"digital disobedience"

I'm trying to keep up with the Google vs. Communism battle that erupted last week. This NY Times article discusses the many ways people in China, in acts of "digital disobedience", penetrate the Great Firewall. If Megan and I had realized what a nuisance internet censorship was going to be, we would have followed Dad's advice and downloaded VPN software before we left home. (Cue Tech King's "Told you so.")

Honestly, I hardly thought about what would be blocked and how that would affect my cyber life. It's kind of nice to not have the Facebook temptation, and Youku has everything I've wanted to look for on YouTube -- and more because of its flagrant copyright violations. Fine, Hulu, you won't let me stream The Office because I don't have a US IP address? I'll just watch it with Chinese subtitles. Now that I've learned what and how the Chinese do, it's a lot easier to fulfill my internet needs, and for those sites that don't have Chinese substitutes, I've gotten used to living without them. (So Facebook, you can stop emailing me requests to return to your world. It ain't happenin' right now.)

The above picture (that hopefully shows up on this PRC blocked blog of mine) is what turns up if you attempt to access any of the restricted sites. For this particular result, I searched for "falun gong", and as Michael J. Horowitz says in the previously mentioned Times article, "China goes more nuclear at the mention of Falun Gong than any other two words in the whole dictionary." haha.. There's no way the "page is taking too long to respond" because this pops up immediately after hitting the 'Enter' key. Does anyone actually believe that or does everyone online here know what's going on?

I have my doubts that they do, given the facts that my students don't know what happened at Tian'an'men, or that most of the West has less than fond feelings for Mao, let alone why. Another Times article quotes a Peking University professor on what's happening with Google: "If this process goes on, more and more people are going to realize that their freedom of information is being infringed upon, and this could bring changes down the line."

I would say I'm happy to have ringside seats for this debate and the potential down-the-line-changes, but given that all of this is unfolding where it is, heavily shrouded, I'm more in the dark in the middle of it than out.

glasses for cool

At first I thought the Chinese just had poor eyesight. The majority of our students wear glasses, most of the cashiers at the supermarket, most of the people on the street, young and old: wearing glasses. With the younger people, the "nerd" variety is especially popular. Then Megan noticed many of these pairs of glasses did not have lenses. The next day in class I studied the kids with specs and realized that most of them were indeed lens-less. A fashion phenomenon!

A few weeks later Vence was sporting some (with lenses) and I asked if they were real. "No, they're just.." he took them off and turned them over, "they're just for cool."

We needed some.

The Shanghai People's Square metro station delivered. 

Mine fit the "nerd" criteria but they're not right for my face, so I'm on the lookout for a replacement pair.

Side note: My little architect likes the design of this building because of its sleek, modern interpretation of the traditional pagoda. 

all aboard!

The journey begins! Mom and Pop Kelly left KC yesterday at 2pm and should be landing in London in about five hours. I hope the camera batteries are well charged so we can see every bit of their first hemisphere's offerings. They're taking two weeks to get to Beijing, and after this flight to London, it's trains the whole way! I'm highly envious. As this "let's visit the kids" trip turned into an anniversary celebration, Megan observed that their tour 'round the world is just like Dad buying Mom some commemorative bling. Mom said she thinks she'll prefer the train trip. I'm hoping their butts and morales hold out long enough to deliver them to the PRC in good spirits.

Dad has intricately planned out what to do at each stop along the way: coffee here, Belgian chocolates there (and maybe a gift box to go?), homestays in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then back to Moscow to board the Trans Siberian. While crossing Russia (anyone else wonder what Siberia looks like in January?) the train has a Russian-style dining car, then for the couple days in Mongolia it gets switched out for a Mongolian dining car, and the last day through China will provide a chopsticks primer before they disembark at our rendezvous point.

Now that we're in our last days of class/exams, I'm getting really excited to see (the parents obviously, but also,) what the Chinese consider the center of the world: Beijing. True to form, I'm most excited about the food there. I recently learned that each province has an official restaurant and hotel for their government officials to stay at while oiling the bureaucratic wheels in the hub of the machine. The restaurants fly in staff and ingredients from their provinces and are open to anyone. I'm trying to figure out which provinces we won't physically get to, but whose cuisine we should try out. If our dining plans aren't as intricately plotted as the rest of the trip, Megan and I will get a big F- as research assistants. So far the list only consists of a couple of these province restaurants and a Xinjiang spot (the westernmost province/home of the Uighurs).

Simultaneously descending on Beijing is Loreta and her friend/student Casper, and the Valder party: Jeff and Claire, their two friends coming over from Nebraska, and our beloved Vence. No one's really looking forward to the January temperatures, but the company should keep us all preoccupied with more important things. Can't wait!

"maybe communism with chinese characteristics is just the nastiest form of capitalism you've ever seen in your life."

--- my astute traveling companion, standing outside a "holy" temple on a "holy" mountain, amid the cacophony of hawkers, noise-makers, hawkers hawking noise-makers and other frenzied sounds of oversupply and needless demand.

party in the usa

Since I have my freshmen class four times a week, I regularly play them English-language songs on Mondays, which I have cleverly dubbed "Music Monday". I play the song while they look at the lyrics, some of which I have blanked out so they have to listen for what the words are. Just this week I realized I could greatly enhance Music Monday by showing them music videos downloaded with some unnamed downloading client (because as of now, we shadily are not allowed internet access in the classrooms...). iTunes' top downloads list tells me that some song called "Party in the USA" is quite the hit back home, so I searched for it and downloaded a live performance.

And that's how I learned about this pole incident which looks to have been a real flurry in the media that I thankfully missed before we left.

Here I thought Miley Cyrus would be a nice window to American culture as a solid representation of current American pop music. What a tragedy that she really is a current icon of American pop! She is not such a nice window to American culture for these Chinese students. There's no way I could show this to my class of 20 year-olds: Megan and I drew out the lyrics for "The 12 Days of Christmas" and the boys couldn't even be mature about her stick figure drawing of 9 ladies dancing. Plus, I don't want to show it to them, which is really the sad thing, that what's "popular" in my country would embarrass me as a cultural ambassador to my students.

At least they now know who U2 is. Can you believe Bono was unknown in a corner of the world?

new year's in shanghai

New Year's Eve isn't such a big deal here since the Chinese New Year is what everyone looks forward to (happening this year on Feb. 14, ushering in the year of the tiger), but we made it our own big deal by going to Shanghai with Jeff and Claire since we all had New Year's Day off of school. I moved my Thursday afternoon class to Wednesday so we could head out earlier, and made it to the hostel by 8pm. Jeff and Claire had gotten in earlier in the afternoon so we hopped on the metro and met them at People's Square, which was filled with thousands of, you might guess, people. And that's probably not an exaggeration since the population of the city is somewhere around 19million.

A friend of a friend of theirs, who is a Shanghai native but went to college in the U.S., met us all and took us over to the Bund, right next to the Huangpu River. My camera promptly announced it had no battery life left, so I'll have to get the pictures from Jeff before I can post any, but we had a great view of the Oriental Pearl Tower across the river. The lights on the Tower turned into a countdown, so Megan joined in with "shi! jiu! ba! qi!" and I tried to recall them but only chimed in at three/"san!" I forgot that no one else would be shouting "Hap-py New Year!" after we got to "one!" but did it anyway and smooched my date on the cheek. A spectacular fireworks show ensued and it felt really cool to be standing there at the start of 2010.

Surprisingly, the area wasn't so mobbed with people as I expected, but it got a little scary when everyone decided to turn around and head back down the street. They just move, which means plowing through with no concern for whatever other humans are in your path. A man wrapped his arms around his wife and propelled them through the crowd by using her as one of those log things people in medieval times used to knock down castle doors (what are those things called? logs?). It's very easy to see how it's not uncommon for people to die in stampedes in this country. (Schools have waves of dismissal times so there's not a horde of kids trampling each other while racing out to mommy's mo-ped.)

I asked my class who their New Year's kisses were going to be and the ones that understood gasped, blushed, and cried, "No one!" At 19 and 20, most of them still think the opposite sex has cooties I'm pretty sure. One girl said she would be in bed by midnight so I took that to mean they don't much care about seeing the clock change.

The rest of the weekend was sort of a bust: Megan had forgotten her passport here in Huai'an, the bank below the hostel started jack-hammering my eardrums at 7:30 ("We must finish for the Expo!"), and the Shanghai friend took us to the tallest building in the city, which also has the tallest prices of anything in China I've seen. It cost 150RMB (over $20) to go up to the top, and we were pretty cash strapped slash not that into it, so it was a futile, time-suck field trip. However, the bathrooms in the lobby of the tallest building had heated toilet seats, which somehow made it semi-worth the trek.

thank you, Shanghai's Swiss Chamber of Commerce, for the tiger picture: swisscham.org