Have you ever noticed how distant memories of people and places present themselves to you in the form of images, like snapshots or very short film clips from long ago?
That’s what comes to mind when I think about my cousin, Geoffrey Geisinger (we always called him Geoffie), who died yesterday.
One image is of us at my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Freddie’s house in New Haven, Connecticut. It was a sprawling, single-storey house with a sunken living room and a pool in the backyard. I must have been very young, because I’m quite sure that Geoffie was a teenager at the time, and, if I’m figuring this correctly, he was 13 or 14 years older than I was.
The image is of how tall he was; he seemed like a giant. He was kind to us much littler cousins, and would pick us up and let us ride on his shoulders. I remember that every time we saw him, my sister and I would beg for rides on his shoulders and he would let us take turns until he was too out of breath to go on. It was so exciting for us to be up that high, and to be able to touch the ceiling.
I remember their basement in that house, and how Geoffie tried to teach us to play pool. He was very good, at least to our young eyes, and the joy of visiting wasn’t playing pool with him, but simply getting such friendly attention from this tall, imposing cousin.
I remember his first wedding. I must have been about seven years old then. What I remember about it is my jealousy: Nina, my younger sister, got to be a flower girl, and I didn’t. I remember the dress Nina wore: a deep orangey-yellow maxi dress, with a braided rope of sorts around her waist. She looked like a princess, and I wanted to look like one too. I think I was too consumed with jealousy to remember much else.
Another clear memory is a snapshot: Geoffie with his handlebar mustache. It was so out-of-fashion, and yet for his entire adult life, as far as I know, he had that mustache. On the rare occasions that we would see each other, he would lean down (still tall, even when I was grown up) and give me a kiss on the cheek, and his mustache tickled.
I don’t know much about his work, or his accomplishments: the kind of information that would usually be included in an obituary. I haven’t seen him in many years. But I have a few very clear, fond memories of him, and they make me smile.
My daughter just received her International Baccalaureate exam results, and she’s more than met the conditions for admission to her university of choice. Her high school career is over. She went off to Greece for 10 days with a couple of friends, came home for a few days, and then went off to Texel, one of the Wadden islands, for a summer job waiting tables. In September, she’ll be off to the University of Northampton, in England.
This all makes me think about my mother and the years when I was, like my daughter now, almost an adult, trying to prove I wasan adult, and gradually separating myself from my family.
I didn’t actually go away without my parents until I went to college, and the college was less than an hour away from my hometown. My mother, whom I called Ma, worried about everything: the safety of the student housing, the suitability of my roommates, the quality of the food in the dining hall, and so on. (My father just checked for fire escapes.) and she didn’t just worry; she expressed her worries. I did a lot of rolling my eyes and telling her what she wanted to hear: that I would call if I had a problem, that my suitemates were great (they were), that the food was surprisingly good (it was), that the housing was safe (it was, relatively speaking) and that I would remember to lock the door (I did).
I, on the other hand, simply could not understand what she was so worried about. I was quite sure I could take care of myself, and my biggest worry was that I hadn’t moved far enough away, so that she might visit unannounced. Before accepting admission to college, I made her and my father both promise always to call before a visit.
I realize now that I was right. I could take care of myself, and I would have asked for help if I ever needed it.
I also realize now that Ma understood that. Her expression of her fears was real, and came from her heart, but her head knew perfectly well I was going to thrive at college. That’s exactly how I feel now: terrified for my daughter, yet also confident that she’ll love it.
She’s a sensible, deep-thinking adult. More sensible, and probably more deep-thinking, than I was at the time. She makes friends easily, but also chooses them carefully. She doesn’t get pushed into doing things she doesn’t want to do. She sets goals and works toward them, though she has the same trouble with motivation and procrastination that I still struggle with. Her self-confidence level varies, as does mine.
Actually, now that I type this, I realize how much she resembles me. And I thrived in college, so why am I worried?
Because she may be just like me, but I am just like my mother. Now if I can just keep those ‘Ma moments’ under control, I’ll be fine. And so will she.
As I sat last week watching a room full of students sweat through an exam, as I’ve done many times before, I wondered, as I’ve done many times before, why we do it. What is the point of examinations?
To see if they’ve mastered the material, you say. Okay, but so what if they haven’t? They can easily look up information on the Internet. They can easily find expert and not-so-expert analysis, if analysis is what they need.
You’ll say ‘But they need to be able to analyze and evaluate information themselves, and that’s what we’re testing.’
Fair enough; that’s worth finding out, but is that really what we’re finding out when we test? How can we be sure they’re not just regurgitating someone else’s (such as the teacher’s) thoughts?
Clearly some tests do better than others. The International Baccalaureate’s Language A tests include a section in which the students must write an ‘unseen commentary’, which means they do a close analysis of a literary text that they’ve never seen before (unless they’re extraordinarily well-read and lucky). That strikes me as a legitimate measure of skills: analysing literary devices, organizing and writing an essay, etc.
The Dutch system’s Dutch test requires students to read a text they probably haven’t seen before and summarize it within a certain word limit. That would certainly show if they’ve been able to recognize the main points of a text. Maths tests in general require students to use the concepts they’ve learned to solve problems they’ve never seen before.
My questions is more basic: why do we put them through it? Why use a TEST to see what they’ve learned? Besides the obvious misery it causes, when will they ever use their test-taking skill in ‘real life’? I’d argue that they’ll never use it again once their formal education is over.
The fact is that in the ‘real world’, people collaborate. They brainstorm, they bounce their ideas off each other, they contribute their own particular strengths to a team effort. That’s how business, medicine, the arts, the non-profit sector, even educational institutions work.
And that collaboration that leads to innovation? In the classroom, it’s called cheating. Why do we do that? We should be encouraging collaboration, not punishing it!
Any teachers reading this will say ‘But we do encourage collaboration. We assign group projects!’ That’s true, and that’s good, but we still usually finish the unit or chapter with a test, and the test usually counts at least as much as the collaborative project.
The problem, you’ll say, is the ones who ride along for free, who don’t contribute in the collaborative group. How can we know what they’ve learned if we don’t test them individually? In my view, that’s what we should be focusing on: teaching our pupils to work well in a group, giving them the skills they need so that free rides don’t happen. The child who doesn’t contribute needs to learn how, and the other group members need to learn how to approach a task and create a group dynamic that gets the best out of everyone.
But in testing students individually, we’re sending a very mixed message: working together with others is good and productive, but if you do it now, you’ll be punished!
You could argue that students who manage to get a free ride through their schooling would become a plague for any employer who made the mistake of hiring them. I suppose that’s true, but give their fellow employees some credit. A colleague who doesn’t contribute would soon enough get forced out or forced to change his behaviour. In any case, tests as we give them now don’t help us identify who will collaborate well anyway.
I understand that this isn’t going to change. Tests give the illusion of being scientific measures of students’ learning. They’re all judged the same, the points are tallied, the grade is given. It has a neatness that appeals to us. But I think we’re missing the point: what we want kids to be able to do, which isn’t passing tests.
I’m in London right now. I hasten to add that I did NOT come here for the wedding; some of my American cousins were going to be here on Saturday, so I decided to come here to see them. Then, when the wedding was announced, I decided ‘What the hell, I’ll go see that as well.’
And I’m glad I did. It was, obviously, a uniquely British event. I’ve seem similar patriotism in the US on the fourth of July and in Holland on Koninginnedag or any international soccer event. But this was subtly different if you looked beyond the flag-waving. It was good-natured. There wasn’t the implication — open in the US, somewhat less so in Holland — that feeling love for your own nation also means feeling that your nation is better than all others. It was just ‘Yay Britain’, not ‘Britain is the best.’ And the foreigners like me in the crowd (there were a lot of us), didn’t feel unwanted or unwelcome. It was all just joyful (and, increasingly, as the day wore on, drunken, but cheerfully so).
And this morning I woke up to hear that Osama bin Laden is dead. People are celebrating in front of the White House and there is a general feeling of delight and smug satisfaction on the internet.
I find this all a bit disturbing. Yes, I’m glad he’s dead, but it doesn’t mean any real change, does it? I have this feeling that it’s somehow improper to celebrate anyone’s death, even that of someone as evil as he was.
I’m reminded of the story that is told every Passover: the Exodus story in which Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt. When they came to the Red Sea and Moses parted it so they could cross, the sea closed again over the pursuing Egyptian army, killing them. Part of the Passover service includes a warning about celebrating those deaths. Isn’t that what we’re doing now with bin Laden?
I think that perhaps the reason we shouldn’t celebrate it is that the spiral will just continue. We will celebrate, they will respond angrily — in deeds as well as in words — we will step up the unwinnable ‘War on Terror,’ and so on. Bin Laden’s death may make us feel triumphant — that smug satisfaction I mentioned earlier — but it’s certainly not the end of anything, except his life.
There’s a commercial on Dutch TV that I was reminded of recently, in which a young boy is picked up at school by his mother. As he approaches her, he’s clearly upset, and though I can’t catch all that he says, it’s clear that he hates school and doesn’t ever want to go back. After they walk home, they sit at the kitchen table, where his mother pours him a glass of juice, saying ‘Het komt wel goed, schatje.’ This loosely translates as ‘It’ll turn out okay, sweetheart.’ Then the father walks in, looking upset too, and tells them that the promotion went to someone else instead of him. The boy hands his father a glass of juice and says ‘Het komt wel goed, schatje.’
I was reminded of the commercial when I was bicycling along thinking about many students I’ve had (and my own son), who aren’t willing to do the work necessary to do well in school. We call them lazy or unmotivated, and they are, but I was trying to figure out why they’re that way. I think it may have to do with a belief in ‘Het komt wel goed, schatje,’ that seems to have become ingrained in Western culture.
What inspires kids to do their best? The usual answers have to do with having a goal or finding the material interesting, or feeling a sense of competition, for example. Those all work in one way or another, though I’d suggest that only the first – having a goal – can help a student sustain motivation over a longer period.
But what I was trying to figure out was: what are we doing that allows kids to feel that they don’t have to do their best? How can they feel secure about their future? And it seems to me that in the Western world – not just Holland – that’s the problem: they feel too safe. Everything has always turned out okay. They always got the toy they wanted eventually. Their parents always solved whatever problem came their way. And, of course, they always could depend on having enough to eat and clean clothes to wear and a roof over their heads. And if they’ve always had this security, their feeling is: ‘Why should it ever change? This will always be so. The world will take care of me.’
This complete and absolute confidence that everything will be taken care of takes away any motivation to do well in school.
Think about the kids who do their best, who really try hard at school. Of course, that description probably applies to every kid who attends school anywhere in the developing world. They’re motivated because their existence is NOT secure. They CAN’T be sure of having enough to eat or clean clothes to wear or a roof over their heads (Forget the toy: it’s not in the realm of their experience.). School is their ticket tosecurity, and they know it. So, despite hunger or helping care for siblings or working the fields after school or not having books or lighting to study by, they work their butts off to do their best.
Of course, in the West, there are certainly kids who try hard. My guess is that those are kids with a clear and difficult goal. How that goal became so clear, and how they came to the realization that they would have to work hard to reach it: I don’t know. Or perhaps those are kids who have experienced deprivation of some sort: lost a home or a parent or gone hungry in the past.
But the rest don’t achieve as much. We tell our students, like I tell my son, that they have to do well, work hard, try their best, in order to succeed in the ‘real world.’ In the end, for many of them, it WILL turn out okay: through luck, or connections, or the help of their parents. Or perhaps they’ll gain motivation as they get older, go back to school, make up for their laziness as teenagers. But for many, they’re in for a real slap in the face: it WON’T turn out okay. They won’t be adequately prepared for the kind of career they want, and won’t live in the ‘style to which they’ve become accustomed,’ unless their parents continue to support them.
The thing is: for the father who didn’t get the promotion, ‘Het komt wel goed’ isn’t true. A glass of juice won’t make it all better, and neither will his parents. He has to make it on his own, and through his own efforts. How can we teach our children this in a way that they’ll really believe it?
As we left Yangshuo (fantastical landforms, bamboo rafts on rivers, lovely ecolodge, Chinese cooking class) on our way to Guilin to catch the night train for Guangzhou so we could catch the ferry the next day to Hong Kong, I realized that China has, at least temporarily, affected my general tolerance for risk.
This occurred to me in the taxi that picked us up from the hotel. The driver turned from a relatively minor road onto a major road. He was turning left, so he had to cross the oncoming traffic and merge with the traffic on the far side. As seems to be customary there, he went ahead and crossed, regardless of the fact that there was not only a car coming from the left, but there was also a second car coming from the left which was busy passing the first. At the same time, cars were approaching from the right, menaced by the car that was passing as well as by ours.
I noticed this all happening, but didn’t even flinch. In the beginning of our trip I was constantly horrified at the maneuvers our taxi drivers made: cutting into traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road toward oncoming traffic, passing on blind curves, passing a car which was already busy passing another car, etc. Now, at the end of the trip, none of it seemed to faze me anymore. I seemed to have developed a certain fatalism: ‘Que será será,’ as Doris Day so eloquently put it.
Any of you who know me know that I’m more ‘The Little Engine That Could’ than Doris Day. I like to be in control. I tend to believe that from my own effort I can make anything happen, and, damn it, I will. My fear of flying comes from this same need to control my destiny: in a plane I have to hand over that control to the pilot, and that makes me uneasy. (I’ve long believed that if I took flying lessons I could get over that fear, but the problem is that I’m afraid to take the lessons!)
So if I’ve managed to allow myself a certain level of fatalism, how can I hang on to that in my ‘real life’, when I take up the normal routine next week? I’d love to learn how to be comfortable with teaching a lesson that isn’t planned out ahead, or to stop being early to everything because of being afraid that I’ll be late. How can I just ‘go with the flow’ without ingesting any mind-altering substances?
Here are three hot business opportunities for anyone entrepreneurial enough to take them. I’m not taking them because I’m an idea person, not an entrepreneur.
Beds: More and more Western tourists are traveling to China, yet the hotels still use Chinese style (i.e. very hard) beds. Many Western hotel chains are already here; I’ve seen a Holiday Inn and a Crowne Plaza, for example. All a hotel chain would have to do to attract a bigger proportion of the Western market is advertise that they offer Western-style beds. Since much of the tourist market right now is Chinese, all you would have to do is buy a few Western mattresses for a few rooms in each hotel. Then as the Western market share increases, designate more rooms as Western. So your investment would be gradual. My cut: 1% of your net increase in profits for the first ten years starting from the baseline profit of the year before you instituted the Western bed campaign. You don’t expect me to give these ideas away for free, do you?
Toilets: This idea would take significant initial investment, but would be sure to return large profits. Western tourists are begging for Western-style toilets and would be happpy to pay for them. They’re risking urinary tract infections by simply holding it in all day until they get back to their hotel rooms. Start by buying a concession in or very near the Forbidden City in Beijing. Install Western-style sit-down toilets. Publicize your guarantees: clean, non-smelly, sit toilets, supplied with toilet paper, with working flushes, hot and cold running water for hand-washing, and paper towels and air dryers available for hand-drying. Charge for the privilege of using them; Western tourists (especially women) would gladly pay a euro or so to use them over standard Chinese toilets. So would many middle-class Chinese women (I’ve seen them holding handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths as they enter standard toilet facilities.). Once the concession in Beijing takes off — and it will — open more branches near any site where tourists are likely to go. Publish flyers with lists of locations and the tourists will plan their days around where they can make toilet stops. Issue a card where visits could be checked off and every tenth visit is free. My cut would be 1% of net profit for the first 25 years.
English: This idea won’t make any actual profit, but would finance a long trip around China for anyone with fluent English and passable Chinese (Mandarin). You could travel from place to place with very little expenditure by trading your knowledge of English for room and board. Approach hotels with a CV of your credentials and offer to rewrite their signs, brochures, etc. into correct English. In exchange, require them to provide you with free room and board for a few days. Offer the same at popular tourist destinations in exchange for free admission. The only problem with this plan is that it would eliminate one of the greatest charms of traveling here: reading the garbled English on the signs. I can’t take a cut here, so this idea is free for the taking.
For those of you who might be wondering how we’re doing, I’ll describe a few things that we’ve done or that have happened to us.
Accommodations: We pre-booked all of the transportation, transfers and hotels before we left. I just didn’t want the stress of having to figure out train or bus schedules or go from hotel to hotel looking for a room, like we did in our younger days. Especially not with two teenagers in tow. The hotels have all been 3 or 4-stars, mostly huge and soulless, but a welcome respite from the noise and dirt of a day’s sightseeing. And the toilets are always spotless and not at all smelly. The breakfasts are generally a mixed bag of Western (or an attempt at Western) and Chinese. Not surprisingly, the Chinese version is always better.
Health: So far, so good. I had a bit of an accident last week. We were walking home from the old town of Hancheng in the dark, in a section where work was being done on the road just a block from our hotel. There were no street lights, and we were passing a construction site, I think, so we could see very little, but we knew we were walking on the soon-to-be bicycle path by the road, a mostly dirt and gravel surface at this point. What we didn’t see was that a manhole cover had been left open, and I stepped right in it. Fortunately only one leg went in, while the other leg and one hand stopped my fall.
The offending manhole was closed by the time we went back to see it in the daylight the next day.
So my left leg has an impressive scrape perhaps 5 by 10 centimeters in size, which is healing quickly to reveal several bruises on and below my knee. The other leg, which broke my fall, must have hit quite hard on a stone or something, because I have a truly phenomenal bruise on my right inner thigh. At the time I didn’t notice this until later, and it never hurt much at all, despite its appearance. It doubled in size over the next two days and now we’ve been regularly admiring the array of new colours each day.
Meanwhile Albert did something to his back one day, so he could barely straighten up, never mind walk. That led to a scene straight from a sitcom: we had hired a guide for a day, and at the moment that we were supposed to be meeting him in the lobby, Albert had just taken a muscle relaxant and I was in the shower. So we got a call from Mr. Wang, the guide, from the lobby, and I explained that we’d be late because Albert was having back trouble. Next thing we knew, there was a knock on the hotel room door. I opened it wrapped in a towel, thinking it was Anne and Krislyn coming to pick us up to go downstairs. Instead, there was Mr. Wang, very concerned and wanting very badly, it seemed, to see Albert. I let him in, and he immediately got started on giving Albert a massage, with me standing there in a towel and the two girls, who arrived right after him, looking on. I don’t know if it was the massage or the diclophenac, but Albert was right as rain within a day.
Crime: I’ve been impressed at how trusting people are here. In particular, when we were in Pingyao, on the morning we left, we walked into a tiny corner store and saw through the door behind the counter that someone was asleep on a table in the room behind. We had a whole conversation there about whether to wake him up to buy what we wanted, and he didn’t wake up until we knocked quite hard on the counter. All of his merchandise was available for anyone to take, presumably all night long. How trusting is that!
Our first sense of not being quite safe ourselves came yesterday, when Anne was pickpocketed. It probably started when she was coming up an escalator here in front of our hotel. She felt a tug on her backpack as she stepped off at the top. She turned around quckly to see what was going on and a middle-aged man was standing there with her two glasses cases in his hands. She just grabbed them back. She says he just shrugged and walked (not ran) away! So now we’re all being a bit over-paranoid, I think, about our things.
Racism: When our bellhop heard us say that we were going to the Muslim quarter as we checked in, he warned us of pickpockets. We shrugged that off, of course, as just a bit of racism. But then today, a tour guide gave us some unsolicited advice: be especially careful with Muslims, she said. You can tell who they are because they look a bit different from us, she said, but they do a lot of pickpocketing. She said this completely straightfaced, without any hint of apology or awareness of how racist she sounds.
Krislyn: People keep assuming that Krislyn is our tour guide, and even refuse to believe her when she says she’s our foster daughter. This sometimes works to our advantage, though. For example, last night we took a taxi and the driver quoted us 30 yuan for the trip. Krislyn had the usual conversation with the driver, and when he found out she wasn’t our tour guide, he told her if he’d known that he would have quoted a higher price. Apparently the norm is for the driver to quote a reasonable price to the tour guide and the guide quotes a higher one to the tourists, pocketing the difference. This has happened several times.
The other thing that keeps happening is that people either a) compliment Krislyn on how good her Chinese is (It’s her native language, but a different dialect.) or b) criticize her for how bad her Chinese is. Even when they hear that she’s from Singapore and lives in Holland, she gets: ‘Why can’t you speak Chinese?’
terracotta warriors
Reactions to us: Here in Xian (home of the terra cotta warriors) is the first place we haven’t been stared at everywhere we go. That includes Beijing. And people aren’t subtle about it: they’ll actually stop right near us and simply stare. Children, as you’d expect, but also adults. Sometimes people take pictures of us, never asking permission first (which has led us to stop asking permission to take pictures). They’re looking at our size, I think, and Albert’s beard. They stare at Krislyn as well; we think it’s because she’s not acting as a tour guide should act. The fact, for example, that she sits with us for meals is weird, if you think she’s a tour guide. They never sit with their clients for meals.
English: Here in Xian is the first place where we’ve experienced hotel staff, shopkeepers, and so on who speak a modicum of English. And thank goodness for that, because the further south we go the less Krislyn understands of what anyone says. It’s clearly a far more touristed place than anywhere else we’ve been. Even in Beijing we couldn’t get more than ‘hello’ out of anyone, which surprised us. It’s clear from several children who have approached us that education in English is improving, however: a little boy today asked me in a clear accent: ‘May I take a picture with you?’ Most adults, if they do try a sentence in English, have such poor accents we can’t figure out what they mean to say, and sometimes it isn’t even clear if they’re speaking English or Chinese. One day in a park a man tried to ask us something in English and a Chinese teenager we were talking to had to interpret his English for us before we could understand him. And all he was trying to ask was ‘Where do you come from?’
an interesting find in a bowl of hotpot
Food: In a word: delicious! We’ve mostly been eating at very cheap local places, spending from about one to about six euros a person for a whole meal with soft drinks and a beer for Albert. It’s usually quite random what we get; the menus often have names for each dish without descriptions so Krislyn doesn’t know what they are — could you guess what Welsh Rarebit is just from its name? Some restaurants have pictures, though that doesn’t always help either. So we just pick three or four dishes and share what we get, and it’s almost always interesting and delicious.
Tomorrow we fly to Lijiang, which we’re hoping is a prettier place in general with cleaner air. I’ll let you know.
Everywhere we’ve gone so far, there have been very few foreign tourists like us. Most of the tourists — and in some places all of the tourists — are Chinese. Sometimes they’re in pairs or families, sometimes in groups. When they’re in a group, even if it’s just 5 or 6 people, they hire a tour guide.
I used to be a tour guide when I lived in San Francisco, so I know the routine, and I know a good tour guide from a bad one. These are almost all bad ones. I may not speak any Chinese apart from the words for ‘thank you’ and ‘hello’, but I can tell when someone is reeling off a memorized speech in a monotone, and that’s what these tour guides do. It’s not just the sound of their voices; it’s the fact that their eyes don’t make contact with their clients’ eyes. Instead their gaze is fixed above the tourists’ heads somewhere.
Anyway, that’s no problem for me, of course. Except that these tour guides often carry around a portable loudspeaker in a backpack, and speak into a microphone, so all of us get to hear their memorized litany of facts and figures. The quality of the sound varies enormously, so sometimes the voice is amplified through hissing static.
And it gets worse if the place is crowded. Yesterday we visited Longmen Grottos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site 1500 years old, where thousands of Buddhas are carved into caves along both banks of a river. (I would recommend seeing the Yungang grottos outside of Datong over these; they’re more extensive, in better condition and much less touristed.)
At Longmen Grottos, as at other popular sites, there are numerous groups with tour guides. If one has arrived at a particular grotto and started talking, and then another one arrives too, they don’t just stop and wait their turn. No, they start talking as well. So then all of us are treated to the sound of two competing amplified monotones. And because they’re competing, they both talk louder.
And don’t imagine that stops when a third group arrives. It doesn’t. Then all three talk simultaneously and loudly through their sound systems. And, of course, all of those tourists are trying to get a glimpse into the grotto at the same time. I don’t know how they manage to follow what their tour guide says when they can understand all three voices.
It finally occurred to me to record this yesterday. On this 30 second film (coming soon) you can get an idea of how it sounds when three tour guides are talking over each other. Imagine this much more packed with people and you’ll know what the Forbidden City was like.
The other remarkable thing that Chinese tourists do is pose in front of things: the grottos themselves, but also monuments, views, whatever. And when they pose, they often hold one hand up in a victory sign. I saw one pair of young women yesterday who I swear posed that way in front of every single grotto, first one woman, then the other. I’m sure I’m being culturally insensitive here, but that’s got to be the dullest photo album ever!
I’m puzzled by Chinese attitudes toward cleanliness. The cities we’ve seen so far: Beijing, Chengde, Datong, Pingyao and where we are now, Hancheng, are dirty, loud, crowded places. People spit loudly and copiously on the street. There’s litter. Everyone smokes, everywhere. Look at the short film I’ve added here and you’ll see what I mean: it’s the view from our 11th floor hotel room here in Hancheng. If you’re wondering if it’s overcast or if that’s pollution, I don’t know; I can’t tell. click here for film
The worst part is the toilets: they are smelly and filthy and disgusting. They’re squat toilets, which is good as far as I’m concerned, because that allows me to avoid touching them, but I don’t understand why people accept that level of filth, especially the smell. There’s never toilet paper, and, apparently because the plumbing can’t take it, the toilet paper doesn’t get flushed but gets put in a wastepaper basket next to the toilet — hence the smell. There’s more detail I could give, but I think you get the idea.
Clearly, too, the vast majority of people here live in relative squalor: mostly run-down huge apartment blocks. There are many public toilets along the streets, and they all stink (I haven’t been in them, but they stink just walking by.). I suspect that many people don’t have toilets of their own, perhaps because apartments and more traditional houses have been subdivided so much, so these public toilets get a lot of use.
street scene in Pingyao
In the smaller towns, even without massive apartment buildings, people live in squalor. Yesterday, in Pingyao (which is a popular tourist destination because the original walled city of traditional courtyard houses is completely intact), we were walking a side street, away from the main tourist area, and saw a ‘night soil’ man. They used to have these in European and American cities as well, but that was perhaps 100 years ago! This man had a donkey-pulled cart with a big tank mounted on it, and he was pouring a bucket of ‘night soil’ into the tank. That means there are people living in these traditional courtyard houses who still don’t have plumbing for toilets.
a 'night soil' depot seen (and smelled) from the city wall of Pingyao
Early this morning we had to leave for the train to Hancheng and walked in the old center of Pingyao for a block or two. It was a hot night and some people had left doors open for air. What we saw is that people live in one room, and they sleep on their tables (See my last post about beds.).
At the same time, they can be exceedingly clean too. The hotels we’ve stayed in are spotless, and labour must be cheap because there are people busy dusting furniture, cleaning floors and so on all day. Shops and restaurants are often bare-bones, but always clean. The train compartments and the bedding on the sleepers are absolutely threadbare, but clean, and the windows of the train are cleaner than the average in Holland. (Yet the train toilets are just as bad as the public ones.)
Several times I’ve seen people pull out tissues and carefully clean around the sides of their shoes. In the waiting room at the train station, where I saw people spit and litter even inside, I watched a woman very carefully peruse the available seats critically before deciding which to sit in. People dust off their scooters before sitting down.
People here are always neatly dressed, even if they are poor. Their clothes are clean and their hair is clean. How they manage that, I don’t know. And people here don’t smell of body odor, even in this midsummer heat. I don’t think I’ve visited any other city in the summer where people don’t smell!
So where is the boundary? When is cleanliness important and when is filth acceptable?
