Within The Wall

Xinjiang Housing Philosophy

Ori — Sat, 17 May 2008 07:11:02 +0000

“We have good rooms, and the price is very cheap, Have three human lives and have four human lives, many human lives”.

(click image below to enlarge)

Dimsum

Ori — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:59:40 +0000

What is the first thing you notice about the Chinese word “dim sum”? If you speak even just a bit of Mandarin Chinese, it would probably be: the word is not in Mandarin. The word “dim sum” is in Cantonese, as is the food itself; specific to the Cantonese cuisine and usually found only in Guangdong (AKA “Canton”) province.

Contrary to common belief, dim sum is not a dish but rather a type of meal, comprised of many different dishes. In the west we sometimes mistakenly attribute the word dimsum to other Chinese foods such as “jiaozi” (饺子), “baozi“(包子), or any other sort of dumplings. In fact, dim sum can be steamed or fried, solid or liquid, sweet or sour or spicy, and so on:

As you can see from the pictures, a main feature of dim sum is the size - a dim sum meal is made up of many small dishes. There are no specific requirements as to the actual content of these dishes, although the Cantonese kitchen has many “famous” dishes which tend to appear in most restaurants. Some examples with mouth-watering pictures can be viewed here.

When entering a Cantonese restaurant which serves dim sum, often the first question you will be asked on entrance is: “do you want to eat food or drink tea?”. This question is confusing and misleading even for non-Cantonese Chinese. Eat or drink? Why can’t I have both? The answer is that “drink tea” in this context means have a dim sum meal, while “eat food” means have a regular meal. This gives an immediate clue as to the nature of a dim sum meal, as tea is the central component around which the rest of the meal revolves.

The first question asked by the waiter, after you are seated, would be: “what type of tea would you like to drink?”. Tea is not an option in this sort of meal, it is a must, although prices of different teas can vary greatly. After tea is brought to the table, you start ordering dishes. Dishes in a dim sum meal are priced in a peculiar way: instead every dish having a specific price, they are separated into categories: “small”, “medium”, “big”, “extra”, “special” and so on- usually 5-6 categories. Each category has a price, and each dish will belong to one category (and at the end of the meal will be priced accordingly). The customer will be assigned a tally page divided into these categories; whenever a dish is delivered, the waiter stamps the appropriate category for the dish:

There are three common ways to order dishes:

The “classic” way #1: the restaurant is divided into several sections: one for steamed dishes, one for fried dishes, one for porridges, one for sweet dishes, etc’. The customer walks around the sections, picking up any dish that catches his eye, while the waiters stamp his page appropriately:

The “classic” way #2: Trollies move about between patrons, who pick from them whichever dishes they want. Like before, the tally page is stamped for each dish taken:

The method which is usually used in the smaller restaurants - a special “ordering page” is provided, in which you mark which dishes you would like. This page is given to the waiters which later bring the dishes to the table:

Dim sum is usually not served all day; it is either served in the morning (called: “morning tea”), in the afternoon (”afternoon tea”) and sometimes at night (”night tea”). Morning tea and afternoon tea are more common. Night tea is served in fewer restaurants and usually starts relatively late - nine or ten at night. During the time in which dim sum is not served, most restaurants keep serving other “regular” dishes (usually cantonese dishes but not always).

Dim sum is a relaxed, slow meal. Because there are many small dishes, many flavors can be enjoyed even when only a few people are sharing the meal. Often morning clientèle will consist of retired people - they will order a couple of dishes with their tea, open a newspaper and idle away the morning. A common Cantonese aspiration is to open one’s own business,”become a boss” and have morning tea every day.

KTV

Ori — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:45:32 +0000

I was seated on a sofa, in a private booth. In front of me eight pretty girls were arrayed. The Big Boss, seated next to me, gestured toward the girls and said: “choose”.
I had just emerged from the toilet (private booth, private toilet) and a human meat market was not exactly what I had expected to find. The drinks were absurd
ly overpriced, and the minimum order for our considerably large booth was high. As there were only three of us (me, friend, Big Boss) I had been wondering why our KTV booth was so large; finally it made sense. Friend and I were not interested but Big Boss insisted (bringing in two additional sets of girls in an attempt to whet our appetite). Finally we gave up and let him pick for the three of us.
So what is KTV? When I had just arrived to China, I thought it was a TV station. As it turned out, I was quite off the mark. KTV is the common name in china for what we call “karaoke”, and it’s the number one pasttime in china. It is always done in private rooms, special for this purpose. Each room typically contains a television set, microphones and a computer system for picking songs and building playlists. Many places offer food and drink (most Chinese seem to believe singing is best done drunk) and some, as I discovered, also offer “companions”. These will chat with you, play drinking games with you, fawn over you and - if you cooperate - eventually go “all the way”. It’s hard to bring across just how big a part of the Chinese culture KTV is. A great amount of business deals are cemented in this manner, singing loudly over a bottle of whisky (and possibly a girl or two).
As KTV is so popular, it comes in all quality levels. The cheap ones will consist of spartan rooms and run-down equipment. The fancy ones will be expensively furnished and boast private bathrooms and personal attendants to care for you needs. Whatever you social class or income level is, there is a KTV for you: the phenomena crosses all social boundries in china.

Doggiewear

Ori — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:01:16 +0000

When I was preparing to come to China for the 2nd time, I chatted on the internet with a girl I had a met during my first trip here, and asked if she wanted me to bring her anything from Israel. Her response was: “please bring me a dog”.

Chinese are often quite surprised that in many countries out of China, dogs can be obtained for free (or for a token fee to cover vaccinations). As it appears, some also do not realize the troubles of getting one through customs, not to mention backpacking with it for several months. A dog in China will typically cost several thousand RMB. In the past a special license was needed as well, which might go towards explaining why almost all dogs found in the cities are very small.

Coming at such a price, dogs tend to get much more attention than their countepart western mongrels. One of the ways this attention is expressed by is providing them with clothes. The motive is to protect the poor doggies from the cold; it is interesting to note, however, that this habit is most popular in the major cities of Guangdong province, where temperatures rarely reach below 10 degrees Celsius:

While many Chinese do eat dogs (dog meat is considered very good for your health), eating these city-dwellers is usually scorned upon. The reason for this is that dogs eaten in China are specific breeds which are bred and raised for these purposes in special “dog farms”. Some may consider this hypocrisy, but to me it makes some sense: I guess it is similar to how an American might watch the movie “Babe” and then go have a ham sandwich…

Wine & Coffee

Ori — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:52:30 +0000

On Chinese New Year’s eve, I was invited to a Chinese colleague’s home for dinner. Not wanting to come empty-handed, I brought with me a bottle of good Cabernet Sauvignon. My hosts gladly accepted the wine, poured it and… added a good measure of Sprite to all the glasses.

This anecdote is not an isolated incident, but rather represents a country-wide phenomena in China. As part of the fast changes in China for the past few years, Chinese were quick to adopt western habits: among them culinary habits, such as wine and coffee. These habits, however, were adopted mostly because they were hip and stylish - indeed, most Chinese are completely unused to the flavors of these beverages, which are an acquired taste.

Coffee is a good example. Up to a few years back, all the “coffee shops” in China were more or less the same: often located in or near vacation resorts, these fancy restaurants had a list of around 10 types of coffee in their menu. These coffees were named “Blue Mountain” (always at the top of the list), “Columbian”, “Ethiopian”, “Brazilian” and so on. All of them tasted bad. The Chinese would fork up for a single cup of coffee the same amount of money that they had just paid for lunch. The shop owners could get away with serving bad coffee because the customers could not tell the difference anyway; I had even seen a waitress explaining to a patron that the white chunks floating in her coffee were perfectly normal and were the expected result of adding warm milk to coffee.

The coffee scene has recently started to improve slightly with the growing popularity of Starbucks. While in my opinion this chain (which is very successful in China) serves only medium-quality coffee, it had at least started acquainting Chinese with coffee-drinking culture. Nonetheless, it seems that most Chinese still go to drink in Starbucks because of fashion and not because of love of coffee; and so it would come as no surprise that one of the most popular drinks is their Caramel Macchiato, in which the sweet caramel almost completely overrides the taste of coffee. Recently, a few higher-quality coffee chains (a good example is the Italian chain Illy) have started establishing footholds in China, and I hope this means that Chinese are slowly beginning to develop an actual taste for coffee.

Which brings us back to wine, where there is still a long way to go. Adding Sprite to wine is extremely popular in China, up to the point that some bars offer “buy a bottle of wine, get a bottle of Sprite free” promotions. It is interesting to note that while “red wine” has the same meaning in Chinese as its English language counterpart, the word “white wine” actually refers to Baijiu, a traditional Chinese liquor made from sorghum. To refer to white wine as known in the west, you would have to say “white grape wine”. Although supermarkets will usually stock quite a few types of red wines, they will often not have even a single bottle of white wine.

To be perfectly honest, I can’t really blame the Chinese, as these sort of cultural gaps exist all over the world and work both ways. I can picture the dismay of a Chinese who brings high-grade Longjing tea to his western friend, only to see him sweetening it with sugar, or - heavens forbid - artificial sweetener…

Things Afoot

Ori — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:29:35 +0000

“No pain, no gain”, or so the saying goes. And one of the pains you will have to endure for your health, at least according to traditional Chinese medicine, will be in your feet.

The basic idea behind acupuncture and pressure points is that stimulating specific locations in your body will, in turn, cause positive effects in other areas. One of the best areas for such stimulation is the foot. It is believed that different areas of the feet correspond with different parts of the body, and that together they map out the entire human body (check out this chart for an example). This is probably one of the reasons why foot massage (briefly described in this old post) is so popular in China. The better foot masseurs have actual knowledge in traditional Chinese medicine and know how to do a “proper” foot massage by stimulating appropriate parts of the foot. The lesser masseurs probably make it up as they go along, and rely on “foot lore” which is loosely based on the same principles; for example if you yelp in pain when they apply pressure on a certain point on your foot, they will say “this means there is a problem in your kidney”. I doubt that actual traditional Chinese medicine is as clear-cut as that, but the basic idea is similar.

All was well for a while, until some Chinese woke up in the middle of the night with a flash of inspiration: why pay someone money to massage your feet, when you can have gravity do it for you for free? And thus the pebble walkways were born: outdoor walkways made out of jutting, round pebbles:

These can be found in most parks, and are almost exclusively used by old people. They are walked back and forth, barefoot or wearing only socks. I tried walking one of them once, and it really hurt - I guess those masseurs would say my entire body is one big health problem…

And finally, some Chinese wise guy took the thing one step further: why go all the way to the pebble walkways, when you can carry them with you? Which resulted in this contraption:

Guangzhou Train Station - Sea of Humanity

Ori — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:00:24 +0000

(keep reading for first-hand photos - press the “more” button)

Uncharacteristically cold weather has hit China at a fatal timing - just before Spring Festival and Chinese New Year. This time of year involves a mass migration, as countless Chinese head home to visit their families, and in normal conditions cause a very heavy load on the mass transit system. Recent weather in Southern China, reported as coldest in the last 50 years, resulted in a total systems collapse as railways were blocked by snow and trains were halted on the tracks.

The result - countless people stuck in railway stations, unable to board trains. The problem was most severe in Guangzhou, which serves as a transport hub for southern China: hundreds of thousands have been stranded there for the last week, waiting for trains. Massive amounts of police and army units are currently stationed there trying to maintain order, supplemented by conscripted civil-service workers and volunteers. Last Saturday I visited Guangzhou and decided to go and take a personal peek at this “sea of humanity”:

The subway line had stopped one station before the railway station, from where I had to continue by foot. There was not a very long distance to walk, though, because long before arriving at the train station I had already bumped into a seething mass of humanity waiting to get in. The police had had a few days to learn from their mistakes and get organized and had constructed several “rings” around the station in an attempt to contain it. Once in a while an outer ring was opened allowing people to flow into a more inner ring. Here is how it looked outside the outer ring:

As it turned out I was “lucky”, and a short time after I arrived an outer ring gate near me was opened, and I was swept along with the flow into the outer ring:

Inside people were mainly milling about waiting to get deeper inside, and there were a few volunteers walking around handing out food, raincoats and blankets. Finally I’ve seen enough and decided that it’s time to leave. I turned around to head out from where I came in (or was swept in, to be more accurate), and found myself facing this sight:

As it were, I was in a “can’t spit, can’t swallow” position - I couldn’t move deeper into an inner ring, nor could I go back out. Both ways were blocked and I was stuck inside the outer ring, along with a few hundred Chinese who, like me, wanted to get out, and untold thousands who wanted to go deeper in. Cajoling the policemen manning the barrier did not help - they would not open the barrier for us, nor would we have much of a chance getting out through the scores of bodies pressed to the barrier even if they did. Vague promises were made (most of them ending with: “go stand over there”), but nothing happened for a long time. I prepared myself for the time the police would open the barrier again to let another wave through, at which I will try to work my way against the flow and out to freedom - but as the hours ticked by, the barrier remained closed.

At some point a few of my fellow inmates have discovered a wall which, when climbed, leads to an on-ramp to a road (long closed to traffic). This on-ramp was used by the police and army to deliver supplies and seemed to eventually lead out of our prison. Some people tried scaling the wall, and the police stationed on top of it tried to discourage them - leading at times to near-violent confrontations. Darkness fell and the weather became colder and colder (about 4-5 degrees celsius with occasional light rain), desperation causing people to become bolder and bolder; until at a certain point they started ignoring the police altogether and rushing the wall:

[youtube 8w99psiAyLE]

The police, at this point, had completely given up on trying to contain the people who wanted to leave. I joined the crowd swarming the wall and, after being stuck inside for more than four hours, finally reached freedom - vowing to myself not to ride a long-distance train until the holiday rush is over…

Earwax

Ori — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:11:49 +0000

When visiting parks and outdoor teahouses of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, you may often encounter people walking among the patrons offering their services. Each carries a toolset: various small metallic instruments, some pointed, others soft-edged：

These people are ear-cleaners, an occupation which is perhaps unique to China. Their tools are designed to rid your ear canal from its surplus earwax. One interesting tool among these is a thin, flexible metallic rod with a miniature feather-duster at its edge. When the rod is tapped it starts vibrating very quickly and emitting a faint noise, just like a tuning fork. After being tapped, the vibrating rod is inserted into the ear canal, carefully as not to let it touch the sides. The delicate duster at the tip will gently bzzzzzzt against your inner ear, cleaning it. The feeling is supposed to be “weird at first, but you get used to it”.

I had considered trying it when I was in Chengdu, but refrained; one of the main reasons being that I hadn’t noticed the cleaners replacing or sanitizing their tools after cleaning other people’s ears…

Taxi Headrest Covers

Ori — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:33:55 +0000

A typical headrest of a taxi in Shenzhen:

Can you guess what it says? You might be surprised to find out that the text simply means “Monday”. This method guarantees that the headrest cover has been replaced the same day (or exactly a week before…). Of course, nothing prevents the driver from simply putting back on the same dirty cover that he took off last week (without washing it), but at least there are seven dirty covers instead of just one… lets them get a whiff of fresh air on their week off!

Translating Humor

Ori — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 03:44:38 +0000

One of the things which frustrate me in China is my inability to tell jokes. In the past I had believed that to be able to tell a joke properly, the most important thing is that both joke teller and listener are fluent in the language which is used to tell the joke. As such, I believed that once I reach a certain fluency of language I could start to tell jokes in China as well. I never expected to be able to tell them with the same flourish as when I am using my native language (Hebrew), but I figured I ought to at least be able to handle the simpler ones.

I was wrong. What I had underestimated is the extent to which jokes rely on cultural background. It’s not that the Chinese humor is vastly different from mine - in many ways I think it can be quite similar. The problem, as I came to realize it, was the way the vast majority of the jokes I know are rooted in myths/conceptions etc from our culture. A few examples off the top of my mind-

Black men being “well endowed”
Blonds being promiscuous and dull-witted
Some ethnic group being tight-fisted with money
Some ethnic group being stupid

I’ve even had one joke in which, only when I reached its end, I realized nobody in China will understand its punchline simply because policemen in China don’t wear blue uniforms… all this is of course in addition to all the jokes which are somehow based on puns or words games and are nearly impossible to translate. In some cases (in particular - ethnic groups) my guess is that in theory I should be able to find proper “replacements”, but at the moment I don’t know them - anyone care to enlighten me?