Snow

I got back from Pingyao, and pictures are up! A lot of similar ones have been tagged on Facebook already from my friends, but most of the pictures I host should have a story in the caption, so check 'em out.

Being in Pingyao was a really good experience. I was a little nervous that it would turn out to be kind of kitschy, given that I'd heard that it had become something of a tourist town, but it actually had a lot of merit.

First, it has one of the best old city walls anywhere in north China, partly because they were so poor during the Cultural Revolution that they didn't have enough money to tear them down like everyone else was doing. Second, Pingyao hosts the oldest draft bank in China. Sounds a little lame on paper, I suppose, but it's actually pretty sweet. One of the ways they would prevent fraud when printing bank slips was to embroider silk into the bank slip, making it really, really hard to counterfeit. I'm sure partly because of the financial success that the bank brought to town, Pingyao also hosts China's first armed escort agency, which we got to visit. There's a few pictures of us toying around with weapons the escorts were trained with, starting here. Lastly, Pingyao still has a lot of old temples, including Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian, several of which we visited during our ample free time.

Since I've gotten back, life's been relatively quiet. I'm getting a better and better rapport with my host dad. I'm deliberately making time for myself every week to cook with him at least once, if not a couple of times. We have some really good chats, and it boosts my Chinese really fast. I actually just talked with him last night about staying in this same home-stay next semester, and he was game for it, so that's got me settled with a good home next semester as well.

Yesterday, we got the season's first snow storm. My dad mentioned that it was record-setting early, so I figured it must be just one of China's weather phenomena this year. Oh the naïveté. It was seeded by the Chinese government to try and alleviate the drought that's been hitting this part of the country for the last decade. I guess I see the logic in it, but seeing as the Beijing authority doesn't turn on the heat in most homes until November 15th, I have to imagine that a lot of people are kinda chilly. I lucked out; Shushu mentioned that BeiWai has separate heating rules because so many foreigners live on campus. Don't want to give the 老外 a bad impression, I suppose.

I've also been having a music revival, lately. Why? Because all of it's free. And legal. Turns out that Google has a sweet deal with a bunch of record companies. Since piracy had become so rampant in China that no record companies were making money at all, Google approached them with a solution: provide all of their music available for download, free on a Google-hosted site, and at least come away with the advertising profit. Only caveat is that you have to be in China to be able to download. One of the very few times that China's internet users have an advantage over the rest of the world... For those who are interested, I've been on a Simon and Garfunkel kick, lately. Those guys were good.

Pingyao

Hey, all. Sorry for not getting back to the blog sooner. I've been pretty busy this week, and it doesn't look like it's going to let up any time soon.

"The Founding of a Republic" was no let-down. I'll admit that most of the cameos went straight over my head (I know, I really should be spending more time catching up on the Chinese soap opera scene...), but the performance wasn't bad (in a cheesy, overdone propaganda film kind of way). Here are the highlights:

1) When (I think) Chiang Kai-shek's wife, Soong May-Ling, visits the United States to plead with President Truman for financial aid, there is a fantastic scene in which she steps out of the limousine and climbs the steps to the white house. An African-American White House guard follows her with his eyes as she enters the building. When she leaves, he enthusiastically exclaims, in English, "Man! She's so hot!" ... You can tell that the director had political correctness in mind when shooting that one.

Oh, and in this same scene I learned that George Marshall, Truman's Secretary of State, had a British accent. Who knew?

2) Yep, sure enough, they mixed in Deng Xiaoping's reforms into Mao's monologues. Upon learning that all of the lowly petty bourgeoisie have fled a city recently taken by the Red Army, and worse, they've taken all of the cigarettes with them, Mao claims, verbitim, "We need the capitalists back."

All right, fair enough, while it's unlikely that Mao would have ever said such a thing, the petty bourgeoisie weren't the biggest of his problems, so I'll let it slide. And then he said something to this effect: "We don't know how to run the economy ourselves. That's where the capitalists come in."

OK. Come on. This is the guy that came up with the Great Leap Forward for Christ's sake. I don't think he'd be spouting free market theory at the dawning of the age of the Maoist planned economy. If I had to guess, I'm thinking that this scene's script was the one that the CCP had a hand in 'editing'.

3) This one's for you, Dad. The movie ends with Mao's famous phrase, "The Chinese people have stood up!", triumphant music, and with a greyscale Chinese flag fluttering in the wind. The hues gradually change until the flying flag is shown in full color and vibrancy.

Now, I'm as staunch an American as the next guy, but this scene ran shivers down my spine. It was pretty well shot, if a little (well, okay, very) overdone. It is, though, a real testament to the power of film as a political tool.

So this weekend, I'm off on another school-sponsored trip. This time we're off to Pingyao, a famous, well-preserved old town from the Qing era, located in Shanxi Province. I was just talking with a Chinese friend of mine who said that it used to be a really prosperous trade center back before the revolution, so I think it's going to have a lot to offer. Moreover, we'll be staying in an old, true-to-history refurbished Qing mansion and learning about their legal system. So that should be fun.

And unlike my trip to the Great Wall last weekend, I'm going to have fresh batteries in my camera, so I'll actually be able to take pictures. Grr... It's not a total disaster on the photo front, though. I got some of my friends to take some shots of me on the wall, so when I have time, I'll take them and link them here.

Wishing you all well!