More Chinglish

Starting once again with the extreme politeness of Chinese signs.  Not "Do not enter," but ...

This one warns you about everything.

These two signs were at the Museum to Mao's long march, and again, they get in everything.  I believe that "No Scribbling" means "don't write on the walls but I'm not sure why there is an emphasis on quietness.

How many ways can they politely tell you that the floor is wet?

One of my favorite signs was on the escalator at the Hong Kong airport.  It said "Don't look only at cell phone."  Very apt as everyone here has a cell phone and everyone is always looking at them.  Also, at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

Lijiang has canals running through it, so besides warning you about slippery floors, they very helpfully tell you not to fall into a canal.  The local tribe is the Naxi and they want the water kept clean.

A sign on the boat railing as I was cruising down the Li River looking at the karst scenery also warned about falling in the water.

Now, this is the reason for all of those warnings.  Of course.

This sign tells you where to return your audio guide, but the next two mystified me.  I never did figure out what they were talking about.

Another polite way to tell you not to walk on the fence.  Kind of like "No Spanning."

On the way down to Tiger Leaping Gorge and back up, there were very conveniently placed places to rest.

And I loved the name of this bus touring company in Lhasa.

On a slightly indelicate topic ...  Most Chinese prefer squat toilets;  western toilets are called potty toilets or handicapped toilets - appropriate since all westerners are handicapped in China.  Also, in most places, you put the toilet paper in the trash, not the toilet.  But I think this sign (in Tibetan as well as Chinese and English) has the order wrong.

And since Chinese people prefer squat toilets, you have to warn them not to squat on western toilets.

I saw one t-shirt that said "Pill out all the stops" and another inscrutably said "Be Current underway."  Huh?  But how many typos can you get into one sign?

And this was my favorite English language t-shirt of all.

And the one thing I can read in any language.

Hong Kong protests

I started my day with a ride on the famous Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor.  I am staying on the Kowloon side so I went to Hong Kong Island to ride the last double decker trolley in the world.  Central Hong Kong is primarily a business center, so I expected it to be quiet on a Sunday, but it was packed with people.  On every sidewalk and overhead walkway, groups of people, almost all women, were sitting.  They were eating, putting makeup on each other, playing cards.  I really could not figure out why there were there.

Finally I saw a lot of people in a plaza.  Someone was talking on a loudspeaker and there were signs hanging on the fence.

I'm still not sure, but I know that Hong Kong has a huge income disparity and affordable housing crisis.  The Filipino Migrant Workers Union sign leads me to believe that this is another Hong Kong protest that we don't read about - migrant workers wanting humane living conditions.

Another of the weekly big protests was planned for Sunday afternoon and one enterprising tour company ran a Protest Tour.  According to their website:

The Hong Kong extradition bill protest has undoubtedly attracted a lot of attention from around the world. However, retracting the bill is only a Red Herring and now the focus is more on the Five Demands.

Why is that and what are the five demands? And what’s the reason why we had this problem to begin with? Let’s answer all these questions by going near the protest! We will select the date/time where it will most likely be a peaceful protest so we can watch it from a safe distance. You will have the chance to interact with people in the scene and find out the answers yourselves!

In this tour, we will be OBSERVING the earlier part of the protest which is most likely to be rational and peaceful. Please note that you are responsible for your own safety when you join this tour.

The guide was fifteen minutes late and I thought I was going to have to follow the protest without the answer to all those questions, but he finally got there.  The Metro and Star Ferry had been packed.  While waiting for him, I saw hundreds of people arriving every minute, wearing black clothes and face masks.  I tried and I did wear black pants, but my darkest clean shirt was royal blue so I didn't quite blend in.

After the guide explained the reasons for the protest ... I am more confused than ever.  It is very different than what we read in the newspaper and does not fully make sense to me.  I thought the proposed law that started the protests was to allow extradition to China.  According to the guide, however, the incident that precipitated the proposed law was when a Hong Kong couple went to Taiwan.  The man killed the woman in Taiwan and returned to Hong Kong.  Taiwan (not People's Republic of China) wanted the man extradited back to Taiwan, but Hong Kong had no extradition treaty with Taiwan.  So the proposed law was to allow extradition to countries where there was no existing extradition agreement.  Kind of sounds reasonable to me that this man should be extradited to Taiwan.  But here is where it gets fuzzy.  First, Hong Kong could not make an agreement with Taiwan because China does not recognize Taiwan as a separate country.  And second, someone (who?) figured out that China could use the new law to extradite Hong Kong residents, and no one likes the Chinese judicial system.

It seems rather unbelievable to me that the extradition of a murderer to Taiwan could precipitate a crisis between Hong Kong and China.  I kept asking, and the guide explained it to me five times, but I still feel like I am missing something.  The key, however, is that the extradition law no longer matters.  Hong Kong has now withdrawn the proposed law, but it is too late.  Now the people are upset that the government of Hong Kong ignored the peaceful demonstrations of one million and then two million (out of seven million) Hong Kong natives.  Now the issue has morphed into a demand for universal voting.  As it turns out, the leader of Hong Kong is selected by 1,200 electors who are themselves elected by about 100,000.  And with the huge income disparity in Hong Kong, the few with the power to vote are either very rich or pro-China.  As explained to me by the guide and a few natives in my group, the vast majority of the protesters do not want or expect independence or democracy.  They just want the ability to vote and they want to feel that their government is listening to them.  Concept.

That was all the "touring" and "guiding" that we got.  Then we joined the protest which was a very peaceful walk from the southern tip of Kowloon up the main street for two or three miles.  The protest was "illegal" because the government had denied the request for permission to march.  Also, one of the leaders of the protest movement had been attacked a few days ago with a hammer by unknown assailants and was still in the hospital.  The guide told us to tuck in our shirts because police had been joining the marchers with their weapons under their untucked shirts.  Tucking in your shirt showed you were a protester.  When we got past the endpoint of the planned march, the guide told us the police could intervene and it was time to leave.  He would not take any money for the "tour."

I found a place to sit and read and watched as people kept marching on for at least another hour or two.  Periodically someone would start shouting or running, but most people were just strolling.  It became increasingly clear to me, however, that certain protesters were looking for a fight.  Dressed all in black with full masks, they started carrying sticks and were breaking up sidewalks to get pieces of rock.  They also were carrying gas masks.

After a while, one of them came over to me where I was sitting and said, Madam, you should leave; the police are coming.  I got up to see what was going on and the protesters were throwing the sticks and rocks and anything else they could find into the streets to create barricades.

Sure enough, the police showed up in tank like vehicles and drove right through the "barricades."  I saw smoke and thought it was tear gas, but it was protesters burning something in the streets.  The police used fire hoses with blue coloring on the protesters.  Apparently they use the blue color to identify them later.

As the police were marching up the street, they unfurled a sign that said:  Warning tear smoke.  Everyone who was not wearing a gas mask (including me) decided that this would be a good time to leave.

The Metro stations in the area were closed, so my food tour that night was cancelled.  Most of the shops and restaurants were shuttered anyway, including the ubiquitous 7-11s on every block.  In Hong Kong, the 7-11s are owned by one of the two biggest local corporations.  Fortunately, the Circle-Ks were still open and selling Coke Zero.

With the Metro closed, I had to walk back to my hotel.  At 8 at night, there were still protesters and police everywhere.  (The protest had started at 1:30.)  I have to say, however, that these were the nicest protesters.  Besides telling me politely to leave (and calling me Madam) they were cleaning sidewalks from the blue water and directing traffic around the barricades.

So I have very mixed feelings.  I read the New York Times article on the protest when I got back to my hotel and I'm not sure we were at the same protest.  Actually, I was at two different protests.  The first was a very peaceful march by hundreds of thousands (a million again?)  Hong Kong residents.  My guide and the two natives in my group were representative, as were the throngs of people, young and old, who strolled up the street.  The New York Times barely mentioned this protest.

Rather, the Times article emphasized the barricades and tear gas and the fatalism of the protesters who were not sure they would come back alive and unharmed.  The article also said that the protest has no leaders.  I would disagree.  This was too well organized.  The protesters knew where and when to move beyond a peaceful walk.  Helping clean streets and directing traffic?  That was spontaneous?  And to the extent that things did get somewhat violent at the end, I think that was the intent of the protesters, not the police.  It seemed to me that the police were trying hard not to get into a fight.

It is so easy to read the paper in the United States and say, I stand with Hong Kong.  I'm not sure what that means.

Hong Kong

I arrived in Hong Kong in the evening and it was lively.  All the stores were lit up and open, and the sidewalks were crowded.  There were two immediately obvious differences between Hong Kong and China.  First, they drive on the left here, and second, they stand in line for buses.  Chinese people do not stand in line; they swarm.  Oh, and they stop for pedestrians in crosswalks here.  In China, cars always have the right of way.  As my guide in Beijing said:  if the cars stopped for pedestrians, they would never get home.  In Xi'an they had recently passed a law that cars have to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks and the drivers are very upset about it.  So I was shocked when cars in Hong Kong stopped as soon as I stepped off a curb.

On my first morning I took a four hour historical tour of Hong Kong.  Very interesting.  I had no idea of the geography of Hong Kong and, as so often happens, geography determines history.  The "main" part of Hong Kong is Hong Kong Island.  Across the harbor is Kowloon Peninsula, and surrounding the island and Kowloon in a big circle are the so-called New Territories.  Both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon are narrow strips along the water with steep mountains behind them.  The New Territories are comprised of the mountainous area behind Kowloon on the peninsula and the hundred or more smaller islands around Hong Kong Island.

So this is the most interesting thing I learned on my tour:  why did the British give Hong Kong "back" to China?  I immediately said that the lease had expired.  That is mostly wrong.  According to my guide, the British "owned" Hong Kong and Kowloon; the lease was just on the New Territories.  In the 1980's, Britain offered to buy the New Territories when the lease expired but Deng Xioping said no.  He wanted all of Hong Kong back or he would go to war.  This was just after the Falklands war and the British might not have had an appetite to fight again.  England considered its options and determined that Hong Kong was indefensible, even if not a single Chinese soldier stepped in the territory.  It turns out that Hong Kong gets 80 percent of its fresh water from China.  All China had to do was turn off the water and Hong Kong was toast.  So England gave all of the land back to China.  In fairness, England had originally gotten Hong Kong after the First Opium War when they forced the Chinese to buy opium so England could have a positive trade balance.  No one has clean hands in Hong Kong.

In the afternoon, I rode the cable car up Victoria Peak, the highest point on Hong Kong Island.  Great view.

In the evening, I took a quick walking tour through the night markets and neighborhood food stalls.  There is still a lot of food that I just cannot recognize, but I'm getting better at it.  On the walk back to my hotel, I saw a really strange sight.  A lot of the protesters wear face masks so the ubiquitous cameras can not identify them using facial recognition software.  So the government banned face masks.  Oh, you're going to tell me I can't wear a face mask?  I'll definitely wear one.  Consequently, I see way more face masks in Hong Kong than I did in China.

So walking back to my hotel, I saw a line of people wearing Halloween style masks and singing Do You Hear the People Sing in Chinese.  It took me a minute to realize the melody they were singing since I obviously could not understand the words.  But I know them well in English.

If you are not familiar with the anthem from Les Miz ...

Do you hear the people sing?

Singing the song of angry men?

It is the music of the people

Who will not be slaves again!

When the beating of your heart

Echoes the beating of the drums

There is a life about to start

When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Beyond the barricade

Is there a world you long to see?

Then join in the fight

That will give you the right to be free!

It is a wonderful sentiment for any protesters for freedom.  Sadly, however, the protesters in Hong Kong are no more likely to be successful than Enjolrais and the students at the barricades in Paris in 1848 that Victor Hugo wrote about.

The next day I took the Turbojet ferry to Macau.  The British "owned" Hong Kong for 150 years, but the Portuguese were in Macau for over four centuries so it has an interesting mix of Portuguese and Chinese culture.  The iconic picture from Macau is of the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral.  The cathedral was destroyed in 1835 by a fire during a typhoon, but the facade still stands.



Next to the ruins was a very interesting museum of the history of Macau.  The theme was convergence, so the first section had parallel displays of Chinese and Western writing, philosophy, religion, and technology prior to the fifteenth century.  Thanks to Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors, the Portuguese were the first Westerners to explore the coast of Africa and go around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean.  The Portuguese reached mainland China in 1513, but were not encouraged (allowed) to stay in China.  About 1553, the Portuguese did land in Macau, perhaps on the pretext of a shipwreck.  Whether the shipwreck was real or not, the Portuguese stayed.

Outside the museum is a statue of Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest who was apparently the first Westerner to proselytize Christianity among the Chinese, arriving in Macau in 1582.  In 1601, he went to Beijing and was given permission to stay there.  When he died in 1610, he was the first Westerner to be buried in Beijing.  I had mixed feelings: did he deserve a statue or to be burned in effigy?

The museum showed the convergence of Portuguese and Chinese architecture, games, and lifestyle. Another sentence that I never expected to say in my life:  I watched a cricket fight.  Not a cricket match.  A fight between two crickets.  Well, it was the video of the fight but still ... Whatever I think about cock fighting or dog fights, the cricket fight mystified me?  How do you train crickets?  Why do they fight when you put the in the "ring"?  Why not just hold hands and go off in the sunset?  I think the cricket fighting came from the Chinese side of the convergence.

Although Portuguese is one of the two official languages of Macau, the population became increasingly ethnic Chinese.  Finally in 1999, the Portuguese gave Macau back to China where it is a SAR - a Special Autonomous region - just like Hong Kong and Tibet.  And none of them are happy about it.  Macau does have its own flag and currency, as does Hong Kong.  I missed the ferry I intended to take in the morning because I went to the terminal without my passport and had to go back to my hotel to get it.  I went through passport control both on entering Macau and on returning to Hong Kong.

I got back to Hong Kong in time to see the nightly light show.  They say it is the biggest light show in the world, but I thought the similar show in Shanghai was even more impressive.  You sit on the Kowloon side and watch as they light buildings and send off lasers into the sky on the Hong Kong Island side.  By day and during the show ...

Guilin and Hongshuo

I came to Guilin in Southern China to see the dramatic karst scenery.  A karst is a cross between a big boulder and a small mountain - a large rock formation that juts up from the ground.  I first saw karsts in Halong Bay in Vietnam and thought they were incredible.  When I mentioned that to my guide in Guilin, he said that they consider Halong Bay to be "Little Guilin."  Maybe a bit of chauvinism.

I could see the dramatic scenery as soon as I entered Guilin, but on our first day, we went to another local site: the Longji Rice terraces.  The mountains here are quite steep, but beginning nearly one thousand years ago, farmers built very narrow terraces - no more than six feet wide.  Unlike rice paddies that require a lot of water, they grow dry rice on these terraces.  The local village, called Ping'an has a population of 190 families of the Zhuang minority group.  Various families own incredibly small pieces of the rice fields: the largest is only .62 square meters and the smallest one can only hold three grain seedlings.

While walking up the hill through the village of Ping'an to see the rice terraces from the top, I saw people putting cylindrical things into wood fires.  It turns out that the cylinders are pieces of bamboo about a foot long.  They put the dry rice along with some chopped meat and vegetables in these piece of green bamboo and cook them until the bamboo is burn and black.  The rice picks up moisture and flavor from the green bamboo.  Then you split open the bamboo and eat the rice.  That was my lunch and it was really good.

The next day I took a cruise on the Li River through the karsts from Guilin to Hongshuo.  It is stunning scenery.  In the second picture I am holding a 20 yuan note.  The picture on it is the karst scene behind me.

As usual, the boat was full of Chinese tourists and I was the only westerner.  With my guide translating, some Chinese tourists asked where I was from.  When I said America, one man said, oh, very good in soccer World Cup.  I looked dubious since the men's team did not get into the World Cup, but he was talking about the women's team which defeated the Chinese.  So I told them I was a soccer coach and showed them a picture of me with my team.  They were so excited and impressed.  They kept giving me the thumbs up sign and they all took pictures with me.  I have gotten used to having a guide and driver and feel like Queen Elizabeth sitting in the back seat, but I am still not used to people wanting to take pictures with me.  Later, I was standing with my guide when another man came on deck.  I could see one of the original men pointing to me and telling the new man who I was.  The latter immediately walked over to me to take his picture with me as well.

After the cruise, I took a Chinese cooking class at a local restaurant.  One of the dishes we made was kung pao chicken which I make all the time.  I didn't tell the teacher that I think my recipe is better.  Here are my dumplings which was a new dish for me.

Finally, to top off a long day, I went to the Liu San Jie Light show.  It is an incredible spectacle performed by a cast of 600 on a water stage on the river and they even light up the karsts in the background.  The show was created by the director of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

It was such a long day that I did not get to my hotel until after dark so I did not see the beautiful view from my window until the morning.  The hotel is in a nature preserve with karsts, of course, and a river running through it.  People ride down the river on long boats with two chairs on them and a man poling the boat.  Sort of a Chinese gondola.

I got in a quick bicycle ride through the countryside to see the scenery one more time.

And then it was off to Hong Kong.