Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Er Ling Ling Jiu

I just realized that today is the last day of 2008.  It’s New Year’s Eve.  With that in mind I’ll try to write something deep and meaningful, and since I’m in China I’ll give it a little Chinese flavor.  The most commonly held beliefs in China, other than political ones, are Taoism and Buddhism.  The OED defines Taoism as

[t]he central concept and goal is the Tao, and its most important text is the Tao-te-Ching. Taoism has both a philosophical and a religious aspect. Philosophical Taoism emphasizes inner contemplation and mystical union with nature; wisdom, learning, and purposive action should be abandoned in favor of simplicity and wu-wei (nonaction, or letting things take their natural course). The religious aspect of Taoism developed later, c. 3rd century ad, incorporating certain Buddhist features and developing a monastic system.

Deep stuff, huh?  I’m not religious at all but this type of thing fascinates me.  “The world does what the world does, and you should just let it happen.” (They’re actually somewhat similar to the Stoics in that regard.) Now, compare that with the OED on Buddhism.

Buddhism has no creator god and gives a central role to the doctrine of karma. The ‘four noble truths’ of Buddhism state that all existence is suffering, that the cause of suffering is desire, that freedom from suffering is nirvana, and that this is attained through the ‘eightfold’ path of ethical conduct, wisdom, and mental discipline (including meditation).

Look at this in a list.

1.  All existence is suffering.
2.  The reason we suffer is because we desire things.
3.  We can be free of suffering.
4.  Thinking is the means by which we free ourselves.

Thus, in a nutshell, the less we desire things the less we will suffer, and the more we contemplate our lives the more we can achieve happiness or “enlightenment.” That’s some pretty weighty shit.  Then there’s karma.

[T]he sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future.

In 2009, think about your actions.  This year for me is going to bring a number of opportunities where I have to make serious, life-changing decisions, not the least of which is whether I stay in China, come back to the US, or move to some as-yet-undetermined location.  If we go by what the Chinese believe, I’ll end up with exactly the future I deserve.

So that is what I wish for all of you.  From the Chinese perspective the type of person you are, and the way you act, will determine your future.  May 2009 bring you exactly the future you deserve.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The China I Know

Next to my office there’s a small walkway, underneath the air conditioning units.  Next to this walkway is a fence separating our area from the courtyard that I can see from my office window.  There’s a big pine tree on the other side of the fence.

One day I noticed an enormous dog turd, like Great Dane sized.  I thought this was odd because large dogs are banned inside the city limits, you can only have irritating yapping lapdogs.  (I saw an enormous husky in Hohai one night, and that was the biggest dog I’ve seen in the year that I’ve been here.) The size of this dog turd was kinda remarkable.

A couple of weeks later I noticed there were a few more dog turds there, and next to them were these white things.  Upon closer inspection they were wads of toilet paper.  Which do you think is more likely, some disgusting Chinese peasant was taking a shit behind the tree, or someone trained their Great Dane to wipe its ass?

This, my friends, is China as you can only experience it by living here. 

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Misquote

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

—Winston Churchill, House of Commons, Nov. 11, 1947

“Democracy is the worst form of government.”

—Winston Churchill, as quoted in a contemporary Chinese high school politics textbook

Thursday, October 02, 2008

All that Glitters is Not Gold

I have the whole week off work for “Golden Week,” which is more or less a week-long Chinese 4th of July, celebrating the founding of the PRC.

The country’s top leaders observed its 59th National Day by paying respects in Beijing yesterday to those who had sacrificed themselves to the founding of New China.

Led by President Hu Jintao, the leaders presented flowers before the Monument to the People’s Heroes at Tian’anmen Square, with 18 soldiers lifting the flower baskets to the base of the monument.

“The wreath-laying ceremony is a great way to honor the Chinese people’s indomitable spirit of struggle and self-sacrifice in the face of great challenges and difficulties,” said Gao Xinmin, a professor with the Party School of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

Note mentioned was the inconvenient fact that all of the difficulties and struggles requiring self-sacrifice were caused entirely by the Communist Party.

“Without such spirit, Chinese people wouldn’t be able to make such remarkable progress and achievement,” Gao said.

Not to mention the “bullet in the back of the head” threat can also be a wonderful motivator.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up…

Allow me to properly translate this into English.  “This year marks the 30th anniversary of the day that China realized that communism and Marxism were total failures, and that in order to keep their police state they were going to have to institute economic reforms.” Think I’m kidding?

Chang Aoxue, from rural Shanxi province, also joined the crowd, watching the flag-raising with her 2-year-old daughter.

“I came here together with my daughter to show my gratitude to the Party for encouraging the implementation of a policy that encourages the prosperity of the people, and to offer good wishes to the motherland,” Chang said.

Party, people, nation, policy, and prosperity.  Everything in one tidy little sentence.  For the past year I’ve said that the Chinese see no distinction between race, culture, and politics.  There you go.

Update: One final point:  2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.  It also marks the 20th anniversary of that little protest thingy.  I wonder which will get more media attention?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Groundhog Day Williams

The other day I discussed the Chinese custom of naming children after an event that happens at the time of or during the year of their birth.  Here’s one example of that custom in action.

A total of 7,147 residents of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region share the same given name Guoqing, meaning the National Day in Chinese.

All the Guoqings were born on China’s National Day of Oct 1.

There are more than 400,000 residents nationwide with the given name of Guoqing.

Many Guoqings are happy with their names.

A female Guoqing said she was given a surprise birthday party when she was in college.

When she asked her roommates how they knew the day of her birthday, they replied: “You must have been born on Oct 1 because your given name is Guoqing.”

Guoqing literally means “Country Celebration.” I wonder how many babies in the US who have a birthday of July 4th are named “July Fourth Smith” or something like that.  There would have to be one or two somewhere in the country, but 400,000?  That’s a pretty good number of people, even for a country with 1.3 billion citizens.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Skin Trade

If you get a chance you need to watch China’s Stolen Children, a documentary by HBO and the UK’s Channel 4. 

Ten years after the policy-changing and award-winning film, The Dying Rooms, the same team returns to a very different China where the infamous One Child Policy has had the horrific side effect of a boom in stolen children.

With extraordinary access to devastated parents desperately searching for their stolen son; a man who brokers the deals and has sold his own offspring; and prospective parents grappling with giving up their soon-to-be-born daughter through lack of options, we are brought face to face with the crisis that such a stringent government policy has created among China’s poorest people.

Beautiful, haunting, deeply tragic, but impossible to ignore, this film takes us into the heart of modern China. A place where girl babies are being sold for 3,000-4,000 RMB (£200-270); detectives specialise in finding kidnapped children; and child traffickers are so relaxed about the trade they ply, that they allow the film-makers to covertly record them buying and selling tiny human lives.  Tens of thousands of children are now kidnapped and traded on the black market whilst the State is more concerned with keeping the story quiet than tracing Chinas stolen children.

The film is powerful, find a way to see it.  However, having lived here for almost a year now I can really appreciate the film on a level that I never would have been able to do otherwise.  So much of what you see in the film just makes sense in the context of how the Chinese do and view everything else.  ( See the baby food post below.)

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Fun With Numbers

Recall, if you will, my post about the cursed Fuwa, the Olympic mascots.  I’ve mentioned many times how superstitious the Chinese are, particularly about numbers.  I’ve also said that, according to folklore, 2008 will be an unlucky year for China.

Got all that?  Good.

At the Olympics this year the Chinese won 51 gold medals, 21 silver, and 28 bronze.  If you write these numbers out in a row you get 51 21 28.  Remember China’s massive earthquake? 

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake … or “Great Sichuan Earthquake” … occurred at 14:28:01.42 CST … on May 12, 2008 in Sichuan province of China.

Look at the numbers:  5/12 2:28. China’s medal count was 51 21 28.  Even though the silver medals were only one off, a lot of Chinese believe this is significant.

But wait, there’s more!

On December 14 there was a huge snowstorm here which caused major damage.  Then on March 14 there was the uprising in Tibet.  The earthquake was on May 12.  Look at the dates:  12/14, 3/14, and 5/12.  If you add 1+2+1+4 you get 8.  3+1+4 is 8.  And 5+1+2 is 8.  8 8 8.  On May 12, the day of the earthquake, it was 88 days before the Olympics, which began on August 8, 2008—8/8/08.

I was told in 2007 that, despite the fact that eights are considered lucky in China, 2008 would be an incredibly unlucky year.  You be the judge.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

The Legation

There’s a part of Beijing known as the Legation Quarter.  Here’s a little bit of history that I bet most of you didn’t know, about the role of foreign military powers (including US Marines) during the Boxer Rebellion at the beginning of the 20th century.

In June 1900, the Boxers, along with parts of the Imperial Army, began attacking foreign embassies in Beijing and Tianjin. In Beijing, the embassies of Great Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, and Japan were all located in the Legation Quarter near the Forbidden City. Anticipating such a move, a mixed force of 435 marines from eight countries had been sent to reinforce the embassy guards. As the Boxers approached, the embassies were quickly linked into a fortified compound. Those embassies located outside of the compound were evacuated, with the staff taking refuge inside.

On June 20, the compound was surrounded and attacks began. Across town, the German envoy, Klemens von Ketteler, was killed trying to escape the city. The following day, Cixi declared war on all of the Western powers, however her regional governors refused to obey and a larger war was avoided. In the compound, the defense was led by the British ambassador, Claude M. McDonald. Fighting with small arms and one old cannon, they managed to keep the Boxers at bay. This cannon became known as the “International Gun,” as it had a British barrel, an Italian carriage, fired Russian shells, and was served by Americans.

To deal with the Boxer threat, an alliance was formed between Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. On June 10, an international force of 2,000 marines was dispatched from Takou under British Vice Admiral Edward Seymour to aid Beijing. Moving by rail to Tianjin, they were forced to continue on foot as the Boxers had severed the line to Beijing. Seymour’s column advanced as far Tong-Tcheou, 12 miles from Beijing, before being forced to retreat due to stiff Boxer resistance. They arrived back at Tianjin on June 26, having suffered 350 casualties.

With the situation deteriorating, the members of the Eight-Nation Alliance sent reinforcements to the area. Commanded by British Lt. Gen. Alfred Gaselee, the international army numbered 54,000. Advancing, they captured Tianjin on July 14. Continuing with 20,000 men, Gaselee pressed on for the capital. Boxer and Imperial forces made a stand at Yangcun, but were defeated by British and American assaults. On August 14, the army entered Beijing and ended the fifty-five day siege of the legation compound. Over the next year, a second German-led international force conducted punitive raids throughout China.

You can read more about the Boxer Rebellion and the siege of the Legation Quarter here and here.  Why do I bring this up?  Because this is a picture of the Legation Quarter today.

As we gear up for the Olympics, more new buildings and lavish venues are rushing to take advantage of the global attention that the games will focus on Beijing – although it seems not all of them are going to make the August deadline. After a hastily arranged art opening back in May, the Legation Quarter revealed a more composed and ready-to-meet-the-world version of itself late last month when it invited Beijing’s glitterati around for the unveiling of Shanghai Tang’s 2008 Autumn Winter collection. Over 400 people, including film star Zhou Xun, American director Andy Tennant and photo artist Xiao Huiwang attended what was the label’s first international event in Beijing.

…

As well as looking in much better shape, more of the Legation Quarter’s venues are now open. The classy French restaurant Maison Boulud a Pekin run by celebrity chef Daniel Boulud, is now open for business and you can get a peek inside the kitchen here care of Time’s China Blog writer Simon Elegant.

The allied Marines protect the Legation against the Boxers.  The Emperor is overthrown a few years later, resulting in the nationalist government.  Eventually the nationalists are overthrown, resulting in the People’s Republic of China under Mao.  For almost a century foreigners were all but forbidden to come to China.  Mao died in 1976.  His successor, Deng Xiaoping, began a policy of economic reform, resulting in foreigners returning to China.  Beijing is about to host the Olympics and the Legation Quarter, once the sight of a fierce battle between foreigners and Chinese, is now the height of haute couture for China’s ever-expanding wealthy, bourgeois capitalist class.

Funny how shit works out sometimes, isn’t it?

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Ask the Professor

Yale University professor Jonathan Spence, a leading scholar of China, discusses the future of China.

The West’s consensus view is that so long as the economy keeps hauling millions of people out of poverty, the Communist Party can survive in power.

Its challenges are enormous. Twenty million people enter the job market each year and need to be found work.

A recent increase in local-level protests suggests millions more feel left behind by growth so far, and resentful. There is simmering popular anger about official corruption and environmental damage.

Yet the biggest challenge will be political.

Can China’s authoritarian leaders, who have risen to the pinnacle of a one-party state, be prevailed upon to accept competing visions of how the country should be governed, and even share power?

And can they do so before the tensions being stoked by such unprecedented social and economic upheaval become overwhelming?

Prof Spence does not ignore the risks, but sees more grounds for optimism.

He points to the ballooning number of university graduates, the emergence of grassroots civil groups, and the vast improvement in the education levels of top leaders as evidence that change will have to come.

“The whole idea of representation is being explored. Remember China had a hard time with representative government, which fell apart under the warlord era [in 1915].

“China is backtracking into the past, looking for ways of making changes. We could wish they changed much faster, but we should be glad they are changing at the speed they are,” he says.

Happy people don’t revolt.  The government has to keep the people happy, with continued prosperity and security.  I also thought this observation was interesting.

Mr Spence hints that while British traders were there first, it is now only the US which realises China’s future potential.

“In the UK, one gets the sense that people think it’s just another country,” he says.

This is fascinating considering that many European nations, including the UK, are going to boycott the opening ceremonies.  Bush has said he will attend, and I’ve written that I think this is an exceptionally good idea.  Ignore China at your peril.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Clash of Civilizations

Here’s Petey the Policeman, from another restaurant.

In case you can’t make it out the English text says PLEASE BEHAVE IN A CIVILISED MANNER.  Somehow I think the word “please” doesn’t really mean much.

(And that’s not a typo, it’s the way those pinko commie Brits spell “civilized.")

No Tell Hotel

Remember how I said bribery is a way of life here?  Lest you think I was making it up…

The hotel hosting the official non-accredited media centre for August’s Beijing Olympics is offering cash to reporters in return for positive media coverage.

The Gehua New Century Hotel, which describes itself as “China’s first five-star hotel with a media-cultural theme”, has promised journalists up to 1,000 yuan (74 pounds) for articles about it.

It is common practice in China for local media to be paid “travel expenses” of 200 to 300 yuan for attending news conferences—in effect an incentive given that most taxi journeys in the city cost less than 50 yuan.

Hush money has also been paid to reporters by coal mine owners and, in some cases, colluding local officials to cover up fatal accidents.

The handout in Chinese on headed notepaper given by staff to the media after a Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) news conference at the hotel on Friday promised 100 yuan for a mention of the Gehua in reports.

Once verified by the public relations department, the document said, media can claim 500 yuan for a “positive” article on the hotel of 100 to 500 words in length and 1,000 yuan for an article of between 500 and 1,000 words.

“We want to extend our reputation through the opportunity of the Olympics, it is necessary to promote our brand,” PR manager Zhao Xiaoda told Reuters by telephone on Monday.

“I understand it is different from international practice. It was a decision of the PR department not the hotel.”

¥1,000 is about $150.  So if you’re a reporter, and you want to pick up a whopping $15 bribe, mention the hotel.

To any reporters who may read this, if you mention this blog in any capacity in one of your stories I’ll take you out, get you drunk as shit, and hire you the Mongolian hooker of your choice.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Stocking Feet

Yesterday I spoke about how women here generally can’t dress themselves for shit.  I forgot to mention one other completely revolting aspect of Chinese women’s fashion.

It’s summer now, and with it women are beginning to wear skirts and shorts and capri pants, much like their western counterparts.  With these clothes they wear a variety of sandals and other strap-type shoes.  In the US women who wear something like this will either wear stockings or hose, or most likely just go with bare skin.  Not Chinese women.

You know those calf-high pantyhose-style stockings that your grandmother used to wear?  Well, they wear those, only they come up just past the ankles.  Imagine, if you will, a cute young Chinese girl in a sundress and sandals, with ankle-high pantyhose stockings on her feet.  It’s one of the most revolting things I’ve ever seen.  How ANYONE could look in the mirror and think that looked good is beyond me.  But, this is China, and you quickly get used to the fact that the Chinese do a whole lot of shit that makes absolutely no sense to us whatsoever.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Match Game

I’m trying to remember if I blogged about this before or if I just thought about blogging it.  If this is a repeat, please accept my apologies.

One thing about girls in China:  for the most part they have absolutely no idea how to dress, particularly how to match colors.  Unless a girl is born with an innate eye for doing so, Chinese women dress as garishly as mafia furniture.  Tacky doesn’t even begin to describe it.  Basically they think that if they have as many bright colors on as possible then they’re fashionable, especially if the garment has a designer label prominently visible.  It’s not uncommon to see a girl wearing three clothes from three different designer labels, none of which are the same color or go together.

For example, one of the girls who works for me today came to work dressed like a clown.  She had on a white t-shirt, a plaid miniskirt, black stockings, and hot pink fuck-me pumps, straight out of a porno from the late 80s.  It looked like shit.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, for the past week or so she’s been wearing this ridiculous blue baseball cap with big puffy, padded hands sticking out the side, sort of like on the costume of The Flash.  She looked ridiculous.

I was thinking today about why this was, and I’ve come up with a theory.  During the Mao years everyone in the country was basically forced to wear a uniform.  For decades there was no such thing as fashion.  Deng Xiaoping only began to open up the country in the late 80s, and it has only been in the last 10 or 15 years or so that western clothes have been available as we know them.  (Retail stores are a relatively new concept.) Thus two generations of girls grew up without a mother telling them how to dress properly.  I imagine that once the Mao-era uniforms were no longer required, and women dared to be fashionable again, they looked back into Chinese history for inspiration, and saw colorful silks of red, green, and yellow.  The idea of colors which match each other is not something which has much historical precedent.  So the girls of today, the first to really grow up in an era where fashionable clothes were readily available, have had no real guidance in how to dress.  They are, in other words, making their best guess.

Some women get it and some don’t.  And, sad to say, the ones who don’t get it are in the majority.  Seriously, you ought to see some of the shit that women here wear, it’s crazy.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Race and Money

In this post I discussed Chinese attitudes towards the cyclone victims in Myanmar.

One of my coworkers asked the company why we don’t have a box out for the victims of the Burmese cyclone.  “Well, um, yes, well, you see, while we operate internationally we are concerned locally.” In other words, we don’t give a fuck about them because they’re not Chinese.  But when the Chinese are in peril, doing your part to contribute is seen as an act of loyalty to country and culture and ethnicity, and God help the foreigner who comes here to reap the benefits of all that China has to offer and doesn’t prostrate himself in public as a sign of gratitude for it.

One of my foreign coworkers just made me aware of something.  This is the website for the Chinese Red Cross Foundation, in English.  On the right hand side of the page is a search box.  Type in the word “Myanmar” and see how many hits you get.  Just to check I also typed “Burma” and got exactly the same amount.

They don’t give a fuck, because they’re not Chinese.

The government recently held a telethon here similar to the ones held shortly after 9/11 and Katrina.  The news channels (all of them controlled by the government) have been running continuous updates about the situation there, with stories of heroic rescues and people pulled alive out of the rubble after being buried for days.  Nothing wrong about that, it’s perfectly legitimate.  I’m sure the army has indeed shown some heroics in their rescue attempts, and media stories of miracle survivors are common after any natural disaster.  But they’ve had a running ticker-tape series of continual updates at the bottom like you see on the western news networks, and they’ve been making a big deal about how communities of ethnic Chinese around the world, especially in American Chinatowns, are working to donate money and supplies.

There are a number of words in Chinese for “foreigner,” the most common of which is lao wei.  This, however, is better translated as “foreigner who isn’t Chinese.” So even though these people in Chinatown might be fifth generation Americans, they’re not really considered lao wei.  Thus money which comes from someone with ethnic Han Chinese blood, no matter where they are actually from, is more important than money given by some regular foreign devil.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Give Or Else

It has been a long established fact (which any of you can verify with a simple Google search) that individual charitable giving in the United States is higher than any nation in the world, even when you exclude corporate donations.  In fact, the only nation to donate more than 1% of GDP to charity is the United States, which gives almost 2%, with the UK at just under 1%.  Whenever there is a disaster anywhere in the world there will be someone in the US who holds a bake sale at work, or organizes something in their community, to raise funds for the disaster.  As an American this is one of the things I am most proud of about my country.  We might do a lot of stupid shit in the world sometimes, and piss off a lot of people, but I think that Americans are at their core some of the most fundamentally decent people in the world.  Part of this, I think, has to do with the sense of personal responsibility which is, unfortunately, slowly eroding in the US.  Europe pays significantly higher taxes than we do, but they also view the government as the responsible party for solving most of life’s problems.  Thus when a disaster strikes somewhere (say the Indonesian tsunami) other countries will expect their government to send money on their behalf, but Americans will be more likely to donate directly from their own pocket.

I mention this not as a rah-rah America thing, but to put a little context into what I am about to relay.  You have all undoubtedly heard about the devastating earthquake in southern China.  This was apparently a 7.6 or 7.8 depending on the news reports.  To put this in perspective, neither the massive Loma Prieta nor Northridge earthquakes which struck California was above a 7, and they caused hundreds of billions of dollars of damage.  I think this amazing photograph of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake is probably representative of the degree of damage in southern China, since the quality of the buildings down there (wood frame, hand-built) probably wasn’t much better than many of the buildings in San Francisco at the turn of the century.

According to the scuttlebutt around town the government has asked specifically for donations of money.  Now, in a country as flush with cash as China, this sounds a little dodgy to me.  I decided to donate money to the Red Cross through their website, so I knew that my money would go to a charity and not end up in the pocket of God-knows-who. 

A few days ago our receptionist put up a small box at the front desk for donations for earthquake victims.  I came in to work one morning and she pointed it out to me.  I told her I had already made a donation to the Red Cross through their website.  However, on Friday something very peculiar happened.  She walked around with the box to everyone saying, “Have you donated yet?” You would NEVER see something this crass in the US or UK.  Charity is considered voluntary, a “help if you want to or can afford to” thing.  As our receptionist was walking around with the box the head of our company, the Chinese guy who is basically the capo de tutti capi of this venture, came around asking all the foreigners if they had donated yet.  Through one of the Chinese I mentioned that, yes, I had donated to the Red Cross online.  This wasn’t met approvingly.

The box was essentially a loyalty test.  It was for the foreign devils to show their gratitude to China for all that their country has given us.  So while all my Chinese employees were sticking in 10s and 20s, I stuck in 100, as did all the other expats.  (Since we make so much more than the Chinese we were expected to throw in ten times the amount of money.) Now, this is a box of money in the office.  I’d be willing to bet my entire salary for the rest of the year that not one yuan of this money actually makes it to an earthquake victim.

One of my coworkers asked the company why we don’t have a box out for the victims of the Burmese cyclone.  “Well, um, yes, well, you see, while we operate internationally we are concerned locally.” In other words, we don’t give a fuck about them because they’re not Chinese.  But when the Chinese are in peril, doing your part to contribute is seen as an act of loyalty to country and culture and ethnicity, and God help the foreigner who comes here to reap the benefits of all that China has to offer and doesn’t prostrate himself in public as a sign of gratitude for it.

This is Chinese racist nationalism in action.

One final point.  My employees have been asking me a lot about earthquakes, since I lived in California for the past decade and felt many of them.  I showed them photos online of the aforementioned Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes.  Portions of freeways collapsed, buildings crumbled in on themselves, all sorts of damage.  They said, “Wow, how many people died?” I said “About 80 in each one.” They couldn’t believe it.  How could China have an earthquake and 20,000 or more deaths, while California could have an earthquake of similar magnitude and only 70 or 80?

One day the reality about China will sink in with the Chinese.  I’ll be long dead and gone by that point, but one day they’re going to start asking themselves these sorts of questions.