Hangzhou Lovin’

This is how the CHinese fight SARS! Propaganda.

At Hangzhou T-salon

I have a hard time believing these are real, but you never know in China.

Conversation with my boss

“long time I havn’t seen you, I miss my good friend”
“yeah”
“I’m sure you have heard on the televison, about the new illness. saseh”
“SARS, yeah I know”
“Oh hehe, good good, then you know it is very serious, you must be careful”
“ok”
“SARS came from america… an american tourist and monks from Thailand, but now it is in China… Hong Kong and GuangDong. There has been one person in Henan, a tourist”
“Really”
“Safety is very important to Chinese people, espiecially the safety of foriegners…
the diesease travels through the air… allways keep your windows open.”
“ok”
We will spraying the whole school, we will give you a spray for your house, youshould do it everyday.”
“ok”
“You shouldn’t go out… Last night you were out tooo late hehehe, I talked to the gated keeper, he said you didn’t come back till midnight, hehehe”
“ok”
“everybody in our school is staying in side and keeping safe, they are washing there houses everyday, all the teachers and the students are not going out”
“mm hmm”
“you know the labor day holiday? it is very big in China. None of the students can go home. it is not good to go on holiday”
“good idea”
“If you need to but anything just call me and I will help…. you should not go to crowded places, keep your windows open for fresh air… we are good friends you know… you are my little brother”
“I know”

SARS has still got me down. I’m pretty sure there has been one case in town as everybody is telling me the same story. Since all the details match up I don’t think it is just a rumor. There is also this story from the Atimes, about the outbreak in Shanxi province. I don’t want to live in a town like the one they decribe. most scary is this qoute

“The list has been distributed throughout the county so people who may have been exposed to SARS can take appropriate measures. SARS infections were discovered in a dormitory at 11 Tonghu Street - now the large building is empty. People who used to live in the building are feared to have been infected with SARS, but they have all left, fanning out in every direction to live elsewhere. ”

This story really hit me, it’s abou the cover-up of SARS patients in Beijing. The thing, I know a doctor who works at the hospital in question, the Chinese Japanese friendship hospital. He is a friend of a friend and I went out to dinner with him in Beijing this winter. That means I am damn close to a potential SARS patient. He was the person I was planning on calling if I ever got sick, but who knows what I will do now.

Despite SARS I went to Luoyang today to see the pretty flowers. Tehy have a peopny d\festival. A peony is a big colorful flower that smells nice. I got a papercutting of Mao Zedong to. Then we went to the Longman grottos to check out the buddha’s. The longman grottos are these two hills where all these people have carvd out caves and but Buddha’s in them. Many of the Buddha’s are gon enow cause Laowai’s stole them. Unfortanatly I couldn’t find any nice enough for me to steal. This was alos one of the first places I saw people walking around with face masks. On the road there the land is strange. All red caly, with big valley’s gased into the land and people living in caves on the hillside. One of the strangest things about China is the gas stations on the highways. Huge affairs with a big pyramid roof, and giant ballon animals. Very bizarre.

i’ve been eating way to much mutton lately. today I went to a xinjiag resurant and had mutton ribs and some other unedietified sheep part. These were big portions laden with fat and I ate most of them since I went with a girl. Yesterday I went out for hotpot after my private lesson. I don’t really liek my students but I was hungrey and I like hotpat. It wasn’t so bad, they soon forgot abou tme and I got down to eating about one whole giant plate of shaved mutton. (If you don’t know what hot but is, it’s like instant stew. You sit around a table with a boiling pot of broth in the middle and dip things in to cook them. Mutton is always a favorite and is quite good when dipped in the spicy side and dipped in seaseme suace). The a few nights before that I went after the bars I went out to a late night outdoor resturaunt, (these alone make china in the summer much nicer than china in the window.) for more mutton ribs. ANd about every other day I can’t resist getting a yang rou quar, that’s a mutton shish kebab, on the street.

to much f’ing sheep meat.

So a couple more quick SARS thoughts…. The thing about SARS is that it’s the first world event to really effect my life. The IRaq thing affected me a little, because I had to have a talk with my boss about safety. But with SARS it affects my whole life here in China. Where I want to travel too, who I want to see, how interact with people. This Mayday, I am considering going to Tibet solely because there aren’t that many people there and no SARS cases. I have this thing going on with this girl but she is a tourist guide who travels all around China. Fucking SARS is giving me second thoughts about seeing her. I already didn’t like it when people touch me,* but now I wanna run away when someone wants to shake hands.

Umm I thought I had something more insightful to say, BS time, “It just goes to show you what a interconnected world today’d globalised society is. A feather dropping in Myanmar can effect soy bean prices in N. Dakato. I am that feather”

*Well… I don’t like men to touch me. This isn’t a homo[hobic thing, it’s got to do with freudian issues of resisting patriachal control during adolesencse. I’m working it out with the therapist in my head.

Hmm, this SARS thing is starting to scare me. One of my students just told me that the news said there was a report of the disease in Henan province where I live. Before I didn’t believe rumors of the diesease, but if the actaul news said there were case of it, it is much more likely to be true. I have started compusivly washing my hands, something I never did before. Everytime I touch my face, I jerk my hand back and try to think when the last time I washed my hands were. Guess it’s time to go buy a mask.

Plus the Chinese goverment just came out with a report that there is a large outbreak in Shanxi, which is to the east of Henan, where I live. Hu Jintao needs to wipe that fucking smirk of his face, commie piece of shit. He fucked up big time.

Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with my chinese books. Look at this wonderful gramatical explanation

“A sentence with a verbal predicate which describes the existence, appearance or disappearence of a person or thing is called the sentence expressing existence, appearance or disappearence.”

And that’s all it has except for a few examples. Another annoying thing is that they have pinyin in the practice conversation, but not in the grammatical examples, so I have to look up words by radical if I want to have any clue what they are talking about. The sad thing is this is by far the best books I’ve seen published in China.

I’ve been hearing a lot of stories about how the CHinese goverment is covering up massive amounts of SARS cases and that there’s probably a hospital just down the street that is full of SARS patients. I know that govermnet lying is wrong but these rumors don’t help as well. First of all the good news, from the WHO report from Guangdong, (via SARS watch),

“The team concluded that the health system in Guangdong responded well to the outbreak. The province has a health system in which every hospital at every level reports any new cases of SARS. The WHO report therefore concluded that virtually all probable cases of SARS presenting at a hospital in Guangdong Province will be detected and rapidly reported.”

This is great news, because it means that there probably isn’t some hidden pocket of SARS in GuangZhou that wil be impossible to stop. It also shows that China is capable of xontrolling the diesease. The bad news,

“However, the team found an urgent need to improve surveillance in the countryside to head off new outbreaks in rural areas. The team was further concerned by an increase in sporadic cases, which could not be linked to a particular transmission chain, as such cases raised questions about the adequacy of contact tracing.”

In addition, the report noted many remaining concerns about the ability of other provinces, where health systems are not as strong as the one in Guangdong, to respond promptly and effectively to the challenge of SARS.”

Hopefully, the goverment will see the urgency of the situation and take the proper measures. SARS is still at a small enough level that it can probably be contained (it is still only several thouseans peeple who have it). HongKong appears to be the only place with unexplained outbreaks. But Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, so it should not be surprising that the diesease has spread fastest there.

Since the SARS virus has been identified, they should be able to develop a test for it. This is very good news as it will make it much easier to contain, and people don’t have to be worried abou tput in quarantine if they just have a cough. Hopefully soon they will be able to determine how the diesease is spread. The more we learn abou the virus the easier it will be to contain. Hopefully it won’t spread to much before that. But I think doomsday warning are premature.

update:interview of head of WHO SARS team, good timeline of what happened with SARS.

This game is cool, It tests your belief in god. I got 3 hits, but they were only semantic errors, my logic is perfect.