But now we don't dare to eat...

"Chinese artist Liu Bolin waits for his colleagues to put a finishing touch on him to blend into rows of soft drinks in his artwork entitled "Plasticizer" to express his speechlessness at use of plasticizer in food additives, in his studio at the 798 Art District in Beijing, China, on August 10, 2011." From a photo essay in the Atlantic.

 One life-long resident of Old Nanjing, Hou Bo,* was born in the 1930s. He was teaching me a few phrases in the Nanjing dialect, he said, "When Nanjing was the capital of China, the Nanjing "dialect" was the standard language [putonghua, what would now be considered "Mandarin"] throughout all of China. When the capital was moved to Beijing in 1949, the Beijing dialect became the standard language." I asked him what other major changes in his life have taken place, and he said, "Well, we have enough food to eat now. That is the biggest change in my life, at least in the last 30 years. We never had enough to eat during the Mao Zedong era. Now we can fill our stomachs." Then he paused for a minute, smiled, and said, “But now our food is full of poison, plastic, and pollution (污染). We have to be very careful and wash everything 3 times. It is a terrible crisis. Before we didn't have any money and didn't have enough to eat. Now we have money and have enough to eat, but we don't dare to eat." 

Hou Bo was referring to the scandals of chemicals in baby formula, watermelons, milk products, and fish oil in recent years. It is something that has touched the news in the Western world, but I was surprised how conscious Chinese people are about it. For example, they wash their fruits and vegetables with a special soap that is not unlike dish soap. I am still unsure if this is better or worse (my fruit always smells like soap afterward). I talk to Chinese people about it almost everyday. "Let's not go to that restaurant, they use petrol instead of vegetable oil in their cooking." or, "You've probably heard about how dangerous plastic products and good is here in China." As a result, foreign brands have taken off in China. I saw a commercial for some sort of fish oil supplement for babies on TV the other day. It sure seemed like a Chinese product to me, but it promoted itself as an "international" brand.  Another mother in Old Nanjing has a daughter working abroad and she is taking care of her grandson. She had a closet full of baby formula that had been brought by her daughter from abroad. "Baby formula is not safe here," she told me.

Anyway, food safety is a big deal in China. I read this translated "text message" on Maryann O'Donnell's blog entitled "If we are what we eat, then what are we becoming" that was quite moving:

百毒不侵的中国人是怎么炼成的？早起，穿冒牌运动服出门，买地沟油炸油条，切个苏丹红咸蛋，冲杯三聚氰氨奶，上班。中午，在食堂要一注水肉炒农药韭 菜，有毒猪血，来碗翻新陈米饭，泡壶香精茶叶。下班，买条避孕药鱼，尿素豆芽，膨大西红柿，开瓶甲醇酒，伴根瘦肉精的双汇火腿肠吃个硫磺馒头。饭后在地摊 上买本盗版小说盗版光盘，晚上钻进黑心棉被，睡了…

How is Chinese resistance to one hundred toxins cultivated? Get up early, put on a fake namebrand sweatsuit, buy an oil stick fried in gutter oil, cut a tonyred salted egg, pour a glass of melamine milk, go to work. At lunch, have a serving of water-injected meat fried with over-fertilized chives, toxic pig’s blood, have a bowl of repackaged old rice, brew a pot perfumed tea leaves. Get off work, buy a prophylactic fish, carbamide bean sprouts, enhanced tomatoes, a bottle of methanol liquor, clenobuterol hydrochloride ham, and a sulfur steamed bun. After dinner, go to the kiosk, buy a counterfeit novel and DVD. At night, snuggle into a black hearted blanket, sleep…

*Names of people and places have been changed to protect anonymity

Chinese word of the day

创造- chuang4 zao4- literally "to create and concoct" aka "to invent or create"

The view on an early morning run

I go running in Nanjing almost every morning, except the weekends, usually leaving my apartment at 7:00 or 7:30 am. This is actually a little late to be running because rush hour has already started so the roads are crowded. By the time I get to the park around 8:00, almost everyone is already gone. I cannot for the life of me get up before 6:30 am though, so 7:00 am runs it is. It is still a fun experience. I run to a couple different parks in the city and it is always an interesting experience just to run through different neighborhoods in Nanjing. It's a very genuinely "Chinese experience", one could say. It's fun just to watch the hustle and bustle of everyone getting breakfast, buying groceries, waiting for the bus, dodging traffic, weaving in and out of motobikers, ect, ect, ect... At Xuanwu Lake, one of the parks near my place, my favorite thing to do is to stop and watch these professional-looking (they wear this really awesome Tai Chi garb) Tai Chi/Taijiquan Club. They are at Xuanwu Lake every time I run.

If I need to do research in the early morning, I run on the track in the evening, after sunset sometimes, and that is an experience in and of itself because the track is crazy crowded (I mean, I'm dodging in and out of people walking on the track the entire time) and there are no lights. So it is an experience I cannot capture on camera, but you can imagine, pitch black, really crowded, me trying to run. Anyway, here are some pictures from one Thursday morning run around the Xuanwu Lake about a mile from my apartment.

Hatchet Article About Me

GW's school newspaper, the Hatchet, wrote an article about the other Fulbrighters and me! It is hilarious because it is a picture of me, but they labeled it as Emma Morse in Tanzania. It is actually me in the Gobi Desert last year.

EALL newsletter

They published a little blurb about me in GWs East Asian Languages and Literatures newsletter!

If it doesn't take you straight there, scroll down to "Letter from Nanjing" or click on "Letter from Nanjing" link on the left-hand side.

Old Nanjing

Urban redevelopment in China is complicated. I cannot pretend to understand even a fraction of China's urbanization phenomenon, let alone urban planning design or the politics that surround "saving face" and corrupt officials. The only thing I can really speak to at this time is the complexities surrounding the perspectives of the people. Most Chinese people I have talked to recognize the view of the urban preservationist or archeologist: they agree that China needs to better preserve aspects of its tangible (有形的) cultural heritage. "You should go to Suzhou or Huizhou or Hangzhou and do research there! The old neighborhoods there are so beautiful and very well preserved. Those are important areas of Chinese cultural heritage," they tell me. "Nanjing has not done a very good job of preserving the old cities here. There isn't anything left! Maybe you should study the Ming Tombs instead. That would be a good thing to study."

The concept of studying intangible (无形的) cultural heritage is a somewhat more foreign concept to them. When I explain that I'm studying the Nanjing dialect, specialty foods, and the neighborhood, lifestyle, and culture of Old Nanjing, they insist that Suzhou would be a much better field site. But for me, Suzhou reeks of everything fake, and is swarming with tourists and peddlers. I guess the fact that I'm studying local Nanjing culture and social behavior sounds pretty boring, but for me it's quite fascinating. My ethnographic research, in my opinion, is also quite urgent, as the unique sense of a local Nanjing identity is quickly fading and Old Nanjing will probably literally disappear in the next few years. In fact, after I arrived in Nanjing but before I actually started my research, several Chinese people told me that Old Nanjing had already been demolished. I thought I was going to have to change my field site or research topic, and I can't tell you how relieved I was when I discovered that a portion of the neighborhood is still standing. 

What's wrong with urban redevelopment in China?

Many of my posts from now on are going to focus on the theoretical and concrete aspects surrounding my Fulbright project, as opposed to updates on my daily life. I've pretty much run out of amusing things to say about my own daily life in China. I think this is because I am integrating especially well into local culture and the routine of daily life is becoming slightly more monotonous for me, and thus I can't think of interesting things about my daily life to post about (that is, the daily parts of my life excluding aspects of my actual research). My life right now is pretty much conducting ethnographic field research in Old Nanjing, going to class, and reading books and articles in Chinese and English about urban politics, spatial structure, and cultural preservation.* Blogging about urban redevelopment might not be as much fun for those of you that are following me just to keep in touch or see what it's like to live as an American in China. I will try to still document some interesting or funny things that happen in intercultural communication, but for the most part I'm going to reserve those moments for my Twitter (@sbtynen). For those of you that are currently subscribed to my blog (you get emails every time I publish), please let me know at any time if you wish to unsubscribe.

*That being said, I am planning on writing a post soon about running and working out in China (one of my favorite daily routines is running around the lake or university track in the early morning) and volunteering (I am going to start translating for a charity called the Amity Foundation next week). Stay posted! ;-)

My blog is generally going to take on a slightly more academic tone for the next few weeks as I hope to prepare myself and my readers for the theoretical aspects of urban redevelopment: urban morphology [the study of the formation of human settlements and the process of their transformation], cultural preservation, socio-segregation and grassroots political movements. You know, the usual. The aspiring geographer in me is most interested in socio-economic segregation and I would like to incorporate this aspect into my case study. During my extensive literature review during the past couple months and field research in the past week, I realized that 1.) I don't really know what I'm doing, 2.) I need to re-write my research questions and research design. Therefore, in the upcoming months I plan to write about the existing literature, my new research design, and finally, my ethnography.

Furthermore, I'd like to eventually start submitting pieces to various magazines or news publications (Thanks for the tips, Dad!), and I'm going to use my blog as a mode of honing my writing skills and publishing articles that I've submitted. I'm still quite an amateur writer, but I'm hoping that by regularly posting on this blog, I will get enough practice and then eventually will get published someday. Your comments and feedback, as always, are greatly appreciated. Help me become a better writer!

I will use this blog to publish parts of my ethnography...eventually. For those of you that aren't as familiar, ethnography is a research strategy that examines the fundamental aspects of the human experience and behaviors in various cultures and societies. I am in the process of collecting observations, mapping, and interviewing in my field site. While my research is in the very beginning stages and I am very concerned about the ethics surrounding the publication of this data. I know that the people I talk to and take pictures of will never find this blog, but the fact is that I must get their informed consent before I post their personal stories and pictures on the Internet. Because I am still slowly gaining the trust of the residents of Old Nanjing and slowly integrating myself into their community life, I will first be posting more on the theoretical aspects of urban redevelopment and the fundamentals of my research strategy while I collect data. In the meantime, I will occasionally post short anecdotes and pictures about my field research experiences. 

Without further ado, a word about urban redevelopment: 

“纵观世界各国，不同的国家和不同的民族有着不同的城市形态和空间组合，这种城市形态和城市空间组合，展示着包括国家政治、价值取向、民族传统、时代主张等各要素在内，形成了多样化的丰富多彩的世界城市体系。但是，在经济与文化全球化的今天，‘世界性城市’正在席卷世界各地的城市，城市形态和空间组合正在趋同化，上海与纽约的空间样态正在相似、雷同。北京、南京、西安这样有几千年历史的文明古城，正在以现代化整合关系，表现着同一的文化样态，这种发展潮流... ...表现为民族性、地方性和多样化的城市形态正在丧失。”－张鸿雁

"In an overview of the each country in the world, different countries and different ethnicities have different urban morphology and space composition. This reveals the key elements [of a society]: national politics, value orientation, ethnic traditions, and the time period's opinions and standpoints. Each country around the world has formed a rich, colorful, and diverse city system. But, in today's world of economic and cultural globalization, the concept of the "The Global City" [a city that is deemed to be important in the global economic system] is taking off with cities in each part of the world, and the urban morphology and spatial organization is turning into a monotonous regularity. Shanghai and New York have a duplicate pattern, style, and attitude. Beijing, Nanjing, and Xi'an are all cities with thousands of years of ancient civilization, but through modernization they have been rearranged, and now all display the same cultural appearance, style, and attitude. This type of developmental trend...represents that we have forfeited our nationality, local identity, and diversity in the modernization of our cities."[1] –Zhang Hongyan

This one is for my Mom Part II

My Mom, as many of you know, is a kitchen designer and she loves looking at pictures of kitchens in other cultures. Indeed, as many of the urban preservationists in China tell me, you can see a culture and lifestyle, and therefore a society, embedded in the structure of the home. So here are pictures of my friend's apartment, where we cooked dinner together one night last week. Although I want to stress that all homes and kitchens in China are different, from what I've seen this is a pretty typical middle-class apartment. The only time I've seen kitchens that are "better" than this (read: kitchens that look like kitchens you would find in the States) are when I go to visit extremely wealthy Chinese families. Maybe I will post pictures of a wealthy family's kitchen next week.

As the Chinese say, the differences you can see in pictures of Xiaoyu's kitchen (below), Old Nanjing's kitchens and the rich family's kitchen I will post illustrates 贫富差距很大, meaning "the gap between the rich and the poor is very big." The picture of the advertisement below is from an article I found online that discusses this gap. The title of the article is "我国贫富差距正在逼近社会容忍“红线”" which means, "My country's gap between the rich and the poor is now imminently a society that tolerates "crossing the warning boundary." The article basically says that the gap between the rich and the poor in China has "exceeded reasonable limits" and that the gap is rapidly widening and in danger of causing social instability. The most shocking statistics cited are (note: do not know how reliable these are, but I thought it was interesting to see what is being posted in Chinese news anyway): 

The top 10% richest members of society make 23 times more in average yearly income than the top 10% poorest members (up from 7 times more in 1988). 

State-owned enterprise executives make 128 times more than the overall average salary for Chinese workers.

(Probably a migrant) worker sitting in front for a Lancome advertisement.

 My friend commented the other day about how frustrated he gets when he sees Westerners in ads in China: "Will Western ethnocentrism go so far as penetrating Chinese society?" he asked. There's a 成语 (chengyu, idiom) for that! "崇洋媚外， 丧失国格," or "to blindly worship foreign things and forfeit national dignity." According to some of the people I've talked to, this phenomenon is becoming more prevalent in Chinese society, and Westerners in Chinese advertisements is one example. Chinese people discuss this societal and cultural conflict all the time: how to preserve your Chinese identity, while opening to the West? Anyway, I digress. Pictures of kitchens on the next page!

The largest market in Nanjing

Westerners love pictures of markets in foreign countries, especially Asia and, it seems, China in particular. Newspapers and magazines in the States have a seemingly continuous stream of pictures with street peddlers, open markets, and the stereotypical Chinese fruit seller with a long pole to balance across the shoulders. The concept of an open market, especially with live animals or seafood, is especially foreign to us. I will venture that we find this particularly fascinating because Asia, and again especially China, is being heralded as one of the fastest growing and wealthiest economies in the world, and yet they have these seemingly "primitive" (from the strictly Western viewpoint) markets. It's almost as if we look at these pictures and think, "Oh, look how cute and uncivilized they are with their peddlers and markets." I actually find it much more gratifying, and would even go so far as to say humane, to buy from a market than a large conglomerate supermarket.

When I went to one such Chinese market with a friend, I explained that one would probably never find a market like that in the States (在美国是看不到的). She asked, "Then how do you buy your food?" I replied, "Everything is already packaged, prepared, killed, and/or ready-to-eat... And most importantly the bones are (usually) removed, especially from fish. We buy our food at a supermarket."

Americans especially hate the idea of knowing where meat comes from and squirm at the idea of eating a fish head or chicken feet. These parts of the animal, however, are especially valued and tasty in China.  My omnivore friends in the States usually say, "I'll eat meat but I don't want to know where or how it got to my table!" I personally don't really understand this view, as I believe it's important to acknowledge not only the work and effort that went into bringing food onto your table, but also the environmental and economic costs and effects of buying and eating meat (and vegetables for that matter). In this way, I think it is more personable and gratifying to buy food at open markets in China, where you can meet and talk directly with the sellers... or even buy live crabs, chickens, or ducks, if you are so inclined.

Anyway, I usually shop at one such market close to home, but last week my friend took me to the largest food market in Nanjing. Besides the initial culture shock of extremely unsanitary conditions, especially for the meat (you can imagine... butchers not wearing gloves, raw meat sitting out unrefrigerated, ect), it was very eye-opening. This type of market was definitely something you would never see in the States. It consisted of one huge pavilion with at least one hundred vendors selling every kind of food you can imagine. I included some pictures, which are on the next page (click on "Read More").

WARNING: In respect of some people's sensitivities, I will warn there are pictures of live chickens and ducks in inhumane conditions.

This one is for my Mom

I bought a face mask so I won't be cold.

Beautiful, huh?

Chinese names are so much better than English names

I love Chinese names.

It always makes me so sad when Chinese people insist that I call them by their English name. Especially when their English name is Fan or Bracken or Cherry or Candy. It also always makes me really sad when Americans make fun of Chinese names ("Haha his name is Wang Dong! What a weird name! I can't pronounce those weird Chinese names!"). The reason is because Chinese names have meaning. I mean, really, really cool meanings. For example, I remember one day Adam asked me how to pronounce the name of one kid in his physics group, Xiaolong. "It's pronounced "Sh-Ow Long. It means Little Dragon," I told him. I also have a friend here named "Little Tiger" and his English name is the best: Tiger.

Whenever I meet a new Chinese person, I always ask them to enter their Chinese name and phone number into my cell phone so I can more easily remember their name (and contact them later if I need something heehee). I can easily remember their name after that because Chinese names are just so awesome.

I left out the surnames of the following names for two reasons. Firstly, it protects anonymity. Secondly, surnames in China are similar to American surnames in the sense that they usually don't really carry any meaning (Wang means "king", Shi means "rock", Tian means "field"), ie they don't have cool meanings like first names do. They are different from American surnames, however, in that there are only certain characters that can be used as surnames, and this can sometimes give you a hint of where that person is originally from. That is a story for another day, however. First names can be either one or two characters long.

Disclaimer: Chinese characters usually have about 5 different meanings, so if one of my Chinese-speaker readers would like to correct me, please feel free. I put an "and" between the two character names if the words in English don't make sense together. I put a slash if one character has two appropriate meanings in English.

Cool names of my friends and what they mean:

蕴茜 – Yunqian – Profound and Madder (Madder is a southwest Asian herb with small yellow flowers, evergreen leaves, and a red root).

 敏 － Min － Smart

欣怡 – Xinyi – Happy Harmony

笑 – Xiao - Smile

乐 – Le - Happy

雨琪 – Yuqi – Rain and (a type of) Jade

晓钰 – Xiaoyu – Dawn and Rare Treasure

华 – Hua - Magnificent

骏博 – Junbo – Noble Steed and Well-Learned*

颍萍 - Yingping – Ying is a place in Anhui province and Ping means "wandering or traveling"

淑文 – Shuwen – Pure/Charming and Cultured

娟 – Juan – Beautiful/Graceful

丽茹 – Liru – Beautiful/Magnificent and Vegetables/Roots (not sure where that one came from)

盈新 – Yingxin – Surplus/Overflowing of Fresh

晓虹 – Xiaohong – Dawn Rainbow

*The character jun, meaning noble steed, is a way to say "a great and noble guy."

Chinese word of the day: 

沟通 - gou1 tong1, literally "to connect or go through a ditch or ravine", aka to communicate