That said, I’m going to be taking a break from blogging. I do not plan to stop, though for the near future I am far too busy with other projects to give the blog the time and thought it needs. If I am included in your blogroll you may want to take note.

So, until I’m back behind the blog wheel, peace and non-censorshiply yours,
–jg

I have a project which is ‘hanging’ on this site: I posted a Part One entry three weeks ago concerning water, though I  have not had the time to get back to it. I’ve continued on with my Hai River photo project, and will pick that up when I return. There is a link to the photos in the right sidebar. (And yes, Dom, there are even some in color!)

See you soon.

–jg

So, this is just to say that I will not be cluttering up my China blog with US-specific political rants. I have migrated several pieces from this blog over to the new one, so for those who read this blog, you’ve probably read almost everything that is currently up there, though not the latest which deals with writing epitaphs for Mr Cheney, just in case he ‘steps out.’ Better to be ready than to be caught with your pants down on such things.

I have a confession to make, though there are no “Bless me fathers” to go along with this one. Between 1968 and 1972 I was in the US Navy, and much of that time was spent at sea, and all of the sea time was either in and/or on the Pacific. On was preferable to in since I was not a submariner, though there are times when you don’t always get what you want, no matter how hard you try. But that’s another story for another time.

I assume that after all these years I have been downgraded, so my secrets are hardly secret any more. I was, mea culpa, a spy. Or rather, I was on a spy (intelligence?) ship for the last two years of my life at sea, chasing Soviets in between stints in the sunnier south. The US had a few things going on at the time, and I managed to inadvertently work my way into the middle of one or two of them. In what can only be remembered with odd snickers and shakes of my head, I spent those final two years steaming ‘in-formation’ with more Russian ships than US ones, and we were the ones closing to 25 yards. Shooting moons and wang-dangling on those dangerously close runs were all part of the chilly game. And everyone then was officially armed to the teeth.

So, when I read, “In what a Pentagon official described as a “bizarre” incident, Chinese crew members on board one vessel bared their bottoms after the USNS Impeccable had sprayed them with hoses,” I have to admit that our bare asses were hardly newsworthy. And if it was “bizarre,” then I guess we were a full-blown aberrant bunch. Some chapters of the new world order are not all that much different than the older ones. Same old asses, different players, all later the same day stuff.

Prior to his arrival on the scene, major China scholars researching the Chinese script, such as Bernard Karlgren, Arthur Waley and Herbert Giles, tended to communicate mainly with other experts, while the popular press, under the spell of figures such as Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, reinforced notions of the Chinese script as exotic, ineffable, mystical or even – pardon the term – inscrutable. After a century of confusing myths and sheer nonsense promulgated about the Chinese characters (some of it occasionally produced by even the above-mentioned scholars), DeFrancis appeared and changed everything by producing a steady stream of invaluable books and articles that presented the facts about the Chinese writing system in a clear and coherent fashion for specialists and lay readers alike.

Here’s hoping.

On the afternoon of December 3, 2008 I went to Beijing and (surprise! surprise!) shot more photos of the CCTV Headquarters Building, 366 days – it’s a leap year – after I shot my fist photo of the building. Obsessions being what they are, it seemed to be a thing I needed to do. For anyone who would like to know what “preoccupation” really means, click on the CCTV photo link on the right sidebar to see the fruits of a year: 665 photos. There will be more once I have the time to spend to look at the rest of the photos I shot on the afternoon of the 3rd, as well as the morning of the 4th. As I have mentioned in here before, I am not sure what has kept me coming back to this building, though I have a better idea now than I had a year ago, though I am still unsure of how to put it into words. Suffice it to say that it most likely has something to do with Homer (the Greek, not Simpson, though come to think about it …), Rilke, James Joyce; the love of busses and lampposts; sunlight, moonlight and light in general; and a crazy little thing called love. And probably a thing or two more.

click photo for larger copy

Of course the Page One first hit is Wikipedia, an entry on the Raffles Girls’ School in Singapore and something about logos on socks. The second, Nanyang Girls School and more logos and socks. The third is back to Raffles again and the fourth is a YouTube link to “two hot Japanese girls showing off their bodies! 04:23.”

The fifth hit, from boingboing.net, leads to Canadian Catholic girls, 2002: Ontario Catholic Schools doing away with knee socks in favor of tights to combat climbing hemlines and the implied rising occasions of sin. The girls, none too happy about giving up their knee-highs, were “enganging (sic) in civil disobedience” by refusing to sport the officially ordered tights.

I was number six, an entry from February, 2006 about a Tibetan student who’d come to Tianjin and Beijing for 10 days and hadn’t brought any socks, which wasn’t discovered and remedied until day eight. I returned to my ShortStats and looked at the Last Resource box, and the person who’d entered the search had also gone to my original blog post. I assume that whoever generated this uniquely misspelled search was not looking for that, but there it was, linked from the middle of Page One.

You never know where you’ll show up.

Sichuan, the ethnic mash-up: Han, Yi, Miao, Hui, Qiang, and Tibetan. Large and sprawling, from the subtropical to the deeply-wrinkled, winter-frozen Tibetan highlands. There are few places on earth so geographically varied. And I’m not even going to get into the food. (They call restaurants ‘renjia’ – the people, the family, the home. You can burn yourself in a ‘renjia’ and love every minute of the Fire.)

One of the issues I have not yet seen addressed is how the Sichuan migrants, a large, wandering bunch found throughout all of China, are coping with the grinds and groans of terrible unknowing. Or knowing. Many of the construction workers in Beijing and Tianjin are Sichuanren, known for their construction skills and industriousness, which, as best as I can tell, means that they are hard to overwork to death. When I have the opportunity I always ask construction workers where their hometown is, and invariably it is either Sichuan or Henan, the two most populous provinces in China. Before Chongqing was sliced off and tagged by the Centrals as its own special zone – a municipality like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin – the population of Sichuan was close to 100 million. Now, down a municipality, the population is still more than 87 million.

The people of Sichuan travel to work, and they don’t often get to go home. But when they get a chance they take it, and nothing in the world will stop them. Or almost nothing. But this past spring festival, their time to return home, was severely altered by the winter weather that destroyed or damaged over 1 million homes, cut electricity to large parts of central China, and one city, Fuzhou, was powerless for three weeks. It also cut off the travel zone, the large frozen center which they had to pass through in their attempts to get home. Train service was disrupted at this busiest travel period of the year. Imagine trying to control a tightly packed group of a half-million people desperate to get home, as they are being told they can’t get there anytime soon. Guangzhou train station in southern China in the Pearl River Delta must have been packed with Sichuanese, many of whom did, in fact, not make it home. And for how many of them are there no homes left? No families left? A child still buried in the rubble? In Sichuan. This thing is a countrywide affair.

I have been spending a good deal of my Beijing time around construction sites – not hard to do even when you’re not trying. But I’ve been trying, since I am still maniacally focused on the CCTV Headquarters tower and what it does, both literally and metaphorically, with Light. I wander the buzzing Central Business District with my camera. Mealtimes in the CBD puts thousands of men on the streets and it’s a tough bunch doing a tough business. Hard nuggets of men who work close, live close and travel closely together home once a year. These guys don’t drop their stare, don’t look away when your eyes meet passing. They always see the camera, and I’m careful about what and who I shoot. Two tried to sell me their services as subjects of one of my photos, the smaller of the pair letting me know that the last tourist gave them 200 RMB (nearly thirty bucks). I smiled and wished them luck, didn’t tell them I wasn’t a tourist, because they know that someone who’s not like them has got to be a tourist, at some level or other. Though most of them don’t talk, some of them do smile, but only after I smile first. Sichuan all over ‘em.

The most disturbing, though nightmarishly unsurprising horror of all of this has been the collapse of so many schools, an issue that the government will have to aggressively confront since so many people have lost their children. And in many cases, their only child. One-third of the reported deaths so far have been from the collapse of schools. The official state media is reporting the destruction of over 6,900 classrooms, an odd measure of quantifying devastation, which obviously means they know how many schools, though I can only guess they feel that that number must be too much of a twist. (“Why tell them and make us look bad? Let them do the math on their own.”) I imagine that at least several hundred schools were destroyed just as the afternoon classes were getting going. (The Age is reporting that the number of schools destroyed was 7,000. Perhaps the number of classrooms was a bad translation. -May 18.) In one school most of the kids got out of the building only to be consumed by a landslide that swept the schoolyard. “Mei banfa.” What are you going to do, as in, there’s abso-fuckin-lutely nothing to be done. An act of God. But whose god this? Though I don’t lean in the direction of the divine or its retribution, I can hope for a special hell for all those who skimped and skimmed in constructing the schools and sent so many children to their deaths. If they managed to live through the earthquake I would like to think that there are a lot of adults, and overwhelmingly male, who are already on the run.

But it’s a countrywide thing, and Sichuan is everywhere. That’s what Deng Xiaoping, a Sichuanren, did when he let them know that getting rich was glorious. And so they traveled and became a fine-meshed net, small enough to catch the ‘biggest’ fish fleeing the tiniest of ponds, those people who were entrusted to keep safe the children. There’s ‘Special Hell’ writ all over this one.