Chen Clan Academy

Me failing to look composed - but I have mastered the self-portrait timer. Next on the list, personal grooming. Nice courtyard though.

Every tai chi teacher I have had - several - likes to explain why the form of tai chi they are teaching is in some way superior to all the other forms you might possibly have studied in the past and are possibly considering (heresy) studying in the future. I guess it's a kind of marketing technique. All tai chi teachers have a direct and personal link with someone who has a direct, personal and familial link with some form of the "true" Tai Chi. This may be the great great great great great grandson of the man who defeated the incumbent court instructor at the Forbidden City sometime in the 19th century (maybe we should add a few more of those "greats") or it may be the 19th direct descendant of the man who invented tai chi, back whenever people in China didn't feel the need for early morning exercises.

For a while I learned Chen-style tai chi from a very nice and seriously devoted fan of the Chen clan. Indeed, I even met the said 19th direct descendant, whose jacket alleged he was : Chen Xiao Wang - Little King Chen. He seemed a bit grumpy for a tai chi master, but there was no doubt he knew his stuff. I'm not sure if it's fair to point out that another Chen-style (it IS a nice style) teacher I had later claimed that he had learned from a completely different direct family descendant in a completely different city in China. Chen is, unfortunately, a very common surname in a country that doesn't really have enough to go around.

Anyway, the chance to visit the Chen Clan Academy was too much to pass up. Actually, over the years I've seen a lot of the traditional Chinese rich family enclave, and probably I don't need to see many more unless I can work out a way to live in one. But the Chen clan, that's personal. I've met one of them.

I didn't see any mention of tai chi, unfortunately, so either it was a very minor sidelight or a different branch of the family. It's a pity, because this place would certainly have made a very impressive tai chi school. Massive courtyards for practice. Any devotee of the classic historic kongfu movie wouldn't fail to recognise, if not the place itself, the spirit of the place. Although in reality I think it was mainly rich people swanning around being elegant and doing culture, and a very nice place for doing that it would have been as well.

One thing that never fails to impress me about the old style Chinese buildings is how cool they are, despite the lack of air conditioning. Obviously 30 foot ceilings over massive halls help, but even in narrow corridors there's a distinct temperature differential with outside. In fact, even in walkways, where inside is a debatable concept, it is significantly cooler in/on/under the walkway than not in/on/under etc.

There were some features on this building I haven't seen before, either, making it a worwhwhile trip for more than one reason. The roof decorations - which look pretty original, unlike the obviously modern replacement brickwork in the walls - are actually extremely decorative and in my experience unique. Normally a couple of slinking dragons on the diagonal poles is about all you get, plus a bunch of curly stuff & a bit of gilt. But here - see photo - there is some serious committment to decoration going on. As it happens pretty much the entire decoration is a complex series of puns on animal names and various different ways of saying "success in the imperial examinations". Puns that make me think the South has always had a very strong accent or there have been some significant pronunciation shifts over the years. Or possibly that the Chinese like a vile pun as much as say, the English.

The other highlight, which I must immediately get for home, was the screenwork with blue/white glass circles inset. I'm not sure the photo really captures how good this looked, and how good it made the rest of the room look. For a feature wall, this beats the hell out of extremely strange coloured paint.

I resisted the temptation to buy the reproduction bamboo books; partly because they were expensive and mainly because they weigh a ton. I think I will start making my own out of old bamboo blinds when I get home.

The whole academy is set in a very nice park and has its own subway station. Today it had it's own collection of baby-buying Americans too. Interesting how the world finds innovative ways to shift the econmic load from poor to rich countries. The ticket doubles as a postcard - first one to ask gets it!

Earthquakes

I get a bit teary watching the earthquake news. There's a lot to think about. In Australia when there is a big natural disaster it gets a lot of coverage, sort of, but obviously not like here. Something like 45 channels are devoted to it. True a lot of them are showing the same footage, but you could watch it 24 hours a day. Some people probably are. And the really frothy entertainment channels, especially form the out of town satellite distributors, are closed down. And no karaoke - in Guangzhou, I don't know about elsewhere - for three days. That's like closing every pub in Melbourne in say, 1965, when there wasn't really an alternative social venue. The cinemas are closed too.

It's pretty grim. The Stuart Diver story isn't going to come, I don't think. The logistics of the exercise are incredible, the terrain is awesome. Moving the massive machinery through these mountains is an achievement by itself, and that's the least of repairing thousands of dams, embankments, power stations, whatever else. And imagine how horrendously frustrating it must be to have to work in slow motion for days and days in an emergency, because working quickly is even more dangerous. I'd much rather be on the rebuild/repair teams than the rescue teams.

Up to 40,000 people dead now. Tweed Heads has 45,000. Queanbeyan has 30-odd.

I wonder if it's possible to quantify the effect of this kind of even in a developing country. To be honest, compared to say Bangladesh, China is rich (I suppose. I never read any statistics). But while China might be rich, a lot of people in it aren't, which includes pretty much all of these. I bet rich people are under-represented in earthquake death statistics. Anyway, the point is that lots of people here live in massively complex networks of people. Are these resilient enough to deal with the losses, and remake themselves, or are they so fragile that the death of one person is going to overwhelm all the others in the same network? In general, families are smaller now. On the other hand, I guess more generations are alive, which might offset the smaller size of each individual generation. A lot of rural families here are relying on income from a labourer in a city. One of the workers dormitories that collapsed here probably destroyed the major income source of a few hundred families.

It's very interesting the way the cities have responded. It's part of an argument for the necessity of nationalism - historically an accident in one part of China would have very little interest for the rest of the country. Not so this time around. Half of Guangzhou appears to be handing money over to the other half who appear to be collecting it. People proudly tell you how much time they have spent on the collection tables. (They also ask you how much money you have donated, and you how much they have donated. I find that a bit intimidating really - it's obviously not at all Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, I appear to have donated enough not to get disapproving looks) During the first 3 minute silence, on Monday at 2:28, every horn, alarm, siren, klaxon, bell in the city was going off for 3 minutes (a human silence), I couldn't help thinking that this is probably happening all over the country. That's 1.3 billion people, a quarter of the world's population, mourning their dead, together. Maybe one day we can turn these natural disasters into world-stopping moments.

Quiet Sunday

I can’t remember what I did on Sunday, except for nearly killing myself playing table tennis for an hour. I found a very nice opponent who was much better than me, but too polite to stop playing. Which was fun, in an exhausting, is my arm going to fall off kind of way. I seriously thought I’d wake up stiff as a board on Monday, but surprisingly, I didn’t. What did happen though was that I disturbed some of the low level tar deposits in my lungs, so I’ve had two days since waking up with smoker’s mouth.

I need to get out and play more I think. Although it’s not such a good way of speaking Mandarin, it may turn out to be a shortcut to learning Cantonese. And it is fantastic exercise.

Seven days later...

In fact this week has been so busy with work that it's back to Sunday, which I am likewise planning to be quiet, already. I do have a plan for the day, or two plans, depending on how you look at it. I need a haircut. I need to buy some thongs - flipflop type thongs, additional information required by the headlong continuing rush towards American English. It's not really shoe weather. I may even take up wearing shorts.

There is a faint possibility that China Telecom will turn up today to give me a telephone line - I had a long and enthusiastic conversation with one of their people on the phone yesterday & I think that was the gist of it. I'm a little sceptical about any state-owned enterprise employee working on a Sunday, anywhere in the world, but I'm 99% sure that's what the conversation was about. The delays to date turned out to be due to the fact that they had a wrong phone number for me & in all fairness I have to admit that could easily be my fault.

It will be good to get out of Starbucks once I have my own ADSL (although they have cheaper A/C than me as well), and go back to my preferred coffee supplier for breakfast. Actually the best coffee to date has been in a franchise operation called Bluebird, but I can only find them in Shenzhen. I can't remember if I mentioned them before. They do blisteringly expensive espresso, even by Chinese standards, but they also do an Italian-style stovetop espresso machine thing which they bring to your table and it has enough coffee for two people, which makes it good value. And the real bonus is that they can do something with the machine that I never can, which is avoid the slightly burned/bitter edge that I always get with those machines. Instead they produce close to the perfect taste, almost sweet without sugar, flavour across the whole tongue, with a real caffeine punch. Fantastic. If I can only find one in Guangzhou (they have internet too).

While on the topic of good things, I also found, courtesy of a colleague in Shenzhen who is very observant, a great restaurant selling Cantonese style soup/casserole/hotpot stuff. Not only is the food excellent, but their interior designer has done a great job, with tonnes of lattice screens partitioning off semi private dining areas but lots of light so that there is a kind of glow coming from the screens while still retaining a sense of dimness. Maybe it's the lighting engineer who should get the plaudits - anyway, a fantastic piece of ambiance-producing work. It's kind of a modern take on the kind of restaurant that always gets smashed to pieces in a massive 100 person fight in your generic historical kongfu romance.

No pictures this week.

White Wedding

Andy's wedding

I admit it, not the world's greatest picture. The groom is next to the cake - the mobile phone camera is not at its best in dark rooms and over long distances when held by my shaking hands.

This was a very brisk and efficient reception really, I don't think it can really be called a wedding. In some ways the food was the star of the show although the bride did get to wear three different dresses, 2 white, one red. The red one was worn during the traditional chinese bit of the ceremony, where the bride pours tea for everyone and they all give her money. Actually there were multiple opportunites for giving money - when we arrived it was into a money giving melee in the foyer, combined with a photo-taking frenzy. Mind you, it would have take heavy handed donations from all the guests at the two opportunities to even come close to paying for the food. Unlike 99.9% of wedding receptions in Australia, here the food was the star. The roast
pork alone (there is a massive pork shortage in China at the moment, which is really impacting the small restaurants) was extraordinary. It was so extraordinary that all 20 pigs were paraded around the room 3 times before being placed on the tables. And the crackling was to die for. Later, just in case we were getting complacent, there was abalone.

And then, somewhat surprisingly, it was all ended. Just at the point where the drunken family abuse would be starting back home, everyone got up and left. It was pretty much over and done with in two hours.

torch relay & water vacuums

trying the mobile blogging technology again today. OK, and encouraged by an initial success, I will continue. I saw a man vacuuming a water feature today. I realise that doesn't sound as preposterous as it looked, but it did look absurdly like a domestic vacuum cleaner.

That's not the right picture, although it is the railway station I was heading for when I saw the water vacuuming.

Thursday was torch in Guangzhou day and I'm guessing most of the population got to within 100 meters of it. I got to within 5 meters of it, but there was a massive surge backwards in the crowd and I was busy trying not to fall over and not to step on anyone if they had fallen over so I was looking at the ground when it went past. But still it was a hugely excellent experience being in the middle of an enormous crowd. I was at the Asian Cup in Beijing in 2005 and there was something of the experience in that, but the crowd here was immensely larger. The crowd management people do/did an extraordinary job. It is really a miracle that so few get hurt - I was going to say no-one, but I feel sure that somewhere someone must have been - because no-one in the crowd really is interested in the crowd management view. So the police push, everybody moves back, the police relax, the crowd surges forward, police push, and you get the idea. All of this is conducted with remarkable good humour - the crowd expect the police to push them back, and the police don't particulalrly expect the crowd to stray where it has been pushed. No-one gets angry or frustrated, well, no-one in the few thousand people I was with. No doubt it all occasionally goes wrong.

Looks to me like the Olympics will be a big success, if anyone can get to it.

University City

Me in the garden of the Foreign Languages University


University City is a, if not purpose-built, at least purpose-reinforced island for the purposes of higher education. It's not such a bad idea, you have to feel there ought to be some synergies from having so many clever people in one place. Apart from world class backbiting and professional jealousy, that is.

At this stage though, no-one will be getting any inspiration from the environment, although maybe in 10 year when the trees have got to a decent size the foreshore will be rather fine. But at the moment - of course the river is nice, all rivers are nice, that's definitely a bonus - it's a bit Canberra-esque. Not everyone probably thinks that an overplanned soulless city without history or significant cultural endeavour is necessarily bad, so I won't rush to judgement. But if someone had co-opted half a dozen old city streets near the river in the old city and converted them into a university of seven, then I would have been drawing comparisons with dreaming spires and sandstone (not that downtown has either of them, but it does have a very human-friendly atmosphere).

Of course converting downtown would just have meant relocating several thousand people from a perfectly nice place to live to a swamp, hardly sensible or fair even by the standards of property developers, so turning a swamp into a university makes perfect sense. And give it time - I'm a big fan of Chinese urban design, I think they pretty generally know what they are doing. The streetscapes in Guangzhou feel less oppressive than either Sydney of Melbourne CBD's, and in general have a ton more trees, so when you consider the sheer volume of high rises, there is some magic ingredient in their planning standards, so far.



Building an island


Speaking of downtown, I had a tip that there was a fabric market complete with tailors in an area called Da Sha Tou (Great Sandy Point? - maybe the river has moved) so I headed off down there. I was completely unable to find the bus, so I caught a cab. I do not know how anybody is able to find there way around this city; it makes Sydney look like a grid. Chinese style there are highways 3 storeys tall joined by roundabouts, flyovers, on-ramps, and even occasional traffic lights. Following the journey on my compass (I'm in denial about GPS) I can state that at various times on the journey (basically south west) we were pointing at all 360 degrees, and not just because we were going round a roundabout either.

Anyway, I was unable to explain the concept of fabric market to the taxi driver, but he dropped me at the camera market, which turned out to be intermingled with the audio market. Here is where you go in China if you want to spend in excess of $10000 AUD on your stereo. Judging from the number of shops in this business, lots of people do. Lots. Also, PA equipment, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, the works. Unsurprisingly the occupants of half the shops looked like they were probably up too late the previous night testing the equipment. And the camera market, apart from cameras, had thousands of lenses, lots second hand so relatively affordable if you are a lens junkie. Lots of tourists here, but 95% of them African. I live in the European tourist precinct, there is a subcontinental tourist precinct on the other side of the East railway station, and now I've found the African tourist precinct.

Da Sha Tou is one of those nice downtown places mentioned above, lots of trees. I did find the fabric market & it was full of fabric. I was intimidated, but I ploughed on. I embarrassed myself by bargaining something UP in price - I know everyone learns the numbers in lesson two, but there is something difficult in thinking about numbers not in your native language - but very nicely no-one took advantage of me. Well, I wasn't planning to buy anything anyway, but still, they were very sweet, kept the laughter down to a restrained smirk. I spoke to a tailor, curiously he was determined to speak English and I was determined to speak Chinese, which worked surprisingly well. Anyway, I will head back at some stage, they had more stuff than I could take in in one day. it's difficult to bargain for things that already seem cheap though.



Looking back towards Guanzhou (NOT Guangzhou, an outer suburb with a property developers' name)



Went out for a farewell management dinner with Mike (the guy whose barbeque I went to on Thursday) who has been here long enough to track down an excellent northeast style restaurant. So that was a satisfactory day, all in all. A lot of walking. Surprisingly, I woke up this AM not feeling too stiff. Maybe it's the humidity, the 24 hour sauna that just keeps on steaming.

OK, better go to work. It's Sunday, but I have to pay back Friday. *sigh* The Australian work ethic hasn't caught on here. I guess, to be honest, it's losing its grip in its country of origin. I haven't run across a good old fashioned bludger for years.

Quiet Day

A day where not much happened at all, except after much cursing I have the mobile phone interweb thing happening again. I don't understand in any way how or why what I have done works, so I guess that makes me a fully qualified 21st century IT technician.

I still haven't managed to post a blog entry from the mobile phone yet, which is kind of the idea. I've never really managed the discipline of keeping a diary before, but I'm going to give it a go.

I would like to get the phone working for blogging though because I'm starting to use the phone camera & it would be easier to transfer them straight up than across to the PC and then upload them. Unfortunately for reasons of technological simplicity, IT has banned Bluetooth on the company mobile, so I'm reduced to sneakernet for data transfer. Still, it is possible, so the whole thing can keep ticking over.

Added a picure to my profile, don't know if that worked. It's the classic "me at my desk in my room" photo.

Tiedied up the living room. Put away the clothes. Threw out the rubbish. Read a couple of books - bits of them.

Saturday (which is actually today) I will go out in spite of the rain. Umbrellas have been acquired. The weather is actually quite strange, I've never experienced anything quite like it. For the humidity, it seems like the temperature should be substantially hotter, but it's not quite wet enough for a drizzle - it looks misty, but only very faintly. True, I haven't spent much time in the tropics.

Martyrs' Park

Not entirely sure if it is clear that this is a hand clenching a rifle. It is suggestive, though.



















From the base of the gun.
Looks very Greek to me, in a BCE 5th C kind of way.





I like a good memorial and the Chinese do them well. Martyrs' Park is a very very nice place to spend time. On the 28+ degree day (with 95% humidity, that should be a given) that I was there, I reckon it was 5 degrees cooler and 10% less humid under the trees, of which there were plenty. In 20 years I'll be able to get in free (over 70, not from Guangzhou, for locals it's 65). meantime it only costs 3 RMB anyway.

Communism has tended to affect my perception of modern Chinese history, and Communism seems centred on Shanghai and Beijing, but in fact Guangzhou has a serious, if faintly overlooked political history. For a start it's the hometown of the Chinese republic in 1912. Most of the north of China was controlled by warlords at the time; one of the reasons Mandarin (a northern dialect) became the national language was as part of a deal to get political support for unity from northern power brokers. 1927 saw the triumph of the state - OK, the nationalist state, but still the state - so that China could see itself as a single political non-imperial entity.

And being a city with a significant urban proletariat, Communism was a strong political current in Guangzhou as well as Shanghai.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) the museum was closed so I can't provide more details (yet!).

Some of the martyrs were in their early 20's. What was I doing in my early 20's? Weed, mainly. Certainly not trying to found a city-state in the teeth of 5000-odd years of imperial tradition. Still, most of them were weedy looking guys with glasses, so I guess we had something in common.






Trees, etc.

Rain

View of Guangzhou's tallest building - a May Day pilgrimage for many - from the GZ East railway station. I live 100 meters on the left.

The view from my living room window. Note the characteristic tufts of hair and the right ear sticking out. There are better views, but this is the way the camera was pointing.

Hmmph. I had plans today to go and explore a couple of the islands in the Pearl River. There is one, University City which houses about 7 universities. There is a lot of water around Guangzhou, but strangely to my mind it doesn't seem to play a very big part in anyone's consciousness. People don't plan to go boating. Housing developers advertise that they are near the river, but only so you can look at it. Obviously it's possible that the river is so toxic that people only feel safe looking at it from a distance, but I would be surprised really. Lots of the industry is downstream. Of course the part of the city I live and work in is north of the river, so in a way disconnected from it. Maybe it's different for the people south of the river because in a big way they are IN the river - if not quite the delta, the Pearl is making some significant detours by here - the south of the city is an island. Although, not in the minds of the occupants. Perhaps it's a little too big to be an island, relative to the width of the river.

Anyway, the plan for today was to go & look at islands. But not, I think, in the rain. So maybe a day indoors catching up on work & study.

After finally getting the mobile phone to work with China Mobile's internet service something bad happened yesterday and it is now seriously worse than it was before. I can't even connect to the wireless network in the coffee shop; well that's not good, that's the simplest of all the options. I keep toying with the idea of buying another one, but who's to say it would be better? Or more to the point, more comprehensible, becasue really what's at issue here is what the settings on the phone actually do. Or mean. And where they are. And how I can change them - obviously by accident, since I don't think it is a miracle that it suddenly stopped working, but equally obviously I can't find anything that seems likely to reverse the accident. I guess that's another good rainy day project.