Genuine Fakes, Anyone?

       A few months ago, as we were lazing in the U.S., a news story broke and achieved some international notoriety.  Apparently an American blogger had turned up a fake Apple Store in Kunming, China.  He publicized his discovery by writing of it and posting pictures of the store and its workers on his blog.  The BBC, NPR, and other international news organizations picked up on the story, and shortly the local authorities in Kunming were shocked, shocked to find more than a dozen other fake Apple Stores.  Reportedly, these were all closed down. I found the story fascinating, not because someone had found an ersatz Apple Store in China, but because the media considered it newsworthy.

        This is the land of the genuine fake, be it remembered.  I doubt there is a legitimate product (or an illegitimate one, come to that) available anywhere in the world that does not have a fake twin made in China.  As exhibit A I offer this photo of my neighbor’s flip-flops, parked outside his front door:

        For exhibits B through Z and beyond, I encourage you to enquire of Microsoft, Apple, Calvin Klein, Rolex, Gucci, KFC, or any music or film distributor you care to name.  Or really, just pick any company that has tried to sell anything in China and ask if they have had their products copied without their permission.

        This phenomenon really is the greatest hindrance to innovation and entrepreneurship in this country.  There is absolutely no incentive to tinker and toil in your workshop to produce a better mousetrap, because it is a given that if you do come up with something clever, unique, and useful, there will be a dozen competitors undercutting you with cheap knock-offs before you can say “Intellectual pr-”. And unless you have some serious “guanxi” (connections), good luck in getting the competitors shut down.  The legal system here offers no succor to the wronged entrepreneur without connections.

        So, as I say, the amazing thing to me about the saga of the fake Apple Stores was not that they existed; rather that anyone got excited about their existence.  I would have been far more interested if someone had made a tour of China and found no fake Apple Stores.

One for the Foodies

dedicated to my friend Chris, an unrepentant foodie

God bless you, you’ve finally looked us up!  Our first visitor, what a treat!  Have you eaten yet?  That’s the traditional greeting for a visitor around here, you know—the Cantonese are really proud of their cuisine.  You’re hungry, you say?  Splendid—let’s go get a bite!  Come on with me, we’ll walk on over—It won’t take ten minutes.  Mostly, we eat at the student canteens because it’s convenient, and also because the Fiance Minister decided it’s better for the treasury to do so.  But no sense in slumming it today—this is an occasion, having a guest!

Now we could go down that way to dumpling man.  No idea what his real name is, but we go there once or twice a week.  He’s a jolly guy—an owner and waiter all in one.  He usually wanders around shirtless in flip-flops and shorts, and I like him because he helps me correct my Chinese pronunciation.  He’s got good dumplings, too, but the flies can sometimes be a bit too cordial.  So unless you’re really fond of them, I think I know a better place.  Yes?  Good, let’s press on.  Be careful crossing the street here, and pay no attention to the signal light—purely for decorative purposes.  Just wait till there’s a break in the traffic and step lively.  That’s the ticket, and here we are at restaurant row.  What do you mean, “Where are they?” These are all restaurants along here.  Yes, I know they all look like a bunch of oil-change shops, but that’s just the way they build ‘em.  The insides have all the charm of oil-change shops, too, but the food’s pretty good.

Damned if I know what they serve in most of these places—Chinese food, I expect—but you’ll notice that it’s all written in Chinese, too, so we’re pretty clueless once we walk in.  Usually, we select restaurants that have pictures of their dishes on the walls.  I’ve had an idea for a restaurant chain here in China catering to ex-pats.  I could call it Point ‘n’ Eat, with pictures of everything, since that’s what we foreigners tend to do anyway.  Anyway, let’s go in here—they know us and they’re terribly patient.  “Ni hao, ladies!  A table for san, please!”  That means three.  Making great strides with the language, see?

So, you’ll see you’ve got a little bowl, a little plate, a tea cup, chopsticks and not much else.  Well, right, there’s a roll of toilet paper too, but we’ll get to that later.  Ah, and here’s the lady with our jug of tea.  Now, watch this.  It’s the custom here in Guangdong, and not really anywhere else in China, I’m told.  You half fill your bowl with the tea and put in your tea cup—that’s right, into the bowl.  Now roll it around a bit and take it out, slosh the tea around the bowl, then pour it out over your chopsticks into this plastic tub here in the middle of the table.  The Cantonese think everything’s dirty and dusty, see, so they wash all their utensils at the table—wash it in tea—to make sure it’s done right.  Wouldn’t think of eating without doing that first.  No, we don’t do the little plate—you’ll see why later.  Now, I’ll order, and I promise you a pretty tasty meal.

One of these days I’m going to learn to say “The usual, Gladys,” but since I haven’t got that down yet, I’ve had some friends write the names of a few dishes on this notecard—I just hand that to the waitress and we’re all set.  Now, everything is communal here, see?  They’ll bring out a big bowl of rice and more food than we can possibly eat, and put it all on the lazy-susan here.  Then we dig in and help ourselves.  Put some rice in the bowl and add in the other stuff, then repeat as you finish it off.  Not terribly hygenic, with everybody scooping stuff out with their chopsticks, but I’m afraid that’s how it’s done.  They’ll bring a spoon for the dishes if you ask, but I’m dipped if I can pronounce it right.  Last time I tried, they were gone a while and eventually brought me a spark plug.  So I hope you’re not catchy or anything.

Ah, here’s the first set of dishes, the rice and the chicken.  Now the first thing you’ll notice is—well, actually you’re right, the first thing you’ll notice is that the chicken’s head is right there on the dish with a pretty astonished look on his face.  A friend once told me they do that because Chinese diners like to see “the whole animal.” No, I don’t get it, either.  As if you might think you were being served a macaque or something unless you saw that chicken head.  Funny how the comb and wattles don’t stay red once he’s cooked—go a kind of sepia color, don’t they?  Ah, but I see you’re going kind of sepia yourself.  Here, I’ll take the head away. 

No, what I meant to say is that the chicken hasn’t been disassembled as we’re used to seeing in the west.  This poor fellow has been cut top to bottom into a bunch of quarter-inch slices, bones and all.  You should see the chicken we get at the canteen—some of it looks as if it’s been shoved through a wood-chipper.  But it’s got to be easy to pick up with chopsticks, you see, because we don’t have any knives and forks.  But it also means that you chew your food very carefully and slowly, just like mom always told you to do.   And here’s what you use that little plate for—you spit out the bone fragments onto it.  Yes, yes, you can take them out with your fingers if you wish, but really, even the well-mannered Chinese diners just spit them onto the plate.  Sometimes there isn’t a plate, so people will spit out the bones gristle right onto the table.  When I told a Chinese friend that westerners find that odd, she told me that they use the toilet paper to wipe stuff off their hands, rather than licking their fingers the way we do when we get a tasty sauce on them.  Well, fair enough.  I wonder how KFC got such a foothold here in Asia. 

Ah, but speaking of feet, yes, those are the chicken’s feet there on the platter, too.  I told you:  the whole animal.  No, please, help yourself—you’re the guest here.  I’ve had one, which is my lifetime’s quota of chicken feet.  Taste?  Well, I guess it tasted about like you’d expect a chicken’s foot to taste.

Oh, but now here’s something more like—mutton ribs.  Ironic, no?  We lived two years in Australia, spent a month in New Zealand, and had to come to China for mutton.  Here, just slip on these disposable gloves and tuck in.  You’ll love ‘em.  And now here’s a real treat.  I’m going to steal this recipe and use it next time I have to bring the yams for Thanksgiving.  It’s peeled and cooked sweet potatoes, but instead of butter and brown sugar on them, the cook has drizzled over some caramelized cane sugar.  Magnificent!  You pick up a few with your chopsticks, so, but then make sure you dip them in the bowl of water here to cool down the melted sugar first—give you a nasty burn otherwise.  And say, this is good—a cold salad with cilantro and no, not noodles—those are strips of cooked tofu, actually.  It’s got a delicious dressing of some sort with vinegar, and I’m not sure what else.  And the dumplings, of course.  These have a mutton filling, and on these here are filled with  some sort of chives.  Dip them in this sauce and enjoy.  Yeah, we eat pretty darned well here.

Now here’s the phrase I have to practice.  I asked my Chinese tutor why the waitress never understood when I asked to pay the bill, and it turns out I was actually saying, “I want to buy eggs.”  Who knew?  Ah but as I say, they‘re used to me here.  So here we go—no, no, it’s on me today.  You treat me when I get to your place.  The total for all three of us was just 100 RMB, or just about $15—nothing!  Let’s walk back this way, past my favorite little shop—another place where I’ve established a certain rapport with the inmates.  Did I tell you we went to Taiwan a few weeks ago?  The food was very good there—definitely lived up to its billing.  There was an especially nice beef noodle soup that we found everywhere, and I had a wonderful steak and a shrimp the size of a lobster one night.  But I have to say they haven’t quite figured out the tomato yet.  There was a quote I read a while back that fit pretty well:  “Intelligence is knowing the tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is knowing not to put them in a fruit salad.”  That’s where the Taiwanese fell down a bit—I bought a stick of what I thought were candied fruits only to find that in addition to the strawberries and plums there were two cherry tomatoes.  And Kathryn did actually get some tomatoes in a fruit salad with yogurt.  But apart from the tomato faux pas, top marks.

Ah, and here’s my shop!  Allow me to present you with a couple of these frosty green beauties.  This, my friend, is Tsingtao, the finest Chinese product I’ve yet come across.  This superb beer is just $0.70 for a 20-ounce bottle—nearly 2/3 of a liter.  And how gorgeous it is on a hot day!  Let’s get on home and have these on the balcony.  I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you stopped by!

There's No Place Like Home

            “There’s no place like home,” said Dorothy plaintively, clicking the heels of her ruby slippers.  And how glad she was to get back:  hugging her family, weeping, and repeating to the last fade-out, “There’s no place like home!”   That quote was much on my mind a few weeks ago, because on June 6^th, Kathryn and I arrived back in the U.S. for the first time since October, 2008.  There have been hugs at our reunions, but no tears, and the dialogue has been somewhat different from Dorothy’s.  Here’s how it has usually gone for us:

Friend:  Hey!  Look at you! (hugs)  Wow, how long has it been?

Us:  Well, about two and two-thirds years since we left.  Yeah, it’s been a while.

Friend:  But you guys look great (pure small talk; not to be taken literally—ed).

Us:  Thanks, you too.

Friend:  So how is it to be home?

Us:  It’s weird as hell, actually.  We’re completely unhinged.  How much time do you have?  Do you want to go get a beer and hear about this? 

Friend:  It’s uh, 8:30.

Us:  So you’re busy.

Friend:  In the morning, yeah.  Maybe a bit early.  But hey, let’s catch up.  You’re back for good now, right?  I gotta run for the ferry or I’d stay and talk.  But it’s great to see you again.  Take care.

           

            Of course, the conversations haven’t played out exactly like that.  When people ask rhetorical questions, they want rhetorical answers, e.g.

Q:  How are you? 

A:  I’m fine, thanks (correct answer).

A:  I’ve three months to live (incorrect answer).

            The correct answer to the question, “How is it to be home?” is “It’s great to be back,” so that’s what Kathryn and I have typically said to our friends.  But in private we have been comparing notes on how it is much more unsettling to be here than either of us had anticipated; how so many things seem, perversely, familiar and alien at the same time; and how, in some instances, we seem disconnected from friends and society and are no longer sure how to behave here.

            But the first thing that struck us both was the quiet.  That’s not surprising, since we were fresh from Hanoi, where a typical, business-as-usual street scene makes an American Superbowl victory celebration cum riot look sedate and orderly by comparison.  Life in Asian cities is so infused and supercharged with noise and chaotic action that after a while one ceases to notice it.  Living there is like drinking triple espressos all day. 

            Consider just the noise aspect of life in Asia, and forget for a moment the visual distractions.  In the first place, it is not noisy on the streets alone; restaurants, bars, and cafés often have concrete walls and tile floors, for ease of cleaning, and there are no curtains or ceiling tiles to absorb sound.  Moreover, people tend to speak loudly and boisterously everywhere, so chatting with your friends when dining out is like trying to converse at a jazz club or at the end of a busy airport runway.  Even in schools, no consideration at all is given to acoustic properties.  I have not yet taught in an Asian classroom with carpeting or any kind of noise-absorbing panels.  Books slap loudly onto wooden desks, hard chairs bang and clatter on tile floors, and it all echoes around in the concrete-and-glass classrooms.  Thus, students are supposed to learn to speak and listen to English in the acoustic equivalent of an auto-repair shop or a public restroom.

            Small wonder, then, that Kathryn and I woke up on June 7^th and blinked at one another with the same thought:  “It’s so quiet!  Where are all the car and motorbike horns? The throngs of neighbors tramping up and down outside, gabbling and laughing?  The trash lady endlessly chanting “Bring out your trash,” and banging on her shovel whenever the spirit moved her?”  All gone!  We probed our ears, both half afraid that we’d gone deaf.  But no, it was simply a sleepy suburban morning, where quiet is the norm.  At first it was wonderful (“We can sleep as late as we want!”), but soon it felt a bit creepy, as if a funeral cortege was on its way and the neighborhood had been told to hush up, and finally it just struck us as dull.  Where are all the people, we wondered.  There are homes all around us—so why weren’t the occupants in view?  Apparently they were just sequestered in their houses or at work; they certainly weren’t out on the streets, which is where we’d grown used to seeing the populace in Hanoi.   So it took a while for our ears to stop ringing and for us to get used to the relative quiet.

            But then we ventured out and started interacting with those around us, and I realized the biggest adjustment would be simply to reacquaint myself with American society as a whole—the American way of life.  I certainly mean no disrespect to the land of my birth when I say that living abroad has caused me to look at it in a new light.  Indeed, being gone so long has allowed me to see why citizens of other countries sometimes regard America with a mixture of wariness, dismay, and disbelief.  I often felt that way myself, while I was away, as I read or heard how my compatriots were keeping themselves busy.  Much of the news from home seemed to be either depressing, insane, or simply too trivial to care about:  continued grim statistics about the economy, the usual assortment of random shootings, and a wrenching national debate about whether or not the President should be allowed to speak to schoolchildren, for example. 

            And this view of my country was fostered not merely by what the media were saying about the US, but by what Americans were saying to and about each other.  We’ve had no TV for the past three years, and bought no newspapers or magazines, so most of our news came from the internet—the websites of news sources we had enjoyed at home.  The thing that made perusal of these sources unpleasant was the ubiquitous comments section at the bottom of each news article.  What amazing hellbroths these sections are, what foul amalgamations of ignorance, vitriol, and crippled grammar!  Reading them from abroad, I concluded American society had descended into pure anarchy. I envisioned shoppers deliberately running their carts into others in the supermarket aisles, cars climbing curbs in pursuit of pedestrians, foul-tempered seniors tearing down lost-puppy posters and kicking over lemonade stands.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I returned and settled in here, to find that many people still make eye contact as we pass on the streets, and that a good number of these strollers actually say “hello” or “good morning” into the bargain.  I witnessed friends and strangers meet during an amble on the beach and exchange not insults or gunfire, but pleasant greetings and a bit of gossip about how long the road repairs would continue, or how so-and-so’s hernia operation went.  It was a total reversal of what the “news” had led me to expect.  So I have had to recalibrate my expectations about social interactions in my own country, and to realize that websites don’t tell the whole story, even when the man on the street is given a platform to sound off in them.

            The economic situation truly is quite dire, however, and I can only imagine what my worldview would be if I had been living here these past few years—pretty gloomy, I suppose.  A job offer for Kathryn was withdrawn soon after our arrival, and I have not been able to find work teaching English at any of Seattle’s language schools, as I had so airily planned to do before we left Hanoi.  But on the bright side, our friends here have been aces, and have made things immeasurably easier by lending us bikes and cars, finding us temporary work, taking us out for meals, and even giving us places to stay, gratis.  As usual, we are humbled by such generosity, and feel unworthy of it, wondering why people are so kind to pestilent blisters like us.  One of life’s unanswerable questions, doubtless.

            We look ahead now to our arrival in China (via Hong Kong) in less than a month.  In all likelihood it will give us another jolt of culture shock as we re-assimilate to that lifestyle after our two-month break.  We do feel more settled now in the Pacific Northwest, but we doubt that we’ll ever live here long-term again.  I think we have already changed too much to allow us to do so, and more changes are in our future, certainly.  Though these are the streets where we lived nearly 20 years, where we raised our children, and where our house still is (albeit rented out to others), the place simply doesn’t feel like our only true Home.  It seems to be the case that “There’s no place that feels like home” anymore.  This may strike some as a sad thought, but it isn’t to us.  We have never been Waltons-type people who crave the traditional family hearth, with everyone sitting in the same places every year round the Thanksgiving dinner table.  If we feel comfortable somewhere, and enjoy our days, and can make some friends, that is close enough to Home for us.  We’ve found that by such criteria, a wider range of locations than we had supposed actually qualifies.  So for the time being we’ll continue this admittedly odd, itinerant existence, with the plan of returning here every few years to take the measure of the change in us since our last visit.  That’s as far ahead as we can plan for now.  I wonder what Dorothy would make of an outlook like that.

Re-entry--A Word from Kathryn

Steve and I didn’t anticipate any major adjustments on returning to the US for a mere two and a half months after just over two and a half years’ absence.  Thus it came as a profound shock to us both when we discovered, after the initial flurry of family hugs had subsided, that we both feel a considerable disconnect with the America of 2011.  Let me hasten to add this is not because the country or its people have changed vastly between October 2008 and June 2011 but, apparently, because Steve and I have.  Many famous men have noted the power of travel to change a person, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck among them; but Steve and I, having only each other as barometers, felt we’d returned in much the same mental and physical shape as when we left, with the addition of a few more grey hairs a few more wrinkles and a lot fewer high-functioning brain cells.  How bizarre, then, to find everything here so foreign!

There is no true analogy to how we feel but it’s a bit like emerging from a really gripping, high adrenaline movie to discover that the real world doesn’t feature constant laser gun battles, car chases and dramatic background music.  And, just as this realization often depresses the moviegoer, so the flatness of the pace of American life we perceived on our return to the West made us both feel a little blue and more than a little disconnected.  Even Steve, an American from birth, didn’t get that sense of ‘coming home’. 

One month after our return, things are a little more familiar.  I no longer rue the fact that I will not see a brilliantly coloured flame tree, or a Brachychiton, in amongst the sea of Douglas Firs.  And I accept the fact that cars stop for me rather than just zipping on by when I loiter by a crosswalk.  But some things are still inexplicable and—dare I say it?—a tad abhorrent.  One thing I can’t get used to is the ‘waste’ I see everywhere.  What I mean by this is not the sight of garbage, of which there is very little in the Pacific Northwest, but the waste of time and energy that I see constantly.  Now, when I pass an acreage of manicured lawn mown to within an inch of its life and a millimetre of its roots, I can’t admire the verdant land because I see just the hours it took to produce this masterpiece, the gallons of fuel the lawnmower consumed and the water that is required to keep it green.  The effort seems just a futile vanity to me when I compare it to our experience in Viet Nam where every available pocket of land is cultivated for food production.  Likewise the scale of the average American house seems unnecessarily large and wasteful.  I know Steve and I have led an aberrant existence in our shoebox residences of the last few years, but the size of some of the houses we’ve visited is at the other end of ridiculous. 

The other feature of American life that we independently noted as being odd and unpleasant is how dead and lifeless the streets are, at least in the Pacific Northwest.  It’s true that Seattle is a bicycling Mecca and we applaud its bicycle friendly streets, but bicycling isn’t often a communal experience.  It can be, of course, witness the STP, Chilly Hilly and similar bicycling events but, on a day to day basis, one doesn’t encounter much community on the streets.  Now that we are car-less, I witness this phenomenon on a daily basis.  Struggling back with groceries along ample sidewalks that would be the envy of Ha Noi pedestrians I rarely encounter a soul.  Occasionally a dog walker strolls by, invariably talking loudly into a cell phone.  Or a runner pounds past me jogging to the beat of his iPod.  But nobody smiles.  Most of the traffic is single occupancy vehicles driven by intense commuters or harried mothers.  I know I was a coward in Ha Noi and rarely rode a Xe Om (motorcycle taxi), but I do miss the drama of the Ha Noi streets and you have to admit it’s a lot less wasteful to carry your wife, two children, two chickens and a pig carcass to market on one motorbike than yourself and laptop to work in a V8 SUV.

One thing, however, has not disappointed and this is the very generous and warm welcome we have received from our many friends since our return.  I honestly didn’t realize we had so many friends and acquaintances in the Pacific Northwest.  True, the Aussies are a lot of fun, and the Vietnamese are warm and hospitable, but our American friends have shown us over and over just how generous the American people are.  I won’t embarrass individuals by enumerating specific acts of generosity.  Suffice to say that we have been the beneficiaries of multiple offers of accommodation and transportation, and have eaten many magnificent meals at friends’ homes.  All we can provide in return is our gratitude, hopelessly inadequate descriptions of our travels, and the assurance that all our friends are welcome to visit us should they find themselves cast upon the shores of a country in which we are currently residing (this will be China for the next 15 months).

Let me end with one final comment on the topic of community.  The thing we enjoyed most about both Melbourne and Ha Noi was the sense of community we felt as we wandered the streets of these cities, despite being both foreigners and strangers.  Melbourne is constantly abuzz with street life in the form of lively street-side cafes, throngs of noisy students of every skin colour, buskers and entertainers, street artists and tourists.  Ha Noi is a city that only rests between the hours of 11pm and 7am and is otherwise alive with heavily laden motorbikes, street vendors, street markets, and constantly laughing and smiling people sitting in front of their home (which usually doubles as their business), or jostling each other on the sidewalks (or in the streets, since the sidewalks are often blocked by the aforementioned businesses).  Bainbridge, Poulsbo and even Seattle seemed lifeless to us, then, when we first arrived.  However, this assessment must be modified now we are on the far side of both the Bainbridge Rotary auction and the quintessentially American holiday of July 4^th.  These two events have shown us America at its best and have made us finally feel a little more ‘at home’.   

 
Why is this?  Why do our fellow Americans seem more alive to us when they are sauntering the aisles of the big market place that is the Rotary auction?  Why does the market place bring out the smiles, jokes and camaraderie that are absent in day to day America?  And what is it about a parade that brings forth laughter, and energizes an audience?  Is there some primordial ‘community’ gene that is activated when we gather in the market place and share smiles at a parade—some communal ‘feel good’ endorphin that is circulated at such gatherings?  We are, after all, a social species.  Is it this ‘communal high’ that we have been missing and that has made us feel lost even though we are ‘back home’?   Have we become addicted to the ‘high’ we receive from being in close proximity to our fellow man?  For anyone who knows Steve this hardly seems possible, but I’ve seen him shift from indifference to a state of animation when removed from the isolation of a big house and thrust into activity and society.  For sure, one extreme form of punishment is compulsory solitude.  Is this the secret, then, to a happier society?  Should we abandon the self-isolation of our iPods, quit hiding in our houses, and organize more community picnics?  This would be such an easy, cheap way to increased happiness; it couldn’t possibly work, could it?

Sweet and Sour

The Sweet

            We have made a field trip, Kathryn and I, in celebration of her successful completion of the CELTA course.  Even before she finished the CELTA, she had lined up a job at the school where I work, so we now have a common employer for the very first time.

            Our trip was an hour’s flight south to the coastal city of Da Nang, the fifth-largest city in Vietnam.  The sky in Hanoi has been a hazy, smoggy grey since our arrival in mid-January, so the fresh, seaside air down south was a welcome change, even though we never saw the sun. 

            During the Vietnam War, Da Nang was home to a major American and South Vietnamese air base, and at one point in the war, according to Wikipedia, this base saw an average of nearly 2,600 daily flights—more than at any other airport in the world at that time.  So it was a very busy place.

            It still is, but today Da Nang is definitely a city on the rise, and is positioning itself as a major tourist destination.  It has plenty of scenic beauty to help it out in this ambition.  The city is fronted by a fine, sweeping bay with sandy beaches, and the waterfront is being developed to take full advantage of it.  Where the city touches the South China Sea there are several large and fairly pricey seafood restaurants, as well as a lot of open space where tourists can relax, and mingle, and soak up the negative ions in fair weather.  Kids play soccer on the beach, and bamboo coracles lie in clusters as reminders that the old fishing methods are still practiced here.

            Down the beach to the south of the city is a long construction zone where massive and extremely swank-looking developments are going up.  They were in various stages of completion when we were there, but it appeared that posh family homes, hotels, condos, and entertainment venues were all included in the mix.  The walls screening the construction were covered with large, glossy pictures showing families frolicking on the beach, svelte golfers strolling down impossibly green fairways, and a couple dressing up for a night on the town.  Da Nang is clearly setting its sights high.  There were also some incongruous signs on lamp posts along the way, one of which informed us that “If everybody plants a tree, there will be 7 billion more trees on earth.”  While I can’t fault the math or the use of the first conditional, I admit the relevance of such statements eludes me.

            Never mind.  We encountered these future playgrounds for people much richer than us during our walk back from the Marble Mountains.  These are a series of marble ridges soaring up sheer from the plains near the sea.  They afford commanding views of the surrounding countryside, so, of course, they were strategic locations during the war.  The mountains (at least the one we climbed) are bristling with pagodas and shrines.  Most amazingly, there are caves near the summits.  We entered one which had a cathedral-sized chamber within, complete with its own pagoda, several shrines, and a massive carved stone Buddha.  Daylight streamed down through fern-fringed holes in the roof of the cavern, and there was a churchlike stillness to the place that compels visitors to speak in whispers.  It looked like something from an Indiana Jones movie, but it was the real thing, and it positively took the breath away.

            But before the Marble Mountains…ah, before that—

The Sour

            Before the Marble Mountains we had the poor judgment to go to Hoi An, which we had heard was a wonderful place.  I will say right here that Lonely Planet and similar guide books have a lot to answer for in the way they publicize unspoilt corners of the world, attract hoardes of tourists to these spots, and thereby spoil them.  I suppose that if I had blundered into Hoi An 20 years ago I would have found it quaint and magical, but today its narrow streets and alleys are so clogged with tour groups, and westerners on bicycles, and the touts they attract that it's just insufferable.  It was to me, anyway; I couldn’t wait to claw my way back out.  Our four hours there convinced me that masses of tourists are only part of what I dislike about "must-see" sights; the other part is the touts.  Together, they are the spilled sugar and the ants that ruin your picnic. 

            You'd like to stand back and admire, say, a 300-year-old Chinese ship captain's home but you aren't allowed to, because you have masses of people jostling you, and surging back and forth in your line of sight, and there is a tout plucking at your sleeve, trying to sell you a guided tour of the rest of the city, or a Vietnam T-shirt, or a boat ride down the river, or cooking lessons, or his little sister for half an hour.  So you sigh and detach him and move on to the next building—200 years old and French—and you repeat the experience. 

            We encountered no actual thievery, but there was a fair bit of what could fairly be called price gouging (we were twice overcharged on the public bus—once while pointing in mute outrage at the official fare, which was posted on the window; the conductor merely laughed at our drole attempt to pay the Vietnamese price for our bus trip—the foreign price was five times higher, and that was that), and aggressive panhandling.  I gave one fellow my last US dollar, ostensibly for a newspaper, but really it was just to make him go away. 

            The price was not the issue:  a buck isn’t a whole lot of money, and even the three dollars we paid for the bus ride didn’t punch a disastrous hole in the holiday budget.  No, what got under the skin was the knowledge that we were being ripped off, and being powerless to do anything about it.  The day before our trip to Hoi An we had had our most expensive meal to date in Vietnam.  It came to about $40 US, and it was a delicious seafood lunch at one of the big beachside restaurants in Da Nang.  I know we were not swindled for this meal, because all the prices were posted out front.  But at tables to our left and right as we ate were quartets of Vietnamese businessmen who were clearly intent on making a day of it.  One party had purchased a case (36 bottles) of imported beer, and the other group had treated themselves to a 1.75-liter bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old scotch.  And the food?  There was practically a bucket brigade running from the kitchen out to these two tables, keeping them supplied.  These businessmen were dropping some serious dong on these binges.

            And we in between meanwhile were goggling at our bill and quietly agreeing that it was our one indulgence for the trip.  We earn pretty decent salaries—decent by Vietnamese standards—but these businessmen played in another league altogether.  And here’s the thing:  I know that if they took the bus and went to Hoi An, they would have paid the Vietnamese price, and the touts would have looked right through them as if they weren’t there.  It was merely because we were obviously foreigners who didn’t speak the language very well that we were presumed to be rich tourists and so were fair game for every piratical souvenir monger in Hoi An.  And it was pretty irksome after the 26^th or 27^th encounter, is all I’m saying.  So that was Hoi An for me.  And that's why I will hereafter stick to the third- or fourth-tier attractions; I have a much better time at these.

            There are touts in the capital, to be sure, but they do not have the lamprey-like tenacity that we found in Hoi An.  Typically, those of the species in Hanoi troll the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake, since that’s where most of the foreigners are, and usually if you start shaking your head at them in a resolute manner as they approach, it is enough to dissuade them.  In a moment of weakness I once bought a packet of postcards from one of them at an extortionate price.  But now I carry the packet with me wherever I go and whip it out like a talisman whenever a tout approaches.  “I gave at the office,” it proclaims.  I call it the Tout-be-Gone, and it works well generally, though we recently brandished our Touts-be-Gone at an elfen entrepreneur who instantly responded, “Buy more!” But we declined.

The Sweet Again

            The highlight of our trip was a day out at the ruins of My Son (pronounced, “Me Sun”), a collection of ancient Cham temples some two hours by bus from Da Nang.  Champa, as this civilization in Vietnam was known, was one of the “Indianized Kingdoms” that existed for centuries in Southeast Asia.  Another such Indianized Kingdom is represented by Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  There seems to be a dispute among scholars as to whether these civilizations were colonies founded by Indian merchants throughout SE Asia, or whether they were indiginous civilizations, set up by local kings who then imported Indian religious rituals and architecture.

            Well, whatever its origin, My Son was splendid, and well deserving of its status as a UNESCO World-Heritage site.  It dates from the 4^th to the 14^th centuries, and was an important place for religious ceremonies and burial of royalty and national heroes.  The architecture and decoration are decidedly Hindu in origin, and are completely unlike anything we’ve seen in the pagodas and temples we’ve visited.  Most delightful of all, for us, was that it was remarkably free of crowds during our time there, and we were able to stroll, and pause, and photograph, and consider the relics in peace and quiet.  And it was the quiet that Kathryn and I both found so striking.  It was not until we were out in the stillness of the countryside that we realized how much noise we daily absorb in Hanoi.  Here there was only the gentle rain, a light wind, and birdsong.

            My Son was in the hills, too—another treat for us, since Hanoi is totally flat—and these were clothed in a dense forest.  We thought how splendid it would be to have a naturalist at our disposal, who could take us on a tour of the forest and identify for us the plants and birds.  But on reflection, perhaps not.  During the war, the heavy stone buildings of My Son afforded good cover to the Viet Cong, so US B-52s carpet bombed the site in 1969.  Those beautiful, verdant hills around My Son evidently still contain a lot of unexploded weaponry and landmines which are apt, even now, to go off when disturbed.  During our walk around My Son I noted that the buildings and stelai were pocked by bullet holes, and I counted eight bomb craters, though I’m sure I missed some that had become filled in or overgrown.  Of course, the bombing severely damaged many of the temples.  Building A1, the jewel of the site, evidently stood up too well to the bombardment, so the US dispatched a sapper team to blow it up for good.  In response to this, according to Lonely Planet, Cham-art expert Philippe Sterne wrote a letter of protest to President Nixon, who then issued orders to avoid destroying any more Cham monuments.  It was certainly a place that encouraged introspection, and it was very moving to be able to contemplate the layers of history at the site—the creation, uses, and destruction—at our leisure and in relative tranquility, away from the crowds.

            And then we had one more indulgence in Da Nang on our last full day there:  a sauna and a 90-minute massage for a mere $7.50 apiece.  This time I felt guilty about the low price, so I tipped big.  Kathryn claimed that she found the experience only moderately enjoyable, but I left in a state of gelified relaxation and half in love with my masseuse.  Not only was she very skillful, but she had the most amazing strength in her hands and arms.  I have no doubt she could have disassembled me like a plastic action figure right there on the massage table, and it was perhaps partly in gratitude that she didn’t do so that I was generous with the tip.  So overall, the trip earned a respectable four stars out of five possible.

The Savory

            It doesn’t have anything at all to do with our holiday, but I have been looking for a chance to say something about what we have been eating here since our arrival.  “Very odd things,” pretty much covers it.  Our apartment has two gas rings as its only means of cooking food:  there’s no microwave or conventional oven.  So our repertoire has been much reduced, and we have been eating out a lot.  We have found a few dishes that we are glad to have tried, because now we know not to try them again.  Neither of us has (knowingly) had dog yet, but I am not entirely ruling it out as a possibility.  I have grown partial to beef fried rice as prepared by some cheerful street vendors around the corner, who now hail me with “Chao anh!” (“Hi, brother!”) when I walk past.  Kathryn and I both love Bun Oc, a deliciously spicy soup with noodles, tofu, tomato broth, and snails.  On the comical side, when we go to the supermarket the only canned goods we buy are those with pictures or English on the labels.  Some of these latter items have quite bizarre descriptions of the contents, but we buy them because, well, we know what we are getting, at least.  So on the shelf in the kitchen now is Thai sundry vegetable soup, pickled shrimp and eggplant, vegetarian big meat slice, tamarind and chilli (yum!), vegan anchovies in tomato sauce, and artichoke juice.  This last item is a refreshing beverage that you drink cold on a hot day.  It’s better than it sounds, but then, it would have to be, wouldn’t it?

Good Morning Vietnam

            I hate to say it, but a pattern seems to be emerging of giving less-than-full accounts of our doings.  We’ve done it again, you see—scooted to a different country without advance warning.  No warning on this site, I mean; I don’t want to give the impression that we absconded from Melbourne in a whirlwind of unpaid bills.

            Kathryn and I left Australia in mid-December and spent a lively five weeks in New Zealand, which I won’t even attempt to describe here because I didn’t keep a holiday diary.  I will simply say that it was a brilliant trip, and there’s a lot more to New Zealand  than Lord of the Rings filming sites and bungy jumping.  Our hearts go out to the Kiwis as they struggle to rebuild Christchurch, following the terrible 6.3-magnitude earthquake there on 22 February.  It was such a beautiful and vibrant city when we visited it two months ago, which makes the pictures we are now seeing all the more dismaying.

            Our new home is Hanoi, Vietnam, where I am again teaching, though younger learners this time.  Amazing experiences continue to crowd in on us, so the best approach is probably just to recount a few, in no particular order, and trust that order will come to these postings eventually.  Or not.

            First of all, everything you’ve heard about traffic in Vietnam is true: to cross streets here you essentially have to ignore every rule your parents taught you about doing it safely back home.  You do not look both ways, cross with the lights, and only proceed when nothing is coming.  Following that method, you would find yourself marooned for life on a single city block, and even then you likely would be run down eventually by the motorbikes that take to the sidewalk when the streets are too choked for movement. 

            Before my visit to Hanoi last October, a teaching colleague in China gave me advice that probably saved my life:  “Be the rock,” he counseled.  When crossing the street, he said, I should move slowly and predictably, thinking of myself as a rock in a running stream.  This I do, the water (traffic) flows around me, and harmony is maintained.  I’m sure I still look like a giddy, hypersense foreigner, but the system works tolerably well most of the time.  Nonetheless, I’m a pretty vigilant rock, and am prepared to skip if the flow is obviously going to go over me rather than around.  I have a 20-minute walk to work, and have not had a dull commute yet. 

            The other day, waiting at a corner to cross a busy road, I heard a loud clunk a few feet away.  Looking over, I saw two motorbikes had collided in the crush of traffic.  As I watched, the woman who had struck the other bike leaned down and picked up a piece of something that had been broken off the other bike.  She calmly handed it to the other rider and then, because the light was now green, she rode off.  No words were exchanged, much less insurance information: just a typical ride home for both of them, I suspect.

            My only street mishap so far didn’t involve a moving vehicle at all, but was up on the sidewalk.  I had been in town just five days, and it was late evening. I was making my way to a restaurant that had been recommended, and as I stepped between some parked cars and up onto a dark spot on the sidewalk I felt something heavy and quite sharp hit me in the upper left thigh.  It knocked me sideways a few feet, and it was only then that I realized that the heavy, sharp thing was a rottweiler-sized dog with a good set of teeth.  He began snarling, now that his chain prevented him from sampling any other part of me.  If I could have laid my hand on a bat at that moment we might have settled things there and then, but I couldn’t, my thigh was already quite painful, and I didn’t know how strong his chain was.  So I just shook my fist at him and limped away, back into the crowd.

            As soon as I could discreetly do it, I stuck my hand down my pants to see if I was bleeding.  I wasn’t, and my pant leg appeared totally undamaged, so despite the soreness I went on to dinner.  My sense of adventure was at a low ebb by this point, so I just returned to a restaurant I already knew.  There I had another surreal encounter (which I’ll save for a later post) and then returned to my hotel room.  By this time my thigh was very painful and going red, and there was a bit of blood from one of the three distinct tooth marks as I showered before bed.

            I had to observe classes the next two days, so I just winced and limped as my thigh went from fiery red to greenish purple.  The people at my hotel were full of sympathy, and one of them went with me to ask the dog’s owner if, perchance, pup had had all his shots.  Through my translator, the owner assured me the dog was perfectly healthy, and indeed he had felt so during our brief meeting.  This reassurance comforted me for perhaps 30 seconds, and then I realized that the first words out my own mouth, If I owned a vicious cur that had bitten a foreigner, would be, “Don’t worry, he’s perfectly healthy.”  I had the next day off, so I decided to see what a doctor might think.  I was whisked into the examining room minutes after my arrival at the clinic, dropped my pants for two female doctors, and was immediately told that I would need a series of rabies shots.  Furthermore, they didn’t have the shot there, so I would have to mince along to a different clinic a few blocks away for my first rabies cocktail.

            And here’s where the silver lining began appearing round the cloud:  as the one doctor who spoke English stepped outside to give me directions to the other clinic, a young woman pulled up on a motorbike and joined us.  She was the doctor’s cousin, and the doctor quickly related to her what had happened to me, where I needed to go, and what she thought of my underwear, for all I could tell.  But the thing is the young woman instantly volunteered to give me a ride on her motorbike to the other clinic.  Not only that, she led me through the intake process and and remained on hand till I had had my shot.  The nurse who administered this shot had to mix the contents of two small vials, but before she did this she held them up for me to look at.  I nodded at her and she proceeded to give me the shot.  It reminded me of a waiter displaying a bottle of wine and pouring a small sample for the customer’s approval before serving the rest of the party.

            My new friend, Thu Bac, also volunteered to give me a ride to yet another clinic, even more distant, for my next shot in three days’ time.  Her family has since more or less adopted Kathryn and me, and hosted us for a meal during the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, took us to a thronged local pagoda, and even took us in a taxi to a small town an hour outside of Hanoi where Thu Bac’s father owns a private school.  We have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of the Vietnamese people.  Another family that has taken us under its wing is that of Mr. Tran, the uncle of a former student of mine in Melbourne.  This student put me in touch with her uncle when she found out we were coming to Hanoi, and his family likewise had us over for Tet and hosted us for the day in Mr. Tran’s ancestral home in a nearby village.  He teaches English at university, and Kathryn and I went in and spoke to his class a couple weeks ago.

            But back to my rabies shots.  I got the last four of them at that third clinic, and finished the series a couple weeks ago.  I was impressed by the production-line efficiency at this place (a lot of babies were in getting vaccinated each time I turned up) and was even more impressed by the price of the visits—the total for all five shots didn’t even use up the deductible on my insurance.  Indeed, Vietnam seems to be the place to come for cheap drugs.  On the pharmaceutical end, all manner of things that require prescriptions in the west are available here over the counter—from amoxicillin to Viagra; on the recreational side, marijuana is so widely available that half the sidewalk food vendors have a bong on hand for their own or customers’ use.  Even alcohol is dangerously cheap, with a beer going for about 75 cents, while a 750-ml bottle of decent vodka costs just over $3.  I suspect other products are available, but I haven’t made inquiries.

            You see already how one topic leads to another that needs explaining.  Everything is like that here.  I could mention, for instance, that this clinic had a small shrine with incense sticks and offerings of food around it.  All businesses have these shrines, as do most homes.  Ancestors are prayed to at these shrines for guidance and “luck,” especially at important times such as the beginning of the new year, and the first of every lunar month.  Usually the food offerings are fruit, but I have seen boxes of cookies, six-packs of beer, and even a bottle of whiskey.  The practical-minded Vietnamese consume these offerings themselves after a few days, but they always give their ancestors first crack at them.  And still the interesting impressions keep coming—too many for one posting.

Red Light, Go!

            So, about those traffic regulations.  I have not spent any time researching what the statutes say about driving here in Guangdong because, frankly, the written laws are irrelevant.  There are really only two rules of the road, and they’re very simple:  1) The larger vehicle has right of way; and 2) Red light, go!  Of course, drivers go on green lights as well, which keeps things inexpressibly lively out on the highways.  There’s no need for free-coffee rest stops here, because the sheer exhilaration of moving at speed on the roads is enough to keep you awake and alert.

 

Every week three or four of us teachers pile into a motorcycle-trailer contraption and drive a few miles down the road to a vegetable market.  It always staggers me to consider how many laws we would be breaking back home in doing this:  no helmets; no seatbelts; no seats, even, except for the plastic lawn chairs we load in at the start of each trip; ignoring lights; driving the wrong way down streets and highways; all in a vehicle that is clearly unroadworthy.  Along the way we navigate an intersection that you might find in any American city—if that city had not done any road repair for 10 years or so, and you happened to arrive there in the middle of a civil disturbance.  But here the bedlam is just business as usual, and dammit, we need our vegetables.

The market itself is fascinating.  I have learned the Chinese numbers, but only to 10, so the vendors obligingly hold up fingers to tell how much I owe them, or sometimes just show me the figures on their electronic adding machines.  It works out better than I would have guessed a month ago.  There is also a meat section in the market, but I confess I have been too much of a gastronomic coward to buy anything there yet.  It would be easy to become a vegetarian because there is absolutely no escaping the fact that you are eating parts of dead animals when you buy meat here.  You can even get to know your dinner, if you wish, because the animals are often alive when you pick them out.  I’ve already described the chickens.  The last time I was at the market I also saw eels and fish flopping in small tubs of water, saw a turtle thrashing its limbs feebly against a plastic mesh bag.  I also was told one vendor had a sackful of tasty snakes, but declined the invitation to inspect them.  As I say, I’m eating mostly eggs, fruits and vegetables these days, though I have also started taking some meals in the student cantine, where I can get a hearty plate of rice, chicken or fish, and vegetables for seven to ten yuan (AUD$1.25 - $1.60), and it saves me washing up.

I should say a few words about the people.  I have begun teaching now, and have a class of 30 freshmen, none of whom have had a foreign teacher before.  I got the impression at first that for some of them it was as if they had a unicorn at the whiteboard lecturing on the Present Perfect Continuous.  They were initially quite shy and reticent, but are coming out of their shells nicely now.

 

Our college shares a large campus with perhaps half a dozen schools.  The students at these other institutions have entered the “marching and shouting” phase of the year, as my teaching colleagues call it.  These students must undergo a month of quasi-military training, so they get togged up in battle-dress uniforms, stand or sit in the blazing sun for long periods and listen to what sound to me like angry harangues in Chinese.  Later, I’m told they will take to marching or running around campus in formation, shouting out slogans as they go, often at unsociable hours of the morning. For some reason, our students are exempted from this training.

Despite these militaristic drills, I have met with nothing but friendliness and kindness at every turn, and the people around campus are generally very light-hearted and affectionate.  It is absolutely normal to see two female students arm in arm or holding hands as they walk along, or two guys with their arms around each other’s shoulders—not “partners,” as we would say in the west, but just teens and early-20s who haven’t yet learned to feel awkward about physical contact with a close friend.  I have to say I envy them that.  Moving through a crowd, I do see a lot more smiling, animated faces coming at me than I am used to at home.  They enjoy their mobile phones, of course, but I have seen almost no one isolating himself between a pair of mp3 earbuds.  It’s quite remarkable.

And they are an active lot.  China used to be known for its prowess at table tennis, of course, but today the sports of choice here are basketball for the young and fit, and badminton for the older set.  Every evening after dinner young and old swarm down out of their living quarters for some exercise—vigorous or gentle—and a bit of socializing.  Other sports are practiced just as enthusiastically, but generally less competently, than these top two.  This evening as I was returning from the student cantine, for instance, I stopped to watch some comically inept students batting around a volleyball, and they soon invited me to join in.  It was great fun, and I actually didn’t make too big an ass of myself.  I may go back for more tomorrow if my legs don’t seize up in the meantime.

 

It seems that any form of movement, no matter how bizarre, is countenanced.  I have seen people gravely walking backward (or sideways) through parks, clapping at every other step; I have seen people dancing, in couples and singly, and striking preposterously affected ballroom poses while a boom-box played a cloying ballad nearby; I have seen rotund middle-agers dripping sweat and very adroitly kicking a shuttlecock around a circle, as younger people do a hacky sack back home, and of course tai-chi in the park is not just a stereotype—they really do it.

If I can manage to sort out some visa issues, I hope to visit Vietnam in a couple weeks, so my next installment may be about that country.  But don’t let me forget, on my return, to touch on “non-persons” and “the Hard Word.”   There’s just no end of interesting things to remark on here.
--originally posted 9/2010

Whoa, Didn't See That One Coming...

            Let me start off by saying I know it shouldn’t be done like this.  It strikes me as pretty bad form to be incommunicado for months and then to let fly with something from way, way out in left field that had not even been hinted at before.  So I apologize at the outset for doing precisely that, but really the only alternative was to continue in radio silence indefinitely and pretend nothing is happening here.  That also strikes me as a pretty shabby trick, and I mean to treat my regular readers—both of them—better than that.

            So let’s dispense immediately with the totally unforeseen, which, once absorbed, will make the rest of the news seem less shocking.  I am in China now, Guangdong Province, to be precise—way down south on the northern edge of the tropics, near Hong Kong.  I’ve been given a three-month teaching contract at a Sino-Australian accounting school, and will return to Melbourne in mid-November to pack up and prepare for the move to Vietnam in January.  Kathryn remains in Melbourne, holding down the shoebox.  My school is located about an hour outside Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), which is the provincial capital.  I’ve seen widely varying population estimates for the city, but I believe the most accurate is about 10.3 million people, so it’s not just a blip on the map.  It’s the third-largest city in the most populous country on earth.  I have been here just a week, and haven’t met my students yet, but never mind—there’s plenty to write about anyway.

            I am in teacher accommodation here—foreign-teacher accommodation, I should say, because it definitely makes a difference.  My first few days here I had been admiring the hardihood and eco-friendly outlook of the fellow whose balcony faces mine, because he never, ever closed his doors and windows, no matter how dreadfully hot and it was outside.  He just went about his business shirtless and in shorts.  I meanwhile was hunkered down in my apartment with the windows closed and air-conditioning on full blast.  Then I found out that Chinese teachers, such as my friend across the courtyard, do not have air conditioning in their apartments—it’s only for foreign teachers, such as myself.  Though I’ve never spoken to him, I genuinely feel for the poor sod, and wish I could take a few shopping bags of conditioned air over to leave anonymously on his doorstep.  Strangely, the student dorms are air-conditioned, because students pay big money to attend these private colleges, but there are four to six occupants to each dorm room.  So I have it pretty good, compared to people around me.

            I’m on the sixth floor, and there is no elevator, so I’m getting plenty of exercise.  My cooking facilities are spartan-bordering-on-primitive, and my kitchen sink is actually outside, on my smaller balcony, but I have been able to make do so far on rice, noodles, vegetables, some canned fish, and lots of fresh eggs.  They have the freest of free-range chickens here—they wander everywhere—around the stores, along the roads, through the living compounds, and for all I know borrow motorbikes on weekends to visit friends who live further out.  But if they can get a passport and emigrate, they should do it, because there’s no future in being a chicken in Guangdong.  Cages at the markets are stuffed with them, panting out through the bars, and you are given the privelege of picking out the one who looks likely to make the tastiest soup or BBQ.  “Come back in 10 minutes,” the vedor suggests, and when you do he hands you a warm, weighty little bag.

            This past week has given me a strong dose of what my students must go through when they come to an English-speaking country.  About the only word I have found that means the same in Chinese and English is OK.  The rest is all new, but I have been trying to pick up a bit here and there.  I have made a set of flash cards for myself with various words, and I’m constantly flipping through them.  As I think of a new word or phrase I would like to know, I write the English on one side of a blank card and then go and bother an extremely patient Chinese lady who also teaches English at our school, and she writes the symbols and pronunciation on the other side for me.

            Yesterday, despite my language deficiencies, I managed to get into Guangzhou—the big city—on the bus, and even to buy a few small items.  Specifically, I was looking for short-sleeved shirts and a small chess set, and per a suggestion from a Canadian colleague, I went first to a large department store, Jusco, which stands for Japan US Company, or something like that.  At the time I was there (about 10:00 on a Saturday morning), the employee-to-customer ratio seemed to be about 1 to 4, which meant that the instant I showed even a passing interest in anything, an assistant was at my side to call my attention to its many fine features.  I stopped to inspect some shirts, for instance, which caused a woman to materialize from nowhere to show me that all of these Jusco shirts had sleeves and buttons, and came in different colors and were made of material.  She took it well when I declined her shirts, however.  I was a bit disappointed at the prices, frankly, this being China and all.  But these shirts were about RMB 150 and up, or around AUD $30.  I thought I could do better at the Bai Ma (White Horse), another market my colleague had told me about. 

Next my thoughts turned to chess, and an intrepid pair of shop assistants led me to the stationery department, where we eventually turned up an acceptable set.  And then there was some fun.  When one of the assistants finally understood I wished to buy the set, she immediately took it back and wrote me a ticket.  After some gesturing on her part, I carried this to a nearby cashier, who received my money and issued me a different piece of paper.  I brought this back to my helper with the chess set.  She then stuck a green sticker on the box and handed it over to me.  Note to America:  if you want to solve the unemployment problem overnight, simply institute the Jusco sales system in all of your stores.

One other interesting feature of Jusco was that they had a lot of their electronic and cooking devices revved up and going to show how well they worked.  I saw humidifiers puffing out foggy air for the comfort of those who find the tropical atmosphere of Guangzhou unendurably dry.  I also saw things like crock pots bubbling away on display tables beside the aisles.  I could imagine a personal-injury lawyer prowling through the store, licking his lips and wishing he could persuade just one Wal-Mart in the States to set up a similar display.  Then just turn loose a pack of mothers with young children, and his fortune would be made.

Eager for more commercial recreation, I moved on to the Bai Ma to look for shirts, but in the end I came away with only one.  I was soon overcome by the sheer scale and labyrinthine complexity of the place.  Imagine a multi-level rabbit warren lined with cubby holes selling jeans and women’s shoes and leather goods, with the cubby-hole staff sitting on low stools in the warren runs, eating noodles, and you pretty much have Bai Ma.  I soon wished I had left a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back to the subway entrance.  In the end I blundered into the men’s section, or part of it, but most of the cubby holes there seemed to be selling suits, jeans, and young-persons’ casual wear.  A few were selling dress shirts, but these were mostly long-sleeved, and frankly the patterns were hideous.  At last I found one small shop with some semi-decent, short-sleeved shirts and friendly shop girls who spoke a bit of English.  Unfortunately, only one of the acceptable shirts was big enough—a polo shirt with a logo that delighted me immediately.  It is in non-sensical English that is mis-spelled to boot.  It is supposed to say “Paul & Shark Yachting,” whatever that means, but instead it says “Paul & S| ark.” Oh well, it only cost RMB 45, and I’m sure it’s one of a kind, “a genuine fake,” as a shop assistant once assured a colleague.

Wow—what a place!  Remind me next time to touch on the local attitude towards traffic rules.  Well, they’re not rules so much as a set of suggestions, to be followed or not at the driver’s discretion.

--originally posted 8/2010

Let Seat Strine!

            Ah, I need some help—about three hours of your time, actually, if you can spare it.  Kathryn’s away, see, at one of her weekend booze-ups.  Excuse me, I mean at a conference.  That’s what they have to call their drinking sessions if they want to stick the university with the bill.  Anyway, I need to do the shopping, and I’ve only got two hands, and, well, would you mind?  You’ll enjoy it—it’s a nice little three-mile walk to the store, but only 300 yards coming back.  Don’t worry; I’ll explain as we go.  It’ll be fun, I promise. 

            So, this is our road—we go up this way, and yes, here we have High Street, Armadale.  Look at the date on that building there.  That’s when this suburb really got off the ground—the gold-rush years of the 1850s.  But now it’s ground zero for the Victorian wedding industry, as far as I can tell.  To save you counting, just on this next half-mile stretch there are 11 bridal shops with wedding dresses so over-the-top and overpriced that I’ve even seen some of the manequins blushing to wear them.  In addition, this street has 57 boutique clothing stores, 32 art galleries, 21 cafés and restaurants, not to mention the sundry bookstores, houseware stores, Persian rug shops, and four places to get your nails done, though we don’t have time for that today. 

Yes, there is rather a lot of money around here.  You will have noticed all the Mercedes, BMWs and Lexi, of course, and we have a pretty fair chance of seeing a Maserati or a Lamborghini somewhere along the way.  I recently learned that the neighboring suburb of Toorak is the most expensive in the state, and in fact is the seventh priciest in all of Australia.  So this is a community of bank managers, judges and old money—people whose antecedents probably wore top hats and pince nez, and said “What ho!” and “Jolly good,” or, when shocked, “Harumph!”  Since we moved in, I have daily expected a visit from the local citizens’ council to request that we strike camp and remove ourselves to a place more obviously suited to our station in life, but so far I guess we have stayed under the radar.  Possibly they think we are help for one of the estates.

            And well, here we are at Glenferrie Road.  Down that-a-way you have another 31 boutique clothing stores in case High Street didn’t have what you were looking for; and an additional 33 restaurants and cafés as well.  That stately Victorian pile across the way, hiding behind the scaffolding, tram lines and that outlandish Christmas wreath, is Malvern town hall, where the local government is housed and where I occasionally donate blood.  And—what?  Oh yes, those bronze sculptures—aren’t they sublime?

What do you mean, “hideous”?  What a philistine you are!  Look what it says here on the plaque:

THE SUN AND THE MOON IS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR.

THE FIGURES ALLUDE TO CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY:  THE MINOTAUR, APOLLO THE SUN GOD, AND DIANA THE HUNTRESS GODDESS OF THE MOON.

            Note the careful wording:  the figures allude to certain mythological characters, rather than depicting or representing them, which means the artist could throw in as much mythological rubbish as he wanted without fear of being called an ignorant jackass.  He could have added Neptune’s trident, if he’d cared to, or Thor’s hammer, or Ganesha’s trunk.  In one sense, though, these figures are genuinely universal.  They have no connection at all to this particular spot on the globe, but then, being hybrids, they have no connection to any other place either.  They would be equally irrelevant wherever they were set up, so they might as well be here, I guess.

            I tell you, if I could travel back in time and witness one moment of history in this place, it would have been the 1989 unveiling of these sculptures.  How I would love to have been there with maybe a dozen photographers to record the crowd reaction when they first beheld “The Sun and the Moon” and realized A) that they had paid for them; and B) that they and posterity would have them to enjoy for a long, long time.  I haven’t been able to track down a copy of the local paper for that date, but I imagine the headline was some variation on “Harumph!”

            But come on—we have shopping to do, and can’t aford to be swooning over artwork all day.  Up here is our local library—very helpful staff and an excellent selection of jazz and classical CDs.  And this is Malvern Gardens.  They’ll have some free Sunday concerts there this summer, as well as in other local parks; we’ve got the schedule at home somewhere.  Okay, get ready to skip now:  we have to cross the road.  Yes, of course I see the lights up ahead, but where’s the glory in crossing that way?  Mind the tram tracks in the middle, and do step out a bit—there is some traffic bearing down on us rather smartly.  Drivers here give no quarter; I’m convinced they get insurance-rate reductions if they can prove they ran down a certain number of pedestrians in the previous year.

            So this is our weekend routine, Kathryn’s and mine:  we do this one-hour walk to the store and have a talk as we go.  Oh, but look over there, back across the street.  That’s the Harold Holt Swim Centre.  Well may you ask.  Old H.H. was Prime Minister of Australia back in the ‘60s, but he went for a swim in heavy seas a bit south of here and drowned.  Yes, while in office.  They never did find the body, and—what’s that?  Well, yes, I guess it is a bit ironic, looked at like that.  Never thought of it; well observed. 

But oops, round the corner we go here.  Now isn’t this a splendid little piece of suburban heaven?  I actually like this neighborhood more than our own.  The homes are more reasonably proportioned, and they have more yard.  Also, they don’t hide behind brick or stucco walls, as they do back in Armadale, so you can enjoy your neighbors’ gardens as you pass.  And just look at those big, beautiful London plane trees marching up and down the street.  Aren’t they splendid?  The branches shake hands with their partner across the way.  It keeps it lovely and shaded on the hot, summer days.  Now one more death-cheating dash across a 46-lane speedway, and here we are at our usual supermarket, Coles.  Okay, I’ll tear the list in half—you get those items, and I’ll get these, and I’ll meet you at the checkout counter.

What, done already?  You are efficient!  Let’s see—it looks like you got the essentials.  Ah, Tim-Tams:  diabolically tasty, those things.  It’s totally misleading to call them cookies or biscuits—they’re simply in a class by themselves.  Personally, I think they ought to be available only by prescription, they’re so addictive.  And good, some ginger marmalade:  that’s superb as well.  Kangaroo steak, check; and good, some Vegemite too.  Yes, definitely not for everyone, but I think we’ve acquired the taste now—this is our fifth jar since our arrival last year.  

But there’s a story to that little jar.  Every now and then a really big organization here in Oz will do something so spectacularly stupid, that it is forced to curl up in a fetal position while the public kicks it in the kidneys and heaps abuse on it until it reverses course and sets things right, or until another organization does something stupid and gives the public a new target.  Here’s a perfect case in point.  A few months ago, Kraft, which makes Vegemite, decided that in order to boost the sales of this venerable Aussie product, they would have to update the stuff—bring it into the 21^st century.  It would be too simple, of course, just to come out with a clever ad campaign or sponsor an athletic event.  No, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s certainly worth over-doing, so they had a big contest to come up with a whole new name for the product. Vegemite was so yesterday.  But guess what name won.  Go on—let’s see what kind of ad exec you are.

Give up?  iSnack.  Truly.  iKid uNot.  Absolute howls of public fury, the head of Kraft’s CEO ended up on a pike, I think, and the name was changed back to Vegemite within nanoseconds.  But there were already a few thousand jars of iSnack being distributed, and they have slowly disappeared from store shelves as people buy them in the hopes that they will one day be collectible. 

But tell me, did you come across any abandoned baskets in your wanderings—a shopping basket half-full of stuff set down in an odd place?  Yes, I thought you might; I generally find at least one on every trip.  They mystify me.  I can only surmise that they mark the spot where a shopper was abducted by aliens, or suffered a fatal heart attack, or received a call to go perform emergency brain surgery somewhere, because I simply cannot believe that people would be such utter troglodytes as to fill a shopping basket with random items, many of them perishable, and then simply change their minds and leave the basket on a secluded shelf for the shop staff to deal with.  As I say, it’s a true mystery.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see a major investigative news item on the phenomenon.

And now we head out of the shopping center this way—no, over here—and behold, across the road, Caulfield train station.  From here we’ll catch a train toward the city.  Now, have a look at the sidewalks—see all the tiles with the horeshoe emblem?  Caulfield is home to a major racecourse, and earlier in the spring this railway station was a very entertaining place to embark:  every arriving train would decant hundreds of race-goers.  Now, don’t ask me why, but it’s an Aussie tradition to dress up—way, way up—for the races.  The men’s uniform is pretty standard:  suit, garish tie, perhaps a fedora, and a bottle of beer or bubbly in hand.  The women are the ones to watch, however.  Whether it’s bucketing down with rain, or the sun is out melting the pavement, the women go for nothing but superlatives in their dress:  the shortest, tightest, lowest-cut dresses allowed by law; the most preposterously high heels they can actually stand up in; and they finish it off by clipping a random bit of silk, felt, or lace on their heads, and by common consent everyone pretends it’s a hat, especially if it’s got a veil of some sort.  It’s quite a sight to see the young—and not so young—ladies mincing so carefully down the ramps to the underground passage, trying not to topple over. 

What?  Oh yes, there is a fair bit of graffiti—they do love to paint a wall around here.  If you’re looking for a good investment, sink your money into the company that supplies Australia with spray paint and you’ll do all right.  Every now and then our own local station gets muralized with some undecipherable gibberish, but the city must have some miracle-working cleaner on staff because the paint is typically removed within days and not a trace remains on the brickwork.  Ah, here’s our train.  One stop, two, and off we get at the third one, Toorak.

We’re just a few minutes away from tea and Tim-Tams now.  Mind your steps here—this is the street that nightly hosts a parade for incontinent dogs; I believe it won a five-star rating from Dogwalkers magazine.  Round the bend here, and would you believe that the last person to see Harold Holt alive used to live somewhere on this little nothing of a road?  I have no idea where, but I read it in the Sydney newspaper, so I guess it’s true.

And here we are, back home!  Come on through the gate with me and let me show you our beloved Shoebox. You know, I had a feeling you’d ask, so I measured it just the other day: it’s 10 ¾ feet by 29 2/3 feet, or about 318 square feet.  Thinking metrically, it’s about 3.29 meters by 9.05, or about 29.75 square meters.  Decidedly snug, but it helps us keep in check our urge to fling money in every direction, since everything we bring home must be able to justify the space it takes up.  But really, it has everything we need—a bathroom, space on the floor for our matresses, a small refrigerator, and two alleged cooking appliances, which I call the easy-bake oven and the easy-burn cooktop—the yin and yang of our kitchen. 

  

I’m not joking about loving the Shoebox:  it’s quiet and convenient and affordable.  Our neighbor, Paula, is hardly ever here, so we essentially have the back yard all to ourselves.  A delightful set-up, and it does help us keep things simple.  Anyway, here’s your tea; you get an extra Tim-Tam for being such a helpful bear.  Let’s get this on board, and then we can start thinking of the ‘roo and red—you will stay for dinner, won’t you?

--originally posted 12/2009