From John Lennox, author and Professor in Mathematics and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Oxford:

Is there anything worth believing in? Oh, ladies and gentlemen– I’m an old man. Let me speak to you directly.

In all my life studying different philosophies and ideas and mathematics for the sheer fun of it, I’ve never come across an idea that remotely touches this one:

“The Word became human, and dwelt among us.”

It’s not every world-class academic who could also make a good Santa. Merry Christmas!

The Posts of Christmas Past:

Christmas in general:

• Ho! Ho! Who? Santa VS. China’s God of Wealth
• Merry Christmas Music 2009!
• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China
• 圣诞快乐! Merry Christmas! (a Christmas poem for 2007)

Christmas in China:

• Merry Chinese Christmas… text message style
• Christmas Essentials for the Black Hole of China
• Have yourself a Chinese little Christmas…
• Christmas Eve 2009 – Tianjin, China
• Merry… something, from Tianjin! :)
• China’s grinches play hardball
• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• 聖誕快樂! – Shèng dàn Kuài lè! (Taiwan)
• 圣诞节 2006 Photos (Taiwan)

You can see all our Christmas stuff here.

(P.S. – That’s Merry Christmas 2011, not 2012. Ooohh… someone’s asleep at the switch!)

We’re in a Chinese hospital for an ultrasound to confirm our first pregnancy. The examining room is a bit of gong show — there’s no privacy, and forget lining up; a group of women are elbowing each other for position, crowding the examining area, each trying to shove her paperwork in the doctor’s face ahead of the others while the doctor’s busy seeing Jessica. But we don’t care, it’s a spiritual moment for us: we’re going to hear our child’s heartbeat for the first time, see his or her first picture, get real live confirmation that there definitely is a baby growing inside Jessica and that we are indeed parents. Awestruck doesn’t even begin to capture our feelings. “I want to abort it,” a woman says bluntly in Chinese, in front of everyone, as she thrusts her paperwork at the doctor. That was our first personal encounter with abortion in China.

China’s Abortion Epidemic

That was two years ago. As our language ability develops and abortion becomes increasingly ubiquitous and brash in China, we’re running into it more often. If I take a taxi and the radio’s on, chances are I’ll hear a commercial about once every 30 minutes that always starts with the same unflinching dialogue:

“Oh no! I’m pregnant! What about my career? What will I do?”
“Don’t worry! It’s no problem. You can just go to blah-blah hospital and get a 3-MINUTE, PAINLESS abortion!”

Only once have I heard them use the euphemism of “woman’s surgery” for abortion; usually they’re just unapologetically explicit. Students have told me how they were “supposed to have a baby brother” but didn’t, and most of them assume we’re planning to have more than one child because we didn’t get a boy the first time. In a country with an on-going legacy of post-birth infanticide, killing babies before they’re born doesn’t carry near if any the stigma that it does in North America, as our taxi driver last week demonstrated by bringing it up in casual conversation:

Driver: “How many kids do you have?”
Me: “Just one, but we hope to have more later.”
Driver: “Yeah, then you can have a boy!”
Me: “We don’t really care if it’s a boy or a girl.”
Jessica: “Besides, you can’t really choose that anyway.”
Driver: “Sure you can! You just wait until the belly’s big enough” [he gestures] “and then you can see. If it’s a girl you can get rid of it, but if it’s a boy, ‘Oh! We want it!’” [thumbs up sign].

Sex-selective abortion may be small talk fodder for some in China, but pre-marital pregnancy is another story:

“The moral outrage over having a child before marriage in our society is much stronger than the shame associated with abortion,” said Zhou Anqin, the manager at the clinic in Xi’an, which performs about 60 abortions each month, mostly on students aged 24 or younger.
[...]
“Luckily, in Chinese culture people generally feel that before the actual birth, you don’t yet have an actual person, so we have cases of induced abortion at seven and eight months along,” Li said. “I think this is to China’s advantage from a population control point of view … China has absolutely no need for the so-called ‘right to life’ argument, no need to introduce ideas about abortion as murder and so on.” [Full article]

The Chinese abortion epidemic is even skewing gender ratios in North America. In my hometown of Surrey, B.C., Canada where our daughter was born, there were signs taped to the walls in the ultrasound clinics telling us that the techs and doctors would absolutely not tell us the gender of our baby. I later confirmed what the nurses in the NICU had told us: too many baby girls were being killed. Turns out that a school board administrator in the 1990′s noticed that the gender ratios in greater Vancouver elementary schools were skewed in areas with large East Asian and Indian communities (see Canada’s Missing Daughters and Ultrasound ads promote female abortion). (In Canada you can abort your child for any and no reason because a person’s legal status depends on her physical location relative to a few inches of birth canal (or, it used to); if she’s on the inside, then she has not yet magically transformed from a not-a-person into a baby. Arbitrarily disallowing minority women who have a gender preference to know the gender of their not-a-baby seems just a TAD hypocritical to me.)

I try not to share the nastiest parts of our China experience on the internet. It’s rude and misleading to show up in someone else’s country and make a big deal out of the absolute worst or exceptional and freakish experiences. All our societies have brutal, inhuman aspects to them, but China takes it to a whole nother more explicit level by foregoing the faux-moral fig leaves to which Western societies still hypocritically cling. In blunt, unapologetic ‘honesty’ China carries some things further toward their logical conclusions than North Americans are currently willing to go or admit to (in the West we’re still in denial about being unable to grow Judeo-Christian moral absolute apples — like the inherent value and dignity of people — from secular, relativistic trees).

I could share some things, with photos, that people do and accept/tolerate in China that are so mind-blowingly brutal and animalistic that they make ubiquitous abortion look minor by comparison, even to the hardest-core pro-lifers — but I wont. I will, however, translate something below, because abortion in China is invading everyone’s consciousness here with increasing regularity. And since it actually invaded our home this week, I’m blogging it as a significant aspect of our China experience that we can’t ignore.

Magical Abortions… at a discount!

If you buy a pregnancy test today in Tianjin, China (we’re not pregnant), it comes with one of these (below), because if you’re potentially pregnant in China the first thing you’re apparently supposed to do is consider killing your baby. And judging from the amount of advertising, pre-birth infanticide is not only much more convenient than traditional infanticide, it’s a cash cow:

This is an abortion discount card for a local hospital. Mouseover the Chinese text below to see the pronunciation. The front says:

“PAINLESS ABORTION Assistance Card” 无痛人流援助卡
“Assistance amount: $50 援助金额：326元
Tianjin City Family Planning [Government-]Appointed Hospital 天津市计划生育定点医院
Painless Abortion Assistance Hotline 无痛人流援助热线

And then it has the address, bus routes, and website. The back is worse:

The back compares three kinds of abortion: abortion via drugs 药物流产, ordinary abortion 普通人工流产, and (in the pink column) “Blah-blah Hospital’s Hysteroscopy Obtain Embryo Surgery” XX医院宫腔镜取胚术 (a Tianjin City Women’s Federation Designated Medical Treatment Aid Hospital 天津市妇联指定医疗救助医院). Here’s what the pink column says:

• Surgery eligibility 适应症 (“medical indication”):
  • “up to and including the 11th week.”
• Surgery time 手术时间:
  • “three minutes” 3分钟。
• Anesthetic 麻醉:
  • “short-term effect I.V. anesthetic” 短效静脉麻醉。
• Patient’s surgery experience 手术者感受:
  • “sweet dreams during the surgery, wake up promptly, cozy and cheerful after the surgery” 术中甜梦、术后即醒、舒适愉悦。
• Harmful side-effects 不良反应:
  • “very few complications, won’t affect subsequent pregnancies, can go to work the next day” 并发症极少、不影响再次怀孕、转天即可上班。

Under the chart it says you can get:

1. “a free ‘early avoidance early pregnancy detection’/ultrasound exam (valued at $20 USD)”
   免早早孕检测/免费B超检查（价值126元）。
2. “$30 USD off an abortion (Please present this card when visiting)”
   凭此卡可抵扣人流手术费200元（就诊时请出示此卡）。

Related blog posts:

• When the news is real life
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”

Related news links:

• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• China’s abortion numbers grow
• Largest Gender Gap Seen in China’s Youngest Generation
• The worldwide war on baby girls
• India’s unwanted girls
• Mothers in China — Sobs on the night breeze: The centre of global gendercide
• Rise in abortions in China, young women targeted
• Abortion adverts come to a college campus
• Canada’s Missing Daughters
• Ultrasound ads promote female abortion
• Asian ‘Gendercide’ Migrates to North America

Canada’s “fourth trimester abortion”:

• Fourth Trimester Abortion
• Infanticide conviction nets Alberta woman suspended sentence
• Thrown Over the Fence — Infanticide, Canadian Style

On the Kermit Gosnell scandal:

• It is All About Abortion
• Gosnell Headlines? Gone, Baby, Gone!

P.S.

Whatever this post is about, it is most certainly not about Christmas. If you want to read something about Christmas, follow the links:

• Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China
• Take this, capitalist! (cute video by some TCK’s spending their first Christmas in America)
• Merry Christmas Music!

Hey! This post comes with music! Play this while you read:

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Santa VS. the Chinese God of Wealth & Laughing Buddha

Nothing puts you in the holiday mood like seeing your culture’s biggest holiday reflected back at you by a foreign culture… especially when that culture is Mainland China.

The Pantheon

L to R: a laughing buddha (笑佛), the God of Wealth (财神), Santa Claus.

They’re fat, they’re red, they appear on posters and as statues, they mean people get stuff. In North America he brings “gifts” in a big sack. In China, traditionally, there’s two of him, and he’s more explicit, holding gold bars, coins and other symbols of wealth, sometimes in a big sack. But I honestly don’t see how the money god and laughing buddhas can compete with Santa.

Santa Rules
In addition to our veneer of giving in order to get stuff, we Westerners do it better than the Chinese in another important way. Typically, Chinese restaurant owners just stick up a poster or set up a statue of the God of Wealth and offer it food, wine and incense, hoping for prosperity in return. Laughing buddha figurines are popular as good luck charms, and you can rub the bellies of the big statues for peace and prosperity. But in North America we’re more creative and effective: we brainwash our kids. We get them buzzed with songs and movies and talk about toys before taking them to sit on a real live Santa’s lap. “Santa” asks them two questions: Have you been good? and, What do you want? — in a mall of all places, at the height of the biggest shopping season of the year. The kids get the point so well they don’t even realize it; it metastasizes into their developing psyches and shapes their human experience for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t matter if they grow up and lose their faith in Santa; it’s not about him. They’ve totally absorbed the idea that our biggest cultural celebration of the year revolves around wanting and getting. In other words, our patron saint of consumerism kicks butt on the Chinese money god. And surely no belly-rubbing-for-peace-and-prosperity on a jolly, golden, laughing buddha can compete with a mall Santa.

But seriously, folks…
You might think it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to generalize about Santa Claus, the God of Wealth, and laughing buddhas because they seem so fundamentally different. For example, maybe Santa’s not really a god of wealth but of consumerism. And maybe he’s not really our god of consumerism; no one except for kids attempts to bribe, placate, beseech, or otherwise cajole Santa as a spiritual being into enabling our consumption. He’s more like our idol of consumerism; the man-made physical representation of our unhinged desires to consume that helps us focus and realize those desires. And last but certainly not least, Santa is Not Jesus — maybe that’s his real name. He’s our Jesus-avoidance tool; a soothing, comfortably 100% imaginary mascot, employed as a colourful cheerleader to add lighthearted, saccharin distraction to our otherwise obscene consumption, which doesn’t look quite as bad when Jesus isn’t around. I suspect Santa’s a little bit of each. I’m not saying Santa (or gift-giving) has to be this way — it’s not like Santa’s inherently evil — just that he’s currently functioning like an omnipresent consumption mascot on steroids.

Mainland Chinese, by the way, love Santa Claus. They can’t get enough Santa Claus. He fits with the holidays: he wears red, he’s fat, he’s loaded. He means we get stuff. He’s in every other business in Tianjin around Christmas time, where he occupies the same places on walls and doors that’re sometimes occupied by posters of the money god. And how many people could honestly point him out in a police lineup with laughing buddha and the money god? So you see, we’re not so different after all.

For a look at “Christmas” in China, see:

• Merry… something, from Tianjin! :)
• Christmas Eve 2009 – Tianjin, China
• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics
• Holy Santa, Batman!

You’re broadcasting a message to your Chinese friends with your apartment whether you know it or not. It’s a message that locals understand loud and clear, because many Chinese homeowners — especially the kind foreigners are most likely to rent from — use their apartments to send a message on purpose.

First Impressions
This was confirmed for us yet again by a Chinese friend of a friend who was over the other night for our mutual friend’s birthday party. The group was mostly foreigners. Someone mentioned how much he liked our apartment, especially some fancy shelving in one of the walls (like many so-called middle class Chinese, our landlady had played interior design with the place when she lived here, so there’s lots of conspicuous design elements around). Jessica said, “Yeah, I really like that, too, but I wish that some of the other things in this apartment weren’t quite so fancy.”

“Why?” he replied, “It looks nice!”

“Well, it’s just that some of these really fancy design elements give people a certain impression here, like we’re really really rich or something…”

“Really?”

But before Jessica could respond, a Chinese guy whom we had just met that night jumped in and said (emphasis mine), “Yes! When I walk into this apartment, my first thought is that the owner is really, really rich. And also well educated. I would think he or she is maybe a teacher, might know about art, or has relatives or friends that know about art and design.”

Jessica told him he was right, that our landlady is a teacher at one of the local universities. He said, “See? You can just tell by the design that this is the home of an educated person with lots of money.” He continued, “I would also guess that he or she is short,” and pointed out a number of the design elements that definitely don’t take height into consideration (in my 6’4″ opinion, nothing in China takes height into consideration! :) ). Jessica laughed at his observation because it’s true — our landlady probably barely clears 5′ tall in heels (though she towers over the landlady we had in Taiwan).

Chinese D.I.Y. Interior Decorating
This kind of interior decorating is a way for “middle class” Chinese to express their enhanced station in life — status symbols, essentially. It can range from the mildly (unintentionally) eccentric, to what you’d expect from a high school design student in terms of taste, to the extravagantly ostentatious (I’m thinking here of one apartment a foreign friend almost rented that had a raised, transparent, orange-lighted living room floor with a rock garden underneath — the son wanted to have goldfish in it but his mom made him compromise).

In the 80′s wearing a watch and leather-looking, non-”Liberation shoes” meant something (it used to be common for people to look down at your shoes after greeting you to gauge your status — that’s only happened to me once here), so did owning appliances like a T.V. or fridge. In the 90′s it was things like electric bikes, pampered pet dogs, and private cars. But as each status symbol becomes too common, people with money have to find new ways to distinguish themselves. Hanging out in ridiculously-priced $tarbucks, buying ridiculously-priced hand bags, and having an interior-decorated apartment shows you’re a step up with money to burn. These things are meant to send a message, but foreigners aren’t naturally tuned in to all of them, especially things like watches, ‘normal’ shoes, and an apartment that isn’t a white-washed concrete box.

Not Our Ideal
We didn’t choose or really even want this particular apartment, although it is really comfortable. Our friends found it for us while we were in Canada with our newborn baby in neonatal intensive care. It’s lower-average for the kind of apartments foreigners rent in Tianjin (our previous apartment made some of our foreign friends uncomfortable), but we weren’t about to tell our friends ‘no’ and ask them to go apartment hunting for us again while we were in Canada; they’d already done us a huge favour. We moved back to China as overwhelmed first-time parents with an infant; just getting here was a serious hassle and we weren’t about to pick up and move. The apartment wasn’t ideal but at the time we had more immediate concerns like how to get safe baby formula and worrying about the air pollution. Since we aren’t planning to settle down here, we decided we’d live in this comfortable, foreigner/rich Chinese apartment for now.

When we first arrived in Tianjin, we wanted an “average” apartment. There’s a few reasons why that doesn’t make a lot of sense (“average” means less given the stark economic disparity between social classes, for example). Nonetheless, we wanted an apartment in which our Chinese friends would feel comfortable, one that they would feel is normal, one that wouldn’t scream “rich, privileged foreigners.” We arrived with this mentality and were more-or-less successful in finding that kind of place. (More about how that played out here, or at the link below.)

Honestly, that old apartment was ghetto — that’s the adjective the average North American would likely use to describe it, and they’d mean it literally. As far as physical facilities was concerned, it would have been in the worst downtown East Vancouver neighbourhood. (This comparison isn’t really fair, though, because while the building and apartment was physically at the standard of a North American inner-city ghetto, the neighbourhood and community was safe, friendly, and generally pleasant, unlike Vancouver’s drug-and-prostitution-infested, crime-riddled downtown eastside.) But our Chinese teachers felt comfortable in it. We knew it matched their own apartments because the buildings and rent were more or less the same; we’d done some surveying before we chose a place.

When we finally do pick a place to settle down in I don’t know yet how we’ll choose, since this time we have children and family concerns thrown into the equation that weren’t there in 2007. But I’ll definitely be aiming for something that doesn’t send quite the same message as our current place.

To read about how and why we originally lived in an “average” Chinese Tianjin city apartment, and how that played out, see:

• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto

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.

(I told you so!)

If you have an infant in China and you’re using baby formula, then this is for you.

The Problem

After the 2008 melamine milk powder scandal, in which several infants died and hundreds of thousands were harmed by drinking melamine-tainted baby formula, we heard other foreigners multiple times say, “Now’s the best time buy Chinese milk powder — it’s never been safer.” Thankfully, we knew better.

That kind of thinking is what Chinese people call “using foreign thinking to understand China” — in other words: wrong. Now in 2010 it’s all over the news that 170 tons of unsafe milk powder products that were supposed to be destroyed in the wake of the 2008 scandal were simply repackaged and put back on store shelves. Melamine is an industrial chemical used in plastics and adhesives that also creates false, boosted protein readings on quality tests of watered-down milk powder solutions so that they don’t appear diluted. It also causes kidney stones and kidney failure. Despite the very public scandal, people knowingly repackaged and resold a product that they knew was lethal. Silly foreigners; “you laowais can’t understand China.”

It’s not a matter of being overly cynical about the priorities of China’s highest leaders. The system is broken, or rather, it was never designed to protect and empower individuals and the public in the first place (just the opposite; it was designed to empower the rulers at the expense of the people). Even if high-level leaders have good intentions they simply can’t adequately enforce these kinds of policies. In response to a major international scandal in which babies died, hundreds of thousands were harmed and the public was outraged, they executed a dairy farmer and a salesman, shuffled the responsible gov. officials around, and obviously failed to remove 170 tons of the stuff that caused the damage in the first place. (Those ‘disgraced’ officials are now back in same-level or higher positions.)

It borders on irresponsible, in my opinion, to trust the Chinese system more than you have to. Thankfully, when it comes to baby formula, trusting the system is unnecessary.

Breast milk is best, of course, but if you live in China and your baby needs formula, 怎么办？

Our Solution

When we need baby formula, we use Táobǎo to get imported name-brand Dutch formula (inspected by our Dutch friends) for the same price or cheaper than what’s on the store shelves in China. No doubt it includes ingredients made in China, but Dutch babies haven’t gotten kidney stones from baby formula yet.

Taobao.com is the cuter, blinkier, Chinese eBay. Some of your Chinese friends or co-workers most likely have accounts. My Chinese co-workers used to shop on Táobǎo all day before the company blocked the site. Get someone to order imported formula for you or open your own account (opening an account requires Chinese and Táobǎo accounts can be complicated, even for locals).

*Special tip: The first time you order from a vendor on Taobao.com, order a small amount so you can check the product closely to see if anything looks suspicious. You can get fake stuff on Taobao just as easily as anywhere else. If it checks out, you’re good to go! The vendor we use is here.

**Warning: This is not foolproof! By ordering off Táobǎo you’re trusting your ability to spot a fake product. Some fakes can be very well done. Be extremely careful. Ordering imported formula from Taobao is no guarantee, it’s just significantly better odds than domestic formula, imo. For a safer and only slightly more expensive option, see the first and fifth comments below.

If anyone has any other baby-formula-in-China advice, please let us know in the comments!

(This is the first in a series; several more are cued up, in no particular order. We have a baby, so as we discover the tricks of the trade in China, we’ll share them here.)

Related:

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

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

Aside from personal motivations, character, attitude, and general posture toward China and Chinese people, this is the one decision that enhanced our China experience more than any other single thing we did during our first two years in China: we moved out of the foreigner ghetto and into the most average-looking Chinese neighbourhood we could find.

(If what follows starts to sound culturally patronizing, just hold on… I saved that part for the end.)

Welcome to China! the Foreign Bubble

When we first arrived in China with next-to-no Mandarin or knowledge of our city, the organization that helped arrange our visas and school placement also arranged our apartment: we had a prearranged flat in a complex occupied entirely by foreigners where the manager had good English (back in the day this was the only place foreigners were allowed to live in Tianjin). It was super convenient, especially for China newbies who are usually high-maintenance. From the standpoint of an organization facilitating foreigners’ language school placement it was ideal. But for foreigners interested in China and Chinese, it sucked.

Ditching the Laowai Ghetto: hunting apartments armed with Chinglish

We’d come to China to study language and culture, and we’d decided before we even arrived that we’d be moving out of “洋人街” ASAP. It was inconvenient for language practice, and besides, going to a foreign country and living unnecessarily isolated from your new city’s regular people seemed really lame. So after about two months of classes we took a vocabulary list of apartment words, a map, and went and squinted at the scrawled 汉字 on the papers tacked to boards outside the little first-floor rental agencies tucked away in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

We knew what we wanted: an average neighbourhood (“average” as defined by locals, not foreigners) with a lot of outdoor community life and an apartment we could tolerate and that our neighbours, teachers, and local friends wouldn’t feel strange in. Surely, we thought, that isn’t too much to ask. Foreigners from one of the international schools told us we wouldn’t find “anything” (read: “livable”) for twice the price of what we eventually paid (also twice the price of what they said was the average Tianjin salary). We went with what our teachers told us instead, quickly realizing that foreigners can spend years in China and still know next-to-nothing about it.

Of course it was awkward pointing at a circle on a map and mispronouncing vocab words to rental agents who had maybe never talked face-to-face with a foreigner in their lives, but we managed to have three apartments shown to us. I wanted the first one, but the landlord balked when he discovered we were foreigners (that’s when we learned what “他有事” really means). The third location was perfect — better than we’d hoped. We incurred some 关系 debt because we had to ask a local friend (the boyfriend of a fellow foreigner) for a big favour to come with us to the contract negotiation and signing. It went smoothly, so we borrowed an electric 三轮车 and moved in.

The Benefits: people, people, people

Rather than bring local Tianjiners into our cultural space, we wanted to meet them in their own world where they were more comfortable. The single biggest benefit that living in this kind of neighbourhood gave us was exponentially increasing our daily opportunities for interaction with average, mainstream locals more on their turf than ours. We couldn’t come or go without speaking to someone, and usually more than one. The old boys club that hung out on the bike repair corner regularly included me in their Chinese chess, outdoor meals, and teasing. Families would invite us into their homes on the various big holidays. The only person we met in that neighbourhood in two years who had any amount of English — besides one charming but mentally handicapped man who would yell “I love you!” at us — was a university student three floors down who became a language exchange partner. It was a laid back but crowded, active community where language practice opportunities with everyone from laid-off factory workers to university professors were immediately available in excess of what we could handle. Those neighbours taught us more about China and made China more interesting, alive, and lovable to us than any books or classes ever could. Even on the worst days, we never regretted our decision to live there.

A few months after moving in our teachers, in their more candid moments, would sometimes confess that they felt extra awkward and distanced when visiting their foreign friends’ apartments for two big reasons. First, the furniture, decor, food, and even the way they were received as guests all felt foreign. Second, although the foreigners were taking a step down in living standards, to the Chinese their apartments just screamed wealth and economic privilege. In addition to the unavoidable language and cultural barriers, these foreigners, through their lifestyle choices, were emphasizing another gulf of distance between themselves and local Chinese: economic disparity.

The Downside: our economic elitism

The economic privilege in which most of us were raised (speaking globally here) gets us in two big ways. The first is largely practical, physical, external. The second is intensely personal.

Physical Annoyances & Inconveniences
My mother would be appalled if she saw that apartment. The whitewash was peeling and rubbed off on your clothes. The kitchen was the size of a closet. The toilet was in the shower and the exposed plumbing both precarious and temperamental. The sewer gas that came up the drains in the evenings smelled so bad it woke us up at night until we devised an overly complicated water-bottle-in-a-plastic-bag-hung-from-a-nail method for mostly-sealing the bathroom drain (plumbers don’t do U-bends in Tianjin). The windows let all the coal dust in and the layout of the place didn’t make sense to us. The electricity often shorted out and we had long extension cords running everywhere. There was only enough hot water in the winter for fast showers. I wore a toque to bed the week before they turned on the heat. In the words of younger versions of my little sisters: it was totally ghetto. But we would choose to live there again, no question. It was totally worth it. That apartment was slightly better or slightly worse than those of our neighbours, depending on the neighbours, and close enough to what they knew that our Chinese friends and neighbours felt much less awkward when they visited than they might have otherwise. I mention these things to give fair warning: if you aim to move into an average Chinese neighbourhood chances are you’ll be getting an average Chinese apartment. Count the cost, because not all foreigners are willing to pay it. Also, the neighbourhood and apartment described here, while unremarkable for that district of Tianjin, is still probably well above average for most places in China.

Uncomfortable Personal Discoveries
(Warning: confession/soap box/rant/sermon ahead.)
Whether it’s right or not, what’s a huge step down in living standards for the average foreigner is normal for the average Mainlander. If that embarrassing, awkward and unfair economic truth makes you feel uncomfortable and maybe even vaguely guilty, I promise I know how you feel, but I don’t apologize for bringing it up. That’s what we get for being the economically elite six percent of an otherwise much-less-privileged world. Keeping the hoi polloi at a distance so that we’re less poignantly reminded of this stark economic reality and our consciences are less likely to be called out does not make it any less real — but living in an average urban Chinese neighbourhood makes it harder to avoid.

If you’re a thinking, reflective person at all then living significantly below the comforts you’re accustomed to brings special challenges. Basically, you begin to discover how much of a pampered, manicured, whiny, elitist snob you are who has tragically confused unwarranted privileges with basic entitlements. When you get genuinely frustrated and upset about how sub-standard everything is, then you can enjoy the guilt that comes with realizing that you can’t handle what’s more than good enough for most of the world; for thinking that living more like the majority of the world is such a big sacrifice for which you should get some sort of multiculturalism medal. And when you’re in a good mood and those physical inconveniences aren’t annoying you as much as they would the average foreigner, then you can hate yourself for actually feeling proud of the fact that you deigned to lower your living standard closer to that of the global average, for thinking you’re better than all those other foreigners, and — last but certainly not least — for being so patronizing to the local Chinese.

The silver lining, I guess, is that living this way also creates ample opportunity to contemplate lifestyles that respectfully transcend economic divisions while still being honest about who we are and acting morally with our affluence given the economic disparity in the world… Anyway, that’s a big tangent I maybe should have saved for another post, but it’s part of our experience, so I’m leaving it in.

Gearing up for Location #2

That old apartment with its neighbourhood comes to mind today because right at the moment friends in Tianjin are securing an apartment for us for when we arrive in a couple weeks (we had to let the old one go when we left for Canada). When friends are doing us this huge favour we obviously don’t want to be picky, and with the baby we won’t be as mobile or tolerant/flexible as we were before. I’m also only on a year-long contract, so I don’t know how likely we’ll be to move after we arrive. The photos they sent make this second apartment look several notches above the first. I guess we’ll see…

Fun Chinese Apartment & Neighbourhood-related Posts:

• Becoming morning people
• Negotiating rent in Chinglish – Round One
• Lost the kitten, found the ninja
• Almost Famous
• Some rather dry illiteracy fun
• Our current home by the numbers
• Hunting Tianjin apartments, armed with Chinglish

Related “Living in China” posts:

• China-friendly New Year’s Resolutions for Laowais
• Living in China Q&A with a California Intercultural Studies class

Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, plastic-y Christmas junk, and wanton consumerism? Can’t get enough. But Baby Jesus? Silent Night? In Tianjin? Good luck.

We just got back from the annual NGO Christmas party. Christmas songs and the Christmas Story were conspicuously absent, unlike years past. This year in Tianjin, if foreigners and locals get together and sing Christmas songs or read the Christmas story at a non-preapproved venue and time, the sky will fall down. Actually getting preapproval would cause the canals to rise up and the garbage mountain to be cast into the artificial TV tower lake, so you can appreciate why preapproval is more of a theoretical possibility than an actual observed phenomenon.

Actually, that’s not exactly how the people of consequence explained it. But instead of getting into it and explaining it all here, I’ll just say that things are noticeably tighter in post-Olympic Tianjin, especially around Christmas. Since we’re the well-behaved kind of foreigners, our Tianjin Christmas is just that much less Christmas-y.

We still had a good time; our friends who were organizing it did a great job, especially with having to scrambled to redo the program at the last minute.

Tomorrow night me and a buddy are hitting the local bath house… Merry Christmas to us! Hopefully fun stories will be forthcoming.

(PS – Comments are closed on this post.)

The 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to the bunch of self-interested professional butt-kissers (aka kiss-ups, brown-nosers, toadies, boot-lickers, 马屁精) for their eye-roll inducing paranoia, beyond-ridiculous intolerance, and gutlessly-executed last-minute squashing of totally innocuous Christmas activities joyfully performed (or in this case, not performed) by some of the most pitiable members of Chinese society.

I can’t provide details because this is Tianjin, and they-who-must-not-be-named, and the broken systems they perpetuate, are just that grinchy. Suffice to say that if they were trying to make a bad impression, encourage foreigners to “look down on China,” embarrass a bunch of locals in front of their foreign friends and co-workers and break a bunch of kids’ hearts, then they’re doing a fantastically effective good job.

(PS – I realize, of course, that giving foreigners a good impression is far, far down their personal priority lists. But anyway, now I feel better. ;) )

(PPS – The feelings expressed above don’t reflect our long-term, regular attitude toward these kinds of situations and the people who do them. But occasionally feeling this way is an unavoidable part of living here.)

(PPPS – Comments are closed on this post.)

Vote for us!
It’s time for the annual Christmas post! But first, in an apparent act of holiday goodness, some warm-hearted soul has gone and nominated us in the personal blog category for the 2008 China Blog Awards. We don’t know what happens if you place, but this is your chance to help us find out by taking the next 5 seconds, going here, and clicking the plus sign (+)! =)

Christmas!
And now for Christmas. To set the mood, behold! the photo on the right: this church in Tianjin has Santa and reindeer painted on the side… in August.

Two December’s ago, we brought you some disarmingly cute Third-Culture Kids from Africa making their point in a Target store.

Last December you just got a nice poem, though I was sorely tempted to post this video of a guy who crucifies Mickey Mouses and tries to exorcise the demons of out WalMart signs.

This year, it’s a slick little video from the Advent Conspiracy. Thank God your Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China, or any other nation’s sweatshops:

Having a “christmas” that is Made In China and making Christmas in China — and everywhere else — are two different things. Thank God. And Merry Christmas!

(Thanks Miller and Steve for digging this one up. And for you Canadians: we’re not off the hook. Here’s the Canuck version.)