Unusual things in Xiamen, China

There is some weird stuff here.  

The most popular form of transportation is the motor bike.  Most people have one and they pile on everything in ingenious ways.  It is not unusual to see someone with a TV, five gallon bottles of water, almost anything tooling around taking something home or for a commercial delivery. 

Motorbikes and bicycles.  On the bicycles, particularly on this campus at Jimei, kids are always hopping on someone’s bike getting rides.  They either sit on the small flat luggage carrier over the rear wheel, or stand over the rear wheel on extenders on the axle that leave just enough room for a smallish Chinese foot.  Nobody I have seen does the handlebar trick, which may be a practice abandoned due to bad experiences. 

Traffic here and the ways and wisdom of driving protocol is a hoot.  The rule is that first gets the right-of-way, no matter the vehicle, lane, intersection, whatever.  If you’re first, you win and if you get hit, it’s their fault.  This idea kind of makes rear-view mirrors superfluous……………….everybody focuses ahead of them, maneuvering to get there first.  What happens behind them ain’t their problem.

So except for within Xiamen proper, where tooting your horn is outlawed, the deal is you blow your vehicle horn continuously and go like hell.  It makes for quite a racket but surprisingly few accidents.  And the protocol applies to pedestrians, most of whom have no horn, so they are non-competitive with any sort of vehicle from semis to bikes.  It is not unusual for a motorbike or a car to go barreling along a pathway, jammed with kids going between classes, blowing it’s horn madly and bothering not a bit for people who may be in the roadway.  Pedestrians seem to get it and move, some barely in time.  Deaf Chinese aren’t very plentiful, which probably is a result of Darwin’s observations and flattened people with bad hearing.

Despite some pretty bad air pollution that takes the sharpness and clarity out of the picture of anything in these parts, things are pretty clean.  In Xiamen and elsewhere, there are streetsweepers everywhere, people that is, with bamboo shafted leafy branches sweeping up leaves, trash and anything else.  The efficiency of leafy tree branches in sweeping is remarkable.  They used to use straw brooms the same way in Paris when I first traveled there.  In later years the Parisian’s replaced the natural material with plastic that is supposed to resemble straw or twigs or something.  Here, they stick with the natural stuff and it seems to work better.

There are also more conventional streetwashers, tank trucks that drive around the city spraying high pressure water to clean the streets.  The unusual part about this process is that the trucks are equipped with amplified speakers and play “Happy Birthday” in a high-pitched single horn rendition that is startling, but instructive. I have no clue as to why they’d pick “Happy Birthday” as the streetwasher song, but if you are in Xiamen and hear the strained refrain of “Happy Birthday” you will know to step lively and avoid a soaking.

Nevertheless, the food is plentiful, really cheap and very, very good. 

Smog and Defectors

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Smog and Defectors

When I was in China five years ago, air pollution was apparent in some places but nowhere near the level it is now.  Xiamen (shaman) was one of the better cities in China for air quality.  No more. 

When I arrived in August, the heat and humidity were oppressive and the air was heavy and hazy which I attributed to the humidity.  It’s cooler now, in the 70s and sixties at night, but the air never cleared.  Crisp and clear it ain’t. Pollution in the air here is palpable. Visibility toward the horizon is often limited to a mile or two at most due to heavy smog.  On the clearest days, visibility is seldom greater than five miles – and “clear” days are few. I have seen no day with clear visibility at the horizon that permitted a view.  A “raspy” throat is commonplace and the smell and feel of incinerated particles in the air is constant.

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It comes from coal-fired power plants, widespread use of charcoal bricks for cooking and fume-emitting vehicles of all types from conventional tractor trailers, to hundreds of busses, to thousands of motorbikes, the principal means of transportation for most people. 

Public transportation is mostly a variety of busses and a larger variety of taxis.  The taxi’s range from conventional cabs with dome lights, to marginally legal blue busses which are small, over packed vans that operate as gypsy cabs or the vans in New York, to motor bike contraptions and regular motorbikes where anybody and everybody hops on for a cheap – and risky – ride.  I’ve seen families piled onto the back of a motorbike, with plastic bags of groceries hanging on them while they hung on to each other. 

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Defectors

At the Sofitel Here, a French hotel brand operated here by a Singapore company, they inaugurated a new ballroom by showing the BBC documentary “Crossing the Line” about four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 1960s.  One of them was the guy who was able to rejoin his Japanese wife, a kidnapping victim of North Korea, in Japan after settling up with the US Army and another is still in North Korea, an aged celebrity now in failing health. 

The fellow who got the tickets for some of us is a Malaysian-born Chinese who after spending twenty years being an Australian, came to China.  He’s got an unusual accent in both English and Mandarin.

The event featured the film, a well done and balanced study of North Korea and the US deserters, accompanied by comments by one of the co-producers, Nick Bonner.  Bonner who lives in Beijing runs a travel agency that arranges tours of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  It’s not particularly busy.

The irony of sitting in the ballroom or a luxurious French Hotel, in what some call Communist China (with special emphasis implying a closed restrictive society), watching a BBC produced documentary depicting North Korea in a candid and unflattering way, with a mixed audience of expats from all over the world and Chinese nationals was illuminating.  Well within my lifetime, North Korea was a client-state of both the Soviet Union and Communist China.  Some of the first television I remember ever seeing was newsreel coverage of the Korean War when hundreds of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” streamed into North Korea to fight GI’s.  North Korea didn’t learn how to be a closed society by reading books; they were taught by folks whose kids and grandkids now think it’s a pretty bad idea.