Thursday, February 07, 2008

Chinese New Year 2008, Part II

This is the fireworks as seen from outside on my balcony.  Not much to look at visually, but the important aspect is the sound and force of the explosions.  This weren’t no cherrypopper hot-wired to the ignition of your friend’s pickup, this was “blow a serious hole in the ground” shit.  The low rumble you hear isn’t wind, that’s all explosions.

This was what the scene was like at 11pm.  More movies coming later.

Chinese New Year 2008, Part I

Here’s the first of three videos I’ll be uploading showing Chinese New Year.  This was filmed around 8:00 in the evening, when we went to eat dinner on Ghost Street.  Please excuse my rambling, stupid commentary.

When I start to cross the street, right after the bus drives past, look at where the huge explosion comes from—right in the middle of the street.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Fire in the Sky

I knew living on the 25th floor would pay off during Chinese New Year.  I just got home a few minutes ago, and even though New Year’s Eve isn’t until February 4, the sky is already alight with fireworks.  It looks AMAZING.  It still sounds like Beirut around here with all the firecrackers going off.

Tonight’s drunken counteroffensive begins at 2030.

“Sir!  The firecracker’s name is Charlene, sir!”

Friday, February 01, 2008

Beirut, Day II

The explosions continue incessantly.  The heaviest shelling has not yet begun, but already shellshock is setting in.  We prepare for the worst.

Tomorrow night, we plan a counteroffensive utilizing handfuls of M-80s, and copious amounts of alcohol.

Yellow Cow

The other day I mentioned how Spring Festival, as Chinese New Year is known here, is sort of Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one, where everyone leaves the cities to go home and visit their families in the country.  Most people take the train, it being the most economical means of long distance travel.  However, people who work at the train ticket booths know that the demand for tickets is high, so they buy them and then scalp them.

Interestingly, the Chinese term for this type of ticket scalping is huáng niú, which literally translates to “yellow cow.” I have no idea where this idiom originated, and neither did anyone else here I asked.  But a ticket bought from a yellow cow is known as a huáng niú piào, or a “yellow cow ticket.” Two of my employees, who tried for weeks to legitimately buy a ticket, had to end up buying one from a yellow cow, which comes with a markup in price of about 40%.  In one case, a ticket which was ¥170 regularly was ¥240 from the yellow cow. 

But this is China, and they do things the Chinese way.  Imagine if all the ticket agents at the airlines bought all the tickets at Thanksgiving, then sold them on eBay, that’s more or less what it’s like.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Gong Xi Fa Cai

As I’ve mentioned before, I spent much of my early childhood living in various areas in Southeast Asia—Singapore, Indonesia, and so on.  All these areas celebrate Chinese New Year.  I celebrated Chinese New Year long before I ever celebrated the Fourth of July.  I can still remember how to say it, too—Kung Hee Fat Choy! I remember being about five or six, and we had a banner hanging in the living room of our apartment, gold ribbons with red letters, with these words written on it.

Of course, this is a mispronunciation of the actual proper Chinese, probably made easier for foreigners to say in the days before Pinyin was developed.  (As another example, consider the old spelling of Mao Tse-Tung, when the current accurate spelling is Mao Zedong.) When I just Googled the phrase kung hee fat choy almost all the pages returned were from Hawaii, so it appears that this is either a Cantonese variant on the original, or some kind of bastardization on the part of Christian missionaries centuries ago.

At any rate, here’s how you correctly say “Happy New Year” in Chinese:  gōng xǐ fā cái.  Phonetically this is pronounced “gong shee fah tsai.” Here are the characters.

Literally translated this means “congratulations receive wealth.” Idiomatically translated, it means “Have a happy and prosperous New Year.”

That’s one thing about the Chinese that I find so fascinating.  This is a communist country, where countless people were executed as “class enemies” during the Mao era for simply owning property or being a landlord.  (As one Chinese put it to me one day, “Mao made us all the same,” in the sense of the abolition of classes and the empowerment of the proletariat.) But everything, and I mean everything in Chinese culture has to do with one of three things—luck, fortune, and wealth.  And the three are all tied to the same general concept, that you will be lucky and receive good fortune in the form of wealth. 

So you can see why, as the Party wisely decided to abandon the economic idiocy of Marxism and collectivism, the ideas of business and profit and enterprise have taken off at such an astonishing pace.  Wealth and fortune and luck are in the Chinese DNA, and they’re the building blocks of capitalism.

God I love learning about this country. 

Big Bang Theory

Fireworks officially went on sale in Beijing today.  Which means that, for the next three weeks or so, the city is going to sound like Baghdad.  I can hear the explosions as I type this.

The upside, of course, is that I get to blow some shit up.

Update: Sweet merciful Glaven!  The explosions are insane! There are so many tall buildings around here that when someone pops off a firecracker it echoes for about five seconds.  And there’s something that sounds oddly like machine gun fire.

Update 2: There was just a loud BANG quite close to my apartment, followed by a man’s voice screaming.  I think someone just lost a few fingers. 

èr shí yī

Following up on the “oddly libertarian” nature of life in China, I want to throw another iron into the fire.  China has no legal drinking age.  In other words, you can drink any time you like, provided you can find a bar willing to serve it to you.  This is communist, authoritarian China.  Conversely, in America, land of the free and home of the brave, we have an asinine, rigidly-enforced minimum drinking age of 21.  Both federal and state authorities mete out harsh punishments for anyone who violates this rule.

Here’s the interesting thing.  Among Chinese youth, there is no desire to drink.  It’s simply not part of their culture.  In the US, drinking by teenagers is seen as a rite of passage into adulthood.  When you’re 15 you want to be 18, and when you’re 18 you want to be 21.  Thus you start drinking in your mid teens because it’s cool, and the reason it’s cool is because (a) only adults are allowed to drink, and (b) your parents and teachers have been telling you since birth not to taste the fruit of the poisonous tree, so naturally you’re going to do exactly the opposite of what you’re told.

The Chinese who work for me are all in their early 20s.  One girl, who loves American movies and watches them constantly, asked me about why teenagers always want to get drunk or do drugs.  If I remember correctly she had watched Superbad, and couldn’t understand why the kids would go to such lengths to obtain alcohol.  She simply didn’t understand the motivation.  I tried to explain the dynamic to her, but she really couldn’t grasp the concept.  Here in China, where any teenager can buy beer legally, nobody really wants to.  In the US, where it has a stigma attached to it, it’s all every kid wants to do on the weekend.

I then asked her if, during her college years, there were kids who did drugs.  She said that people would have a few beers at parties, and occasionally someone would smoke some hashish, but that there wasn’t really a lot of any of that going on.  It’s not because of the fear of some kind of authoritarian reprisal, it’s completely cultural—since anyone can drink, nobody really makes a big deal out of it.  Nobody in China does stuff like binge drink, or keg stands, or anything of that nature.  If they want a beer or two they just go buy one, because it’s never been a big deal.

It’s been 21 years since the drinking age in the US was raised to a mandatory 21.  Have we seen a decline in the desire of teenagers to drink and do drugs?  I don’t think so.  I remember being 18, and binge drinking, and doing drugs by the handful.  (I vaguely remember doing that last weekend, too.  It’s a little hazy.) It’s been 20 years since I was 18, and nothing has changed.

Also, earlier I wrote “you can drink any time you like, provided you can find a bar willing to serve it to you.” You never see kids in bars.  Hell, you never see anyone in bars who looks underage.  There are two reasons for that.  One, as I described above, kids don’t think it’s a huge deal to go to a bar.  And two, the Chinese government leaves it up to the general responsibility of the bar owner.  If there’s an establishment that churns out drunk and disorderly kids by the busload, they’ll be shut down.  So as long as there isn’t a problem, there isn’t a problem.

The drinking age in the US needs to be lowered to 18, if not abolished altogether.  Most drugs need to be legalized and thus de-glamorized.  If you want to stop your teenagers from binge drinking, then don’t make drinking cool by making it into something only grown-ups can do.

Once again, America can learn a hell of a lot from the Chinese.

Update: Now this is interesting.

China has banned alcohol sales to minors prompted by concerns that permissive attitudes among parents and teachers have worsened a growing problem with under-age drinking.

The ban, which came into force on New Year’s Day, outlaws sales of beverages with an alcohol content of 0.5 per cent or above to anyone under 18, according to a copy of the regulation on the Commerce Ministry’s website on Friday.

Violators can be fined up to 2,000 yuan $250 for serious infractions. However, retailers have being given three months to implement the regulation fully, according to the Xinhua News Agency. The ban is merely a regulation, not a law, and it wasn’t clear how it would be enforced.

Many shops already display signs saying they don’t sell alcohol to minors, but China has never had a formal ban on such sales. The only previous legal mention was a reference in the law on protection of minors that young people should be prevented from abusing alcohol.

I have highlighted the salient point above.  We’ve been discussing this off and on at work for the past month, and not one person has ever said there was a drinking age.  In fact, they have explicitly stated otherwise.  If this is actually the law, apparently none of them know about it, so it’s clear this regulation isn’t being enforced.

There are two Chinese guys I work with who went to college in the US, then lived and worked there for a few years before repatriating here, and both of them said that when they started going to school they were amazed how important alcohol was in the lives of their classmates.  I’ve been in a shitload of bars here, many of them not your typical expat bars, and not one time have I seen anyone who looked too young to be in there.  Yes, karaoke is popular as hell—it’s called KTV here (I don’t know what it stands for, but you see KTV signs everywhere)—but still drinking is nowhere near as ingrained into the youth culture as it is in the US.  Like I said in the post above, I was specifically asked by this girl, who is 23 and a recent college graduate, why young Americans are so fascinated with alcohol and drugs, because there’s nothing comparable in Chinese youth culture.  And it wasn’t just that this girl was a nerd or anything like that, every Chinese I’ve ever discussed this with has said that (a) there’s no drinking age, and (b) drinking among the young isn’t really a big deal anyway.

Sociologists say rising under-age drinking has accompanied the growth of urban incomes and growing independence among children to indulge in the proliferation of restaurants, bars, karaoke parlours and other leisure outlets.

A quarter of middle-school pupils and up to 80 per cent of high school pupils say they have drunk alcohol, according to figures cited by Sun Yunxiao, of the China Youth Research Centre, in a recent article in People’s Daily.

“Alcohol abuse among minors has been pretty much ignored in schools and society as compared to drug use or even smoking cigarettes,” Sun said.

“There has never been an effective mechanism like there is overseas for preventing the problem.”

I also find it fascinating that the guy says that there has never been an “effective mechanism” such as there has been overseas, when the mechanism we have in place overseas does nothing but make the problem worse.  If there’s an effective mechanism anywhere, doing nothing about it seems to be the most productive solution.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that this is one of those things China does to improve its image on the world stage while domestically doing nothing, like when they executed that guy for taking bribes over the poison toy scandal.

Whenever I go to a foreign country I like to hang out where the locals hang out and absorb the flavor of the country.  So I don’t only go where the expats go, my friends and I often go to bars and restaurants where we are the only lao wei present, and not one time have I seen anyone who looked underage actually drinking.  And, like I said, if this ban is in place nobody who works for me actually knows that there’s a drinking age.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Hong Bao

One of the traditions of Chinese New Year are hong bao, which literally translated means “red package” but idiomatically means “red envelope.” Basically these are used to give gifts of money.  It goes from a senior person to a junior person, most often a parent or grandparent to a child, that sort of thing.  It can also be used for an employer to give a little bonus at the end of the year to an employee.

I found them for sale at lunch, and figured that I’d be a classy guy and kick my ayi a few bucks.  A rule of thumb is half a month’s salary, so I figure I’ll toss in ¥400 (about $56).  This is a sign of respect and thanks, and she will greatly appreciate receiving it, and not just because of the money.

(Apologies for the cyan edge around the envelope.  My camera phone sucks, and to bring out the color and detail of the envelope I had to color-correct the shit out of the image, which turned my white tabletop cyan.)

Guanxi

In the past I’ve discussed the Chinese term guanxi.  You can find a detailed explanation here, but here’s an overview.

“Guanxi” literally means “relationships”, stands for any type of relationship. In the Chinese business world, however, it is also understood as the network of relationships among various parties that cooperate together and support one another. The Chinese businessmen mentality is very much one of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” In essence, this boils down to exchanging favors, which are expected to be done regularly and voluntarily. Therefore, it is an important concept to understand if one is to function effectively in Chinese society.

I mention this because of the Chinese New Year holiday.  Most of the wealth in Beijing is located in the cities.  The rural areas are still poor and the people lie simple lives.  Chinese parents work hard to ensure that their children get a good education, then send them to one of the main cities for college and a career.  Since Chinese New Year is basically an amalgam of Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time when people go home to celebrate with families, the cities largely empty out as people go back home.  The most common means of transportation are the trains.

One of my employees has been trying for three weeks to get a ticket home.  There is a train ticket agency right near our company, and she went in and made a reservation.  However, just because you make a reservation doesn’t mean you can get a ticket.  The people who work for the train company, recognizing the profit potential in train tickets, essentially become ticket scalpers.  Thus if you really want a train ticket, and are not lucky enough to be able to buy one through legitimate channels, you have to turn to alternate means.

My employee has a friend with a great deal of guanxi.  Yesterday she made a phone call and said, “My friend has guanxi.  He should be able to help me.” Today she came in and happily announced that last night she was able to get her train ticket home.

Yesterday I described authoritarianism as being woven into the fabric of the Chinese identity.  Concepts such as guanxi, which have been around forever, are exactly the same.  Who do you know, who are your family, what can you do for me if I help you, and so on.  The Chinese may sign western-style contracts, but the real deals aren’t done in the conference room, they’re done in a restaurant, over a delicious meal with plenty of beer.  Handshakes, cash, and guanxi.  That’s how this country operates.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Taboo

Here are some things which, according to Chinese folklore, you should not do on New Year’s Day.

• Since everyone is in a festive mood during Spring Festival, people shouldn’t argue and parents shouldn’t scold or punish their children. Otherwise, you will have many more arguments during the New Year.

• Women shouldn’t use a knife or shears in the kitchen, because it indicates anger, resulting in the cutting off of good luck.

• Breaking a dish plate, bowel or cup means bad financial luck will follow.

• A married woman needs to visit her mother’s home, otherwise her mother’s family will grow poorer.

• To sweep the floor or dump the trash on New Year’s Day will also sweep away the wealth and luck from the home.

• Don’t take a noonday nap, otherwise family members will be lazy all year long.

• If you wash your hair on New Year’s Day, you will wash your good luck away.

• Don’t wear black or white while visiting friends, because black and white are funeral colors in China.

• People shouldn’t visit a friend’s house if the friend has had a family member pass away recently.

• Don’t eat rice porridge for morning breakfast, otherwise you won’t get rich (in past times, only poor people ate rice porridge).

• Don’t eat meat at morning breakfast, because many of the gods are vegetarians and arrive at New Year’s Day festival in the morning.

• Don’t wake a person in the morning by calling their name, otherwise that person will need another person’s push all year long.

• Don’t take any unnecessary medicine; otherwise you will become unhealthy in the New Year.

• Don’t wash clothes, because New Year’s Day is the birthday of the god of Water.

• If someone owes you money, do not ask for the money back on this day. Otherwise, you will have to request money from that person all year long.

It’s odd.  For a country that is technically communist, everything about Chinese culture has to do with one of three things:  health, luck, and money (or fortune).  Basically, at their essence, they’re all capitalist whores like me.