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Temple of Heaven: Grounds for Optimism, Part 2

 This is Part Two of “Grounds for Optimism”, in which our fearless scribe goes to Chinese gardens, walking and running and thinking about things and then writing about them to dazzling effect. Part the First, on the “Humble Administrator’s Garden” in Suzhou, did its dazzling right here.

The Temple. Little bits of heaven surround it.

The Temple. Little bits of heaven surround it.

A few days later, in Beijing, I loosened my purse-strings again. Though I’d stayed, on a couple of prior visits, in a hotel near the Tiantandongmen station of the capital’s a-maze-ing subway system, I’d balked at the high walls and what had seemed like the rapacious price for a wander around the Temple of Heaven. (Tian Tan. Dongmen means the “eastern door” of this Ming and Qing dynasties-era complex of imperial gardens and temples.) On my second-last day in Beijing, I decided it might be worth running inside those walls, instead of on the chaotic surrounding streets. I had my usual sinking feeling at the entryway crowds, but the lines weren’t actually that long, and I found out that an entrance ticket – no access to the temple interiors, fine by me – was only 15 yuan. (You’re not paying $2.50 to go jogging, goofball. You’re running through Chinese history and culture for the price of a McChicken! Give your head a shake.)

The Tian Tan grounds are enormous, and yes, I got lost. I’d thought to run the perimeter and then see what I’d like to explore further, but after 35 wide-eyed minutes I wasn’t any particular where, as far as I could see. Well, I thought, I must be back near the East Gate by now, but I wasn’t. It didn’t matter. Even without entering The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests – the “most famous temple in the world”, this under-educated Westerner was surprised to discover – or the Beamless Fasting Palace where Emperors purified themselves for weeks before their invocations of heaven, or viewing the Circular Mound Altar of sacrifice, I knew I’d be back for another tour the next day. Quite apart from the legends and the antiquity, there’s so much China in there, the parts just behind the walls of heavy traffic, the veils of pollution, and the look-how-modern-we-are! forests of shiny skyscrapers.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it’s a People Place. (People’s

Rocks to me. Even after I read, I didn't get the significance.

The Seven were just funky-shaped rocks to me. Even after reading, I didn’t get the significance.

Republic. Go figure.) There are tonnes of tourists, absolutely, but what this one liked was the locals who also paid no attention to The Divine Storehouse and the Seven-Star Stones. Folks pay, I found out from a spry old dude with careful and sufficient English, 100 yuan for a year’s pass. They come, singly and in groups, for exercise, community, art, serenity and the most amicable kinds of noise. I walked and ran and watched and listened, and for a time I just lay on a bench looking at the sky through the branches of old cypress trees. Here’s what I saw:

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Running, Pull-Ups and the Oneness of Humanity

I’ve never been able to endure even the idea of running on a treadmill, and only reluctantly do I join the walkers dutifully circling the track at local Chinese schools and universities. (My mind constantly runs in circles, so I don’t need cardiovascular reenactments.) Even plodding along familiar streets gets me restless, which partly explains why I love to run in new places. On a recent day in Suzhou, when my balky body had granted relatively enthusiastic permission for a run, I soured on what might have been a sweet outing, partly because my responsibilities as a friendly tourist nixed my locomotion. Walking (and stewing and brooding) burned a few calories, but I was glad to get out the next day.

We were, however, most favoured tourists. Our more-than-gracious hosts’ apartment  was across the street from Central Park, quiet and leafy in the modern section of Suzhou, so my live-in travel agent and I laced up and lumbered. Ponds and stone avenues, lawns and impromptu dancersize groups of Chinese women gave way to streetcore tourism as my bride signalled she’d had enough. I went straight down Broadway – actually, it was called Xinggang Lu, which means “Denim is my Destination”* — toward the Pants. More respectfully known as the Gate of the Orient, this huge dual tower looks like a pair of low-rise jeans on a hipless Chinese girl. Central Park punctuates, for a few blocks, Xinggang Lu as its traffic flows toward and away from the TrouserGate, and it was only partly for the sake of avoiding getting lost that I went Pants-ward. Impertinence aside, it’s enormous and visually quite compelling, and I didn’t resist its bowlegged charms.

* It most certainly does not mean that.

The boulevard made for pleasant city running.

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Suzhou 1: Tourist Trapped and Nearly Snapped

This post has been updated, mainly with photos. It is part one of two.

We went to see Suzhou, a small (only about six million humans) city in China’s Jiangsu province, a historic centre that bustles and builds ambitiously in the shadow of nearby Shanghai. I’m half a world away from my mother’s grave, so there was no visiting her on her birthday. At a certain point in the day, though, I took a moment to talk to her. It was much better than the dark muttering I’d been doing.

With a break in a busy schedule, we had come to the Venice of China — or, as one chamber of commerce-type banner had it, the “Fragrant Venus” — which has a reputation as, among other things, a city that helps ex-pats feel they’re getting away from China, just a little, you know what I’m saying, not that we always need this, but the place can wear on you, especially if, like me, a person’s prone to mentoring Chinese drivers from the side of the road, or thinking that over a decade of educational habit can be magically transformed by a semester of unconventional instruction from an idealistic white guy, so yes, “getaway” sounded good. (I get tired sometimes.) Travel Girl had made the plans, and Son the Fourth and I were relatively willing to be led to new pastures, or at least along different-coloured pavements. First impressions of Suzhou were pleasant, we arrived to the homely hospitality of a (young) old friend from Canada and his wife and even newer toddler, and what could go wrong?

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Sun, Pavement, Hoops: Outdoor Sociology Class in China

Dear readers: yes, it’s about basketball again, but it’s not really about basketball, and besides, there’s more to basketball than just basketball. And who doesn’t like basketball?

I remember the first time I heard the beating drums and high-decibel chants. I thought, What? There are sports at Chinese universities? I found out that, yes, the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics suddenly sprouts, when spring comes, crowds of shouting fans ringing the outdoor courts, sometimes five and six deep, for something that looked suspiciously like basketball. They’d had them at my previous school, too, but games never happened at my end of the campus and what do I know? I pick up the gist of some conversations now, but none then, and I remain nearly as clueless in reading hanzi as when I came to Dalian five years ago. Illiteracy hurts.

The traditional Chinese drum rolled out of its first-floor closet at the School of International Business at quarter to noon today. I strolled out of my fifth-floor hideaway at about the same time, my pretence of marking papers and reading my writing students’ journals gratefully abandoned. It was SIB’s third game of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it intramural basketball tournament at Dongbei U, and it was one of the brightest, warmest days we’ve had. I’d missed the first two games through linguistic obliviousness, but such is the appetite for hoops in an ex-pat coach-without-a-team that I detected extra bounce – I’m thinking, at least half a centimetre — in my stride as I hustled toward the “playground”, as the Chinese call the asphalt courts for basketball, volleyball and (soccer) football. Every university has ’em, in abundance — especially the basketball courts. It can be a worn-out hoopster’s paradise. Sometimes.

SIB, in white, on a blue-sky day.

SIB, in white, on a blue-sky day.

Listen: the quality of play isn’t very good, but the kids are nice and the sun was shining and I’ve played with a few of SIB’s best and besides, basketball is like pizza, or ice cream: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

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Hockey Night in Dalian. Sidney Scores! (Update)

This piece has been updated to include a footnote I forgot, some photos, and miscellaneous textual massaging. Don’t miss a single revision!

Hey, last night I saw my first hockey game in, what, four years? Five? It was another gold-medal match involving the Canadian men. (I used to be a Canadian man¹: player of hockey, dropper of final –g’s, flinger of ehs.² I didn’t ever see the 2010 final with the Americans in Vancouver, Chinese TV being what it is, though of course I’ve watched numerous replays of the famous Sidney Crosby overtime game-winner. (It’s hard to avoid that sanctified bit of video in Canada, even in our summers back home.)

¹ For the sake of perfect academic propriety and of respect for scratchy vinyl comedy, I tip my keys to the great Bill Cosby, and an early ‘70s routine questioning the motives of young men towards his daughters: I know what men are like! I used to be a man before I got married! Ba-da-boom.

² I noticed recently that in five years in China, though my grasp of Hanyu remains pretty shaky and small, my Canuck eh? has changed to a more Chinese ah in my questions and explanations. My North American right? has become a more international yeah, as in “We’ll each pay for our own meal, yeah?”

My gal is no Sports Gal, but it was her who knew the timing and suggested we try CCTV 5, the Chinese ESPN (or TSN in Canada), in case the final game with Sweden was on. I mocked her naivete – are you kidding? There’ll be nothing but short-track speedskating on repeat, or maybe a montage of great moments in Chinese curling – but that didn’t stop me from turning it on or from finding out she was right. (Again!)

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Temples of Ancient Stone. One of Pure Imagination.

Once or twice a year in my childhood, our tiny Baptist Church’s congregation would join the Presbyterians up the street. They had “Reverend Mac”, a wryly smiling minister who acted Noel Coward and Charles Dickens on the side, made jokes during sermons, and never complained about our footballs and baseballs bouncing on to his front lawn. We had a tightly-wound young fundamentalist who’d have been shocked to know of my Mum’s bridge club, cards being the devil’s playthings. Coming from our plain, cramped sanctuary, the

Awesome as a kid, and still a fine small-town centre.

Presbyterians looked rich and their church seemed a soaring, grand and holy place. It had the highest bell tower in our little town, and in early adolescence I took to sneaky climbs inside the steeple that led to a view of houses, river, ball diamonds, trees, and the farmland beyond them. I’ve found holiness in forests and fields, in looking out over water, in song and in word, even sometimes in the steady rhythm of running or flinging a ball toward its home. I’ve loved, too, architectural prayers: shrines, cathedrals, temples, any place built to honour and inspire loftiness of mind, an enlarging of spirit. (Sometimes, even a gymnasium will do.)

In China, such places have been hard to come by. Before we leave, I hope we’ll get to one of the sacred mountains, but even those sound discouraging, given the masses of people that visit with little that I recognize as reverence; small-town Canuck that I am, I still equate spirituality with solitude, quiet, elevated language and, where possible, green-ness and sky. However, our teaching of English in Dalian does qualify us for more than visas, salaries, and our small service to the torrential societal change in our temporary Chinese home. As we beef up our world citizenship credentials, we also have the luxury of south Asian travel that we couldn’t have managed from Canada.

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Sequel: The (Not Quite) Christmas (Late) Show* Must Go On

*With Chinese Characteristics

(This is Part Two of my attempt to communicate the wonder of a “Christmas Show” in a Chinese college. Part ONE is here. There were pictures.)

When we last electronically met, I recounted my first-row scribbled impressions of an event the likes of which few Ontario basketball coaches get to experience. We made it to Act the Sixth, but there was much more to come. This is a late report, but the show had few connections to any particular season, let alone Christmas. Speaking of which, Happy New Year. (Again.)

It wasn’t all sweetness and light (and singing), but a lot of it was.

ACT 7: Gold-lamé pants, white flowing blouses and pink ribbons. A rather gentle, oriental opening to the dance. BUT. Here come the heaving breasts, the hip thrusts and, my gosh, the friggin’ bass. Well, that was fairly sexual. Unfairly? [And hey: maybe the overwhelming percentage of female students in our college, in our entire university – it’s a Finance & Economics uni, which means female, while the technology school up the road skews massively male – makes this kind of dancing a biological imperative. It pays to advertise, and all that. Come to think of it, maybe it’s not just that it’s a rich-kid college that makes the hallways so often look like a dance-club anteroom. Minis and heels and spangles. I’m beginning to detect a theme. The young men in our school are a pampered lot, in more ways than two, and yet Chinese reserve is such that most guys barely talk to their female classmates. Missed opportunities.]

ACT 8: This looks Japanese to me, which all will instantly deny. White-draped, angelic young women demurely wave feathery fans. They’re wearing what I’d call harem pants if they weren’t so clearly, well, East Asian. Expensive costumes, kids! [And from the Should’ve Known Better File: these, too, are all rentals. There must be some junior staffer whose entire job was costumes. Amazing. Money has been spent.] That was quite lovely, a sweet tonic.

ACT 9: Here they come! the sort-of-English-speaking MC warns. The tonic didn’t last – it’s back to black leather hotpants!

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The (Not Quite) Christmas (Late) Show*

*With Chinese Characteristics

While this all happened, I was scribbling in the dark, periodically shielding my eyes when the gyrating stage lights tried to blind me in my privileged-foreigner (?) front-row seat. For reasons benevolent and charming, some still unclear, and others only a little nauseating, my college puts on its “Christmas Show” on the second weekend in December. When Western universities were completing exams, we had one last bash before the grim final few weeks of term. Exams started yesterday; I have papers to mark and journals to read, but remembering this is more fun. Besides, it’s (barely!) still 2013. I’d missed the show in 2012, on some pretext. Hmm, and also the year before that. This was Chance the Last, and if I hadn’t gone, you wouldn’t be able to read this breathless blurt of hyper-opinionated Western bemusement, befuddlement, wonder and dismay at the spectacle that is a Chinese celebration of we’re-not-sure-what-but-you-must-have-a-great-time…

This is Part One, and a second blast will soon follow. Happy New Year.

Oh, the sparkles, the spangles, the balloons! Oh, the frilly clothing and the 38-yuan red high heels that it was the honour of the young women honoured to be conscripted as the honoured hostesses to buy! Oh, that song, again and still – China takes all the weariness of the post-Hallowe’en deluge of Christmas songs and sharpens it all to a fine point, a stabbing red-hot poker called “Jingle Bells” that plays on repeat. Here is the same version that has impaled me for weeks at the mall where I tutor overpaying English learners on Thursday nights, at one of the many cash-cow private Business English academies. Worse, it’s a rendition that is a sonic cheese-grater to the soft parts of the ears, apparently called “Jingo Be-yo”:

Jingo be-yo, jingo be-yo, jingo ah de whee

Oh wha funny tease to righ / Inna one-hoss oben slee…

[Surely to punish me for my impertinence, the McD’s where I’m hiding away for freedom from distraction and high-grade Author Fuel is playing a diabetes-inducing version of “Here Comes Santa Claus”, which at least has the virtue of not being the George Michaels classic “All I Want for Christmas is You”.]

The glittering MCs come to the fore, to great applause.

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Inside College Basketball*. (Almost.)

* With Chinese Characteristics.

What follows is the bemused, inconclusive, but delightful tale of an “innocent abroad”, yours truly, trying hard to enjoy whatever taste of locally grown hoops he could find, and understand how it worked. Coach Howden was in the building. Several times! He was, though, a long way from his own hometown hardwood, and no one offered him a whistle or a clipboard.

I stole moments in my school’s gym over several November weekends, after I accidentally found out that there was an ongoing tournament for Dalian universities and colleges, 16 of ’em. College hoops! 15 minutes walk from Apartment 902! Who knew?

It’s pretty bad basketball, actually, which wasn’t news to me. I’ve known for years that Chinese universities, if they have teams, field poorly trained squads — never mind their Q scores, they are barely known (beyond their girlfriends) on their own campuses — that play a tournament or two and then disappear completely. Because, though, of a cinematic cheese-fest called Kung Fu Dunk (starring pop idol Zhou Jielun, “Jay Chou”) that I

Surely one of the silliest movies ever. The key fight-scenes were backed by Mr. Chou singing how his “kung fu” would turn hapless opponents into “tofu”. (It rhymes even better in Chinese.) Priceless.

watched during my first flight into Beijing, I knew there was something called the Chinese University Basketball Association. The university I taught at my first two years, Dalian Ligong Daxue, our nearby University of Technology, has had a women’s CUBA team for years; periodically, I’d see tall women trudging toward the outdoor stadium for wind sprints, or hang around after an indoor 4-on-4 game to watch them practice. No men’s team, though, at least not then, and why did Ligong have a women’s CUBA team, anyway? Apparently, some connections, and a willingness to admit under-achieving graduates of specialized sports schools and shepherd them through something approximating a degree,

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Better Read Than Never: “Rudy Kong” & Dragons, Donkeys, Dust

Faithful readers may have been expecting a different BRTN, the third part of the series of summaries I’m doing on John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization. Today’s review is of a decidedly less weighty book, a borrowed one that I finished a while back and have to return to my friend Ladon, who lived parts of it. JRS will return soon.

Dragons, Donkeys and Dust: Memoirs from a decade in China

by Rudy Kong (Bing Long Books, 2010)

Teacher Conradi had a story to tell, actually ten years worth of them, the tales of a foreigner spending an unexpected decade in China. Not only China, by the way, but my very own neighbourhood, the modest and reputedly lovely small city of six million where I’ve spent a half decade of my own: Dalian, the number-two burg in Liaoning province. Conradi is a Canuck, too, and spent his time teaching in the Canadian-based high school that I at one point thought would be my professional home and visa-provider. He left town not long after we came, but he left behind a book and a few mutual friends. I’m glad to know him.

The first story of Dragons, Donkeys and Dust is told in Conradi’s pen name, Rudy Kong. Much as Chinese young people usually choose, often with startling or laughable results, an English version of their name, “RK” is the anglicized version of the Chinese name that this Canadian ex-patriate was given by local friends. Conradi begat Kong Ruidi begat Rudy Kong. (This strikes me as a mild and fairly sane version of an Internet game that has replaced the old “Telephone” fun of seeing how much a message changes with repeated re-telling — put a phrase into Google Translate, and watch what happens to it after sloshes through a few languages. My son loves this.) I’m guessing at how his pseudonym came about,

And away he goes! He spent ten years in China, and all he got was three kids, a million memories, one book (so far) and this cool portrait.

but Mr. Kong has dozens of tales, and he is an engaging and appealing story-teller. He’s a foreigner who genuinely lived in China. He wasn’t here to score a quick million, or view a changing China from the safety of his chauffeured SUV, or to cure his chronic bachelorhood with a compliant (or financially or geographically ambitious) local woman.

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