Earthquake

 

Monday was a beautiful day in Xiamen; low humidity, bright sunshine and a perfect day for running the Olympic Torch through town which in a town of almost two million is a pretty big deal.  Most classes were cancelled since while the administration didn’t sanction it, many of the kids had arranged to go see the torch somewhere along the route.   Every body was pretty happy when the foreign teachers did what many of the Chinese teachers had done. 

It would be silly to tell your grandchildren that you sat on your butt in some silly class when the Olympic Torch was making its way through town on a beautiful day.

Busses, the principal means of transportation in these parts were packed and finally stopped running by noon when the roads into Xiamen Island were closed.  The run hit the peak areas of town about 2:30 and was televised on local stations.  Nobody felt a thing.

I’m not sure what geological structures prevented the coast here from feeling the earthquake in Sichuan Province when it was felt in Taiwan, Hanoi, Tokyo and Beijing, but no one I know sensed anything. 

You’ve probably followed the news………they’re still trying to get to many areas since the weather was terrible in the aftermath and most of the roads and bridges are out.  The numbers keep going up and many kids here are affected.  I know two in particular who are from the area directly involved and they report that their families are safe, but that their towns and everything they had there is destroyed.  Of course a college student from those parts knows the local schools pretty well, so they’re having a hard time of it.

For the CNN/Jack Cafferty fans, the local media is covering all the details in real-time as is the Beijing media………good and bad, warts and all.  It makes that business with Katrina look like the efforts of a third world country.  I wonder if Cafferty has commented on that yet. 

The College is doing what it can and has asked the teachers to check with students who are affected and is taking up the usual collections for aid agencies.  Nothing you wouldn’t see anywhere else.  All the kids are using their phone networks and the Internet to keep in touch and they’ve asked the school to keep the Internet in their  dorms up after 11 PM — it’s practice here to turn it off at 11 so kids aren’t up all night playing online games or chatting with each other. 

All is well in Xiamen, but its a terrible time for China.

 

Yes, Sam………I am still in China

A good friend of mine from Texas asked me if I was still in China since I’ve not posted anything in a long time.  I’ve been busy. 

The school year here lasts forever it seems — from Late February after the Spring Festival until The middle of July.  There is only one short break for the May 1st Labor Day holiday and one of three days of holiday is Saturday so it really doesn’t count.  Most US colleges are finished by the end of May.

College kids here work hard too and have it much harder than I do.  I’ve got twelve ninety minute classes I teach on odd numbered weeks and eleven ninety minute classes on the even numbered weeks and a total of about 500 kids in all the classes combined.  So giving a quiz is painful and takes a long time to correct; giving a written assignment of any length is more painful still.   Four of my classes are in the evening, from 7 to 8:30 and by that time, most of the students have already sat in nine classes for the day. 

I have no idea how they do it.

Also taking some time is a little business venture which envisions buying stone, pearl and glass jewelry here and in Hong Kong and selling it in the States.  Even with shipping US prices can very reasonable and the stuff is really nice.  There are also a couple of artists I’ve found here who can paint an exact copy of any photograph in oils and give you a perfect portrait or scene that you couldn’t touch in the States for six times the price.  (You can send your orders for paintings or jewelry to Silkroadtrader@live.com.)

Here’s one of my son and a rather impressive fish he caught in Western Maryland:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the Olympics coming up in August (I will be back in the US by then), there’s been lots of news about China recently, much of it bad.  Some of it’s wrong.  Jack Cafferty on CNN called the Chinese a bunch of goons and ranted about the toy factories, toothpaste and “crackdowns.”  Of course he did not say that Chinese authorities closed half the factories making toys in Guandong Province once they got word of the problems.  I always liked Cafferty, he was a  NY City news guy for years before making it big as CNN’s answer to Andy Rooney.  But CNN has been getting it wrong about China where I know about the facts personally.  

In March, the Dodgers and Padres came to Beijing to play a couple of Spring Training games in China for the first time ever.  This was at the peak of the Tibet stuff where a well-orchestrated series of protests around the world brought attention to the Chinese equivalent of taking over the Sioux lands in the Dakotas. 

Anyway, CNN and other news outlets reported that the “Chinese Crackdown” eliminated a bunch of Boy Scouts from being in the baseball game ceremonies and that the National Anthem tradition of a US ballgame was also eliminated.  Well, I didn’t go to the Saturday game, but I was in Beijing for the game on Sunday.  I never saw any Boyscouts looking downtrodden after being denied participation, but I saw, heard and sang the US National Anthem and saw and heard the Chinese anthem just like a regular game.  Here’s a picture of the teams lined up, caps off while the anthem was played:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These swarthy characters are ticket scalpers; they’re the same all over the world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Chinese media used stories from the US press to illustrate how carefully cropped news photos suggested impressions of protests that were a little different from reality.  One most frequently shown was a widely distributed photo of two protesters apparently facing truckloads of Chinese soldiers singlehandedly.  The uncropped photo, also shown in the US media, showed a whole crowd of people pelting the trucks with rocks.   

Of course there is no story to sell if the headline reads “Chinese authorities reasonable and restrained in the face of organized violence.”   “Hillary Under Sniper Fire” sure made a better speech than strolling from the plane to the flower girl in Bosnia too.

Don’t believe everything you read or everything a self-serving politician or CNN pundit says either.

Maybe I’m “going native” but my view of this place is very different from what I am reading on CNN, Fox and the others.  Some of my students wanted to go march in front of Carrafour, the big French department store chain that has a store here in Xiamen.  The French were a little nasty during that Olympic Torch run. Their Chinese teachers advised them not to bother the French store and that it would look bad for the school and for China. 

As an aside, there were people from all over the place at the ballgame.  No vendors in the stands, but they sold beer and cold hot dogs and everybody seemed to have a good time.  Major League Baseball paraphenalia was all over the place and they made a bundle selling merchandise at prices that could feed a large family for a couple of months.  Nobody clapped or made much noise at the game.  Instead, the practice here is to take two inflated plastic tubes and beat them together to make appreciative noise.  Same thing at a concert.

This young lady threw six strikes in a row……..and fast too……someone from the Dodger’s Organization was talking to her after her demonstration, but of course human rights problems in the States prevent women from being part of many professional sports teams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So that’s a little of the news from China…busy, busy, busy…….but the next post won’t be so long in coming.  I promise.