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MLB in China: You Can’t Be (World) Serious!

Posted by :James Howden On : October 25, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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Well, it’s been another day in the life of the ex-pat athletic supporter…

I’ve been to one Chinese Basketball Association game up in Shenyang, my province’s capital, and that was a frosty Friday nearly three years ago. The word is that Dalian was once a national power in Chinese professional (soccer) football, and I really ought to get out to the stadium once before I’m back in Canada for good. I’m sure it would turn my athletic crank and shuffle my observation deck if I actually got out there, but I’m not a great expedition-planner and this would require some linguistic Sherpas. A guy with mornings free, which I sometimes am, can often pick up an NBA game on CCTV 5, the ESPN of China, but he can forget about hockey and baseball.

Tools of nostalgia, weapons of youth. I miss baseball.

Except that, try as I might, I can’t forget baseball. As a sports fan in China, I’m mainly a reader, and a big proportion of that textual wading is devoted to basketball, both splashy coverage of the American college and pro games, and homely black and white reports from the Canadian university scene. (And don’t forget NiuBball.com, for all the Chinese hoops news that’s fit to print in English!) I don’t often read about baseball, though, and when I do it’s an in-depth feature on an athlete or on some trend in the sport. Game results? Heck, 162 games times 30 teams (and by the way, the Jays stunk again this year) equals no friggin’ way. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

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Leslie T. Chang (on migrant Chinese women)

Posted by :James Howden On : September 4, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. What year are you? you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars. How much a month?…How much for overtime? Then you might ask what province she was from. You never asked her name….

“When you did make a friend, you did everything for her. If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your [dormitory] bunk despite the risk of a ten-yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught. If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work – this time, the fine one hundred yuan – to spend the day with you….

“Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker’s pay….Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.

“The only way to find a better job was to quit the one you had [and lose two months’ salary and start over again]….The pressing need for a place to eat and sleep was incentive to find work fast. Girls often quit a factory in groups,…pledging to join a new factory together, although that usually turned out to be impossible. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone…” *

Leslie T. Chang was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Beijing when she began to interview and befriend young Chinese women in the factory cities of Guangdong province. Of Chinese descent herself, this American writer had her excellent Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China published in 2008. The passage quoted is from the opening pages of the book. She is married to Peter Hessler, who has written three superb books on life in modern China.  

* If my long overdue brilliant and insightful review of this terrific book is not posted within a week, you should email me indignantly.

reORIENTation

Posted by :James Howden On : August 26, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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(Or is that DISorientation?)

(Or maybe a simple case of disappointment? )

Downtown Dalian: Labour Park and Highrise Central. No view of the hills, or of the sea, that highlight this windswept little village of six million.

They’ve had a tropical summer in Dalian. My dry, windy Chinese city had wild thunderstorms last night and remains a humid mess of clingy air and greyness. Usually, the ocean winds blow away the smog, but not today. (Maybe it’s not all car exhaust this morning.) The gardens at the top of our hill are taller and more riotously green than I’ve seen them. The weeds make visions of compost dance in my fevered head. The last few weeks of our Canadian summer, plus a weekend near Los Angeles, were bright but surprisingly cool for August. Here, I go through several shirts a day, and I’m not even trying to move much.

Marching music plays on an endless loop from the college next door, where this year’s pseudo-scholarly inputs are being put through their paces, without a hint of a metaphor. Their introduction to higher education, these future hairdressers and kitchen hands of China as well as their more highly tested university counterparts, is to march and march. There are team-building, patriotic and letting-off-steam aspects to the drill, but as bystanders our experience is one of martial music on repeat, amplified exhortations and ceaseless counting: Yi! Er! San! Si! Yi, er, san! Si!

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07/01/2013: The Longest Canada Day

Posted by :James Howden On : July 6, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m almost back to normal, though my body remains confused about why I

Missed the big party in the capital, but that was alright with me.

insist on lying down in the dark between 1 and 5 am, which it regards as Afternoon Drive Time. It would be if I was still in China, but I’m sitting in a sunny, leafy backyard behind a loving occasional home that features books, the resumption of sweet old conversations, gustatory temptations that haven’t crooned to me from such close range for nearly a year, and beds in the basement for son and bride and me. We’re back in Canada, almost completely. We flew on Canada Day, which for a long while seemed it would never come; when it did, it went on and on.

It started the way most days have recently, at least for this displaced Canadian trying to figure out Where is HERE? Though worn to a frazzle by an exhausting wrap-up of my working year in Dalian, China, my bladder and the barking of sunrise called me from my bed at about 4:30 a.m. Happy Canada Day! I tried to get back to sleep, but my mind-emptying mechanism was on the fritz. (I couldn’t stop writing parts of this thing, for instance, but I was also mentally packing, packing.)

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Guest Post: A Chinese Student Speaks Up

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Through a P2C2E — a “process too complicated to explain,” as Salman Rushdie called it in his wonderful youth novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories — I got to meet Ms. Z. Like many Chinese university students, perhaps most, she studies in a major chosen by her family, not by her. Unlike many, she is a writer, even in her second language. In a spasm of bravery, she wrote an English essay about something honest and true-hearted and even a bit angry, and it found its way to me. It is a declaration of independence. It is her youthful emancipation proclamation.

I was moved by her courage and her plain-spoken message, and asked her permission to share it with my readers. (I did a quick edit of some rough second-language edges, but this is all Ms. Z.) She is not a “typical” Chinese student, if you assume such a thing exists, but neither is she alone. Perhaps you will enjoy a small taste of life in a Chinese university — but this time, from an eagle-eyed student perspective. She calls her piece “Marionette Generation”.

The ties that bind.

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T&F in China (Pt. 2): Running Hard, Who Knows Why?

Posted by :James Howden On : June 25, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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Part 1 of this piece, a rundown of a track and field meet in a Chinese university, can be read here. It ended with the writer noticing more people out for a run at his campus’s outdoor stadium:

…I liked the athletic company, though there were nearly always as many walkers as runners, and some of the runners looked pretty grim about the whole thing. On the day of the meet, I saw why their training looked so dour. They weren’t exactly staring death in the face, but perhaps they couldn’t help but notice his pimply younger brother.

My feelings careened all over the emotional map during the women’s 3000-metre race. It was glorious, pathetic, dramatic, and a complete mess. (So was I, by the end.) Contrary to all the rules of track competition, many of the schools had conscripted a young man to run alongside their female entrant, while others had a relay team taking one or two hundred-metre turns urging the runners on and charging pell-mell across the infield. Some of the go-go girls carried water bottles, and would fling handfuls at the faces of their favourite athlete on this warm day. Some competitors plodded drearily, hands on exhausted hips. There were two heats of this spectacular struggle session, so as the lead runner was heading for the home stretch, she lengthened her stride trying to achieve a winning time. A dozen young men ran with her, just inside the infield, occasionally barrelling over a race marshal or spectator. Her desperate effort across the last hundred metres had me choked with admiring emotion. The glory of sport! Even here! What a noble effort! But as I moved closer to the finish line, I saw a growing collection of young women, dazed and prone, or in a couple of photogenic cases (but sorry, no photo!) a limp body being carried in the arms of a young Galahad towards a patch of shade. Anxious teams of friends and first-aid volunteers (with no training) fanned and flung water in a flurry of urgent and useless ministrations to fallen warriors. That’s when I started to get angry.

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Sports Day 1: Track & Field With Chinese Characteristics

Posted by :James Howden On : June 23, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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JamesHowden.com is always concerned about the reading pleasure of its visitors. Because the report on my university’s June athletic competition is full of dudgeon and joy, it has been split into two parts. (Well, okay, my bride also said, “It’s too darned long!”) This is Part 1, while Part 2 is here.

I wrote earlier about the (nearly) annual Sports Day at my university (though that story only covered the day’s first 90 minutes). It is a mark of how deeply North America-centric I was (and likely still am) that I was mildly shocked, on arriving in China four years ago, to find that universities had no sports teams. The alliance between higher education and elevated levels of sporting competition is mainly an American thing, so I should’ve known; non-academic sports clubs and academies are the rule in Europe, Asia, and South America.1 There are glorified intramural basketball or volleyball games involving different faculties, which sometimes draw hundreds of drumming, shouting supporters. Yes, and there is (usually) a track and field meet, bumped off the schedule last year for the 60th anniversary commemorations of my university.2 In my earlier piece, I didn’t get past the pageantry, so here, by popular request3, is the sporting part of the story.

1 I may have been fooled by watching Kung Fu Dunk, starring Taiwanese singing sensation Jay Chou, known here as Zhou Jielun, on my first flight to China in 2009. A disgraced Shaolin monk (Chou, whom you might have seen as Kato in the movie version of The Green Hornet), is recruited by a semi-criminal sleazeball to transfer his other-worldly martial skills into stardom in the C.U.B.A. (Chinese University Basketball Association). It was spectacularly and delightfully bad. Anyway, only a few prestigious universities participate in the CUBA, which it turns out is mainly a place to enroll unqualified students – those who came up through State basketball academies, but have no future as pros – for the glory it will cast on school administrators. Hmm. Maybe it’s not completely different from American schools…

2 That day had pageantry and enforced student enthusiasm by the bucketful, so apparently there was no need for running and jumping that year. This reinforces my suspicions about what this “athletic meeting” is for, and for whom.

3 Well, my buddy JP has been bugging me about it. And my wife. That’s popularity!

A view of the finish line area from across the infield: officials, marshals, timers, medical volunteers, team spirit leaders, and a bunch of random people milling about. Photo: J.P. Mayer

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The Party, the Bread, the Track, and the Circus

Posted by :James Howden On : June 10, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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God knows that I love bread. (Bread and I, however, are in the midst of a relatively amicable separation, and my waistline has noticed.) The student body at my university, and especially at the rich-kid college within it where I teach, is of a particularly well-fed demographic, and they see their grindstone bachelor’s degree exclusively as job training, nothing more. (The majority work in majors chosen for them, often with no real interest or aptitude in the subject but only faith in the promise of the “comfortable life” that most Chinese — understandably — seek.) Though privileged within Chinese society, they do endure acres of boredom and megatons of rote learning, so the circus does come to town. And though I am not above the occasional superior sneer at the circus entertainments chosen by others, I’m still a sucker for the Olympic march of the athletes, small-town parades, the communal experience of fireworks. Even loners like me love a good show, some high-wire performance, but I was recently put in mind of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s scorn of the use of “bread and circuses” to pacify a population.

It was Sports Day at my university in northeastern China, a day common to most schools here. It is a more of a show than a track and field meet, and actually two days of class are

The March of the One-Time Athletes. A beautiful day for a show. (Photo: JP Mayer)

sacrificed for it. Many students are required to miss class sessions in the days before in order to prepare, but not for their events. In a country where precious little importance is given to physical education – except, that is, for the tiny minority selected in their youth or childhood to attend State sports schools and bring sporting honour to their province or their Olympically-ambitious country – this once-yearly festival of geng kuai, geng gao, geng qiang (“faster, higher, stronger”) sees astonishingly little athletic preparation, or even the possibility of it. It drives my Canadian friend JP, a masters decathlete and long-time high-school coach, just slightly bonkers.

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The Rich, the Poor, and the Playground

Posted by :James Howden On : April 30, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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I have known for most of my life, at least in a shallow way, that extremes of wealth and poverty are toxic to world unity and peace. The Baha’i teachings have insisted on their elimination for something close to 150 years. I accepted the tenet as fact – alongside the necessities of defusing all prejudices, widening all loyalties, and rethinking all assumptions – as an idealistic young man, no more than a boy, really.

During my privileged, Canadian-born lifetime, the gap between rich and poor has only widened, and now I live in a country hell-bent on leading the world in this dubious marker of development. (My understanding is that the Excited States of America is still in front by a nose, but China and Brazil are

Sorry, this is a bit graphic. Yes, that is Chairman Mao on the 100-yuan note, China’s largest denomination (about seventeen bucks Canadian). Families live on that for a month.

closing fast. To the winner goes the spoiling, the rot, the instability, but the runners-up will know it, too.) Lately, I’ve been  brooding on the reasons for my steadily – sometimes violently – growing disillusion with sports, at least at the pro level.

Stratospheric salaries for the best horse-hide whackers and roundball  bouncers (and all their sweaty peers) are, of course, a cliché these days. Spaniard Pau Gasol of the Los Angeles Lakers will make $19 million next season, and he’s far from the highest-paid jock. I made a good and steady North American income for nearly 30 years, and my take was somewhere between a mil and $1.5 million, I figure. Such comparisons are so banal that nobody really talks about it anymore, which is why I just did.

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Eric Hoffer (on fearsome & fearful enemies)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 11, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

I don’t know an awful lot about Eric Hoffer, or about where and when I came across this quote. Perhaps it was the one memorable line in another’s book, one that I’ve forgotten, but this citation has stayed in my mind. And now that, shamed by the ignorance I’ve confessed here, I know a little more about this mainly self-taught American intellectual (and migrant worker) and philosopher (who worked for decades as a longshoreman), I’m hungry to know more. His most famous book, published in 1951, was called The True Believer.

In my immediate surroundings, I can’t help but think of another quote, from my buddy Joe Pearce, that “China is a fear-based society”. Observing the alternating fear and boredom that oppress my Chinese students and friends, I try to determine what is their “enemy” — “fear itself”, the Roosevelts might have argued — and what that enemy, be it philosophical, historical, or institutional, most fears.

I fear that this is about to turn into an excuse not to write what I was going to write, so here I end.