the fauxhawk had a little wild sparrow sitting on his desk, eating a snack of crumbs he’d placed there for it. In my terrible Chinese, I asked “your friend?” whilst flapping my hands, winglike, beside my face. He nodded and smiled. I’m disappointed none of them are on duty.

The front door, as always, is open. As I step outside, the sun is already unforgiving. This third blast of heat is more extreme than the first two. But it’s nothing yet. Nanjing is one of three so-called “furnace cities” of China. Something about the geography makes them hotter than other cities at this latitude. (Calcutta, for instance.) Throughout July and August, most days the temperature exceeds 30 degrees Celsius. About ten days each summer, the temperature is in the 40s. And, this is a typical summer. By midday, the heat will have the shirts of even native Nanjingers sopping wet with sweat. The men will roll up their shirts and expose their midriffs in search of some relief. The heat never drives women to undress in this way. Even on the hottest days, many of them wear panty hose with their shorts. But, they find some relief under large hats and umbrellas. I too carry a little collapsible umbrella everywhere so that I have it when the heat becomes overwhelming. It’s funny. One night early on in our stay here, I was caught in the rain because, even though we’d only been in Nanjing for a week or two, I had already come to think of umbrellas as intended for sun protection rather than for rain protection. That evening, as I headed out, I thought to myself, “No point bringing the umbrella. The sun has set.” And then it rained, and I remembered what I used umbrellas for pre-Nanjing.

If I turned left, the first business I would see is the Lamborghini dealership housed in the same building as our hotel. But I turn right, crossing the alley that might be a road. Thanks to five weeks in Nanjing, I no longer feel confident in my ability to distinguish between alleys and roads. Cars drive everywhere, even in the narrowest arteries, and act (rightly or wrongly, I don’t know) like they have right-of-way everywhere. The road-alley distinction is a fuzzy one here.

Our first week here, the Kid and I spent twenty minutes sitting in front of the hotel watching an astonishing show in this very alley. For several days there had been leaning against the opposite building three or four used metal dividers of sorts. Each of them had a skeleton of hollow steel square tubes covered with sheet metal. We didn’t know whether they were there because their owner needed them for a project or because they were being thrown out. The night of the “show”, we could hear from our hotel room a loud, persistent banging. When we went downstairs to pick up some snacks at the shop around the corner, we saw three men – two young and one old – a three-wheeled bike with a trailer on the back and a van all engaged in a salvage project. The old man, assisted by one of the young ones, was kicking the crap out of the metal dividers, using his feet and whatever blunt objects he could find to try to hammer and pry the sheet metal loose of the girders. The third man – we later decided that he owned the van and got out of the vehicle when he realized there was no way to drive around the project – watched from a few feet away, his arms folded over his chest. Over about fifteen minutes, the two workers managed to detach all of the sheet metal from the skeletons, to roll the sheet metal up, and to somehow strap everything – steel frames and sheet metal rolls to the bike trailer. Well into this project, an expensive black SUV tried to pull out of the hotel’s parking lot via the alley and, when foiled, began honking. (There are signs at all of Nanjing’s intersections prohibiting honking. One may just as usefully put signs in fish tanks prohibiting swimming. Chinese drivers and cyclists are universally enamoured of their horns.) So, the van guy and the two white women were watching and the SUV guy was honking. A woman – perhaps an employee; she seemed authoritative, but I didn’t recognize her – came out of the hotel, got right up in the faces of the two workers, and began waving her arms and screaming at them. The workers were impassive. No matter how much she gesticulated and screamed – even I could make out that she was threatening to call the police – they ignored her and silently carried on with their task. In any event, once the task was finished, the young guy who’d been helping simply walked away. Could he really have been a stranger who stopped to help? The old guy slowly pedalled away on his bicycle. The yelling woman stopped yelling and went back inside. The fancy SUV and the van both pulled away. In the alley, there was no trace of the metal structures that had been there an hour before.

But it’s weeks later now, and I’m on my way to the university. As I finish crossing the alley, I hold my breath for a second. I’ve discovered that one little expanse of the alley always smells like urine. Then, I’m in front of a row of shops: a massage parlour, a fancy clothing store, an optician, a fancy grocery store (still closed; security metal still covering its plate glass windows), a little outdoor snack stall where they sell drinks and tea eggs and sticky rice steamed in banana leaves (Are they banana leaves? Well, they’re some kind of leaves anyway.) and steamed corn on the cob and a sort of bain marie full of little foods – mostly meat – on bamboo skewers – the skewers stand at attention like a little army. I never see anyone buying food there. I worry that the corn and the eggs are as old as the proprietors, a crotchety couple who take turns sweeping the area in front of their stand with a home-made twig broom and scolding their mean little white dog for terrorizing the grocery store’s customers.

I walk briskly along, dodging e-bikes. Nanjing has a gazillion merciless e-cyclists. The city has a great system of separated bike lanes, but the most aggressive and the most timid cyclists both prefer the sidewalks because there are fewer other cyclists there to get in their way. This makes the sidewalks treacherous to Nanjing pedestrians. They don’t seem fazed by it, but the e-bikes constantly whizzing past so close that I can feel their breeze freak me out. As I wend my way through the throng, I notice a little off-leash wiener dog. Most Nanjingers don’t use leashes for their dogs; so I assume this one has an owner, but I can’t see one anywhere. Could it really be a feral wiener dog? Is such a thing possible? Certainly, Nanjing has its share of feral dogs and cats, but the breeds aren’t usually so exotic. Many of the city’s dogs bite if you approach them, but the wiener dog seems more or less harmless. Nonetheless, for no reason I can discern, one man takes a hate to it. He rounds on another pedestrian, whom he takes for the dog’s owner, and begins gesticulating towards the dog and telling the guy off. The second man, who is clearly not the dog’s owner, adopts the international facial expression for “WTF!?” and strides off. The first man chastises the wiener dog one last time and then carries on. The dog trots along, apparently unaccompanied by any human, unaware that any of this has happened.

Then, there’s the Sichuan restaurant with the stone floors, the heavy wooden tables, and the friendly, patient staff. Then, the guard gate for the middle school. Sometimes, children in uniforms and red sashes emerge from this gate. The Kid tried to get in to take photos one time, but the guard was unmoved by her request. After the school, there are more stylish dress stores, the fancy Hong Kong eatery with the rude staff and the terrible scallion pancakes, and a series of electronics stores – already open and already blasting air conditioning onto the street.

Then, I’m at the intersection of Zhongshan Lu and Guangzhou Lu. “Zhong” means “middle”. It is the first character in the Chinese word for “China”. Like, “Middle Kingdom,” you know? The character for “zhong”, which looks a bit like a squared-off Greek phi, occurs in the logo for the Bank of China precisely for this reason. “Shan” means “mountain”. “Lu” means “road”. There is a mountain in Nanjing, and Zhongshan Lu does head vaguely in the direction of the mountain. So, when we first figured out what “Zhongshan” means, we thought that the road was so named because it’s kind of the main – or middle – road one takes to get to the mountain. We were wrong. “Zhongshan Lu” is like “Main Street.” Almost every city in China has one. This is in honour of Sun Yat Sen, the founder and president of the Republic of China (and, hence, an important historic antecedent to Mao Tse Tung). His seat of government was in Nanjing. He loved Nanjing and was much beloved of Nanjingers. His mausoleum sits atop the mountain. He had several names. One of them was Sun Zhongshan. The street is named after him. Any resemblance to nearby mountains is purely coincidental.

This intersection is one of the major ones in the city. There’s a metro station there, two five star hotels, a high end shopping mall, tons of restaurants, cafes, bars, shops, and an astonishing crush of pedestrians and cyclists (e- or otherwise). It takes three or four minutes for me to cross from the southeast corner to the northwest one, watching all the while for bikes and cars, neither of which have any compunction driving into a pedestrian crossing while pedestrians are crossing. Once across, I slip behind the building with the sushi restaurant and the glass elevator and the “music pub,” and into a narrow alley-road (again, I can’t tell which it is, or even whether the distinction has any traction in China). In the alley, there are fewer bikes and cars. The alley is lined with busy little storefronts – mostly restaurants, dispensing morning bao (steamed white buns stuffed with vegetables or meat or tofu or noodles or red beans – they are to Nanjing as cereal is to Waterloo) from stacked bamboo steamers on outdoor cookers to people on their way to work. Nearby, laundry is hanging from makeshift clotheslines. The Chinese hang laundry everywhere. On sunny days – which are frequent – people bring their wet laundry to the city parks to spread out on bushes to dry. One young woman is crouched down, washing some metal dishes in a basin of water. The alley is teeming with life and thus smells riper than the main intersection. I step carefully to avoid potholes and suspicious looking puddles.

Then, checking first for bikes, I cross the alley and step through a solid metal gate, thereby entering the Nanjing University campus. My point of ingress is a residential area, but it’s sketchier than the student residences. Every morning when I pass by, there is an open, idling garbage truck with an old man shoveling the most vile garbage into it from his cart. Why every morning? I can’t tell. In front of the residences, there is not only the ubiquitous laundry, but also garbage and discarded household objects. Old people sit around on stools. One time, there was a row of empty 500 ml beer bottles on one of the lawns. The area, though on campus, is squalid. Is this where the university’s workers live? Or the students with families? One of the residence buildings here has a picture of two birds sitting together on a sign outside its front door. Does that symbolize married students?

I turn right when I get to the construction area, which is surrounded by a blue corrugated metal fence. Now that there is some (imperfect) respite from the traffic, I notice the clattering of giant cicadas in the wutong trees all around me. They sound as if they each have a set of castanets. All summer long, they have been banging away at those castanets, turning the entire outdoors into a giant, mad, city-sized percussion instrument. After the construction area, there is a huge pile of dirt, covered in red, white and blue striped plastic sheets and itself surrounded by corrugated metal. I guess that they’re building a new residence. The pile of dirt must be what they took out of the ground to dig the basement.

After the sketchy residence buildings, the others are all tidy and orderly – long, low-slung grey buildings, with lots of little air conditioners, laundry lines and covered bike racks. As I come out of the student resident area, I see the so-called “School Supply Supermarket,” which doesn’t have all that many school supplies in fact, but where I did manage to pick up a pretty little manila notebook decorated with Chinglish. In boldface: “I could not resist too much plot…” And then, in regular type: “Pink world divided into three/scorecards align the Christmas/…madness of the times.”

Not far from the School Supply Supermarket is the student canteen, where they prepare dozens and dozens of different Chinese dishes each day – many kinds of dumplings and soups and vegetables. Oh, so many vegetables: eggplant, kale, chard, long beans, bitter melon, cucumber, tomato, potato, sweet potato, chives (which are often as not cooked as a vegetable here), bok choy, other cabbages I don’t recognize. …And tons of meat and poultry dishes and a huge array of fresh fish and shellfish. And, at one table, a mountain of watermelons and woman with a cleaver chopping them into huge pieces for the students. One time, three of us feasted here on dumplings, rice and five different vegetable dishes for eight RMB (less than $1.50). And it was delicious – some of the best food we’ve had in China! The students here eat way better than Canadian university students.

I pass the bank and arrive at the only crosswalk in Nanjing that cars and cyclists actually respect – a wide pedestrian area leading to the southern gates of the academic area of the campus. I nie hao the grey-uniformed guard stationed at the gate, and pass into a verdant avenue of trees and bushes and huge red banners celebrating NJU’s 110th birthday. Now, there are winding paths in little gardens. Old people sit on benches there, many of them with a baby or a child. When the parents go to work, the grandparents take the kids to the park. After the gardens, there’s the stately building housing the international exchange program offices, as well as the offices for the study of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. I don’t know about Macau, but this is attention that Hong Kong and Taiwan would perhaps prefer to avoid. Despite the recent celebrations in Chinese media of fifteen years since Hong Kong was returned to China, and the TV reports about how happy Hong Kong residents are with the transition, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents have taken to the streets to protest the new mandatory “Patriotism Studies” courses the Chinese government has introduced into curricula at all levels of study there.

The next building is another long, low one, most noteworthy for the tribe of feral cats always sleeping on the path beside it. Nearby are empty take-out containers from the food the students brought to feed the cats. They are well-loved, but they do not reciprocate the affection they receive from the students. Do not attempt to pet these kitties!

Then up the hill to the sports fields. They are more or less empty now, but in the evening, when the workday is done and the temperature has cooled a bit, these fields will be crowded with tons of people – little kids, university students, and old people – running and playing soccer, basketball and badminton. Across from the fields are a couple of poured concrete platforms where, at this time of the day, there are always one or two old people dancing or doing Tai Chi. This morning, it’s a single old man. Sometimes, it’s two women. The women always play music on a little portable stereo. Sometimes they dance to it, and sometimes they do Tai Chi – with swords even! (Last night, when we went to the Ming Ruins, there were old people on top of them doing Tai Chi as well.) The next concrete platform is empty in the morning, but in the evening parents bring their kids there to roller skate and play badminton.

Next, there’s another guarded gate – the one for the west end of campus – and then my building. I walk inside and nod to yet another uniformed guard. The air is hot and close and I am damp from my walk in. The elevator takes forever to arrive. There are two elevators in the building, but in my five weeks here, they’ve only both worked at once for about five days. One is always out of order. The one now working was out of order for a very long time. A pizza guy got stuck in it for hours, and it was crazy hot and the a/c in the bum lift didn’t work either. And then one day it was working again and the other one was out of order. The first time I entered the formerly-out-of-order elevator, I saw that the maintenance people had added a small red and pink plastic phone with a cartoon of a bunny on it. The phone was scotch taped to the elevator’s wall. Seeing this phone never inspires much confidence in me, but it’s too hot to hoof it to the seventh floor where my office is. I take my daily leap of faith and, once more, step into the bunny-phone elevator. A waft of cold air hits me as the doors close. My steamy journey to work is done. It’s time to go to class.

Shanghai, Part One — Clean-up Crew

“I’ve seen the future.”

So said a colleague of mine here, as he recounted his experience of visiting Shanghai the weekend just past. Of course, having returned from Shanghai a full week earlier, the Guy, the Kid and I were experienced veterans, nodding wisely in reply.

But later at dinner, the three of us wondered aloud among ourselves what exactly he’d meant by his pronouncement. The Guy and the Kid thought he was being utopian, as in “Shanghai is a city of amazing, colourfully illuminated skyscrapers and bullet trains and astonishing, bright, shiny wealth and luxury. That is how I imagine the future. Hence, having seen Shanghai, I have seen the future.”

Well, maybe. I’m sure lots of people have that experience of Shanghai. For me, it was a different vision of the future, a less utopian one.

I mean, all the Jetsons stuff is there, alright. The bullet train to Shanghai is astonishingly fast and efficient. It travels 300 kph with nary a bump or a jiggle. Inside, in air conditioned comfort, passengers recline in plush bucket seats, electronic devices charging, as uniformed attendants offer tea and cakes. On the screens overhead – movies and reports on the train’s speed, distance from its destination, etc.

But, look out the windows. There, the landscape between Nanjing and Shanghai is 1960s industrial. Big, square, grey buildings. Smokestacks, factories, cramped lodgings with laundry and cooking outside. The occasional hill, and occasionally a small temple on top of the hill. But, otherwise, everything is grey.

This cheek by jowl juxtaposition of the technological advancement and concomitant comfort of the bullet train with the hardscrabble existence of the poor is emblematic of Shanghai. It’s a city of contrasts – old and new, wealth and poverty, East and West.

I’ve never seen such wealth in my life. The rich in Shanghai are very, very rich, and, for them, there are five star hotels, French champagne, Dolce and Gabbana and Jimmy Choo. But the poor are extremely poor.

The first evidence of this is the cheapness of the labour. In general, Chinese litter and spit more readily than most Westerners do. However, the streets of Shanghai (like the streets of Nanjing, and, one presumes, every other Chinese city) are extremely clean because there is an army of poor people always near to hand to clean up other people’s messes. Many of these are salaried workers – either for some level of government or for a private store, etc. These uniformed workers are ubiquitous – constantly cleaning up litter, sweeping, wiping people’s spit off floors. (Seriously. At an upscale mall near our Nanjing apartment, there’s a uniformed old woman with a cloth whose sole occupation is to key an eye out for spit on the floor, and wipe it up when she finds it. Alas, this task keeps her busy.)

In addition to this “regular army,” there are also guerrilla cleaners – unsalaried entrepreneurs who hover near the garbage cans to sort through and remove any recycling. So far as I can tell, I never pay a deposit when I buy a tin of beer or a bottle of pop. So, I don’t think these people make their money by redeeming these things for their deposits. Besides, their huge, always-overflowing carts and bags of recycling are really diverse – not just bottles and tins but broken things of all shapes and sizes and materials. When we first arrived at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport weeks ago, we were astonished to note that the signs on the recycling bins picture not just bottles and cans, but also shoes and umbrellas. At the time, we wondered how we’d know what to put in the recycling and what to throw out. We need not have worried. Essentially, so long as it’s not food waste, the recycling people will take it, regardless of where you put it. Indeed, most areas in Chinese cities only have garbage cans and no recycling bins. But, someone like me who always obsesses about putting recyclables in the blue bin can be confident that any recyclables in the garbage here will be recycled because there’s always a salvager lurking nearby, waiting to sort through the garbage. Indeed, in Shanghai, the Kid, the Guy and I started simply handing our recyclables to these people, who beamed with gratitude for our having saved them the digging-through-garbage step. While we were happy to cooperate with them, it was, of course, difficult for us to feel that we were being very munificent. That’s one of the weird, disturbing, discomfiting things about Shanghai. You can hand a person inconceivably poorer than you your refuse and, as a consequence, receive their gratitude.

But these people – the salaried cleaners and the independent recyclers – aren’t the poorest of the poor. In Shanghai, the very poorest people are those who are physically unable to sort through garbage – very old people, and people with severe disabilities. These people survive by (often aggressive) panhandling – now that I’ve typed it, that term feels too North American for this context, but I’m conditioned not to say “begging”, the term of choice around here. Public areas are full of people with missing limbs, twisted bodies, chemical burns, and misshapen, crying babies, variously pressing themselves upon visitors – especially foreigners – with their metal cups.

I wondered to myself whether an allegedly communist state has a social safety net for such people, and why they aren’t using it. Then, I saw a news report on CCTV about a Beijing man currently facing charges for defrauding the Beijing medical system out of 70,000 yuan of services for his sick wife. On the discussion panel that followed the report, one expert explained that people’s health and senior citizen’s benefits are attached to their province and city of citizenship. China tightly controls internal migration. It is extremely difficult for rural peasants to receive official approval of an application to move to the city. Of course, the cities need the cheap labour of migrant workers; so, they come illegally nonetheless. But, when they get old or fall ill, they fall between the cracks. They can’t afford to go back to their official home, and they aren’t entitled to any benefits in the city. I don’t know if that explains all of it. I have no idea whether the social programs within any Chinese jurisdiction are adequate to provide decent health care and a dignified old age for legal citizens. There are so many people here, and life is (in some respects at least) so cheap, I’d be surprised to learn that social programs are very good. But this is merely a hunch, not a reliable report. What I can report is that even in wealthy Shanghai, it is rare to see a wheelchair or (hence) a wheelchair ramp. It is a country of stairways and narrow streets. Not remotely “accessible”, to use the North American term.

At the train station, we are panhandled by (inter alia) a young man who is missing an arm, a woman who looks 55 but who might be 30 and who is carrying a photo of her severely disabled daughter, and a very old man dressed all in black who has the mien of a proletarian and looks old enough to have been there with Mao from the start.

In addition to the cleaners and panhandlers, there are of course the touts and hawkers. One tout makes the Guy for a likely target and follows us for ten minutes until we shake him. Some hawkers have their wares spread out on the ground – outside the metro, inside the metro, in the train station, at the park, near the museum, lining the streets. They sell knock-off designer sunglasses and purses and watches, kitschy souvenirs, toys – gadgets that convert your shoes into disco roller skates, brightly lit spinning tops, handheld laser shows, extravagantly-shaped foil helium balloons. And animals too! A basket of improbably coloured puppies, a bike overladen with songbirds, baby bunnies and chipmunks, each crammed into its own tiny bamboo cage – the birds appear stoic, the rabbits are overheated and in despair, the chipmunks work to McGyver their way out. Festooning the pet-bike – countless smaller bamboo cages each housing a chirping cricket. In the international language of gesture, the Kid asks the merchant if she can take some photos; he shrugs in the affirmative. He looks as depressed as the rabbits. When the impromptu photo shoot is done, he climbs onto the bike and begins to slowly work his way through the crowd. I wonder how many smotheringly hot Shanghai back alley storefronts house more rabbits and birds and chipmunks (and other things)? How many in Beijing? How many in China?

Somehow, it’s easier to think of all the unseen, overheated animals than all of the sick, the poor, the disabled people. But, it’s very difficult to think even of the animals for very long. The enormity of the suffering, and our helplessness in the face of it, is overwhelming. In the case of the bunnies, of course, there is the additional paradox that the rabbits are bred and kept captive in inhumane conditions because of people’s fondness for them. If Chinese children didn’t feel their hearts soften when they see them, the market would dry up. I’m reminded of that old carnival attraction from my childhood wherein you could insert a coin in a machine and watch a duck or a chicken dance to tinny music. I used to pop one coin after another in the slot, delighting in the duck’s antics. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the duck was dancing because inserting the coin set off a mechanism that ran an electrical current through the metal floor on which it stood. How many children paid to torture ducks, I wonder?

But this is the past. What about the alleged future that one can see in Shanghai? It is most obviously present in Pudong.

Shanghai is more or less divided in two by the Huangpu River. To the west of the Huangpu is Nanjing Road, the French Concession, the Old City, the Bund. Across the river to the east is Pudong, Shanghai’s Mississauga. Pudong is rich – nouveau riche – in a way distinctively Chinese. On a chunk of land jutting into the river and probably occupying not much more than a square kilometre is crammed countless gleaming skyscrapers in implausible shapes – this one is a skewer of multiple illuminated spheres, this one is a handbag. Each of these buildings is colourfully illuminated, usually in multiple trailer park Christmas tree colours, many of them with lights blinking on and off in patterns that create an animated effect. We didn’t get the full force of this at first. We took the metro to the Pudong side of the river before sunset and spent a long time on an abortive effort to find Shanghai’s Sex Museum. The Guy was reluctant, but the Kid and I didn’t want to miss it. Alas, our two Shanghai maps allotted different names to the very same streets, and none of these corresponded with the names on the actual street signs. And, we didn’t want to ask for directions because doing so would bring even more touts on us. So, we spent a long time wandering the streets of Pudong, seeing it in daylight from just below.

Eventually, we gave up and crossed the Huangpu using the so-called Bund Sightseeing Tunnel. I say “so-called” because it is impossible to engage in any Bund Sightseeing in the underwater tunnel. Instead, passengers – six or eight to each automatic, unattended bubble car – are treated to an LSD lightshow complete with trippy sound effects and giant inflatable wavy arm guys – the kind you see at used car lots. Large flatscreens project images of molten lava, space, deep sea weirdness. The effect, I think, is meant to be awe. We just giggled.

Emerging on the west side of the river just as the sun set, we saw Pudong as it wants to be seen – by Shanghai. The sight was literally breath-taking. Pudong may be tacky, but (or maybe “so”) there’s no taking your eyes off it.

We climbed the stairs to the wide elevated promenade that runs parallel with the river for the length of the Bund. There, we were treated to a vista likely unmatched by any city on the planet. To the west, stretches the Bund – the centre of colonial, 19th century Shanghai. Monumental, grey stone buildings such as one finds in Paris, London, Berlin, New York. The only hint that you’re in China is the occasional Chinese flag flying from a rooftop pole where once flew a European flag. To the east is garish, sci-fi Pudong. I can’t think of anywhere else on the planet where one can straddle two such distinct, but equally ambitious, visions – one of a stately empire upon which the sun never set, one of a Buck Rogers future where the party gets started when the sun goes down. The effect is utterly unique, and utterly unforgettable. The promenade itself is a mass of festive people, mostly Chinese, posing for photos, laughing, playing, eating, drinking. And, weirdly, no touts, no salespeople, no panhandlers. There’s no other public place in Shanghai like it. Below us, on the water, brightly coloured tour boats decorated to look like junks sail alongside dark barges.

When we descend the stairs to head back to the metro, we only have to go a couple of blocks before we come upon a large pool of what can only be blood, some unidentifiable shredded animal tissue mixed in with it, in the alcove of a building. One or two people stop and look at the puddle. As they realize what it is, they exchange glances with us. Very briefly, we share in the horror of imagining what happened. But there’s nothing to be done. We hasten our pace. Someone will be along to clean it soon.

At last, the Chinese Room

This blog has more or less become a travel(bl)og(ue), but that wasn’t the original intention. Once upon a time, I had ambitions to do something cool with my teaching in China, and to blog about it as I went. Well, I’m still working on the cool stuff, but haven’t reported about it here. I haven’t reported about how, at first, all the students stood up to speak in class (but it was hot and crowded and the chairs were squeaky; so I told them they could remain seated). I haven’t reported about their tendency to memorize passages verbatim, something that is much more strongly emphasized in Chinese education than in schools in the English-speaking world. I haven’t reported about the lovely red flowers my t.a. made for me to use as participation tokens (when a student participates, I give her a flower; she redeems it for grades), or about hot, humid room that curls paper in one’s fingers and sets everyone a-fanning themselves. (I have a beautiful silk fan that I fan myself with as I walk between the rows of students, feeling for all the world like a teacher from a Tennessee Williams play.) In any event, there is much to report, and I promise to do so forthwith. But for now, I just want to share the super cool thing that my students will be doing this week.

When I first decided to teach here, I debated whether or not to teach Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment. On the one hand, I always teach it in intro classes. On the other hand, it represents Chinese as unintelligible gobbledegook and I wasn’t quite comfortable sharing that representation in China with Chinese students. That’s when I realized that it’s only acceptable to teach the Chinese Room in Canada if it’s acceptable to do so in China, and that my Chinese students could teach me whether it’s acceptable or not.

Suddenly, I remembered another Western philosophical text that trades on a particular representation of Chinese thought, Malebranche’s Dialogue Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher. Since I already planned to teach Malebranche in my early modern philosophy class, it was easy enough to add this text to the syllabus and subject this second Western philosophical representation of China/Chinese to the scrutiny of Chinese students in China.

Well, I taught the Malebranche last week. The students were mystified by Malebranche’s representation of Chinese thought, which was, to them, unrecognizable as Chinese. I’m teaching my other class The Chinese Room tomorrow. And, this week, both classes are going to examine both representations more closely through some in-class groupwork.

I reproduce below the respective in-class assignments. Next week, I’ll report on how they went.

Here’s the assignment for intro:

PHI12 In-class group assignment #1

In his famous Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle describes a “program” that allows a non-Chinese speaker to interact in Chinese, creating the illusion that he is fluent in Chinese. How realistic is it to imagine someone writing (and someone else following) such a program? Let’s find out!

Over the next 45 minutes, work with your group to write a short “program” that will allow me (Shannon) to interact with students in the class in Chinese. Of course, 45 minutes won’t be nearly enough time for you to make me appear fluent. Instead, aim at producing some short, modest interactions. Whatever instructions you write down, I will follow to the letter. (So, don’t expect me to make any assumptions about what you want me to do. I will strictly follow your program, just like a machine.) Other students from different groups will be the ones interacting with me and judging the success of the program.

We’ll spend the last 45 minutes of today’s class “running” the programs. As we do, each student should complete the following questionnaire. (P.S. It’s time to give your group a name that I can use to identify it from now on. So, take a couple of minutes at the beginning of class to decide on a cool group name that you all like.)

Name:

Group name:

1. What was the biggest challenge about writing a Chinese Room program?
2. What difficulties in running the program did you encounter that you didn’t anticipate?
3. Did your experience writing a “Chinese Room” program change your opinion about Searle’s thought experiment? About philosophy of mind generally? If so, how? Explain, using as much detail as you can.
4. Evaluate the success of the other groups’ “Chinese Room” programs (I’ll be sharing these comments on Moodle; so be constructive in your remarks):

Group name

What worked best about this group’s program?

What worked least well about this group’s program?

Any surprises or additional comments?

5. Any further comments about this in-class assignment?Please turn this questionnaire in at the end of class.

And, here’s the assignment for my early modern class:

PHI13 In-class group assignment #1

In his Dialogue Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher, Malebranche represents the Christian philosopher as the champion of the infinite and the immaterial and the Chinese philosopher as the champion of the finite and the material. Despite this difference, Malebranche is convinced that there is sufficient common ground between the two sides for the Christian philosopher to convert the Chinese philosopher to his side. As we discussed in class, however, Malebranche’s representation of “Chinese thought” (or the very idea that there is a single, monolithic Chinese way of thinking) is hardly accurate. Here’s your chance to even the score.

Choose one “Christian philosopher” – either Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, Spinoza (not quite Christian, but close enough), Malebranche, Leibniz or Locke. Now choose one Chinese interlocutor. It could be a Chinese philosopher with whom all of your group members are familiar, or it might be a Chinese student (one of you, or an amalgam of all of you), or perhaps someone else you know – a parent or grandparent. Finally, choose a single topic for them to debate – some topic that the philosopher in question wrote about (and which we’ve studied as a class).

Then, take the first 50 minutes of class to write a brief (5-6 minutes) dialogue between your two characters. The dialogue should explore the similarities and differences between the two characters on the topic in question, and their reasons for holding the views that they do. In the last 40 minutes of class, two members of each group will perform their dialogues.

In addition to helping to write (and perhaps perform) your group’s dialogue, you must complete the following questionnaire. (P.S. It’s time to give your group a name that I can use to identify it from now on. So, take a couple of minutes at the beginning of class to decide on a cool group name that you all like.)

Name:

Group name:

1. Who were your dialogue’s two characters? What topic did they debate?
2.  What contribution did you make to your group’s dialogue. (Be specific. Provide as much detail as you can.)
3.  Comment on your fellow group members’ contributions to the assignment. Did some work especially hard? Some less so? Who was helpful? Who wasn’t? Provide as much detail as possible. (Your answers to this section will be kept strictly confidential.)
4.  What was the most important thing you learned in the process of creating and, if applicable, performing your group’s dialogue?
5.  Any further comments?
6.  Evaluate the other groups’ dialogues (I’ll be sharing these comments on Moodle; so be constructive in your remarks):

Group name	Who were the characters in this dialogue? What topic did they debate?	What was the best or most interesting thing about this dialogue?	What could have been better? How?	Any further comments for this group?

Please turn this questionnaire in at the end of class.

For those of you who prefer the travel(b)log(ue), never fear. Next time, I’ll report on our trip to Shanghai, a city of astonishing contrasts.

Chinese puzzle box

Today was the last day of the teaching week, and it was a good day. This morning, the sky was actually blue — the first blue sky I’ve seen in China. It turns out that when the sky is blue in China in the summer, the sun occupies about half the sky and beams down unremittingly. It’s hot and bright and kind of wonderful, so long as you don’t have to do any real work.

At today’s faculty meeting, they fed us Pizza Hut pizza — faintly sweet with the mildest hint of five spice powder in the crust. Otherwise, very plausible. The only thing besides the five spice crust that betrayed its etiology was the corn on top. Yup, Nanjingers sure do love their corn.

I went for coffee with a colleague originally from Calcutta who has spent the past twelve years in North Carolina. His accent is a perfect cross of an Indian accent and a southern drawl. One of my students has an accent that’s half Nanjing and half Chicago. “Yo, what up?” is his usual greeting. I am falling in love with hybrid accents.

Tonight, SIE welcomed its students and faculty with a “band party” at the local “music pub.” There were posters everywhere advertizing it. We all three went. The Guy was late because he had to go to the 14th floor to mime to the front desk that none of our key cards were working; we were yet again locked out of our room. The door is a bit of a hybrid itself. There’s a mechanical lock, and the door handle itself performs different functions depending on whether you pull it down or upwards. On top of this, there’s a key card; when you tap it on the door, other mechanical things happen. In combination, it’s a pretty complicated puzzle; ergo, the instructions on the inside of the door for locking, opening, etc. Alas, instructions in Chinese. So, we’ve been working through the combinatorial possibilities on our own. It thus took a while to discover that there really is something wrong with our key cards. The Guy had already spent much of the afternoon trying to persuade the desk staff of this fact. This was his third trip.

The band party was in a trendy bar full of neon and white leather corner couches and cool lighting and futuristic chandeliers and hip Western drinks. Cold Stella and Corona and Guinness. (And, inevitably, Tsingtao — both cold for the foreigners and room temp for the locals.) The snacks were all — more or less — Western. Fries and ketchup, a dish here commonly shared over drinks, like nachos or wings. The places that serve fries have special plates for them with a little well for the ketchup. The fries are basically McDonald’s fries, but slightly undercooked, and served at room temperature. The other snacks: five spice popcorn and peanuts lightly scented with (what else?) five spice powder.

There were small balloons and glow-in-the-dark bracelets, and games. Well, one game really, in which young men prowled the room trying to trade bracelets with young women who’d caught their eye. If the woman accepted the advance, the couple was whisked to the stage. Once all the couples were arrayed in a row, there was some kind of ritual embarrassing of them, followed by a game of strength in which the young men had to do squats with the young women astride their backs. And then they played the game again, young women screeching and hiding behind the couches, or dragging their friends out from behind them.

The cool butch woman in the control booth — one of very few such women we’ve seen here — was indifferent to the game, scanning through car ads and the Chinese version of Facebook on her laptop.

And, there was a band. An awesome band, whose name I will probably never know. And karaoke. And surprisingly impressive displays of rap and break-dancing. And, just as impressively to someone accustomed to North American bars, smoking of cigarettes.

And dancing. They think it’s exciting or hilarious or something when their professors dance. So, when I got onto the dancefloor with the Guy, there were actual woos. But not as many as when the weirdly handsome Berkeley prof got up to sexy-dance with his preternaturally beautiful Russian wife. Damn Californians. Woo!

A good band party.

As we left the bar, we spied a couple of old women selling lotus fruits, which I’ve been dying to try. The Guy handed one of them 10 yuan and received in return a bundle of lotus fruits tied with a bow and placed in a plastic bag.

You’ve probably seen lotus fruits before in dried flower arrangements. You know that weird, fist-sized funnel thing with the big holes on its surface? Well, that’s lotus fruit and its seeds are a popular snack food here. You pick the seeds out and eat them raw, leaving the holes behind.

I really wanted to love lotus fruit seeds, but alas I didn’t. They’re kind of waxy and hard and bitter and cardboard-like all at once. I ate a few seeds and then wasn’t quite sure what to do with the remaining lotus fruit.

Just then, we passed a skinny, leathery old man who looks the spitting image of Gandhi. We’ve passed him several times on the street over the past week. He’s perhaps one of the poorest people on the planet. He was lying in an alcove trying to sleep, covered with a thin brown blanket, and fanning himself with an old magazine in search of relief from the impressive heat.

Maybe it was a terrible idea, but I thought, these people all seem to love this food, and he’s probably hungry. Why don’t I just give it to him? So I slowly approached him and very quietly greeted him, “Nihao, nihao.” He didn’t look up; so I simply placed the bag of lotus fruits beside him on the ground, whereupon he began to get up and to speak to me in rapidfire Chinese, with animated gestures. He seemed to want me to take the lotus fruit back and made as if to follow me. Of course, I couldn’t take it back, in case I was misinterpreting his meaning. You can’t give food to someone who needs it and then take it back if you’re not 100% sure that’s what they want. But he was agitated, really quite agitated. I kept saying, “No, it’s for you, it’s for you.” And then, I turned and walked quickly towards the hotel, gazing straight ahead, hoping that I hadn’t wronged him somehow. I think it was an ok thing to do, but man did he seem agitated.

At almost the very same spot on the sidewalk yesterday morning, I had an equally confusing exchange with a Buddhist monk. As we passed each other on the sidewalk, I let my gaze linger on him for a few seconds. He immediately approached me and pressed a small gold-coloured metal object in a red envelope into my hand. “You are beautiful, you are beautiful,” he repeated in reply to my quizzical look. And, then he withdrew from his pouch a small exercise book. “Jiming Temple, Jiming Temple,” he said. “Oh, yes. I’ve been there!” I replied. He pointed to a line in the book and said something in Chinese. Taking his meaning, I wrote my name on the line with the pen he offered. Then he said “how many people? How many people?” “For what?” I asked. He wrote “1″ in the relevant column. And then, to the right of that, he wrote the price. 200 RMB. “Oh, I don’t have that much,” I replied. 100 RMB, he wrote. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t have it,” I replied. (I really didn’t. I was down to 80 or so yuan.) I pressed the metal object back into his hand. “You are beautiful. You are beautiful.” Out came a bead bracelet. “No, no. I’m sorry.” I replied. He smiled broadly, “You are beautiful, you are beautiful.” “Xie xie,” I replied, “Thank you, thank you” and hastily took my leave.

In general, I’m actually kind of enjoying not speaking the language. There is a kind of privacy and calm that comes of being unable to engage in smalltalk, being unable to eavesdrop on people on the bus. Have you ever read or watched True Blood? The protagonist, Sookie, is able to read people’s minds. Their thoughts come unbidden to her in a loud, overwhelming torrent. But she can’t read vampires’ minds. So, she likes hanging out with vampires. It’s quieter. I get that.

But, sometimes, quiet won’t do, and mime isn’t much better. Sometimes you need to know what the old man you’ve disturbed wants from you. Or the monk. Fortunately, the Kid, the Guy and I start Chinese classes on Monday.

A couple hundred feet from our hotel, we were stopped in our tracks by a car driving in a circle on the sidewalk while the street vendor’s little dog ran before it, looking slightly distressed. Everything here is interesting, and much of it is unintelligible.

Even the most basic communicative success is a kind of victory. Back at the hotel, there was a note on the counter of our kitchenette:

Sir:

The inconvenience. caused to you really. feel shy, Lock sometime looks. tor professional master repair again, now the door into the card can be used, the key also to you. thank you for your understanding and support!

A door opened, a puzzle solved. Time to call it a day.

Chinese Buffet

Ah, so much has happened since I last wrote.

Let’s see. Well, there was the first faculty meeting on Sunday. A dozen or so faculty, all from different disciplines – one prof per discipline. We’ll be having regular faculty meetings. This reminds me of college life in the 19th century. Some years ago, I was researching American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s education. In that capacity, I spent some hours leafing through the Harvard College papers from his cohort. I was charmed by the minutes from faculty meetings, in which all of Harvard’s professors would meet and discuss student issues. These days, we rarely meet to discuss our students, and we hardly ever meet across disciplines. There is something quaint and old-fashioned about being part of the SIE faculty.

The evening after the meeting, SIE staff, faculty and families all went to a local restaurant for a welcome dinner. The restaurant was housed in a huge ultra modern, very high-end, shopping mall that houses such labels as Dolce and Gabbana and Gucci. The restaurant was on the seventh floor, which also boasts a multi-plex cinema that shows both Chinese and Western films.

We sat on traditional Chinese wooden stools around four huge, round tables with lazy susans in the middle, Nanjing opera (different from Bejing opera) playing in the background. Each table was already spread with massive platters of crayfish, duck (the head is the best part, they say!) and assorted pickles and salads. Honestly, I think that the food on the tables when we arrived was likely enough for a full meal, but no matter. Once we were all seated, an army of waiters began delivering a steady stream of local delicacies – duck blood soup, lion’s head soup (no lions were harmed in the making of the soup – alas, the same cannot be said of ducks with respect to the duck blood soup), both steamed and pan-fried meat dumplings, spare ribs, chard, spinach, okra, cabbage and preserved duck egg soup, crispy tofu, sea bass, a sizzling platter of spicy eel, silken tofu and egg yolk, BBQ pork, soy beans and pork wrapped in soft pancakes, countless other meat and vegetable dishes, pitchers of freshly squeezed orange and watermelon juices and endless supplies of beer.

This was our first proper “family style” meal, and I was surprised by the size of our plates. In Canada, we dish Chinese food onto large plates and then focus on our own plate throughout the meal. Not so in China. You eat family style meals off small plates, which requires you to keep returning to the lazy susan for reinforcements. And, what chaos! With ten hungry people at the table, inevitably someone else starts turning the lazy susan while you’re still dishing your chard. And the food is simply brought to the table as it’s ready. There are no courses, no pause between deliveries. Since (as I later realized) our hosts were trying to impress us with their munificence, this meant that there was never adequate room on the table for the food that kept arriving. The servers started piling dishes upon dishes. Hong Ping kept pouring beer and opening more beer bottles in the most theatrical, innovative ways – this time with a chopstick, this time with another beer bottle. Pouring quickly and right into the middle of the glass so that the foam overflowed onto the table along with all of our waiting tools – plastic gloves for the crayfish, chopsticks, soup bowl, soup spoon, individual napkin packets for multiple clean-ups and for any trips to the restroom that might be necessary. (Chinese washrooms don’t have toilet paper. Everyone carries a little packet of Kleenex with them for their restroom visits.)

I usually eat vegetarian, but couldn’t resist trying the crayfish, sea bass and eel. They were all wonderfully delicious (even though, in my clumsiness, I got more crayfish on my skirt than in my stomach), but especially the eel, which was tender, sweet and unctuous. The Kid was more disciplined than me and kept (more or less) vegetarian. Her very favourite dishes were the cabbage and preserved duck egg soup, the okra, the chard, and the spinach. For the Guy, it was all about the crayfish and spare ribs.
Predictably, when the meal was done, there was still enough food left on the tables to feed the whole group twice over. Clearly, our hosts were keen to communicate their wealth and generosity. While I was impressed by the spread, I was anxious about all of the uneaten food left on the table. The Kid rescued some dumplings. An SIE staff member scooped up a whole platter of uneaten crayfish.

Outside on the street as we walked back to our hotel, old people in rough clothes were bent under yokes bearing at each end large baskets of lotus fruit, which they tried to hawk three for 10 yuan ($1.70). Others swept the sidewalks with homemade witches’ brooms.

The streets of Nanjing are way cleaner than I thought they would be. In North America, one hears so much about spitting and smoking and hygiene problems in China. In fact, I’ve seen no more spitting or smoking here than in Canada. The only difference is that Chinese smokers smoke pretty much everywhere – in university buildings, in non-smoking sections in restaurants – and no one tries to stop them. Despite the claims in the travel guides that Chinese people shove rather than queuing, I’ve seen plenty of patient line-ups and very little in the way of shoving. The streets and sidewalks are clean and tidy, and (unlike Canadian sidewalks) completely free of dog shit.

There are really only two problems with Chinese sidewalks. First, they are completely overrun by e-bikes and occasionally even motorcycles. They occupy full lanes of the roadways, but also spill over onto the sidewalks, which they barrel along at top speed, honking to warn pedestrians of their approach. Indeed, our first night in China, as we arrived from the airport, we noticed a number of road signs picturing a trumpet with a prohibitive diagonal line through it. “No trumpets?” we joked. “No jazz? No reveille?” And, then I understood, “Ah! No honking! I get it.” Beside us in the van, Lixiang wryly observed, “It doesn’t help.” He was right. The car and e-bike horns are a steady chorus, even in the quietest neighbourhoods. Chinese drivers and cyclists prefer to ignore right of way and barrel ahead, leaning on their horns to make sure everyone gets it. The sidewalks offer no respite. But no one seems to mind. Children and small dogs run loose, and pedestrians and cyclists alike stare at their phones instead of the oncoming traffic, and yet, somehow, it works. Everyone gets where they’re going.

The army of cyclists is a sight to behold. They all wear normal street clothes – for many, this means high heels and long, flowy dresses, for others the attire is more utilitarian and stereotypically communist. There are very few helmets. What helmets there are tend to be disco-era motorcycle helmets, not cycling helmets at all. More common are large plastic visors – like a cross between a card dealer’s shade and a welder’s mask, surgical masks, and bandanas tied over the riders’ mouths and noses. Many e-bikes have large mittens vaguely resembling oven mitts attached to the handlebars, presumably to protect the riders’ manicures. Some riders wear special removable fabric sleeves on their arms to protect them from dirt. Others slide their jackets on backwards, over their chests instead of their backs. A large minority of cyclists double passengers on their bikes – on purpose-built seats, or on fenders or, apparently, in very mid-air. Others have special contraptions to carry their wares, sometimes as large as whole sheets of plywood. And, when they arrive at their destinations, Chinese cyclists park their bikes right on the sidewalk. When you’re not ducking out of the way of a moving bike, you’re steering around a dozen parked ones.

The other problem with Nanjing sidewalks is the lack of storm sewers. Despite the fact that the region experiences heavy rain for two months of the year, the streets aren’t designed to handle the rain. When it rains, the water pools inches deep on the sidewalks, soaking pedestrians’ shoes and pant hems.

But, lord, the rain is spectacular. Yesterday, on the way home from teaching, I was caught in the rain. Astonishing, shattering, end-of-the-world. People clustered under awnings as if watching a parade. E-bikes with two riders under rain capes – four legs, one head – chimerae! I had taught Aristotle’s physics earlier in the day. He says terrestrial motion is downwards. Not in Nanjing. Here, rain falls horizontally. Later the same night, after an fancy dinner in the elegant New Era Hotel (a dinner, that despite the topnotch ambience and service and the generous, gut-splitting servings of delicious food, cost about $25, all in, for three of us), we stepped outside just as the sky opened up again. Umbrellas inside out, instant puddles, sheets of lightening and crashing thunder. The next day, back to the same old heat and humidity. The rain is the only respite.

Monday morning’s class, the room had no air conditioning. Crazy hot in a small room crowded with 40 bodies. Everyone sweating buckets after ten minutes. They all pulled out fans, or devised them out of notebooks. They stood up whenever called upon to speak. Squeaky chairs. Terrible, terrible chalk that breaks at the least provocation, but (inexplicably) the best chalk brush I’ve ever used. All the students Chinese; but two or three with distinctly U.S. accents. Most of them natives of Nanjing, home to visit their families. Many of them are from Rice. I asked why. Two answers mooted: “Rice students love Philosophy” and “Rice University loves Nanjing students.” I countered, “What does Rice have against Beijing students?” and the whole class broke into laughter.

I was back in my office after class when the building went dark and silent. Power outage. No a/c. Headed to lunch, I bumped into the Guy and the Kid wandering the neighbourhood. We made our way to a little spot around the corner with no English writing but a very friendly young man smiling and waving us in. Four tables, two occupied by the family who own the business. We ordered by pointing at things. A huge delicious (star anise and chilli flavoured) soup — way too much for us — of noodles, veggies, tofu and (accidentally, but these things happen; hell, they *keep* happening!) chicken, a big bowl of rice, a big bowl of veggies, three 500 ml beers and a Coke came to 60 yuan ($10). Our crockery arrived sealed in cellophane. We were served by the whole family. Brother cooked, grandma poured our boiling water (They serve boiling water here rather than ice water due to pollution), sister and mother took our money. Little brother played nearby — weirdly, with a toy often sold as a souvenir of Canada’s first nations community. I puzzled over this and then realized that most of those toys are made in China. I guess some fall off the lorry.

Next class was in the same room. A/C still out. Ten minutes into class, Ma Fei reported that there was an air conditioned room available for us to move into. We moved. However, it was already occupied by another class, but they were strangely compliant and simply moved to the back of the classroom as we moved to the front. For half an hour they watched me lecture, looking bemused. Then they left. The next morning, as I rode the elevator to my office, Lixiang got on and announced, “We’ve lost both classrooms. Somebody took them.” Oh, China!

Yesterday, I broke down and bought an Americano at the local Starbucks knock-off. Inside, a large table of businessmen was smoking, sharing fries and ketchup and drinking green tea. The burger menu features some great examples of Chinglish: “Hamburg steak signs, Pig carotid row Hamburg, Farm Chicken Hamburg, Grilled Bacon Hamburg, Pastoral Hamburg.” Pastoral Hamburg made me think of Beethoven. (Could it be a veggie burger? Hard to say. Tonight, at a local restaurant, the Kid and I gave the server a note requesting vegetarian dishes. She nodded and returned with chicken and beef.)

So many other things – too many to remember, but I don’t want to forget them. Cicadas louder than power drills, giant, elegant, long-horned cockroaches, playful Chinese magpies and swallows. The old women who practice ballroom dancing in the square each morning as I pass by on my way to work. The pretty dresses, so many pretty dresses. Young women who look like real-life paper dolls or Barbies – as if they were dressed by 8-year-olds who want to pile all of their pretty things on them at once. And the women’s legs! Why didn’t I know that Chinese women have the most beautiful legs in the world? It doesn’t matter how old or young, skinny or fat the women are – their legs are all perfection, shapely and lithe. But that’s the only generalization I can make about Chinese appearance. As I search the faces on the street, I see many shapes, many distinctive features – I suspect a dozen or more ethnic groups are represented in these crowds – Han, Nepalese, Mongolian… Such variety! (I’ve learned that, except around Beijing, home to Mandarin, most Chinese speak one language with their family and another one in public. And the Hunan and Manchurian students I’ve met don’t like Nanjing food — too sweet and mild. There are many Chinese cuisines.) And, in this context, I feel so weirdly British. Like I should be wearing a pith helmet and linens. Like a colonist.

And, what else? The kindness and generosity. “I like you very much” and “You are beautiful” are common utterances. After the grand dinner above, I thanked our host. “I am so, so, so, so, so happy you enjoyed the meal,” she replied, beaming. This morning, when I arrived at work, my employer gave me a beautiful silk and bamboo fan and a small red envelope containing a note wishing me a happy belated Canada day. My first Canada Day gift. Here. In China.

And, still there’s more – the shedding plane trees, the ubiquitous scent of five spice powder and rice, the little dog under the street vendor’s stall, the roller blading children at the university, the father and daughter playing badminton, the shabby alleys, the stunning skyscrapers, the thin, sour, wonderful yogurt, the students who keep buying me lunch before I can object…
There’s too much. I won’t be able to take it all with me. China is like that feast on Sunday night. I’ll have to leave too much behind. But, with this post as my doggy bag, I can keep some too, for later.

Three Days In

I can’t believe it’s only been 72 hours.

We landed three days ago – tired, disoriented, excited but discombulated. My t.a., Lixiang, (lucky for me – a student I’ve taught before at UW) and two other SIE employees met us and some other SIE faculty at Nanjing airport. They brought us water and sweet buns and loaded us into the waiting van while a car behind honked the horn impatiently – the first of many such honks we’d hear. The drive to Nanjing was about an hour. In the darkness, the empty, modern highway could as easily have led to Toronto or L.A. We observed aloud that when you arrive in a city at night, you get little sense of what it’s like. There were signs for the Yangtze, but we didn’t see the river.

We arrived at our hotel room, which was pleasantly spacious, clean and cool (although the night we arrived, Nanjing was unseasonably mild; so we didn’t yet appreciate how important air conditioning would become for us). Lixiang and my “personal welfare assistant,” Sha, came up to the room with us to make sure we got settled ok. Around the room, someone had placed post-it notes with English translations of the Chinese signs – “on/off”, “caution – fragile”; on the television: “4 has English sub-title” and “147 is an English channel.”

Other oddities: the washer/dryer is a single unit. The very same compact object both washes and dries the clothes. Magic! The kitchen sink has two taps – one for sterilized water and one for unsterilized. This is a huge luxury. Most Chinese must drink boiled water because they have no potable water in their homes or workplaces. (The yard outside the student canteen at Nanjing University is a forest of large, brightly coloured thermoses. The students leave them outside and fetch them as needed.) The glass of the shower stall forms one wall of the bedroom; the person in the shower is afforded privacy by venetian blinds on the bedroom side of the glass wall – a Penthouse letter waiting to happen. Inside the shower – three pairs of plastic sandals. We’re meant to shower in sandals, it seems. But three pairs? Because we’ll shower at the same time? Or because the sandals mustn’t be shared? Curious.

I was worried that nervous energy would keep us awake all night despite our sleep-deprived state. The worry was misplaced. The second our heads hit the pillows, we fell into long, deep sleeps.

The next morning, we had to talk ourselves into venturing out to look for breakfast. Still tired, we weren’t quite up to the challenge of finding food – vegetarian for the Kid and me – without the benefit of a common language. We’d been told there was a hotel restaurant on the second floor, but that we couldn’t access it with our elevator. So, we go to the main floor and greet the security guard at the door with a cheerful “Nihao.” He looks unimpressed. We point to the elevator and hold up two fingers to ask about the second floor. He is unresponsive. We try to open a few doors to find the elevator that will apparently take us upstairs. We find one, but it doesn’t go to the second floor either. So we head outside.

We’re greeted by warm, moist, close air with the already-familiar scent of coal soot and five spice powder that pervades Nanjing. The city is bustling. We’re in the thick of downtown and have no idea where to go next. We begin by circling our building. We discover that the building also houses a Lamborghini dealership (!) and, on the second floor but accessible by a separate door, a fancy restaurant with the red and gold that is characteristic of traditional restaurants here. The staff are friendly and greet us warmly, but we can’t yet muster the nerve to attempt to order food in Chinese; so we smile and flee.

We decide to walk around the block to get our bearings. Just past the Lamborghini dealership, there is an alley – a bit on the squalid side for one so near such a business – beside each door backing onto the alley a small food stand with meat, dumplings and unfamiliar things. We don’t yet have the nerve to shop in the alley, so we keep walking. Then, beside the Bank of China and behind a battery of parked e-bikes (there are more e-bikes than regular bikes in Nanjing; they clog the streets and sidewalks), we see “Ivy Food Store.” A possibility. But a glance in the window reveals a stock of Western foods and liquors. We may not be ready for the alley yet, but we’re not going to resort to expensive foods for expats. Half a block on, we find the SG Supermarket, which has some foreign foods, but Chinese foods too. We buy honey cakes, yogurt, fruit and juice and head back to our apartment. This first meal feels like a real accomplishment.

This will be hard. How will we make it work? We begin to hatch a plan to increase our radius a bit. Then, the phone rings. It’s someone from SIE who wants to know if we’d like a personal welfare assistant to take us shopping. Yes. Very much.

Soon enough, Sha is walking us north on Zhongshan Lu to the busy intersection with Guangzhou Lu. We turn, cross the street and head past several blocks of shops, restaurants and street vendors before we arrive at a large, shabby two storey department store – groceries upstairs, housewares and clothing downstairs. We buy some pots and pans and utensils, and a supply of tofu, beer and chilli sauce. “That is spicy,” Sha warns me. “I know,” I reply. She looks surprised – “You like pepper?!” Sha, it turns out is from Hunan, where the food is spicy. She loves Nanjing, but misses peppery Hunan food “almost as much as my family,” doesn’t much like the blander, sweeter food of Nanjing. And, she prefers rice to the corn that is ubiquitous in Nanjing this time of year.

As we walk, we take turns chatting with Sha, who has studied English for six years, but who is unaccustomed to idiom, and whose English pronunciation is very difficult to parse. Like many English speakers here (as we’ve discovered), when Sha speaks English, she does so using Chinese intonations and phrasings. We’ve now several times heard speech on t.v. or on public announcements where, only towards the end of the speech have we noticed that they were speaking English. It is no doubt an effort for Sha to carry on discussion for so long in English; but it is also an effort for us make out what she is saying. When she doesn’t understand, she says “I cannot catch you.” We begin to use the phrase too. Stopping in at the SG, I ask Sha whether the store is primarily intended for foreigners since it stocks many Japanese and Korean, as well as some European, items. She cannot catch me. She tries to explain what a grocery store is. I repeat my question. Still no luck. It is only later that it occurs to me that Sha may never have shopped in a grocery store herself. Certainly not in her little Hunan village, and not likely in Nanjing, where she lives in a student residence with five other students and eats in the student canteen.

After the shopping is done, we say goodbye to Sha and return to our apartment, with plans to head out for dinner around 5:30 We’ve read that Chinese people eat dinner earlier than our usually late dinner time and aren’t anxious to try to talk someone into staying open later for us. As soon as we reach our room, though, it is as if a spell has been cast on us. All three of us fall asleep, and don’t wake up until 8:30. We quickly gather ourselves and head out to a nearby restaurant which has, thankfully, both pictures and English in the menu, and whose staff is patient, warm and hospitable. We eat the most delicious, unctuous eggplant and green bean dish, a crunchy and savoury celery dish and, inevitably for Nanjing, a plate of corn. And rice. The rice here is sticky and savoury. Unlike in Canada, it is not served with soy sauce. It doesn’t need it. The rest of the evening is spent drifting back and forth between sleep and Chinese television.

The next day, the Guy stays in the room to work while the Kid and I head out to meet Sha. There is a problem with our showerhead; so Sha takes me to the front desk which is, inexplicably, in a small room on the 14^th floor, to get it sorted out. The Kid takes her camera and heads outside to try to take a photo of the local middle school girls who are outside in uniforms and red scarves doing their morning exercises. No dice. We can see the exercise yard from our hotel room, but it is inaccessible from the street. (Later, Sha asks a guard at the school if we can enter the yard to take photos. He is not amused by the suggestion.) When we join the Kid outside, a parade of young boys, all wearing gold trimmed red sashes, marches by. The Kid snaps some photos.

Sha walks us to the university. The buildings are shabby and outdated, but the grounds are lush and green. The central avenue is lined with trees and strewn with red banners marking the uni’s 110^th anniversary. The students, who all study English as part of their mandatory curriculum, often stop to say “Hello.” We answer “Nihao.” I see the classroom I’ll be teaching in – 1940s era wooden desks bolted to the floor, a blackboard at the front of the room. It’s a real “To Sir, With Love” classroom, although I have no illusions that my pedagogy will be as life-changing as Sir’s. We pop our heads into a classroom full of young people sitting behind such desks. Lixiang is among them. He looks relieved to see us. “You look like a student,” I tell him. “I feel like one,” he replies. Apparently, Chinese t.a.s are more regimented than Canadian ones.

Sha shows us a row of foreign restaurants. I see a coffee shop and can’t resist (It’s been two days since I’ve had a coffee, after all.) We sit at a booth. I order a latte, amazed that it’s possible to do such a thing. Molly orders a pot of oolong, Sha an iced tea with milk. As we sip our drinks, Sha teaches us a bit of Chinese; we teach her a bit of English. We flip through our travel guide and phrase book and show each other stuff, ask her about the country.

Sha has been in Nanjing for six years. She loves it and would like to stay, but the Chinese authorities severely limit migration from rural to urban areas. For now, she’s permitted to be here because she’s a student. After she graduates, she’ll need to buy a house or marry a local if she is to stay. Or, she might get a job with a wealthy firm who can help her to get a residence permit. I ask her if she has a local lined up to marry yet. She doesn’t (and she doesn’t seem to discern that I am kidding). We practice a bit of Chinese script and work on our pronunciation.

As we’re leaving campus, Sha invites us to lunch at the student canteen. I tell her I’ll buy, but she insists that it’s her treat. It’s very cheap, she says, and she can pay with her student card. I am reluctant to accept her generosity – I can only imagine how much richer I am than her – but equally reluctant to spurn her hospitality. Finally, I accede, insisting that it’s my treat next time.

The student canteen is a large, unadorned room full of four-seater tables and surrounded by counters arrayed with dozens of large serving dishes full of a dizzying variety of foods. There is a counter for soup and dumplings, another for seafood where whole fresh fish and piles of crayfish are evident, a counter for meat dishes, one for vegetarian, and other counters we don’t make it to. Sha orders a dozen leek and agar dumplings for us. The dumpling kitchen is a blur of activity. One woman is rolling fresh dough; another is stuffing the dumplings; others still are steaming and serving them. Several industrial fridges are full of cookie sheets piled with freshly stuffed dumplings.  While the dumplings are being prepared, we head to the vegetarian counter where Sha orders three metal bowls of rice and five dishes, each likewise served up in a metal bowl – long beans, chard, cucumber salad, tofu and tomato, and shredded potatoes. I say, “This is too much!” Sha assures me that the students always order two dishes each. At the dumpling station, Sha has to twist the server’s arm to get a bowl of pepper sauce for dipping, but she is undeterred. The pepper sauce is the closest thing to Hunan flavours Sha gets in these parts.

Sha grabs three pairs of chopsticks from the dispenser. I tell her that we have our own with us. We carry them both because the Kid wanted to buy some nice ones while here and because various China travel blogs advise that carrying one’s own chopsticks reduces the risk of exposure to illness. But I don’t tell Sha this. She seems surprised that we have chopsticks with us.

I am feeling vexed about the amount of food Sha is buying for us. As if she’s read my mind, she turns to me and says, “All of this – only eight yuen!” That’s about $1.33. Is such a thing really possible? I paid over 70 yuen for our coffee and tea. Perhaps that’s why Sha was so insistent on buying us lunch.

We had resolved not to eat any salad in China. Raw vegetables here carry the risk of food poisoning or hepatitis. But, I don’t hesitate before diving in to the cucumber salad. Sha has been incredibly hospitable and I’m going to show my appreciation by savouring every single dish. It is not at all difficult since every dish, including the cucumber salad, is delicious. The dumplings are the best I’ve ever had. We all three agree that, besides the dumplings, the long beans are the tastiest dish and that the pepper sauce is wonderful. I ask Sha if it’s poor manners to put pepper sauce on one’s vegetables. She says that it isn’t usually done, but we decide that I’ll be violating so many Chinese norms that this further faux pas will do no harm. I slather chilli sauce on my potato. Sha follows suit.

That afternoon, when we return to the hotel, both the Kid and her Dad again fall asleep. The speed and force with which fatigue overcomes us lately is astonishing. We’ve had three days of uncontrollably falling asleep in the middle of activities. While they rest, I head out to explore the city and to buy groceries for dinner.

Nanjing’s downtown at 5 p.m. on a Friday is a wonder to behold. The streets are crammed with cars, bikes and pedestrians. Every square inch of the sidewalks is occupied by street vendors. This one has baskets of flowers; that one is frying eggs, a bowl of ground meat at her elbow awaiting some further treatment; there are balloons in the shape of animals, baby chicks in tiny bamboo cages, giant white peaches, corn, watermelons, baskets of some kind of green plant product that I can’t identify – bright green, fist-sized and the shape of a funnel, with large seeds protruding from the flat surface, they look like something from space. And the food! Long metal skewers of meat, roasted duck and pancakes, sweet cakes and fresh squeezed juices. At the end of the workweek, the street is a veritable carnival.

I buy bok choy, noodles, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, fresh lychees and Chinese beer. Back at the apartment, we are soon eating soup and a spicy ginger-chilli tofu dish that I come up with, inspired by Sha’s Hunan reminiscences. Nanjing has begun to feel like home.

The next day – this morning – after finishing up the last of the soup, accompanied by glasses of green tea, the Kid and I head south to Nanjing’s city centre. On the way out, we encounter some other SIE faculty heading out for the day with their personal welfare assistant. They seem astonished that the Kid and I are going out without a guide and that we know where we’re going. They still seem overwhelmed and anxious.

The city centre is emblematic of the “new China” – shiny new skyscrapers emblazoned with “Cartier” and “Gucci”. The billboards feature photos of Gwyneth Paltrow and Charlize Theron. In the semiotics of Chinese capitalism, white women stand for luxury. Selling jewels or wine or massages? Better use a white model. Selling toys or cookware or educational c.d.s? A Chinese model will do. Turning left onto Zhongshan Donglu at the sculpture of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, we soon see countless bustling book stores. The Chinese clearly *love* to read. E-books are (for now) no threat to Chinese publishers and booksellers. The Kid begins interacting with people. She’s been practicing her pronunciation and starts to approach salespeople to ask about products and prices. I am astonished by how quickly she is picking the language up, and how well she’s interacting in it. Where did this child come from? How is she doing this amazing thing?

Then, we pick up the Guy and hop on the Y1 Northbound bus in search of the Jiming Temple. Before we go, the Kid copies out the characters for Jiming Temple on her notepad. We get off the bus and approach a McDonald’s worker on a smoke break. The Kid shows him the characters. He borrows her pen and pad and draws a rough map to the temple. En route, every time we need help, we show people the Kid’s note. They point towards the monastery and wave us off with a smile. Finally, we arrive. The  temple – a working Buddhist temple with many prayer rooms – is huge and gorgeous. It backs onto a large, pretty lake and faces Purple Mountain. Our first order of business is to find the temple’s  renowned vegetarian restaurant. “Shu shr?” (vegetable food) we keep asking. People keep pointing up. And up up up we go to the top of the mountain temple where we are rewarded with the nuns’ amazing vegan food, and with stunning views of the city, the lake, the mountain and the Ming Dynasty city wall against which the monastery abuts. Sated, we explore the temple for a while, light some incense and then head to the Ming wall.

The wall is shockingly free of tourists, but we have company – several playful magpies who taunt us, always just out of reach; a heron of some kind; an egret and some doves; many swallows darting back and forth overhead, hunting; giant friendly bumblebees; two or three kinds of butterflies; and a chorus of the loudest cicadas I’ve ever heard.

We walk for hours until we’re tingling from the heat and humidity. I adopt the Chinese habit of using an umbrella as a parasol. Leaning over the ramparts to catch the cool updrafts affords a bit of further relief. After we descend from the wall, we stop for cold water and then begin to make our way back to the hotel. En route, we see fortune tellers, beggars, a man selling live ducks, turtles, snakes, quail and a hedgehog. The Kid asks if she can take a photo. He says no. Later, when we encounter the men selling songbirds in bamboo cages and the men gambling with backgammon, they encourage her to snap a pic. “Xie xie ni,” she says (thank you), and they smile broadly.

It’s only been three days, and our confidence is deepening; our circle is growing ever larger. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

 

Postscript: I didn’t write nearly as much about our adventures at the Jiming Temple and Ming wall as I’d intended to. Fortunately, the Guy had plenty to say about them. Check it out over at Chinese Television.