Chinese Peter Jenkins

There's a magazine/website for expats here called Go Chengdoo, a really useful source of information.  (There's also a website called Chengdu Living, the name of which gives me a slight brain hemorrhage.)  While I was looking for information on recycling and the municipal waste system (I like to cut loose after 8pm) I found this article, entitled  "the most handsome trash digger."

It's about a young man, currently in Chengdu, who makes his way around the country ("he's been able to travel to over 10 cities") by picking through the trash for recyclables.  This made a splash in the Chinese internet community, because most trash-pickers are very old, very poor country people.  His looks were compared favorably to the actor Tong Chun-Chung. 

Basically he's just a kid from the country who likes having a job where he walks around and gets to travel to new places.  His big goal is to save up 10,000 kuai so he can move to the QTP* and pick through trash there.  Which sounds pretty amazing, actually, considering he's funding his travels by recycling, and spends his whole day walking around (low carbon emissions) and doing what he wants.  In Chinese society "trash picking" is a pretty low kind of work, so perhaps he needs to be rebranded as an awareness-raising environmentalist and critic of new middle class values?

Here's a great, gushing quote from the article:

even that classic line from Stephen Chow's movie was used by netizens to describe his appearance: "A man man like you, just like fireflies in the dark, as bright as that, as numerous as that, you with your eyes so sullen, with the air of one breath you betray yourself."

*Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

寻狗启示

Saw this just inside the school gate this morning on my way to school.  It says:

Inspiration for Seeking Dogs

On the 16th of September, at 6 in the morning, somewhere around Sichuan University, I lost two dogs, one small white dog and one big black dog.  If you saw anything or can provide any useful clues to help me find my dogs, I'm willing to personally reward you 200RMB.  Although 200 Yuan is not much money, I hope that a caring comrade will help me!

Thank you! 

Smaug the Magnificent

Eight o'clock this morning, the view from the first ring road, on the way to school. 

So much smog.  Some time last week I was talking to my roommate Patrick about how thick the smog was that day, and he said "don't you think that it was pretty hazy in Chengdu, even in pre-industrial times? Some of this is just natural fog."  "No way." I said.  He paused for a few moments and then said "well, I'm trying to be optimistic."

Yesterday Patrick went to the top floor of a hotel called the Shangri-La, and he said he could see some kind of big industrial plant with smokestacks producing thick black smoke.  He asked me why they would put a plant right in the middle of the city like that.  (Patrick asks a lot of questions.)  My guess was that the city probably grew in around the plant, which was probably built right after the damn communist revolution or something.  He said "so in Europe they build cities around churches, and in China they build cities around factories and oil refineries?" Which led to a discussion of danwei, which I stopped listening to because I was watching a dog cross the busy road, which was harrowing.

That reminds me of a conversation I had with Shutzer this summer when we were passing through one of a thousand small "charming" Missouri towns on the Great River Road.  Since I took two classes in the College of Built Environments I'm pretty much an expert on urban design and planning, and I like giving little mini-lectures on the subject to captive audiences.  I said something like "all these towns are built around railroad stations.  The railroad built this great nation."  But then we actually passed the center of town, and there was a big courthouse there, which was really gratifying to Shutzer, not only because I was wrong, but because it allowed him to go on at great length about a proposed history thesis that undermines all prior scholarship operating under the assumption that human beings came before human concepts.  "Before there were pioneers, covered wagons, railway depots...there was justice.  Wild justice, roaming the land."

What's at the center of the city? For amateur anthropologists, always a good question to ask.

binge together

"happy wildness men" --a poem from my coffee mug

We are happy men!
We love nature;
We live on hunt;
We live together;
We love freedom;
We are mightiness;
We are bravery;
The only thing we want is to go
along with themen we love and
binge together,live up together.


*I placed the mug on a photo of Russell Crowe to enhance the masculinity of the piece

Unwanted Advances

Although this has nothing to do with China, I really want to share this totally fucking phenomenal photo I took of a goat under Prusik Peak.

I think the most amazing part is the goat-devil shadow.

Waiting...

While I'm waiting ten years for my photographs to resize, I wanted to share this article I found while I was furiously trying to find everything academic ever written about wildlife conservation in China, ahead of meeting up with an expert at 川大(Sichuan University) next week.  (Having no scientific background makes me something of a confidence man when I'm talking to people about my research.)

This article came out in The New Yorker in 2008, written by "Great American Novelist" Jonathan Franzen, no less.  It's called "The Way of the Puffin," and it traces a journey Franzen took to China to visit factories and go bird watching.  He was inspired by the gift of a luxe golf head cover in the shape of an adorable puffin-"made in China." But hypocrisy nagged at him--that somewhere nature was plowed over to build a factory to make stuffed animals to sell to people who get sentimental over stuffed animals.

At one point he asks his bird-watching companion to take him to a bird market, and the guy very reluctantly agrees.  He writes this (forgive the blog-unfriendly length, he's a talented writer, and builds to a point):

There, in a maze of alleys north of the Qinhuai River, we saw freshly caught skylarks beating themselves against the bars of cages. We saw a boy taming a sparrow on a leash by stroking its head. We saw tall cones of bird shit. Least disturbing to me were the cages of budgies and munias that had possibly been bred in captivity. Next-least disturbing were the colorful exotics-fulvettas, leafbirds, yuhinas-that had been extracted from some beleaguered southern forest and spirited to Nanjing. I hated to see them here, but they looked only half real, because I didn't know them in their native habitat. It was like the difference between seeing some outlandish stranger in a porn flick and seeing your best friend: the most upsetting captives were the most familiar-the grosbeaks, the thrushes, the sparrows. I was shocked by how much smaller and altogether more ragged and diminished they looked in cages than they had in the Botanical Garden. It was just as Shrike had told Xiaoxiaoge: what a nature reserve protected was a place. Almost as much as the animal was in the place, the place was in the animal.

The entire article is worth reading.  For not being remotely a China expert, Franzen's observations are very thoughtful and unadorned with travel-writing BS.  At one point he mentions how Chinese elevators are on a "hair-trigger" which I was reminded of today when I got on the elevator at my apartment building and the guy already on the elevator pressed the door close button before I was all the way on, and it slammed shut on my backpack, trapping me for a tense 3 seconds.  The guy looked at me and let out a put-upon sigh, like "you see what I'm working with here people?" Then pushed the door close button again.

S.O.P.

Continuing in my role as the world's first blogging bear, I've created this auxiliary blog to chronicle my historic* trip to Sichuan.  I hope to make this blog something between a travel journal and field notes--I mostly want to write about things I observe that are related to my thesis work, including human-animal relationships, NGOs in China, ecotourism, animals in TCM, wildlife conservation, etc.  I'm hoping to have a lot of pictures too.

I've been here in Chengdu for about 3 weeks, and much of my time is taken up by Chinese language study.  We have a four-day break next week for the mid-Autumn festival, and my classmate Kiana and I are planning a trip to E'Mei Shan 峨眉山which translates roughly to "lofty eyebrow mountain." It'll be nice to get out of the city.  The smog is opressive!  Today I saw the sun for the first time in a week or so, and the heat was somewhere between Louisiana summer and a self-cleaning oven.

A note on the blog name, from a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.:

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

That seemed right to me.  It's an aspirational quote, to remind me that a critical eye should be coupled with compassion for ALT**.  A quote that might be more personally descriptive is this one from Firefly:

Mal: Mercy is the mark of a great man. (Thinks about this for a second, then stabs his opponent.) Guess I'm just a good man. (Stabs him again.) Well, I'm alright.

Thanks Joss Whedon. Moral relativity for men, women, space cowboys and bears, everywhere.

*What makes something "historic"?
**All Living Things (henceforth: ALT)