Wish You Happy Every Day

I’ve got two poems and a prose piece up in the first edition of The Chimaera, the spinoff zine from The Shit Creek Review. Both poems are also found in From the Middle Kingdom. Other notable expat names include Michael Cantor, Janey Kenny and Chris Mooney-Singh, while in the non-expat section of the journal Sal Shepherd and Jeff Calhoun are two names to watch out for.

http://www.the-chimaera.com/October2007/

Posted on October 11th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Well, Ive now arrived in China 3 times, and each time I’ve had to go to the hospital within 2 weeks of arriving. the first two times it was to get a full medical check up (both times after having paid tons of money to get it in australia prior to arriving- they are ironically suspicious of any medical system that’s not chinese), and this time to visit my colleague who’d been involved in a car accident. It went like this-

I arrived at work, checked my emails. Lili said in chinese something about going to the hospital to visit Wang Laoshi who’d been involved in some sort of accident. Having had experience with what ailments chinese deem worthy of hospitalisation i figured she had a common cold. I didn’t really know what was going on but figured if everyone else was going i should too. A group of five of us started walking to the hospital, purchased a gift (a fancy nut powder thing that apparently tastes nice when water is added to it- on the ingredients page it specified in impressive chinglish that it contained no ‘antiseptic’, which had me laughing for some time) before walking to the hospital. We arrived, caught the lift to the 4th floor and walked into the room. She was lying in the bed, deathly pale, stitches all over her face and a morphine drip plugged in. The stitches around her face were very close to her eye and she seemed lucky not to have lost the eye. She was literally covered in ugly bruises and had broken her thigh bone.

 She spoke very softly. a few days previously she’d been involved in a car accident in which two people died and several others were injured. She was bloody lucky. The next day at work we had an 8.30 meeting at which Mr Zhang spoke of the importance of safety. As it turns out he’s recently been involved in two car crashes and no longer has a car to drive.

The whole country is a traffic nightmare. The simple fact is when you suddenly impose millions of cars upon a traffic system previously consting only of bikes, horses, rickshaws and other small, slow vehicles, and no one changes their attitudes, incredible rates of death and injury are inevitable. And while people are paying for their own hospital cover, and the population continues to explode faster than the country’s environment and infrastructure can deal with, there is zero incentive for the government to try to do anything about road safety.

 Wang Laoshi is expected back at work in a few months.

Posted on October 11th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

This is a pretty amazing article from the Daily Times http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C02%5C16%5Cstory_16-2-2007_pg9_17 that i found through Elizabeth’s Kunming blog here-http://www.elizabethinchina.com/

I won’t make any judgements though will say…only in China.

 Officials paint mountain green Local government officials in China have been criticised for spraypainting a barren mountain face green. Laoshou mountain, near Fumin in Yunnan province, was left an eyesore by quarrying. But instead, of re-foresting the mountainside, foresty officials hired seven workers for 45 days to spraypaint it green. Nearby villagers have been driven from their homes by the strong smell of paint, reports City Times. They claim the workers told them the work was being done to improve the view from a newly-built government building. Local businessman Huang said: “At first I was glad to see the green mountain, thinking the government was paying more attention to the environment. “But then I noticed the great contrast with the surrounding mountains.” Another villager complained: “We thought the workers were here to spray pesticides before planting saplings. But it turned out to be green paint.”

Posted on October 4th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

I’m too tired to maintain any sort of narrative cohesion, so instead here are dot points of notable events from today.

1) The combination of BAD dumplings, two glasses of coconut milk, hot weather and tiredness (and altitude sickness? I got a nosebleed in the elevator) has done me no favors today.

2) I just had the best bowl of noodles ive had in ages, reminiscent of meat noodles in the deserts of xinjiang. It too 45 minutes of walking to find a place that wasn’t intimidatingly packed full of staring people- as i returned to the hotel i saw, across the road, an outdoor food court that looked just perfect.

3) The mix of minorities here in Kunming is fascinating- such a blend of southeast asian derived peoples and more tibetan people. My workmate who i’ll be working cl0osely with is a Bai minority,  sweetest person ever and very smart- masters in development from guangdong uni. Reminds me of the Bai people I met in Dali in early 06, salt of the earth, so different to so many *insert diatribe here)\*.

4) House hunting is hen mafan. I looked at 5 places today- one was dirty but cheap, but unfortunately up 8 flights of stairs in an old building with no elevator and no western toilet (old bucket job). One was bloody expensive but so nice- 1600 kuai per month, plus 3000 bond and 1500 agent fee- half of my money gone straight up. But great location, fantastic furniture (massive widescreen tv), good bed, great bathroom. The last was near where i work, the cousin of a woman i work with owns it- in a gated compound, very new, but no furniture- so id have to buy a fridge and a bed and tables and everything else. bu fangbian de. So i still don’t know where i’ll be  living.

5) my boss was annoyed that i went house hunting on my own. I do understand that the  danwei (work unit) is a vital part of many Chinese lives, that after the family they are the most important source of help for people, but as the last post mentioned i like to do things on my own, because generally its a whole lot easier. how to make this clear to them without causing offence is tough.

6) I had my clothes washed today- all of them it’s so bloody good to have clean clothes. This morning before i had them i found a fresh pair of socks at the bottom of my suitcase, it was awesome .

7) met the other Kunming Ayads last night- good bunch. they showed me where to drink and get coffee and books and all sorts of things. I had a conversation with an ayad who is doing a phd on timber usage in southwest china, and we got talking about the relationship between health and the environment- we spoke of forced relocations in yunnan and other provinces, especially in the context of dam construction. he made the interesting point that one paralle is aboriginal australians who have moved from spiritual heartland to cities, and that the health of those who live traditional lives is far better than  those who have changed. could be an interesting case study in the context of patterns in china.

it has been a truly massive period since 21 september when i flew back here. totally mad.

9) tomorrow is chinese national day. i am going to tourist places with my two dongbei workmates, who are my fave people at the college. they are the same age as me and seem so much more mature than many of the chinese i meet of the same age. People in China give dongbei ren a hard time about being gruff and tough and rude, but i love em- they’re honest and they drink and they make good friends.

10) Of all the places Ive been in China, Kunming’s levels of hellos and laowai cat calls is right up there at the top. It’s an interesting thing. Tojns of tourists pass through here, and i’d figured that the place must also have far more foreigners living here than my two previous homes, Jiaxing and Changchun. Further I would assume that the natural ethnic diversity of the place would make people immune to difference. apparently not.

Posted on September 30th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Blogging again after a year, it’s quite exciting. Welcome.  I just finished a week of training in

Because of my prior Chinese experience I mostly didn’t have to attend the workshops in Beijing, and so instead caught up with various friends (Hi Erla and Irene) and studied Chinese. I’m happy that I seem to be picking up a lot of new stuff and improving quickly. I was a bit sad to leave

Arrived in Kunming last night with Sam and Lisa, who will also be working in the city. I had phoned ahead to book rooms in a hotel I’ve stayed at before, but was told by the guy who met me from the college they had already booked something for me. I figured saying no might cause offence so travelled with them to a dingy little bing guan near the college where I had to take all my belongings up 5 floors of elevator-free stairs, and into a dirty, noisy room. I went out for dinner to a northeast restaurant with two colleagues (who are both from dongbei and who I immediately got along with famously), ate guobaorou and qieze, then went to bed, where I lay thinking about how nice the other place would have been, and woke up after about 9 minutes of sleep, wondering where the hell I was and why the hell my alarm clock was going off.

I spent this morning meeting the people at my college. My boss, Professor Zhang is a big shot at the WHO and speaks terrific English, and the other staff are lovely. And my work looks great- working on a new health and environment project, with a fair bit of fieldwork involved in rural areas. I’m writing a bilingual report on the relationship between health and the environment, helping with newsletters and the website, and hopefully playing lots of scrabble on Facebook.

 The guy who has been assigned to look after me is, however, taking his job far too seriously, and is driving me up the wall, so I have managed to escape to a nicer hotel. We arrived (he insisted on showing me how to get here) and then he insisted on showing me to a bank. I told him I’d go by myself and then that I’m very familiar with how it works, and with where I can use both my Chinese and foreign bank cards. He argued ‘til he was blue in the face that only one place could do it, so I gave in, only to be told that it was in fact the only place where we couldn’t use both cards. With any luck if I demonstrate that I am hen xiguan I will get some Sam Time. Sam Time is very important, otherwise Sam morphs into the entity known variously as Grumps or Asshole Laowai.

I am now 21 storeys up. I just had a hot shower and made a coffee, neither of which I could do at the last place. I’m feeling good, though I have zero clean clothes and need to either buy some more or wash the ones I have. I am checking out apartments this afternoon with a colleague, Zhang Lao Shi, an older woman with a dalai-lama-esque aura of peace about her, though will make it clear that especially since the AYAD program will refund all my hotel expenses and I’m now very comfortable, there’s no great rush to move in.

Posted on September 29th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Posted on August 31st, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »