china: day seven (special swine flu edition)

I want to preface this by saying that I completely understand just how dangerous a new strain of influenza could be to China's population. People live so close together in the major cities, and have so much contact with each other, that a disease as easily transmitted as the swine flu could never be contained once it got into the country. Even with as low a mortality rate as this disease has, the effect would be devastating. China is right to be cautious.

I also want to clear up some terminology. H1N1 is just a name for a subtype of influenza A, and it's as old as dirt. A strain of H1N1 was responsible for the 1918 flu outbreak, for example. Your annual flu vaccine prepares you for H1N1, H3N2, and influenza B. It's a really, really common virus. While it's accurate to say that swine flu is of subtype H1N1, the unfortunate moniker "swine flu" refers to the specific strain of H1N1 that has been in the media so much recently. To use "H1N1" as a synonym for this new strain is imprecise. The actual strain responsible for the swine flu brouhaha hasn't been given an official name yet. So when I say "swine flu," don't correct me. I'm trying to refer specifically to this new strain, and not to all variants of H1N1 ever throughout history. If you raise pigs, I'm sorry, press and television in the U.S. just trampled all over your business. Take it up with them, not me.

(Edit 6/21: "Swine flu" isn't a very precise term either. The term "S-OIV," or "Swine-origin influenza A virus," is beginning to come into common usage to describe this strain.)

There is a national policy in place right now to investigate any fever above 37.5 degrees Celsius, or 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit, measured under the arm. Stay above that for more than two consecutive measurements and bad things happen. I was, unfortunately, unwise enough to let my temperature slip upward just that much.

When I got back to the dormitory last night, my temperature measured 37.6. The administration had me measure it again (37.5) then told me that 37.5 was right on the edge of the temperature at which the national response triggers. They said a hospital might or might not have to send a car for me, and that I should wait in my room until they found out. I went upstairs, and ten minutes later, I got a phone call asking for a "Peter." I told them they had the wrong number. Moments later, a knock on my door: "Peter? Peter!" Right person, wrong name. Unfortunate. They handed me a face mask and said a car was waiting for me outside to take me to a clinic for a doctor to measure my temperature professionally.

This was a good introduction to the Chinese art of lying.

By "car," they had meant "ambulance with flashing lights and an entourage of smaller hospital vehicles." By "doctor," they meant "team of doctors in biohazard suits." By "measure my temperature," well, I'll get to that. I suspect this tendency to lie comes from a China's high-context communication style. If, for example, I had looked outside and seen the flashing lights, I would have been able to parse "car" properly. I found out later, of course, that in China it is more appropriate to tell a reassuring lie and let the listener be blindsided by the truth later than to tell an unsettling truth and be responsible for your words upsetting the listener. In America, we become more upset at the act of lying. When in Rome, eh? I still can't figure out, though, how that meshes with China's uncertainty avoidance. I would have expected high uncertainty avoidance to appear in the same places low-context communication does. In any case, the most important things in conversation with Chinese people seem to be maintaining the face of the person you're talking to, and not saying anything that might alarm or unsettle that person.

Now, to explain what they meant by "measure my temperature." The ambulance took me for a half-hour ride to the opposite side of town. Now, I've read two books on body language, and I was giving off every tell for calm and composure that I could remember. Either my stillness was giving me away, though, or the lady in the back of the ambulance with me was projecting, because she kept telling me to calm down. After I exited the ambulance, a man in a biohazard suit sprayed it, the ground I had walked on, and the medical staff with disinfectant. Then, I was asked for my passport, and I heard my flight numbers spoken back and forth. A nurse pulled out two cotton swabs on long sticks and shoved one up my nose and the other down my throat. I didn't fully understand what the purpose of this was, but I think she was trying to make me cough and sneeze. They took me inside for a chest x-ray, followed by a full medical examination--blood pressure, lymph nodes, stethoscopes, the whole nine yards. They then took a blood sample and told me the test would come back in half an hour. I asked why all the other tests were being taken when the blood test was the only important one, and received this answer: "We don't really know what the symptoms of H1N1 are yet."


One hour later, I was told the test was inconclusive, and that I would need to wait a little longer. I was offered a hospital bed for the night and two mystery pills. I asked what they were, and the woman who gave them to me had to go back and ask. Hmm. They turned out to be antibiotics. The hospital was handling out antibiotics like candy to a man suspected of having a virus. Fortunately I was able to refuse them without any major consequences. They said, "It should be OK to drink some warm water instead."

I'm not sure whether this is the Chinese version of the Hippocratic Oath, or a set of instructions for this particular hospital.

All throughout this, I was referred to as "mei guo ren" (American) even though they had asked for my name twice and seen my passport. Maybe it was just the distressing circumstances, but I found this to be really, really offensive. I can't imagine Xing or Mahmoud back in the States would appreciate being called "Chinaman" or "Iranian." It was sure great for the old self-esteem to be a faceless, foreign national security threat in the medical team's eyes.

At 7:00 AM today, they brought me breakfast. It was a nice gesture, and I'm sure they never meant me any harm, but I am still irrationally angry at them. Forty minutes later, the blood test results came back from a regional testing center they hadn't told me about. Surprise! I do not have swine flu. My one-degree fever is, in fact, just a one-degree fever.

Here were the three things that raised the WTF flag the highest throughout the evening:

"A car will come to pick you up." After I found out that this was a baldfaced lie, I should have been a little more prepared for everything else that happened.

A single dose of antibiotics for a low-grade fever, without a prescription? I can't imagine the superbacteria that must be developing over here.

Now, the biggest: "We don't really know what the symptoms of H1N1 are." Really? Really? You're doctors. I assume you have access to medical journals, or the Internet at the very least. There are how many documented cases of swine flu worldwide? Just how many people have been forcibly detained for having symptoms or being in circumstances completely unrelated to the disease? How many hours, how much money, have been spent on quarantine facilities and testing because you don't even understand the illness? I can only hope that others have been as fortunate as I have to escape without permanent harm. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, match your impressive temperature detection equipment and medical facilities with enough research and knowledge to put them to their best possible use. Don't flail around in blind panic.

On the plus side, though, I now get to add "abducted by the Chinese government" to my resume.

china: day six

Today was the tour of the terra cotta army. I had wanted to see it since Dr. Coble's class two years ago, but I have not been allowed to go because of my fever. My one degree Celsius fever. Fortunately, where there's a will, there's a way, and through a mechanism I cannot fully explain I found myself at the museum. I did run into the other group briefly--something I'd been hoping to avoid--but no harm came of it.









The soldiers are, well, something else. Each one has a unique face, and there are many hundreds of them. They are a testament to the power of a culture's beliefs about death. What if Western Europe had not been dominated by the Christian idea that "You can't take it with you?" At first, I thought of the soldiers as a massive waste of time and resources. All of those laborers and artists put effort into artifacts the emperor would take with him to his grave. But then I realized that the soldiers had repaid China many times over in the knowledge of military and religious history they preserved, not to mention the tourism dollars they bring in. What goes around comes around, I suppose.










In the evening, I ate with Dr. Li at a restaurant just outside the University gates. It was my first experience eating at a restaurant not intended to cater to English speakers. The menu was entirely in cangjie, and nobody on the premises spoke English. I did have a Chinese speaker with me, however, and he ordered for both of us. I wrote down the names of the better dishes we had, so I could be able to order them again next time. The restaurant specializes in Sichuan cuisine, and it doesn't mess around. We had chicken with green onions and pork with peppers, in addition to a plate of mild fried vegetables. The mild dish and the rice were crucial for offsetting the spiciness of the meat dishes. Everything was fantastic. It had the true essence of the wok, the flavor that I can never produce at home with an electric stove. I hope to return soon.

cybersitter smash!

A team of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan investigated Green Dam, the software China's government wants preinstalled on all new PCs sold there. They found--in addition to a few vulnerabilities allowing execution of arbitrary code--blacklists and configuration files lifted straight from Cybersitter, a Web censoring tool made by Solid Oak, a California software company.

Now Solid Oak is angry.

It's considering taking legal action to prevent computers from being shipped to China with Green Dam installed. There's no good way to resolve the issue; Solid Oak can't enforce U.S. copyright law in China, and stopping U.S. computer manufacturers from shipping their goods to China, while legal and effective, just seems unfair--Dell et al would be the losers in the fight between Solid Oak and the company that made Green Dam.

china: day five

Calligraphy class was unpleasant. The slide projector clicks, a new set of scribbled cangjie appears, and the professor drones, "This is a sample of calligraphy from the Tang Dynasty." This exact scene repeats itself hundreds of times, with only the name of the dynasty changing. Why were the characters written the way they were? What is the link between Tang calligraphy and the Japanese Art of Sho? Guess we'll never know.

There was a fascinating lecture about multinational enterprises in China in the afternoon. I learned that signatures are worth nothing, and that a Chinese person's seal is his identification. I could only imagine how easy it must be to steal someone's seal, and how much that person would lose. What would Schneier say?

The other interesting element of the lecture was that MNEs are encouraged to place research and development operations in China because of access to inexpensive scientists. I wondered how firms weigh the savings against the loss of intellectual property to China's challenging legal environment.

In the evening, we went to the park and watched the water show. It was quite a thing:








After the show, we wandered around the park for a little while longer:



Tonight I started to develop a low-grade fever. The administration has been measuring our temperature twice per day since we got here. The whole country is paranoid about swine flu, and I suppose they have good reason; people live terrifyingly close to each other here. Even so, it feels a little demeaning. They don't trust us. We're being treated like little threats to national security, not people. I can only hope nothing dire comes of this.

china: day four

Today's lecture on Chinese history was delivered well, but it was almost a perfect echo of Park Coble's course at UNL. The biggest difference is that Professor Coble spent much more time on Chinese philosophers than our professor here did; Coble spent two full classes on the philosophy of legalism, which the professor here didn't even cover.

In the evening, we took a bus to the Muslim quarter. It was the perfect, stereotypical image of the Chinese street market. Vendors hawked everything from spices to dumplings to Chairman Mao pocket watches. Everything except pork, of course. It was a strenuous exercise in Chinese language, barter, and keeping track of your wallet. Rickshaws, bicycles, and the occasional Mercedes plowed through hundreds of pedestrians. It seemed like a miracle that nobody got hurt. We then ate at a nearby restaurant famous for its soup-filled dumplings. They were fantastic, if a challenge to eat.

There was a Starbucks Coffee not far from the restaurant. To put things into perspective, I've been paying RMB1.00 to RMB3.50 for most of my meals. A 600ml bottle of beer costs RMB2.50. The drinks at Starbucks cost anywhere from RMB15 to RMB30. Even though that's on par with U.S. prices ($2-$4 for a cup of coffee) they stood out from the entire meals I'd been getting for $0.50. The look of the place reflected its prices--arched wooden beams formed the ceiling, soft jazz played, and artsy light fixtures washed customers in a gentle golden glow. It was an atmosphere more fitting a hotel lobby than a coffee house.

I continued to experience cognitive dissonance at KTV Party World, a karaoke, well, place. I'm not sure how to describe it. You walk in, and marble pillars rise from a marble floor to a twenty-five-foot vaulted ceiling. Brass adorns everything. The receptionist then directed us to our room, where we sang the night away. Now, when I said "our room," I hope I adequately implied that there are other rooms. There were at least a hundred tiny rooms with soundproofed doors scattered throughout the building, and a different party was going on behind every door. It was unlike everything I had ever seen, and I could only wonder what could have created the economic demand to support such a place.

china: scenes from yuan village

china: day three

Today was our first lecture on Chinese painting. Unfortunately there was not much to the lecture I hadn't previously learned, but the professor did bring two of his paintings--I learned far more from them. One had a delicate branch with thin leaves against a light mist in the upper right, with the poem and seal directly below. In the lower left were two fish; the river was implied. The other image had spikier branches to contrast with the wispy strokes of crustaceans' antennae below. Both paintings were composed in virtually the same way, with vast areas of blank paper pulling the eye to the two points of interest in the bottom-left quarter and upper third.

It was revealed today that the XJTU administration wants to keep us Americans confined to the international student dormitory. Not ones to waste one of our precious three weeks, our faculty fought back. Because of their efforts, we were able to visit a Chinese high school, a factory that produces Moon Cakes and halal food products, and a farming-village-cum-tourist destination (imagine Living History Farms in Iowa, or the town in Stuhr Museum in Nebraska). It was a direct clash between China's high power distance and ascription system of merit versus the U.S. low power distance and achievement system. The school administration assumed the American faculty would not fight back, simply because they were placed lower on XJTU's organization charts. Whoops.

Above: Students' hot water bottles.
Below: A student nicknamed "Chinese Obama" by his classmates.

We spoke for some time with the high school students. They had taken enough English language to pass their standardized exams--that is, not quite enough to communicate verbally with us. It may well be true that many Chinese students study English language, but they focus heavily on the written language rather than the spoken one. I'm not criticizing them, but it was an interesting fact to learn.


The food factory was literally built from nothing by a Chinese entrepreneur. That's much harder than it sounds--capitalists aren't really that common over here; indeed, borrowing money in general is looked down upon. This factory, then, was started from a few friends selling the food they made in their house for RMB0.10 each, and grew to a giant plant that produces many tons of Moon Cakes every year. The biggest strategic move, apparently, was locating the factory in a small town. It seems that starting an operation in Beijing would doom it to being forgotten, but basing it in rural China not only gives the plant more attention but causes the town to grow.

home again home again

I'm back in the United States after 28 hours of planes, trains, and automobiles. Access to blogger was cut off without notice on May 14th. I tried to get there from Jiao Da's library, from Starbucks, and from hotels in Shanghai and Beijing, so I assume it was a decision made at either the ISP or national level. Now, I'll post each of my journal entries as soon as I finish working on the photos I took that day.

Meanwhile, here are a few things that struck me immediately after I touched ground in the States:

We have drinking fountains. There are a few dispensers for boiling water in the Beijing airport, but in general, public places in China don't have drinking fountains.

I was paying cash for everything in China. It's going to be a little odd to get used to using a debit card again.

Urinal partitions are actually high enough here. The ones in China were so low they might as well not have existed.

Airports are worried about different things. I got through the security checkpoint in Beijing in about thirty seconds; all I had to do was take the laptop out of my luggage. But Heaven help you if you fail the temperature camera test. Transferring flights in San Francisco, I had to take my shoes off and empty my pockets. After I got through the metal detector, the officer on the other side said, "Male, no alarm," had me wait in a separate area, and sent me through the chemical sniffer. Apparently not setting off the metal detector is just as bad as setting it off now.

All the English-language signs are perfect. I really miss the random terrible translations. I may never see another light switch marked "Smallpox."

Soda is awful here. All the soda I drank in China was sweetened with sugar. I'm not sure whether it was beet sugar or cane sugar, but it was far better than high fructose corn syrup.

There' s no more negotiating for prices. You can't just walk into Dillards and shout "Tai gui le!" at the staff.

I don't get stared at any more. Thirty white people is a spectacle in China; people's heads track you like video cameras. The worst part was when you get within a few feet of or talk to the locals and they cover their mouth and nose because they think you have swine flu. I think I understand how people of Middle Eastern descent feel in U.S. airports.

I miss playing Frogger. Take 16th Street in Lincoln, add four lanes going the other way, and take out the crosswalks, and you have something approaching downtown Xi'an. You have to cross lane by lane at a constant pace. Sometimes you have to wait on the lines between lanes while cars pass in front of and behind you. Sometimes it's best simply to follow the locals. Always it provides an adrenaline rush.

In Chinese, there's a vocalized pause (the equivalent of "um," "uh," or "like") that sounds like the word "nigga." Native speakers will use it two to four times in every sentence, for endless amusement to us English speakers.

There are clothes dryers here. I spent nearly a month without seeing a single one in China. My clothes often took up to two days to hang dry, and my towel never did fully dry out. I'm never going to take warm, dry clothes for granted again.