Thoughts of Failure

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We were in the tiny town of Huangyuan, a little more than an hour outside of Xining. I had been standing on the road for an hour and a half. We had had about ten cars stop and offer us a ride, but all for money. On this trip, we have sometimes had to pay for rides. However, this time, we decided, no matter what happened, we would only take a free ride. We wanted to get to know the real China.

About an hour into this hitching attempt, two college-aged girls strolled up to us smiling. At first, I hoped they were going to offer us a ride. “Hi!” one of them said brightly. In fact, they were also hitching. They said they had been hitching all day and had come from a place seven hours away.

“Did you have to pay for your rides or were they free?”

“Mostly, they were free. We did have a guy say he wanted us to pay 100 RMB towards the end of a 200 kilometer ride. There was nothing we could do about that. But mostly, they have been free.”

They were going the same direction we were, so they moved several hundred feet down the road and began the hitching ritual. I was heartened to hear they had hitchhiked from several hundred miles away. We could do this. Our luck would soon change, I thought.

Five minutes later, a car stopped. “Where are you heading?” the middle-aged man asked. I told him.

“That works for me,” he told us.

“Is it a free ride or is this going to cost us money?”

He smiled. “Who’s ever heard of a free ride? Not in China.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said, waving him away. “We’re looking for free rides. Thanks.”

He pulled down the road to where the girls were, stopping. One of the girls bent over and began talking to the driver. “They got in.” Galen told me as I tried to flag down another car.

“Huh?” I was deflated. Had they just taken the price he was offering? Or had he given them a ride for free, but only been willing to take us for money? Or had they been fibbing when they said they were mostly looking for free rides? Or had the girls just gotten into the car without discussing money.

These were the thoughts as we watched more cars cruise past us. I turned to Galen to say something philosophical about failure and how this experience was making us stronger. “Maybe they just don’t have free rides in China. Maybe this country has taken that phrase, ‘To get rich is glorious,’ way too far. Maybe we are getting to know the real China.”

Before I could finish, an expensive, milky white SUV pulled up to us. “Where are you going?” the two guys in the front asked us, one of them slightly less pudgy than the other, their Tibetan accent barely perceptible through their decent Mandarin.

I told him where we wanted to go.

“We’re only going to Hainan. Hop in and we’ll at least get most of the way there. You can get a ride from Hainan.”

“Is it free or are you charging us?” I asked.

“Free,” they said.

We went from hopeless to hopeful in thirty seconds.

Chinese Television Journalism

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In America, all of our television journalists, in one way or another, are fairly attractive. At least, they are not difficult to look at. And, as far as I know, most American journalists appearing on television have great teeth.

This is because dental health and appearance are very important to Americans, and no one is willing to look at a screen for two minutes if the person is unattractive and has bad teeth.

The same is apparently not true for China.

While watching some of the World Cup coverage on CCTV 5, the ESPN of China, I watched some half-hearted commentary from this guy.

Show me that big smile.

Show me that big smile.

Commentary

Commentary

This may seem like a minor, niggling point, but I think it says something about China and America and the different values that they have.

Tiantang Video

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Tiantang_Temple_in_China

You may have already read the post on Tiantang Temple here, but Galen put together a cool video of the temple as well.

Apologizes for being a little late with this. The Chinese are slowing their internet down for political reasons. We may experience more troubles down the road. We will do our best to keep you posted.

Advertisement – The Answer

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Thanks to those of yall who participated in the little contest we had on this photo:

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We got a lot of great guesses. The closest one was Anna from Germany.

In fact, it is an advertisement for an abortion clinic.

Here is a mostly complete translation of the ad that I put together:

Xining Family Planning Guidance Center

When you are having a surgical abortion, you do not want to take it lightly by doing something like taking medicine on your own to induce an abortion or going to have an abortion at a little clinic lacking the proper qualifications.

It is very easy to have an unsafe abortion, to lose large amounts of blood or to catch a pathogen after the surgery. It may lead to a penetration of the ovaries, where you are not able to get pregnant.

Put your heart at ease.

Harmonious Family Planning,
Serve the People.

I think this ad says a lot about China and how the Chinese view abortion. How do you talk about something that no one wants to talk about? Just as feminine hygiene commercials use pictures of feathers or images of women mowing the lawn, this ad seeks to talk about abortion by showing an attractive woman lying comfortably, hence all the comments from people thinking this was an ad for bedding or wedding dresses. This ad is redefining the process of abortion, moving it from something that is frightening, dangerous and possibly forced (occasionally, Chinese bureaucrats still force women to have abortions in order to meet family planning quotas set by the central government), to a leisurely procedure that, if done by this hospital, is not at all problematic.

When I saw this ad, I thought it said a lot about modern China, and not in a particularly good way.

Advertisement?

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Can anyone guess what this ad is about? It’s not at all what you are thinking.

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Leave your answers in the comment section. If you can read Chinese, please don’t spoil it. Check back in tomorrow’s post for the answer.

We’ll send a postcard from our next stop to anyone who gets it right (and doesn’t speak Chinese).

The Muslims of Xining

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Xining_in_China

Xining has a very Silk Road feel to the city. Qinghai, the province of which Xining is the capital of, is largely a Tibetan land, underpopulated, with vast stretches of wild, high deserts pockmarked with many mountains and almost no cities. However, Xining is dominated not by Tibetans but by Hui Muslims, the Chinese speakers who have a mix of Chinese and Central Asian ancestry. For several periods of time, when the Silk Road’s main route running through the Gansu Corridor was blocked by fighting or controlled by hostile powers, travelers would often swing around Xining, on the Tibetan Plateau, to avoid those dangerous stretches of the Gansu Corridor.

Muslim Women

Muslim Women

That Silk Road heritage is evident in the people’s faces. Features we saw in the people in the Muslim Quarter of Xian are more pronounced: the paleness of the skin, the prevalence of mustaches and facial hair, the roundness of the eyes. I stopped by the province’s largest mosque to watch the men gathering for Friday prayers. Children, their eyes wide and their skin light, scurried past me on their way home from school. Men in round white hats poured into the gated mosque as the call to prayer rang through the green minaret’s loudspeaker. A group of men stood around a three-wheeled cart where a man was selling prayer rugs in an alley by the mosque’s main gate. With each turn of the pedestrian light, more men flooded across the street and poured into the mosque. Women in head scarves and high heels strolled past me.

Dongguan Mosque

Dongguan Mosque

Even today, the Silk Road has left its mark on this place.

Soap-Making in Xining

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We never originally planned to come here to this city on the northwest edge of the Tibetan plateau, yet we’ve been resting in Xining for several days.

Soap Making

Soap Making

Our Tibetan friend has been wanting to start a business that would help young women in her community get involved in entrepreneurial ventures. Unfortunately, there is not much for people to do in her community, which is a Tibetan speaking community that largely herds yaks and sheep to make money. Then, she decided she would try to use the fat from the animals that they raise to build a business making speciality Tibetan soaps.

The only problem: our Tibetan friend had never made soap.

Master at Work

Master at Work

Fortunately, Galen is not only a professional photographer, but he has also dabbled in soap-making. So, as a part of our Silk Road travels, Galen taught our friend how to make soap using local sheep fat.

Rendering the Fat

Rendering the Fat

This normally would not warrant discussion on the blog but, later, our friend told us something that made me want to report our soap-making experience.

Soap is Made

Soap is Made

Our Tibetan friend had originally said that we could stay with her uncle, who lived in the Kumbum Monastery, one of the most important sites in Tibetan religion. She also wanted us to do our soap making experiment at his facilities in the monastery. Our friend later told us that her uncle rejected the idea as too dangerous. If we had joined him at the monastery, he would have fallen under police suspicion, and the police would have almost certainly raided our soap-making experiment. In the end, we had to make soap at the house of a friend of hers, a Tibetan girl who was working in the ethnic affairs office of the government.

I did not mention this fact in the post, but any foreigner that leaves the city of Huazangsi is supposed to have their cab register them. We did not know that, but our cab did, and she made sure not to tell the police because she knew that the police would probably not have approved of us going to Maya Snow Mountain.

Xinjiang, the northwestern corner of China, where we will be throughout much of July, is now the part of China with the most ethnic tensions. But Tibet and Tibetan areas around Tibet are still very sensitive for the Chinese. With every thing we have done in these Tibetan parts of Gansu and Qinghai province, the threat of police action has hovered over us. Looking back at the other posts, my readers may have gotten annoyed with how I never used the name of our Tibetan friend, nor did I put any up close photos of her on the blog. We did this to avoid identifying her, not because she did anything wrong (she didn’t), but because we have had to tiptoe around every thing we did in this leg of the trip.

And in a few days, in a post on our next adventure, the police became directly involved in our Silk Road Hitchhiking Project in a surprising way.

Measurements

Measurements



The Stupid __ of Xining

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Note: Though we normally avoid foul language in this blog, this post does contain a fairly provocative word. In order to faithfully record our goings-on, I have decided to leave the word in, only partially censoring the word.

We were coming into Xining. I was in the passengers seat. A stranger pulled up on the right of our car. “Herro,” he said. “How are you doing?”

This is a common occurence in China. I find it rude, treating foreigners as if they were Zoo animals to throw peanuts at. I said nothing to the man, rolling my window up.

“Stupid c–nts (傻屄). They think that cause they know a few words of English, they’re so amazing,” the driver said.

Immediately, I knew I liked this guy, so I began to think of ways to gin up a conversation. We could already see a dozen cranes building on the city’s skyline, so I asked, “There are a lot of buildings going up. How long has this building spurt been going on?”

“It’s recent. A year ago, there were almost no cranes in the city. They think that if they just build it, people will come.”

“Are they coming?” I asked. “Or are people just keeping them as empties.”

“Oh, most of them, they’re empties.” He responded. “And what’s worse is that these are all being built by people from outside Xining, mostly people from Sichuan or Jiangsu. Lots of people from Jiangsu.”

“Nanjing?” I asked, curious if people were coming from the city in Jiangsu where I had once lived.
“Not so much Nanjing. Other places in Jiangsu.” He said. “They never consider local factors. They don’t consider how it will affect traffic, or where people are going to park our what will happen to the neighborhood. Just build it, make money and then leave town.”

He changed the subject. “Over there, that’s the largest mosque in the whole province. If you’re here Friday. You can go see them gathering for worship. Men pouring out praying out in the streets. ”

“Are you a Hui Muslim?” I asked.

“Yes, I am a Hui Muslim.”

“Oh, I wasn’t sure, since you weren’t wearing the hat that most Muslims in China wear,” I said stupidly. I should have known. His facial features looked very Chinese, but his skin was a shade paler than any Han Chinese person I had met. It was in his paleness that I could see hints of his Central Asian ancestory.

“Mostly, we only wear the hat on Fridays, when we go to worship.”

“So, Xining has a lot of Muslims?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s really more Muslim than Tibetan. In fact, even though this is a Tibetan province, Xining used to not have many Tibetans. But in the last few years, they all seem to have come out of the rural areas where they used to herd sheep. Now, they are everywhere.”

At this point, we got out of his car and let him continue on his way.