It started with an unengaged substitute teacher, escalated with white kids throwing unprovoked juice boxes and insults at the Chinese kids, peaked with a fistfight between one of my Chinese tutoring students and two local black kids, and ended (hopefully) with a two-day suspension from school. My student ended up with a long, nasty scratch across his shoulder and chest.

I get that cafeteria scuffles will happen, and that race is only one factor among many and perhaps not even the main one. But the local students were swearing at the ESL kids in Chinese — they’ve been around Chinese classmates enough to pick up the swear words. It’s his first semester in Canada, but it’s not the first time he’s been randomly accosted for being Chinese. Getting cursed at in your own language by passing locals seems to me to be a little bit worse than having random Chinese people yell “老外！” at you.

Since we’re back in Vancouver, Canada for a few months I’ve picked up some ESL tutoring students. This one, like many, came to Vancouver to finish high school because his parents knew he wouldn’t do well on the 高考, the Chinese college entrance exam. He’s in a grade 11 ESL program at a local public school, with generally poor English, and it’s interesting to hear him relate his fight at school yesterday from a second-language, only partially-understood perspective (for example, he knows he was being taunted and challenged but doesn’t know exactly what they said to him, aside from the Chinese swear words). But it also makes me rethink about the experiences of Chinese students in Canadian schools. I don’t want to imagine what kind of impression he and his mom are getting.

I assume that my white majority perspective, growing up and being educated in a multicultural environment, maybe gives me a rosier-than-reality view of the current Asian Canadian racial experience in Vancouver. I’m not accusing Vancouverites of being exceptionally racist; although I think we’re generally much less civilized than we think we are, it was just one schoolyard scuffle, and I didn’t notice any racism when I was a white student among a large minority of Indians and Asians. But incidents like that of my student yesterday start me wondering if perhaps some of the sunshine and rainbows of our multicultural utopia shine a little less brightly for the immigrants and international students than they do for us in the white majority.

More about Asian Canadian and ESL student experiences:

• Belatedly starting to understand my Asian Canadian high school classmates
• Amy Chua’s Chinese “Tiger Mother” and the Myth of the Model Minority
• Why Chinese moms are superior mothers, and why their kids need serious therapy
• A 16-year-old priviledged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history
• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……

About racism in China:

• Heads-up to foreigners: “racism in China” is a cross-cultural conversation landmine
• A closer look at Han racism
• China’s Changing Views on Race

Greater Hongkouver is loaded with Asians. There’s the “University of Brilliant Chinese” (UBC), and it has the fastest way to get from India to China (the Alex Fraser Bridge). There are two Chinatowns, and whole shopping malls that are 100%-Chinese-language-English-is-absolutely-unnecessary (we’ve gone there to practice Chinese). The parents of Taiwanese kids I’ve tutored complain that their kids speak Chinese all day at their Canadian public high school. Even 500 years ago when I was in high school, I had no shortage of Korean and Chinese classmates (most of us couldn’t tell them apart, at least I know I couldn’t!).

Of my high school classmates (small high school, 50 kids in my graduating class), I can specifically remember five who, while certainly Asian and from Asian families, fit in well with the rest of us. I didn’t consciously talk or relate to them any differently, though I remember once or twice one girl getting annoyed if someone thought she was Chinese: “I’m Korean!” she’d emphatically reply in 100% native-speaker English (sorry, Jennie! ;) ). But aside from those five, our class also had a small group of Asian girls who, from my perspective at the time, were nearly invisible. They were the quietest and most unobtrusive students in our class; they kept to themselves and I can’t remember them ever speaking up in class. I have memories of coming up the stairs, seeing them huddled together by the lockers, but never talking loud enough to be heard.

I recently read Yell-Oh Girls! by Vickie Nam (ed.), 2001, a book of essays by Asian American high school and college freshman girls where they talk about their experience of growing up as TCKs (though they don’t use that term). There’s one particular essay that really made me think of my old classmates, especially that group of quiet girls; I wonder how much this essay does or doesn’t resonate with their experience. It’s unfair in the sense that it compares American cultural ideals to the worst side of particular aspects of East Asian cultures, from the view of a teenager, but it’s still an eye-opening read. You can read the whole essay and more at this googlebooks link. Here’s an excerpt:

“Identity Crisis” by Michelle Chang, 17.

Being Taiwanese American is supposed to give me all the benefits of two rich, vastly different cultures, when in reality, every cultural influence from either side makes it impossible for me to be accepted by the other. Everyone who is Taiwanese considers me American. Everyone American considers me Taiwanese. It’s like standing with one foot planted on the side of a crack that continually widens with time. For every time I thought I actually belonged to either side, there have been five times when I’ve felt entirely lost, bereft, and on my own. When I begin to feel comfortable in one environment, something brings me back to reality. I don’t fit in anywhere.

“Do your parents encourage you to speak your opinions?”

I sit listening to the teacher in an orange chair in the warm classroom, half asleep from yesterday’s grueling six-hour gymnastics workout. Leaning over the desk with my head down in my arms, I try not to attract attention to myself; I am content to listen to, but not participate in, the discussion of a book. Slightly interested, I hoist my head up to watch the other students’ reactions. Of course, the ones whose parents have encouraged them to form opinionated minds are the first to respond.

Someone answers, confidently, “My parents were extremely oppressed and not allowed to voice their opinion, so they try to encourage me to always say what I think.”

Well, then, that was profound, safe, and politically correct. Intelligent, creative, thoughtful answers like these scream, I’m trying my hardest to let you know that I see everyone as an individual and I know that everyone is equal. Their preposterous self-righteousness makes me want to laugh, but instead, I put my head back on the desk and close my eyes.

I consider the question, too, but what could I say?

“Well, actually—no, not really. My parents’ opinions were suppressed; therefore, they silence mine as part of traditional Asian beliefs. I supposedly have no opinion, because as my parents’ daughter, I have no right to an opinion.” Besides, according to my parents, it’s not right to talk about personal, family matters. And now I’m wide-awake. My teacher’s question has reminded me once again of my inner conflict: I don’t belong here or there.
[…]
The generation gap that separates teens from their parents makes communications difficult; in my case, it’s more than twice as bad, not only because my parents are extremely conservative, but because they’re extremely conservative for even for Taiwanese parents. They seem to think that they can raise us exactly the way their parents raised them in Taiwan; the fact that we’re living in the United States a quarter century later apparently means nothing to them. Even though I was born here, I go to school here, and I spend eleven months of every year here, I’m supposed to be 100 percent Taiwanese. Clearly, it doesn’t work, and it’s obvious that I don’t belong in Taiwan. Regardless, they continue to try to make me into something I’m not.

Imagine being unable to lock (or even close) your door for any reason, ever. Imagine being punished for listening to WILD 94.9 radio, not because of the sex and violence contained in the lyrics, but because the music is a sign of how “American” you’ve become. Imagine being treated as if you were less important in the family because you are a girl and because your last name will be lost when you marry. Imagine having to listen constantly to sexist, racist or homophobic ranting and getting punished for expressing an opposing viewpoint. Imagine a place where staying silent when you disagree is not enough; you must vocally agree and submit to their power. Imagine having to follow a course of action that will lead you nowhere, simply because your elders are always right—even when they’re wrong. Imagine living in constant fear of being disowned by your family were you to do something wrong. Imagine having you entire life plotted out for you without your opinion or consent. Any deviation from a prescribed path is impossible.

Imagine all this, living in a country supposedly built on liberty and equality for all, while going to school in a supposedly open-minded environment, where independent thought is encouraged. The home environment inevitably has an impact on everything else, especially school. For instance, how can I participate in class and present opposing views when it’s expected that, at home, I shouldn’t have an opinion at all? How can I choose my own classes, my own path, make my own decisions, when my parents have already made them for me?

Living in the U.S. has instilled me with more American than Taiwanese values; I think we should develop strong, personal opinions and foster creativity. I believe in freedom, equality, and nondiscrimination, wherever these issues might be problematic. Unfortunately, for me, my parents have been more successful than they know in inscribing certain Taiwanese values ideas in me. I feel uncomfortable talking to anyone about my personal problems, or even presenting my own ideas. I’m never happy with anything less than perfection. I see things skewed through the window of my own experiences…

If you’re interested in reading more about Chinese American and Asian American identity, I found these worth reading for the cross-cultural angle:

• “What Does It Mean Being Chinese American”
• Paper Tigers

On the blog, there’s more about Vancouver, our own reverse-culture-shock experiences, raising a foreign kid in China, and Chinese parenting：

• Amy Chua’s Chinese “Tiger Mother” and the Myth of the Model Minority
• Why Chinese moms are superior mothers, and why their kids need serious therapy

We awake in the middle of the night. Not because of a noise. Or a light. It’s a smell. An overpowering, saturating, wrong smell actually woke us up. For the second time! The first time was the night before, which also happened to be the first night in our Chinese apartment. I get up and follow my nose. Turns out sewer fumes are pouring into our living space through the kitchen and bathroom sinks and the shower drain. No U-bends, but plenty of rotten cabbage and leeks.

We’d recently arrived in Tianjin as language students. After looking around and asking our teachers, we’d deliberately picked the most average-looking, average-priced neighbourhood to rent in, thinking (rightly) that this would be a smarter move than living in the foreigner-concentrated, more expensive neighbourhoods (this experience and that apartment is described in Ditching the Laowai Ghetto.) But living in China means living in a Chinese apartment. Each of the neighbours’ apartments we visited employed a different method for combating the drain problem; I remember one just stuffed plastic bags in the top of the pipe when they weren’t having showers. Even our foreign friends living in shiny new developments had the same problem, just not as bad. Two years later we changed apartments but still had the same problem. Here’s how we dealt with it in both locations.

The Sinks
The sinks are the easiest. All you need to do is get under the sinks and jerryrig U-bends. It’s likely you’ve got cheap, flexible plastic hose instead of pipes under there, hose which is so deteriorated that if you bump it it’ll crack, so go buy some more at a hardware store before you mess with it. Bend it into a U-bend shape, maybe hold it in place with rubber bands, and you’re good to go. We did this in both our apartments and had no problems, except that in our second apartment I had to take the entire bathroom sink right off the wall to get at the hose. Still, undoubtedly worth the end result.

The Shower Drain
These things can be a major pain. Our first apartment was a little more old school. The drain pipe actually stuck up exposed with a little moat around it and a metal cap that fit over it like an igloo. The idea is that the bottom/rim of cap will be submerged in water so the gas gets trapped. Even when we wiggled the cap just right so it sat all of two millimeters lower over the pipe, it still never worked. We ended up putting a hot water bottle in a plastic bag that was hung from a wire that we could lift up and hang on a nail when we took a shower. After the shower we’d lower it back over the drain, the idea being that the water-filled bag would seal around the hole. It was better than nothing, but not great, and a pain to clean.

In our second apartment the drain was flush with the smooth tile floor. And, conveniently, there was a spare tile under the sink. So I super-glued a piece of those plastic doorway strips that all the businesses hang in their doorways to keep the dust out to the bottom of the tile, and we just used the squeegee (a Chinese bathroom necessity) to slide it off or back over the drain. Occasionally we’d get gassed out while taking a shower, but other than that this solution worked great. I’ll definitely do it again if faced with the same situation.

Anyway, if you’ve been suffering sewer gas as a result of U-bend-less Chinese plumbing, I hope this helps! And let us know if you have your own success stories.

More stuff about Chinese apartments:

• How your Chinese apartment affects your relationships with locals
• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto
• Hunting Tianjin apartments, armed with Chinglish

Zhuāngxiū time!

If you’ve been living in China the last couple days, you might be wondering why you suddenly have to yell in your own apartment just to be heard… again. Last month you had to yell because of the Spring Festival fireworks, but those are long over. This time, it’s due to the ancient Chinese custom of using … wait for it … jackhammers to knock all the plaster and tiles off their concrete apartment walls and floors and re-plastering before moving in. You can’t move into a new apartment without first gutting it completely by taking jackhammers and drills to the concrete from 8am-7pm for several daysweeks.

It’s called 装修, or “renovation with Chinese characteristics.”

It’s bad luck to do this kind of thing (动土) during the first month in the Chinese lunar calendar — actually it’s bad luck/taboo (禁忌) to do a lot of things during the first lunar month, like get your hair cut — but three days ago the second Chinese lunar month began. The dragon has awakened from its winter rest and raised its head (龙抬头，on the second day of the second lunar month 二月初二); the insects are becoming active and the spring rains will fall (dragons are in charge of insects and rain). That means — among other things connected to interesting cultural traditions that I’ll mention in another post if I get time — it’s zhuāngxiū time! The pile in the picture above is outside our stairwell and was extracted from the apartment directly above ours via jackhammer.

Living with the occasional 装修 is part of life in a Chinese apartment building, and it’s normally not that big a deal. This time of year there’s a lot of 装修ing going on, but it’s usually tolerable. From where I’m sitting I can pick out of the soundscape four different apartments all running jackhammers and drills. Three of them are far enough away — in another part of the building or in the building opposite — that they just sound like noisy traffic outside. But one of them is in the apartment directly above us; I think their entire apartment must be directly above our toddler’s room. It’s driving her crazy, and that’s driving us crazy.

Our daughter loved the firecrackers, but she hates the jackhammers. Every time they start cries and buries her head in one of our shoulders. There is no way she’s taking either of her two regular daily naps, or doing anything else. And since it’s almost constant for hours on end, it means all she does is cry and want to be cuddled. Forget playing, or getting anything done. I’m writing this during the workers’ lunch break, because it’s the only time she can take a nap. She’ll wake up when they start work again around 1:30, and we’ll feed her and escape to a park for the afternoon. She’ll be tired and cranky, but better in the park than next to a zhuāngxiū!

We took her up there yesterday to meet the workers and see what was going on (the workers were really friendly), hoping that she’d be less scared if she could see it. Didn’t work. I pity Jessica tomorrow — she gets to deal with her single-handedly while I’m at work! I gotta run — she just woke up with a startled shriek, practically jumping out of her crib. Maybe if we play Raffi at high volume it will distract her…

P.S. — Other Dragon Raising Its Head traditions
We had Chinese class this morning, and my teacher was telling me all about the second day of the second lunar month (二月初二), called 龙抬头, or “Dragon raises (its) head.” This day, which was two days ago, marks the beginning of spring activity and spring rains; no need to hibernate anymore, the weather is warming up and it’s time to get to work. People call dumplings “dragon ears” (龙耳) and noodles “dragon whiskers” (龙须).

The most obvious change you see, aside from the sudden appearance of jackhammers at work in neighbouring apartments, is that everyone suddenly goes and gets a hair cut (剃龙头). There’re line-ups in the barber shops because it’s bad luck to cut your hair during the first lunar month; if you do your uncle will die. At least, that’s what people tell you if you ask. There are actually a lot of taboos (禁忌) to avoid during the first month of the lunar calendar. Our Chinese teacher this morning explained the hair cutting taboo this way.

When the (foreign) Qing dynasty took power from (Han) Ming dynasty around the middle of the 17th century, they made the Han Chinese grow their hair in a long queue and shave the front of their heads as a sign of subjugation to their foreign rulers. Anti-Qing literati greatly resented this, and taught the common people that they can’t shave the front of their heads in the first lunar month because that would make your uncle die — 死舅舅 (sǐ jiùjiu) — and that sounds like 思旧 (sī jiù), which means “miss the former” or “cherish the memory of the past.” The peasants turned it into a popular custom/superstition without realizing its original meaning, because that’s just what peasants do.

The other explanation is that there’s a saying, “Start at the head” (从头开始), meaning to start things in the right place, with the idea that everything starts at and flows from the head. So at the start of the new year’s activity, it’s good to take care of your head first.

Why are dragons raising their heads now?
The legend behind the dragon raising its head is connected to China’s ancient agrarian society. The Heavenly Emperor was unhappy because China had a female emperor, so he said unless he looks down and sees the earth covered in yellow flowers (I don’t know why), he won’t allow the dragons to make it rain. But one dragon disobeyed and made it rain, so the Heavenly Emperor locked him up. So the people all made yellow things to eat, like scrambled eggs, and the emperor looked down and saw all the yellow, and so allowed the dragons to make it rain. Or something like that. One variation was that the imprisoned dragon’s mother looked up and saw her son and cried, and I think her tears had something to do with the rain?

My teacher was telling me all this this morning, yelling it at me across the table, actually, because of all the jackhammering going on right above us, so I forget the details. Does anyone know the full story?

P.P.S. — Happy Women’s Day
Today is “International Women’s Day”, aka “three-eight” (三八) in Chinese because it falls on March 8. Now, because these numbers are associated with womenkind, “three-eight” is more often used as a derogatory, sexist adjective for people, usually but not necessarily women, who are woman-ish in the sense of being gossipy, nosy busybodies with nothing to do except cause problems by sticking their noses into other people’s business and running their mouths. Happy International Women’s Day!

The question of mutual cross-cultural understanding — generally and in marriage — came up this week in two separate places. Cindy wrote about culture shock and cross-cultural understanding in marriage (as part of her on-going series about cross-cultural marriage — linked below). In a blogger interview we did for a China travel website they asked if we thought foreigners could ever really “understand China.” I love the way both articles tackle the same general theme from two very different angles.

First, here’s an excerpt from Cindy’s Our Unique Bond #4 (I really hope you’ll go read the whole thing on her blog; it’s fantastic and I cut out some of the best parts here):

Culture shock is the pruning process. It’s the Good Friday before Easter Sunday. It’s the dark night before the dawn. It’s the pain before the gain. But let me be clear on one thing: though culture shock is inevitably painful, it is not inevitable. We experience culture shock only if and when we actually desire to engage with another culture in a meaningful way. I personally know couples who marry cross culturally who don’t make an effort to engage in their spouse’s culture and I suspect they don’t have culture shock issues in their marriage. Just as an expat can live in another culture and exist purely in an expat bubble without engaging local culture, they too, won’t encounter culture shock issues.

And here I break the bad news to people considering cross culture marriages. Gulp. In my humble opinion, you WILL have to make sacrifices and be ready to lose aspects of your culture if you want to make your marriage work. [...] There are parts of my Chinese self, that I can never fully share and relate, with J. Though I try with every effort throughout our marriage. I believe it is ultimately healthy for the relationship to recognize and come to accept this. If you find yourself in a cross cultural relationship, you will have to decide the things you value in your relationship is worth the cost. In my case, I saw a character I admired, a common vision for life, and a deep friendship that bonded us even despite cultural differences.
[...]
Easier said than done. But it is worth doing. Please don’t be the kind of couple who just is content with living life according to one spouse’s culture. You are robbing yourself of the gift of being in a cross cultural marriage. J and I have learned so much about each other, and it has provided us with the invaluable skill of being able to encounter people who are very different from us with respect. And we hope to pass this on to our children to help them navigate themselves in our increasingly diverse yet interconnected world.

Here’s one of my answers from the travel website (China Blogger Spotlight: Getting intercultural with Joel and Jessica from China Hope Live):

Do you think [China/Chinese culture] is something a foreigner can ever truly understand?
Yes and no — it depends what you mean by “truly understand.” I definitely think it’s possible for people from vastly different cultures, like East Asian and Euro-American cultures, to have a deep and satisfying mutual understanding. We can also learn lots about ourselves and our own cultures through the perspectives of people from other cultures. Chinese people have the opportunity, to see things about Canadian culture and society (for example) that Canadians can’t see because Canadians are in their own culture and therefore they are too close to see some things. And the same works in reverse: outsiders in China can see things about Chinese culture and society that Chinese people can’t see because Chinese people don’t have an outsider’s perspective on their own culture. So there’s lots we can learn from one another, not just about one another’s cultures, but also about our own cultures.

Sometimes when people say “understand China” what they really mean is “accept and agree with whatever ‘China’ says or does.” Sometimes when these people hear a foreigner express a “non-Chinese opinion” (especially about sensitive topics), they disregard the foreigner by saying “they just don’t understand China” or “they’re just using foreign thinking to understand China.” I think that kind of attitude and thinking is basically nonsense, and it doesn’t promote mutual understanding. “Understanding” and “thinking and feeling the same” are not the same thing.

The differences between Chinese and Euro-American cultures are very, very deep; often I think people don’t realize how different we really are. Cultural differences are fascinating. However, I think the things we have in common are even deeper, more profound, and more important that our differences. I really believe that it’s possible for Chinese and lǎowàis (老外s) to have solidarity that is stronger and more meaningful than our differences.

The Problem

Problem: you have someone’s grandbaby, niece, nephew and/or great-grandbaby, and you live on the other side of the globe. Aside from mom and dad, all the people who love him or her the most are far, far away. This really, really sucks!

We were in Canada for the first four months of Lilia’s life (she spent her first month outside her mommy in the NICU). During that time our Facebook accounts were filled with baby photos and videos as well as daily comments from family and friends all around the globe. And that was when we were still living with family in our own country; we hadn’t even left yet.

In China, Facebook is was the ultimate tool for sharing baby photos and videos with far away family members (and, thanks to the privacy options, not the entire sleaze-saturated, creep-infested, pervert-enabling internet). Everyone from my grandparents to their great-grandkids are on Facebook, and it just kills to not get to share our daughter with them. We also miss the weekly and often daily FB interaction revolving around our nieces and nephews and whatever other family adventures are going on (most recently: the 2010 Olympic Games in our hometown!). Obviously it’s not as good as being within driving distance of your relatives, but FB was a big help and it’s sorely missed.

Some Options

So, 怎么办？ Here’s the three options we’ve come across for making the physical distance from family members a little less painful. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comments!

1) Get a VPN
We haven’t bothered to used a paid service to unrestrict our internet in China. When it comes to the internet less can be more, I’m really cheap, and I assume those VPN services will be blocked eventually anyway. But for $60 bucks a year (wow, I really am cheap…) you can get great services like the one we just won for free! The good folks at ChengduLiving.com had a free giveaway and just yesterday we won six months of free VPN service! We tried it this morning and it’s working great; click here to see the details — you can get a discount code from ChengduLiving.com. (Thanks tons, guys!) Our original strategy didn’t involve VPNs, so I don’t know if we’ll keep using it or not once our free six months are up.

2) Get/Make a Facebook substitute
I’m really cheap, Facebook was already sucking up too much of my time, and I wanted a baby-photo-sharing backup that would work even if/when China blocked every proxy and VPN in the world. So we set up a private, password-protected, family-only WordPress blog. Since we already pay for our own domain name and hosting, this didn’t cost us anything extra. It’s not as slick as Facebook, of course, but we can still share photo galleries and upload video clips that our family can download, and everyone can leave comments and share their own stories and photos. It’s also nice to have some family-members-only space on the internet. Our families can see photos and video the same day we take them.

There’s no guarantee that our domain name/hosting server won’t go the way of Facebook, YouTube, and a growing list of proxies and VPNs; personal sites get blocked, too. But we try to play nice by staying away from topics and words that the gov. deems sensitive. Plus sites like ours aren’t as high priority for censors or as high profile as proxies anyway.

3) Use Skype
You don’t need a top-of-the-line computer or video camera (we have older stuff) to pull off great Skype video calls. And it’s free! And if your grandparents are too computer-illiterate to handle Skype, you can just Skype their phones for pennies a minute at the most ($0.02/minute to Canada and the USA). When international video calls or phone calls are this easy, it’d be tragic not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Any other ideas? How do you stay connected with family and friends back home?

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

Have you ever had parents, siblings, friends, etc. visit you in China after you’d been here a while, and it was their first time in China? Did you tell them anything beforehand? How did it go?

“Normal”
I had a weird experience this week while I was looking out the window. It was a typical busy street scene and I wasn’t really paying attention; mundane daily Tianjin’s increasingly soulless cityscape has long ceased interesting me. But then I suddenly realized my parents are coming — it’s their first trip to China. I looked out the window again and tried to identify all the things that would be new or different for them, the things I would have noticed during our first semester and maybe even photographed. I wasn’t sure I could remember them all, and it’s a strange feeling to suddenly realize your idea of normal is drastically changed.

Comfort Zone WMD
Had a similar experience again last night. I was going through photos that two of my photographically-gifted American friends took of our other friends’ wedding. They have a good eye for photos and had taken entertaining street shots around the church, which is in an older, not yet totally redeveloped neighbuorhood. But then right in with all the interesting photos was a shot of the women’s bathroom at the church. I thought, ‘what’s this doing in here?’ and completely failed to see the significance of the photo. No interesting angles, patterns, colours, people, activity, or funny signage. Just a quick shot of the can.

And then I realized why it caught their eye. And then I thought about my parents coming. And then I remembered the first time (and the second time) that I encountered this kind of old school Chinese bathroom and the unbidden incomprehension/shock/horror/so-bad-I-have-to-look-car-wreck-feeling that instantly raises your pulse. The communal, “privacy-what’s-that?” old school Chinese public washroom has got to be the most effective method ever devised for mortifying privacy-loving Westerners. It’s not like eating chicken feet or double-dipping your chopsticks in a communal plate or learning to use a squatty potty — those things merely stretch Westerners’ comfort zones, and stretching your comfort zone is a good thing. But a tiny room with an open, cramped row of squatty potties where people will be brushing past you or asking you what country you’re from while you’re in the middle of doing your business? That’s not “stretching” our comfort zones; it’s dropping a WMD on our comfort zones.

I’m not a big fan of these things and I don’t mind avoiding them, but it’s strange to realize I looked right at a comfort zone WMD and didn’t even notice.

(P.S. Mom and Dad — most bathrooms in Tianjin city aren’t like this; you won’t get stuck having to use one… probably. Just don’t be surprised when people don’t bother to close their stall door… assuming there’s a stall… with doors.)

(P.P.S. If you didn’t already know, the cross-cultural potty dispute goes both ways. A lot of Mainlanders feel that Western-style sit down toilets are a “comfort zone WMD” because even the idea of a sit down toilet is so appallingly unsanitary they can hardly believe we would even consider inventing sit down toilets. We have Chinese friends who refuse to use them, even in peoples’ homes.)

Finally! I just discovered a great site by a family doctor in Beijing (close enough!) with all the info you need — like what to do — about the appalling infuriating horrifying confounding oppressive chewable inexcusable damnable lethal ghastly hideous depressing atrocious illiberal obscene foul nose-burning abominable face-coating heinous lì hai monstrous odious execrable unholy [they-don't-make-strong-enough-negative-descriptors] air pollution. For example:

• How Bad Is It, Really?
• Why you should Close Your Windows at Night
• About air purifiers
• Pollution slideshow
• Using the Beijing Air Quality Index (AQI) (why “200″ is 4x worse than “100″)

Call me a pampered whiny rich foreigner if you want, I don’t care; I want to liiiiiive!

And please, by all means, you’re welcome to add adjectives to my list (but keep it PG!). Sometimes it just feels good to vent to get it off your chest, especially since you can’t vent to get it out of your chest.

I’ll add a photo later if I can bring myself to take one (through tears, no doubt).

Other posts about Tianjin’s indecent pollution:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

What a half-hour’s bike ride during Friday morning rush hour can get you in Tianjin:

• People who stared at me: 4
• People who took no notice of me: hundreds
• Red lights: 8/11 (meaning I had to stop for 3)
• Buses I wanted to curse at: all of them, but 4 especially noxious ones in particular
• Groups of migrant construction workers protesting their late wages: 1
• Cars on fire: 1
• Buildings I should be able to see but can’t because of the air pollution: dozens? scores? hundreds?
• Years shaved off my life due to the air pollution: incalculable

Five days a week I bike half an hour one way to work; so 13.2 kilometers total there and back according to google maps. The numbers above are only for the morning commute to work. There really was a car on fire this morning.

In three weeks we’ll leave for another couple years in China. Looking back over the last eight months in Vancouver, B.C. (unavoidably longer than we’d planned), I can see some things now about my re-entry adjustment (a.k.a. reverse culture stress experience) that I couldn’t see at the time.

After almost three years in Taiwan and China focusing on Chinese language and culture, we were initially out of our element when we came back to B.C., as we expected. I was a little hesitant, for example, to jump right back into city driving, among other things, but it didn’t take too long to function more or less normally again. Soon I was driving all over the place in Vancouver’s notorious traffic and it was second-nature.

But I’m realizing now that when it comes to people, like hanging out and stuff, I didn’t feel fully at home or totally relaxed or 100% not-more-awkward-than-normal until around six months in, maybe even later. I can look back now at particular social events and see how things weren’t normal for me — not that it was so bad or I couldn’t function, but that I didn’t feel totally myself and wasn’t as effortlessly engaged with people as I would have liked to be. In a few early instances I was a total dud, and I’d much rather blame reverse culture stress than my personality! ;) It feels much easier now after almost eight months, but of course we’re leaving again in a couple weeks. I guess that’s just how it goes. Hopefully when it’s time for 老二 to come along we’ll get to do it all again!

Related posts:

• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home
• How to: Confuse the traffic in your hometown
• Temporary return to Vancouver – Day 5