Fuddland

Looks like I was too hasty in my applauding of the understatedness of the restaurant’s choice of Christmas decoration: they’re now going for the “more is more” school of thought.

Oh and, shear … sheep … wool … okay, a slightly tenuous link for the sake of a pun, but still not as bad as the joke from my cracker at my early Christmas dinner yesterday: what do elves learn at school?

Christmas decorations in China, just like in the rest of the Christmas-recognising world, generally fall into two categories: cheap and tacky or over-the-top, as shown by the two examples below.

The owners of the office block where I work managed a particularly pathetic display. This, believe it or not, is the finished display:

Those crackers look like they were arranged by a powerful sneeze. So it was a pleasant surprise to see a local restaurant taking a different tact, opting for a nice Christmas red and — staggeringly — without a single light bulb in sight. At first I wasn’t quite sure what they were doing wrapping yarn around the trunk and branches when I snapped the photo on my way to work — or why they needed two men standing guard to do it — but it all become clear when I went by again the next day.

A quick growing-my-own-tree tree update: no tree yet.

Although we do already have a traditional tacky foot-tall plastic tree, I hope you all agree that there’s no way I could not buy this:

Especially when it’s apparently as easy as “1, 2, 3, tree.”

I have opened, planted, and watered. Just how long I wait for stage 4, I’m not really sure. Watch this space!

Although I’m sure it makes a very pleasant day out at most times of the year, there’s really only one time of year that, if you happen to be in the area, you should make an extra effort to visit Tianping Hill [in Chinese, Tiānpíng Shān (天平山)]: in the latter weeks of autumn, from mid-November to early December, the maple-tree forest turns all shades of reds and deep oranges.

The park is nicely laid out so that you wander through the trees to the foot of the hill, peering into numerous small temples along the way should they take your fancy, before taking your time climbing the 221 metres up the not-too-steep carved-out stairway to the peak. At the top we found nothing more than some interestingly-shaped boulders and a fairly out-of-place fairground shoot-the-balloons game, although there were signs to a tea house which takes it water from a nearby spring that we never got around to following. But being able to look down and appreciate the contrast of the leaves against the surrounding evergreens is the real reason to have made the climb, as well as looking out towards Sūzhōu (苏州) and trying to make out the skyscrapers through the haze of the pollution.

After a few minutes checking out the view in each direction, I wondered aloud if the collection of large pools of water in a quite bare-looking area below was a quarry — and if so, was it still active? — when the ground suddenly shook underfoot and a large rumble came from the direction I was looking: an explosion had just gone off, which seemed to confirm that it was indeed a quarry and it was very much still active.

Back down in the maple tree forest, we came across the obligatory couples having their wedding photos taken [every beauty spot comes with them], and of course no Chinese park would be complete without some sort of performance watched by a smattering of pensioners and teenage girls. We stood for a few minutes to watch the feats of a man standing on a wobbly plank, but decided not to stay for the graceful acrobatic displays of the girls with their coats on over their leotards.

One particular treat was coming across a local artist painting the view across the pond. At first I thought she was faking it for the benefit of a professional-looking photographer who had set up a tripod just behind her, but she really was putting paint to canvas. I don’t know how she was managing to hold onto her brush without gloves, let alone put the paint where she intended it to go without shivering, but manage she did, and the results were looking pretty good.

With half a billion or so potential reserves, China really has no need for a national service, but a couple of high-school-teacher friends of mine still had a week off work recently thanks to their students all taking part in boot camp: all senior high-school and first-year university students must take part in between a week and a month’s worth of military training, which has been the nationwide policy since a certain student up-rising in 1989.

I talked to a number of my adult students to find out what goes on, and what they thought about it, and the answers have all been generally the same. Some, but not all, had taken part in basic combat training, but for everyone it was nothing more than a lot of marching or standing in formation [more than one person told me they had to stand in the full glare of the sun for up to three hours, without protection], being yelled at, and no messing around whatsoever, in order to instill a sense of discipline, order and good old patriotism. And pretty much everyone — male and female alike — agreed that it did them good to go through it.

I suppose it’s purpose is to counter the much more relaxed pace of Chinese university life when compared to the high school system: in the latter, the students gradually build up to twelve- to fourteen-hour days of study, in which the parents and grandparents literally wait hand and foot on their single offspring in order to allow them maximum learning time, all leading up to the notoriously difficult and stressful university entrance exam. In contrast, the university system is much like that of the West, with much less classroom-time [depending on the chosen field of study] and more opportunities for — shudder — socialising, which is of course a worry for the powers that be, hence the effort to instill a bit of social order into them from the get-go.

Every now and then I get to hold an open “Culture” class in which I choose some aspect of foreign culture around which to shape discussion activities. Since yesterday’s class fell on the eleventh of the eleventh, I took the opportunity to introduce the students to the idea of a Remembrance Day.

I’ve always found it quite surprising that China does not have an official day with the same notion of remembering those who have sacrificed themselves for their country — the closest they come is the festival of Qīngmíng Jié (清明节), but that’s primarily to remember ancestors, and not specifically about fallen soldiers — so after giving them a run-down of the ceremonies and traditions of our version, I asked them to come up with their own: when it should be, and what events should take place. Here are the suggestions of appropriate dates:

• April 6: the day after Qīngmíng Jié, in order to get two days off work in a row

• September 18: the date of the Mukden Incident, when a railroad in Japanese-occupied modern-day Shěnyāng was dynamited, allegedly by Japanese militarists as a pretext to full-blown war

• July 7: the official date of the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937

• December 13: the anniversary of the Nánjīng (南京) Massacre in 1937, during which tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war were murdered [estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 people] at the hands of Japanese soldiers

As for the events, as well as the universal idea of a period of silence [suggestions ranged from one to three minutes], floral wreaths, monuments and so forth, and even though I am aware of the general feelings towards the Land of the Rising Sun, I was slightly taken aback by this idea from one softly-spoken, generally-amiable student:

We should invite the Prime Minister of Japan, tell him to kneel down and cut open his own stomach.

This pretty much sums up the feelings that many Chinese still have towards the Japanese today; the above student wasn’t at all shy about his desires, nor were his classmates in the least bit shocked — in fact, surveys indicate that the current generation harbours much stronger feelings than those that actually witnessed the atrocities. It’s widely known that schools teach children from an early age about the “humiliations” China has suffered at the hands of the Japanese over the centuries, although some of the other students were more open and suggested they could invite “some friendly Japanese people”. I tried to get them to focus more on the commemorating-the-fallen aspect, but some feelings are more deeply ingrained than a single hour-long class can placate.

This is really quite nifty: if you’ve dabbled in night-time photography of stars, then upload the photo to Flickr, submit it to the Astrometry group, and wait a little while. The automated tools of Astrometry.net will analyse the photo and leave a lovely comment telling you what the major stars and astronomical objects are, as well as actually notating the photo. Head on over to a photo I took almost four years ago to see what I mean. Apparently it contains:

• The star Rigel (βOri)
• The star Betelgeuse (αOri)
• The star Bellatrix (γOri)
• The star Alnilam (εOri)
• The star Mirzam (βCMa)
• The star Alhena (γGem)
• The star Alnitak (ζOri)
• The star Saiph (κOri)
• The star Mintaka (δOri)
• The star Arneb (αLep)
• The Witch Head nebula
• The Great Nebula in Orion
• Horsehead nebula
• Christmas Tree cluster / Cone nebula

Sadly the chances of taking any starry photos while living in Sūzhōu (苏州) are close to zero, but hopefully one day I’ll be in less polluted climes, and this tool will make it a lot easier to find out exactly what I’m gazing at, instead of all that tiresome “learning” stuff.

One aspect of the English training centre business out here that I’ve never been entirely comfortable with is what could be described as a form of corporate spying: employees of one training centre pose as potential students at another, to find out about their prices and courses. The turnover of admin and sales staff is high enough to avoid the danger of employees of Training Centre A who visited Training Centre B being recognised when B pays A a visit of their own. To me it seems to be a fairly underhanded way of finding out about local competitors, as well as a pretty lazy method of getting ideas about how to improve one’s own services.

When I occasionally poke one of the managers into defending this tactic, I generally get an answer along the lines of, “Well, everyone else does it.” But when, today, I playfully tsk’d at one of the spies as she headed out of the door on her latest mission, I got a different sort of reply:

What, they don’t do this in your country?

It wasn’t a sarcastic, rhetorical question; nor was it meant to imply that if we don’t do it, we’re clearly doing something wrong — it was asked with a genuine interest. What I found more interesting was my immediate instinct, which was to say, “What?! No, of course not!” But I managed to catch myself and instead gave a stammered, “Um, well, I don’t really know … I hope not.”

But the more I think about it, unless there’s explicitly a law that says it’s illegal to not declare a conflict of interest when enquiring about a company’s services [and it must be a conflict of interest rather than simply posing as a potential customer, because otherwise all those undercover journalist Watchdog-type investigations would be breaking the law on a regular basis], then I don’t actually have any basis to tut-tut this activity other than my own moral standards.

On a related note, a few weeks ago a new student joined a class that I teaching on Sunday mornings. It’s a good group of people from all sorts of different companies that like doing vaguely business-related role-plays, so I welcomed the newcomer, asked her what line of work she was in and was surprised when she replied that she works at the reception desk for a competing English training centre. Thinking that she was either the worst spy in the world, or that her company’s own services must be pretty dire, I asked her why she had joined [and paid for] this group instead of asking her own company if she could sit in on a few lessons a week there. She said that she wanted to improve her English without her employer knowing she was taking extra lessons, at which point I stopped making further enquiries. It’s a source of constant bewilderment to me why people do things that I don’t understand or agree with.