Hangzhou Lovin’

Best Nytimes article I’ve seen on China in awhile. A migrant workers tragic journey to Hang zhou. Worth a read

Chinese Economy’s Underside: Abuse of Migrants
By JOSEPH KAHN

ANGZHOU, China � From his precarious perch 60 feet above morning rush hour, Wang Fulin watched the restless crowd below. Arms were drawing arches in air, he recalled. They wanted a swan dive. People were chanting, “Jump, jump!”

Enraged and afraid, Mr. Wang had scaled the metal frame of a billboard to call attention to his grievances. It was his first day in this bustling east coast city, his first trip outside his home province in southwest China. He had been neglected, robbed and abused. Now they wanted blood.

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In the end he does not remember how he slipped. He recalls only waking up in a hospital bed with three cracked ribs, a broken hip and a shattered ego. “I told those people that I’m a good man, not a bad man, that I just needed help,” he said. “But I could not believe in anybody, and nobody believed in me.”

The six-story plunge was the coda of a two-day cross-country odyssey, a personal tale of desperation emblematic of the gamble every Chinese migrant worker takes, leaving family behind to live on the fringes of urban society with limited access to housing, education, medical care and the courts.

Leaving China, you tend to forget the overwhelming power of chinese culture. You here about how all these western countries are moving into China and from abroad you tend to think of this as a westernization of China. But in reality the culture here takes over everything that comes here. Take Big Box department stores, walmart, office depo etc., among my dissaffected friends in the U.S. these are considered the essence of what is wrong with american culture. They take waway from local business, encourage blandness in the culture and are just depressing to go into anyway.

When you go into Big Box developments in China (they have a lot of them, the local one here is the Au Chan), the first thing you think about is how Chinese these places are. First of all they are teeming with people. Take a crowded day at an american theme park and that’s how it is all the time in these stores. Second most of the stuff the are selling besides the clothes are chinese. In the Au Chan there is a KFC (which I think the chinese like more than the americans) and then a noodle and jiao zi shop. If you want to buy anything, fifty old chinese women will come running up to you shoving things in your face and saying it is the best deal. If you try to pick something that you would like, they will tell you it is ugly, it will make you fat or insult your taste in some other way.

All the critiscims that apply to american big box developments may also apply in China, but I can’t tell. For all I know the Chinese could take over walmart and make it just what there country needs. On the other hand Walmart and China could band together to form an evil alliance to take over the world. Whatever happens, western businesses in china will always have to stay Chinese in order to survive.

Well here i am in China. it’s been a prteety good time despite the fact that i can’t move my arm and my luggage didn’t come till today and my cell phone got stolen, (which all of china lost face for. Stupid cell phone thief.) So if you see a new nokia with a silver case that has messages from the likes of john carl and russel around hang zhou please send it to me.

Going off to china tommorow, time to kick off the cobwebs i’ve aquired sitting around the u.S. doing nothing.

It was nice while it lasted, but it’s time to get moving on.

Hopefully China won’t kick my ass to hard when I come back.

Has anyone noticed that the nytimes has a lot of chinese coverage latley? Most of them are just human interest stories, like the one about split pants, yesterday there was a story about Chinese Americans shipping their ancestors remains to the US, and today there was this article about cancled chinese immersion programs at universities in the U.S.*

It’s nice to see the coverage, but all these articles are just kind of bland. I really don’t give a fuck that princeton student’s didn’t get to go to China. Is the lack of hard news from China because western news agencies lack the reproters on the ground there, because chinese censorship and secercy, or do they just think that the american public appreciates exotic human interest stories from China but wouldn’t be interested in knowing which cadre is moving up the party ladder?

*-Which had this assesment of our generations sense of history in regards to China “Today’s students were small children during the Tiananmen demonstrations,” Ms. Chapman said. “College students don’t remember what was happening three years ago, so there’s no real memory of that time. China is much more accessible now. It’s become a safe, viable study-abroad option for a variety of students, where it used to seem very distant and very exotic.” I’m pleased to be so naive and carefree and ready to take advantage of the business oppurtunities that China allows.

I feel like redisigning this site any recomendations for a novice web designer? Should I just use a prepackaged program? or write the html myself

I also got this notion in my head that I should get a tatoo. Since i obviously can’t get a chinese charecter, beause of all the americanano’s that have worn that idea to death, I’m trying to think of somthing else chinese to get. I was thinking of getting an “a fu” baby on my back. That’s the baby holding a fish that they often put up at new years. Here’s a picture of a particularly girly one. I’d like to get something in just black and more stylised.

Maybe it’s just a passing phase, I’ll see if I actually go through with it.

Western society really is destroying traditional Chinese culture.

A New Policy of Containment, for Baby Bottoms
By DAVID W. CHEN

Urban consumers are embracing the diaper and turning China into one of the world’s fastest growing markets. Annual sales for some brands are climbing by 50 percent or more. Upscale stores are no longer carrying split-pants outfits, but rather shelf after shelf of diapers. Just about all of the babies who grace China’s sleek parenting magazines are wearing diapers.

Man I love those split pants. Who cares if there is baby piss all over the street, at least they aren’t fillin gup the landfills with disposable diapers. Hell, my students always offered me a nice clean newspaper when I sat down.

Maybe I will start a counter offensive and try to bring the split pants to american babies. First I gotta get me some babies…