I just got back from a 5 day trip to Tibet and it was both beautiful and fascinating. The Tibetans still live a very simple and spiritual life and there were moments on the trip where I truly did feel like I‘d gone back in time. The Tibetans live in small towns (Lhasa, the capital city, only has 45,000 people) or in the countryside earning their living as farmers or nomad herders.
The first thing you notice (apart from the obvious mountains) are the prayer flags everywhere - you may have seen them in pictures from the top of Mt. Everest, those colorful squares of fabric strung together. The very next thing I noticed was the lack of oxygen. Lhasa sits at an elevation of 3,500 meters (11,500 feet). I had heard that altitude sickness can be a problem for some people, especially when you fly in directly and your body doesn’t have time to adjust. I didn’t worry too much about it, though, and didn’t even bother to get a prescription for the medication you can take to avoid it.
Well, on my first flight from Shanghai to Chengdu, I was sitting next to a Chinese university student and when she found out I was continuing on to Tibet, she asked me if I did any sports. I was a bit surprised by the question, but I said yes, I was a runner. She got a chagrined look on her face and said that athletes actually have a harder time with the altitude because of their lower heart rate. Fantastic. I was horribly ill the first night there - up half the night with a splitting headache and nausea. But after several doses of Advil (still my favorite product of all time!), I was feeling better by morning - though I did have to walk very slowly and was sucking wind every time I climbed any stairs.
We spent some time in Lhasa exploring the old town, Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple, and a local nunnery. We also spent a couple days exploring the surrounding countryside which was absolutely stunning. Snow-covered mountains, beautiful lakes, rivers, and yaks everywhere (which were delicious, by the way). You can see pictures and more descriptions on my website: www.porterfamilyinchina.com.
Never have I been to a place where religious devotion is so evident and so deeply ingrained in the culture. There are prayer flags draped everywhere, religious symbols on every house and building and painted on the mountainsides, people walking about with their spinning prayer wheels and prostrating themselves in front of the temples.
The prostrating was particularly interesting. Our first day in Lhasa, we saw groups of people in front of the temple performing this ritual. Our guide said they will continue for 2 or 3 hours at a time, which I thought was pretty impressive. Then I noticed that some people were doing it on their way to the temple - you are supposed to walk to the town square, walk clockwise around it, and then go to the temple. Most people just walked normally, sometimes with their prayer wheel, and some liked to chant quietly. But some people would do their prostrating on the way: they would take three steps then kneel, then lay down, then get up again, take three more steps, and so on.
I thought that was just amazing - what devotion! Then a couple days later when we were traveling several hours outside of Lhasa, I saw people doing this along the highway. I asked the guide what they were doing. “Those are pilgrims,” he said. Okay. Then I saw more of them. Still not getting it, I asked the guide, “How far do they go like that?’ He said very simply, “They are going to Lhasa.” I was stunned. He said maybe three or four times in a person’s life they will make the pilgrimage from their home to Lhasa in this fashion. It takes them about 2 or 3 months. You usually see about two or three pilgrims together and then behind them is another person pushing a cart loaded with supplies to make meals for the pilgrims along the way.
It really is incredible and after seeing these people and their way of life, I now have a better understanding of the conflict and the outrage over the Chinese take over of Tibet. Here is a people so religious, so peaceful, and so protective of its way of life and uncorrupted culture being stomped on by the Chinese. Since the communists took over China and built the railway to Tibet, the Chinese have been streaming in and now make up half the population of Lhasa.
There is a huge military presence here - more so than anywhere else I have been in China, and it is a constant reminder of who is in charge and that the people here are not free. When we were in the Potala Palace we saw the prayer room with the empty golden throne that was meant to be for the Dalai Lama. Maybe someday.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
There's no PETA in China
I’ve never been a huge animal lover. Yeah, I might lean over to pet a neighbor’s dog, but my kids still don’t have a pet and unless they get serious about really begging me for one, they probably never will. However, you don’t have to be a big animal lover to feel sorry for the animals here in China.
When I first got here, I did notice that there wasn’t any wildlife to be found. I know Shanghai is a very urban area, but even out here in the suburbs where there is still a little green left, you never see so much as field mouse (unless you count the one I saw in the grocery store scurrying under the table of bananas). I’ve come to realize that the reason you don’t see any is because they are afraid - the Chinese are not very kind to their four-footed friends.
I told the story in one of my previous blogs about the stray dog that followed me into our neighborhood which a security guard then whacked with a bamboo pole. I’ve also heard complaints from a neighbor about locals throwing rocks at her own pet dog.
One of the worst things I’ve seen was during one of my morning runs. I was running along a back path with lots of bike traffic when I heard a goose honking behind me. I almost ducked, thinking it was flying right at my head, but then a guy on a motor scooter passed by me and he had about a half dozen white, long-necked geese tied to the back of his seat. They were hanging upside down by their feet and they were straining to crane their necks upward so that their throats wouldn’t scrape on the ground. I noticed a couple birds whose feathers that were already blackened from the road. It was not a pleasant sight - if you are going to kill them for food, fine, but do you have to torture them first?
I’m guessing part of the insensitivity to animals’ suffering is that here people can still make the connection between a live animal and dinner. In much of the developed world, we are used to seeing our meat already plucked, butchered, sanitized, and sealed in plastic wrap ready to cook and we rarely think about how it got there.
A woman from my Chinese class last year told the story of how her ayi (an ayi is a Chinese housekeeper) came back from her Chinese New Year holiday with a live chicken as a gift to this woman’s family. The ayi brought this chicken all the way back on the bus from her hometown in the countryside. The woman (who is American, by the way) knew this was a very nice gesture and she should be appropriately grateful, but when she walked into the kitchen right at the moment when the ayi was about the wring the chicken’s neck, she couldn’t help but let out an involuntary scream. She then did her best not to insult her employee while impressing upon her that although she appreciated the gift, she couldn’t deal with anything being killed in her kitchen. So after traveling I don’t know how many hours on a bus with a live chicken, the ayi went home that evening with the thing still clucking.
In Shanghai, there are still plenty of places where you can buy your food while it’s still alive - even in the big chain stores like Wal-mart and Carrefour. I was in Carrefour the other day passing by the tanks of fish and frogs and I saw this one turtle who was making a break for it. He had both of his front fins hooked over the edge of the tank and his little neck was sticking waaaay out of his shell, just wiggling his head back and forth like “I’m free! I’m gonna make it!” A couple of the store workers were watching it for a minute, laughing to each other until one of them bashed him on the head with a stick and he sunk back to the bottom. Poor little guy - he didn’t stand a chance, but I was rooting for him anyway.
Unfortunately, even creatures that aren’t food don’t fare too well in China. We’ve avoided going to the Shanghai zoo because we’ve been told it’s really appalling - the cages are small and the animals are in sorry shape. I read just today that 11 Siberian tigers starved to death in a zoo in Shenyang. The really sad part is that no one seems terribly surprised.
And let’s not forget the crickets - yes, even insects! Cricket fighting is a big pastime, with the really serious participants breeding their own fighters. But to be fair, it’s not just for the thrill of watching two bugs try to kill each other - they bet money, too, so it’s big business.
There are some activists in China trying to promote animal rights by rescuing mistreated pets and strays. But the sad truth is, it’s hard to get people to care about animal rights in a country where the humans don’t have many rights themselves.
When I first got here, I did notice that there wasn’t any wildlife to be found. I know Shanghai is a very urban area, but even out here in the suburbs where there is still a little green left, you never see so much as field mouse (unless you count the one I saw in the grocery store scurrying under the table of bananas). I’ve come to realize that the reason you don’t see any is because they are afraid - the Chinese are not very kind to their four-footed friends.
I told the story in one of my previous blogs about the stray dog that followed me into our neighborhood which a security guard then whacked with a bamboo pole. I’ve also heard complaints from a neighbor about locals throwing rocks at her own pet dog.
One of the worst things I’ve seen was during one of my morning runs. I was running along a back path with lots of bike traffic when I heard a goose honking behind me. I almost ducked, thinking it was flying right at my head, but then a guy on a motor scooter passed by me and he had about a half dozen white, long-necked geese tied to the back of his seat. They were hanging upside down by their feet and they were straining to crane their necks upward so that their throats wouldn’t scrape on the ground. I noticed a couple birds whose feathers that were already blackened from the road. It was not a pleasant sight - if you are going to kill them for food, fine, but do you have to torture them first?
I’m guessing part of the insensitivity to animals’ suffering is that here people can still make the connection between a live animal and dinner. In much of the developed world, we are used to seeing our meat already plucked, butchered, sanitized, and sealed in plastic wrap ready to cook and we rarely think about how it got there.
A woman from my Chinese class last year told the story of how her ayi (an ayi is a Chinese housekeeper) came back from her Chinese New Year holiday with a live chicken as a gift to this woman’s family. The ayi brought this chicken all the way back on the bus from her hometown in the countryside. The woman (who is American, by the way) knew this was a very nice gesture and she should be appropriately grateful, but when she walked into the kitchen right at the moment when the ayi was about the wring the chicken’s neck, she couldn’t help but let out an involuntary scream. She then did her best not to insult her employee while impressing upon her that although she appreciated the gift, she couldn’t deal with anything being killed in her kitchen. So after traveling I don’t know how many hours on a bus with a live chicken, the ayi went home that evening with the thing still clucking.
In Shanghai, there are still plenty of places where you can buy your food while it’s still alive - even in the big chain stores like Wal-mart and Carrefour. I was in Carrefour the other day passing by the tanks of fish and frogs and I saw this one turtle who was making a break for it. He had both of his front fins hooked over the edge of the tank and his little neck was sticking waaaay out of his shell, just wiggling his head back and forth like “I’m free! I’m gonna make it!” A couple of the store workers were watching it for a minute, laughing to each other until one of them bashed him on the head with a stick and he sunk back to the bottom. Poor little guy - he didn’t stand a chance, but I was rooting for him anyway.
Unfortunately, even creatures that aren’t food don’t fare too well in China. We’ve avoided going to the Shanghai zoo because we’ve been told it’s really appalling - the cages are small and the animals are in sorry shape. I read just today that 11 Siberian tigers starved to death in a zoo in Shenyang. The really sad part is that no one seems terribly surprised.
And let’s not forget the crickets - yes, even insects! Cricket fighting is a big pastime, with the really serious participants breeding their own fighters. But to be fair, it’s not just for the thrill of watching two bugs try to kill each other - they bet money, too, so it’s big business.
There are some activists in China trying to promote animal rights by rescuing mistreated pets and strays. But the sad truth is, it’s hard to get people to care about animal rights in a country where the humans don’t have many rights themselves.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Don't bother changing the channel
You know, it can be tough living abroad sometimes. Don’t get me wrong - for the most part I love it. I believe that the whole point of traveling is for things to NOT be like home, to have new adventures and experience a different way of life. This expat concept is not new - people have been doing it for hundreds of years, for the very point of being somewhere different, somewhere exotic, to remake oneself into a new person by the benefit of living outside the country of one’s birth.
I get that, and I embrace it. But sometimes it hard and you just have those days where you long for something familiar from home. That’s why I’m willing to spend close to $10 on a box of Cheerios. Insane as that may sound, don’t judge me - all you other expats our there know what I’m talking about. It’s not just that you are desperately craving those Cheerios, but those Cheerios are a part of the culture that you are missing and are so nostalgic for.
And it doesn’t stop at groceries. You never appreciate home so much as when you realize you can’t just hop in the car or go on-line and pick up whatever you want: books, magazines, craft supplies, shoes in the right size, clothes that fit, good running gear. It takes a lot of time and effort just to try and find these items and I’m not always successful. So in the end, it’s a good lesson in needs vs. wants. Things you think you need, you can actually learn to live without. But it doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it.
A prime example is entertainment. The English language options on official Chinese TV are limited to CNN International, BBC News, Discovery Channel, and ESPN (I really don’t even count that last one - there are no hardcore sports fans in this household). For someone who grew up in a TV culture, this is a tough one. So what do you do?
One of the first things our new arrivals agent told me when we first moved here was where to get illegal DVD’s. In fact, on our orientation outing when she showed us around the local grocery store, the IT mall for mobile phones, and the American grocery store, she also took us to a DVD store which was down this rather scary-looking alley. At least, it looked scary to us as new arrivals, but it was more or less just local color.
Again, don’t judge me. You can’t buy a legal DVD in China even if you wanted to. It feels wrong at first until you realize that everybody’s doing it and you can get really good quality movies for a buck and a half! Not that the quality is always something you can count on. Sometimes there are pauses or blips, it may suddenly change to another language, or the sound may have kind of a tinny quality. We recently bought a copy of the animated movie “Up” which for some reason would only play the English soundtrack if we kept on the English subtitles at the same time. Now, this was a good movie in it’s own right, but the most entertaining aspect for us was reading the bizarre translations they came up with for the subtitles. They must have been done by a Chinese person who had taken one or two years of English in high school. It was beyond funny.
Option number two is, of course, illegal satellite TV. We were given the name of a guy who spoke just enough English who could hook us up to a system out of the Philippines. The problem was, after a few months the system would stop working and he would have to come over with a new card, box, or dish which cost more money. It was obvious we were being taken for a ride, especially when every time I tried to challenge him on something, his English suddenly got a lot worse.
We stopped calling him after a while and our channels gradually dwindled until we had to resort back to the Chinese TV offerings. So no more cartoons, no more dramatizations - just news and documentaries. I was getting a really bad case of news fatigue. It gets depressing when you’re constantly exposed to hard-hitting issues like terrorism, war, and natural disasters. I’m sure even the newscasters like to go home and watch The Office or Cash Cab.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so finally I contacted our realtor and she gave me two options: legal or illegal satellite. For an extra $150 I decided the legal hook-up was worth it this time. Though I’m not really sure in what sense it is “legal”. I think it just means we are paying the provider, because I still don’t think China allows it, with all that American indoctrination and free speech going on. I can tell these channels aren’t monitored because CNN can say anything they want about China without being blacked-out like they do on the local feed.
Speaking of blacking out, our internet access has been getting steadily worse over the last six months or so. In addition to not being able to access my blog (Russ is posting this entry for me from Singapore), we can’t get onto Facebook or YouTube, and many of Russ’s podcasts are being blocked.
But anyway, last Tuesday two guys came to the house and hooked up our “legal” satellite and the boys and I marveled at all the channels we now have - not just one, but two cartoon channels! And that night as we sat on the couch and watched a particularly annoying episode of Spongebob which they’ve seen at least a dozen times already, I thought, “Man, this sucks”. Do you think this is what they mean when they say “You can’t go home again?”
I get that, and I embrace it. But sometimes it hard and you just have those days where you long for something familiar from home. That’s why I’m willing to spend close to $10 on a box of Cheerios. Insane as that may sound, don’t judge me - all you other expats our there know what I’m talking about. It’s not just that you are desperately craving those Cheerios, but those Cheerios are a part of the culture that you are missing and are so nostalgic for.
And it doesn’t stop at groceries. You never appreciate home so much as when you realize you can’t just hop in the car or go on-line and pick up whatever you want: books, magazines, craft supplies, shoes in the right size, clothes that fit, good running gear. It takes a lot of time and effort just to try and find these items and I’m not always successful. So in the end, it’s a good lesson in needs vs. wants. Things you think you need, you can actually learn to live without. But it doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it.
A prime example is entertainment. The English language options on official Chinese TV are limited to CNN International, BBC News, Discovery Channel, and ESPN (I really don’t even count that last one - there are no hardcore sports fans in this household). For someone who grew up in a TV culture, this is a tough one. So what do you do?
One of the first things our new arrivals agent told me when we first moved here was where to get illegal DVD’s. In fact, on our orientation outing when she showed us around the local grocery store, the IT mall for mobile phones, and the American grocery store, she also took us to a DVD store which was down this rather scary-looking alley. At least, it looked scary to us as new arrivals, but it was more or less just local color.
Again, don’t judge me. You can’t buy a legal DVD in China even if you wanted to. It feels wrong at first until you realize that everybody’s doing it and you can get really good quality movies for a buck and a half! Not that the quality is always something you can count on. Sometimes there are pauses or blips, it may suddenly change to another language, or the sound may have kind of a tinny quality. We recently bought a copy of the animated movie “Up” which for some reason would only play the English soundtrack if we kept on the English subtitles at the same time. Now, this was a good movie in it’s own right, but the most entertaining aspect for us was reading the bizarre translations they came up with for the subtitles. They must have been done by a Chinese person who had taken one or two years of English in high school. It was beyond funny.
Option number two is, of course, illegal satellite TV. We were given the name of a guy who spoke just enough English who could hook us up to a system out of the Philippines. The problem was, after a few months the system would stop working and he would have to come over with a new card, box, or dish which cost more money. It was obvious we were being taken for a ride, especially when every time I tried to challenge him on something, his English suddenly got a lot worse.
We stopped calling him after a while and our channels gradually dwindled until we had to resort back to the Chinese TV offerings. So no more cartoons, no more dramatizations - just news and documentaries. I was getting a really bad case of news fatigue. It gets depressing when you’re constantly exposed to hard-hitting issues like terrorism, war, and natural disasters. I’m sure even the newscasters like to go home and watch The Office or Cash Cab.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so finally I contacted our realtor and she gave me two options: legal or illegal satellite. For an extra $150 I decided the legal hook-up was worth it this time. Though I’m not really sure in what sense it is “legal”. I think it just means we are paying the provider, because I still don’t think China allows it, with all that American indoctrination and free speech going on. I can tell these channels aren’t monitored because CNN can say anything they want about China without being blacked-out like they do on the local feed.
Speaking of blacking out, our internet access has been getting steadily worse over the last six months or so. In addition to not being able to access my blog (Russ is posting this entry for me from Singapore), we can’t get onto Facebook or YouTube, and many of Russ’s podcasts are being blocked.
But anyway, last Tuesday two guys came to the house and hooked up our “legal” satellite and the boys and I marveled at all the channels we now have - not just one, but two cartoon channels! And that night as we sat on the couch and watched a particularly annoying episode of Spongebob which they’ve seen at least a dozen times already, I thought, “Man, this sucks”. Do you think this is what they mean when they say “You can’t go home again?”
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