Category Archives: travel

Puppies–Pets or Protein?

Posted on January 19, 2015 | Leave a comment

Puppies—Pets or Protein?    —by Jinny Batterson

First, a couple of disclaimers: 1) I have never knowingly eaten dog meat while in China;  2) No Chinese restaurant in the United States would risk serving dog meat to its customers.

That said, I have seen dog meat on restaurant menus in China. I have also seen, in meat markets in rural China, both caged live puppies and singed dog carcasses, though I wish I hadn’t.  I’ve been frightened several times while walking in the countryside by coming across an unaccompanied, unleashed dog—not sure if it was a tame dog whose owner was careless and let it run free, or a feral animal.  I’m lucky that I have not been bitten, since rabies is a serious problem in China, and most human rabies cases there result from bites by rabid dogs.

Dogs have a long and mixed history in China. Dog remains have been found in graves beside human ones in archeological excavations of Chinese Neolithic sites dating back about 7,000 years. There is a fair amount of evidence that dogs were domesticated early, used in ritual sacrifices, and also as a source of animal protein (along with pigs). China’s earliest emperors kept hunting dogs. Also since the earliest Chinese dynasties, small dogs have been used by noble families as pets. The “Pekingese” breed even bears the name of China’s capital city. There is speculation that these snub-nosed fluffs were bred to resemble Chinese fantasies of lions, which do not exist in China and were not photographed or imported to Chinese zoos until recent centuries.

Estimates of the total number of dogs in China vary widely, with most in the range of 100-200 million. The vast majority of dogs in China are unregistered. In rural areas where public health infrastructure and public health funding are limited, controlling dog populations by encouraging rabies vaccinations, administering spaying and neutering programs, enforcing fencing or leashing requirements, and minimizing exposure to feral animals remains difficult. Chinese researchers reported over 3,000 cases of human rabies exposure in China in 2006, most resulting from a child or teenager being bitten by a dog. Increasingly, major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai require the registration of pet dogs, limit the size of allowable pets, limit the number of dogs per family (typically one), impose a registration fee, and require up-to-date rabies vaccinations. In Beijing, annual dog registration is handled through the Public Security Bureau, the same agency that deals with registrations and permits for its human inhabitants.

Dog fanciers in China can be just as elaborate in providing for their canine companions as dog owners elsewhere—I’ve seen pets outfitted with bows, bangles, elaborate collars, sweaters, even booties to protect their paws from the cold. I’ve seen pet dogs riding in cushioned comfort in baskets at the front of owners’ bicycles, peeking out from carrying cases or elaborately embroidered bags, or being carried in owners’ arms across muddy streets to avoid their getting dirty.

Once we asked a Chinese colleague whether dog meat was served in the dining facilities at his school, hoping to avoid eating some by accident.

“Oh, no,” he answered.  “We can’t afford it. Dog meat is expensive.”

We were relieved, but never verified the pricing part of his response.  Other Chinese friends and acquaintances have told us that there are lots of folk traditions associated with dog meat—in some areas, dog meat is considered a strengthening, warming food during cold weather. In other places, certain organs or parts of the dog are reported when eaten to help cool the diner’s metabolism during extreme hot spells. However, as China becomes more urbanized and as its younger generations become more globally connected, the overall trend is toward vaccinating, petting, walking, playing with, and cleaning up after Rover or Fido, rather than chewing on his remains at a banquet.

 

 

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Plum Blossoms in Winter

Posted on January 12, 2015 | 1 comment

Plum Blossoms in Winter    —by Jinny Batterson

One of the pleasures I most enjoyed during the school year I spent in Ya’an, Sichuan (2008-2009) was taking solitary walks along paths through the upper reaches of our campus and the surrounding small villages and farmland. The school where I was a foreign teacher had over 20,000 students, so solitary walks would not seem to have been practical. However, much of the activity on campus took place around the dorms or classroom buildings, or in the adjacent commercial areas in the flat land near the river that bisected the town.  At certain times of day, especially in cold or foggy weather, the paths and trails further uphill, near the campus tea plantation or up beyond the graduate dorms, were nearly empty.  During part of the Spring Festival holiday that year, my husband and I stayed on campus, awaiting the arrival of Chinese friends whose transportation challenges made them several days later than originally expected.  The campus had pretty much emptied out—students had gone home to be with their families at this most important of Chinese festivals. Some faculty members were also away visiting extended family; most of those still around were indoors hosting extended family meals at apartments or restaurants.

As I remember it, one chilly early afternoon in mid-January I walked up toward the complex that included several graduate dormitories around a central courtyard.  The gate to the complex was shut and locked, but the small manmade lake just below it was still accessible.  The lake area had been lovingly landscaped—there were pebbled pathways, a small island, a rock face adorned with a recirculating waterfall, and lotus pads, now shriveled and dormant, that had put out blossoms earlier in the year. Trees had been planted on the island and around the perimeter of the lake. Most were leafless—willows and gingkos that had turned yellow and then shed a month or two before. When I looked more closely at some smaller trees I didn’t recognize, likely fruit trees os some sort, I noticed buds on their branches. By the time our friends arrived and we walked together to the lake, the buds had become blooms, small yellow “suns” amid the winter gloom.

Our friends explained that these were one of many varieties of Asian plum trees (Latin name: prunus mume; over 300 cultivars exist in China alone). Most of the time, blossoms came in white, pink, or red, so these yellow ones were somewhat unusual, perhaps specially bred at our agricultural school.  Representations of blossoming plum branches abound in Chinese paintings. These hardy blooms that brighten short winter days are a beloved symbol of persistence and of overcoming adversity. They are planted everywhere in China. In most locations, the blooms appear sometime between early January and late February, so they often overlap the timing of Spring Festival (known in the U.S. mostly as Chinese New Year). People welcome them as the first harbingers of spring, a little like pussy willow buds in northern parts of the United States.

Images of plum blossoms are easy to find in popular Chinese culture—painted on scrolls or fans, photographed and featured in exhibitions, sketched onto teacups, embroidered into clothing. Good reminders when it’s cold outside or conditions seem bleak, that spring always follows winter, and that adversity never lasts forever.

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Silent Night in China

Posted on December 22, 2014 | Leave a comment

Silent Night in China  —by Jinny Batterson  

The Thanksgiving I spent in Ala’er, Xinjiang, China as a foreign English teacher at a desert reclamation college was one of my most memorable (please see post from November 24, 2014 for more detail).  Buoyed by the good feelings that holiday celebration generated, I started making plans for Christmas. I checked with the school administration and got permission to rehearse and conduct a student winter holiday chorus as part of a larger program by the school’s English department near the end of the solar calendar year. As December advanced, many shops on campus and in town put up Western-style Christmas decorations. (You’ve probably noticed that most holiday decor these days is manufactured in China.) Because American friends with experience in China had cautioned my husband and me to avoid any appearance of religious proselytizing, I picked out three more or less neutral holiday songs for our chorus numbers:  “White Christmas” (on honor of a light snow which fell in late November and  lingered in shady areas for weeks), the Latin round “Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace),” and as a finale, a rousing version of “Deck the Halls.”  I tried scheduling four weekend chorus rehearsals—I think two actually took place, with a different set of student singers at each.

The English program, coincidentally held on Christmas Eve, found our chorus of about 60 singers, rehearsed or not, standing in uneven rows on three sets of steps at the front of the school auditorium. Most of the students owned or had borrowed red or green clothes to wear. I had a red elf’s cap from a local shop, and wielded a long chopstick as my baton. Our singing was lusty, mainly on key, and well received.  Other acts by some of the Chinese teachers of English got great reviews, especially one by a half dozen young women skimpily clad in black who did a jazzy dance to a hit English-language song in China that year, “God is a Girl.”  As a program finale, “Santa Alex,” one of the school’s best English students, explained a little of the secular part of the legend of Santa Claus. Alex was dressed in an improvised Santa costume, scrounged and adapted from one of the local shops. We’d supplied him with a sack filled with the red envelopes most Chinese children get at Chinese New Year, each containing a few hard candies and a small-denomination Chinese coin. Everyone got a small gift. No one, not even the laziest student, got a lump of coal.

Christmas Day was not a holiday in Ala’er. In fact, most students were extra busy studying for end-of-term exams, which would start soon. However, the older brother of one of our students, who lived in town, invited us out to dinner.  Asajean, whose name roughly translates as “Jesus,” was ethnically Uyghur, member of a largely Moslem group that had lived in this arid area for centuries. He ran a small private English tutoring business, and had often phoned us with questions about English vocabulary or grammar.  We joined him for a “big plate spicy chicken” evening meal at a local restaurant.  Afterwards,  Asajean walked us back to our campus apartment. It was a cold, clear, starlit night, with the stillness that only comes when most people are indoors and motorized traffic is non-existent. As we neared our apartment block, some unexpected music started playing over the campus loudspeakers—“Silent Night,”  complete with four-part harmony and English lyrics. For one brief moment, this juxtaposition of a Chinese-administered university, a Moslem dinner host, and a Western religious Christmas carol seemed the most natural thing in the world. Happy holidays, all!

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Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice

Posted on December 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

Mutton Dumplings for Winter Solstice  —by Jinny Batterson

The first time we spent the winter solstice in China, we were in far western Xinjiang in northwestern China.  By December, it was really cold in our small town of Ala’er. The temperature in the central ground floor area of the campus market near our apartment block was often at or near freezing. All fall, multiple small vendors had arranged their fresh vegetables, fruits, and meats for sale on trestle tables in this large open area. There was a wide doorless entryway at one end of the cement-floored market, and the roof, though covered, was more than two stories up. As winter approached, a few of the fresh market vendors persevered,  lighting small fires between market stalls to help keep their produce from damage, covering their products with quilts and blankets at night. Most vendors, though, just gave up for the winter.  In contrast, the restaurants along the edges of the market nearly all stayed open. Most were only big enough for a few tables, with a kitchen at the back—glassed-in single story enclosures with the sort of plastic flap doors that drop back into place once someone goes through them. When the heat in our apartment was dicey, even if we had enough food on hand to cook at home, we’d sometimes head for an evening meal at a market restaurant just to stay warm. Many of the restaurants specialized in dumplings and dumpling soup. Both steamy variations got more appealing as the weather got colder.

Early on December 22, the day of that year’s winter solstice, our Foreign Affairs Officer, Mr. Ma, brought a surprise gift to our apartment: two large bags of frozen mutton dumplings, to be stored in our smallish freezer, then reheated batch by batch for as many meals as we could make of them.  He explained in somewhat halting English that we should boil some of the dumplings that evening, and also eat our fill of the dumplings throughout the winter to help keep warm and to protect our ears from freezing.  He said that since the dumplings were shaped roughly like ears, people had come to believe that eating dumplings would help prevent chilblains or frostbite on one’s ears.   As it happened, we didn’t try our dumplings until a bit later in the winter because that evening, the head of the English department invited us out to a huge meal of mutton hot pot.

Since our arrival in Ala’er several months earlier, we’d found a number of local restaurants that specialized in mutton dishes.  We’d sampled lots of mutton kebabs and several varieties of mutton stews, sometimes invited by students or in-town friends, other times on explorations of our own. Our experience in Xinjiang was the first time in our China travels up to then when we were keenly aware of dietary differences between Han Chinese and some of China’s other ethnic groups. Much of the local Xinjiang population is Moslem.  Many of the inhabitants of rural Xinjiang are sheep-herding pastoralists of the Uyghur nationality, one of 55 non-Han groups officially recognized in China.  Moslems do not eat pork, which plays a substantial role in the traditional Han diet.  Han and Uyghur restaurants in Ala’er were distinct.  At the Uyghur restaurants, the menus were always pork-free. A few Han students and faculty (including the chair of the English department) would occasionally eat at a Uyghur restaurant. The reverse never seemed to be true.

Some of the less tolerant Han students and school officials, including the Foreign Affairs Officer, looked askance at our eclectic restaurant choices.  So a gift of mutton dumplings from someone who did not seem to us to be very sympathetic toward Uyghurs seemed a little odd.  Why not pork dumplings?  We did not ask, chalking it up to just one more local Xinjiang custom that we might never understand.

Two years later, after a year’s interval back in the U.S., we were again teaching in China as the winter solstice approached. This time we were in a small city in Sichuan province where there were almost no Uyghurs—the proportion of Han Chinese was likely above the national average of over 90 percent. It was quite rare to find a mutton dish on any restaurant menu, and we never saw mutton for sale at any of the local markets near us. So it was a surprise when our Foreign Affairs Officer at this second school invited us out for mutton dumplings on the winter solstice. When I did some later research, I found that mutton is one of the meats most closely associated with “yang,” or warming energy, in Chinese medicine. An early Chinese physician is said to have cured peasants in his village from winter chills with a hearty soup laced with mutton dumplings. In much of northern China, mutton dumplings or mutton hot pot are traditional dishes at the winter solstice. I’m not sure how much truth there is to the legend of the physician’s cure. My Western mindset has not yet fully absorbed the concept of food as medicine. However, any excuse to eat dumplings, especially mutton ones, in cold weather, is fine by me.

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Staying Warm, Chinese Style

Posted on December 8, 2014 | Leave a comment

Staying Warm, Chinese Style     —by Jinny Batterson

Heating season officially started in northern China on November 15. When we lived during 2006-2007 in the area of China covered by central heating (roughly above 33 degrees north latitude along an irregular, government-decreed line), this official day for the onset of available heat was strictly adhered to, regardless of weather. In spring, heat was turned off on March 15, period.  We heard that during the 1950’s, shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic, the Chinese government, with Soviet help, began a practice of developing a single heating plant for each large area or population center.  At the time, this was a considerable improvement over the hit-or-miss heating available to most Chinese householders.  However, the policy has changed little since then, while increases in population and population density, advances in technology, and changes in fuel supplies and fuel use have made these centralized systems less and less efficient compared with other available options. Coal-generated winter heat is a substantial contributor to smog problems in major Chinese cities. Coal-fired power plants produce the majority of China’s greenhouse gas emissions, so there will need to be substantial changes to existing systems if China is to meet the ambitious emissions targets laid out in a recent U.S.-China climate change agreement.

Our faculty apartment in western Xinjiang was a recipient of central heat, as were all the other staff apartments, dormitories, offices and classrooms of our 10,000-student campus. The heat for everyone was produced by a coal-fired heating plant at the campus’s western edge, just beyond the athletic fields.  I’m not sure how the heat reached the various buildings, but once it arrived in a building, heat was delivered via hot water radiators. We had no thermostats in our apartment or our classrooms, and no valves to control the flow of hot water to the radiators, most of which were situated under south-facing windows. Heat arrived on an irregular basis, causing considerable clanking plus alternating periods of sweltering and chilly indoor temperatures. Sometimes we’d have the windows wide open on -5 degree C days; at other times, indoor temperatures would be as cold or colder than outdoors. We had no way to circulate the heat inside, either (except for drafts when the wind blew). The temperature sometimes varied by several degrees from one side of a large room to the other.

We never got totally toasty during any of our winters in China, but after a while we picked up tips from our Chinese colleagues that helped a lot:

1) Long underwear is your friend.  Nearly every Chinese friend had several pairs. Larger department stores even stocked sizes big enough for our sometimes larger Western frames. As soon as the weather got cold, everyone layered up.

2) Change your eating habits with the seasons—in most places, winter offered various flavors of “hot pot” (vaguely like Western fondues, eaten communally around a large table with a gas burner at its center—more about winter eating in next week’s installment.)

3) Huddle.  Although Chinese people we knew were generally shy about hugs and public displays of affection, they were not averse to having a lot of folks around the same table  or in the same room during cold weather, upping the temperature noticeably in the process.

4) Get and use inexpensive hand and foot warmers—the ones we were familiar with were electrically powered, filled with a sort of gel that would warm fairly quickly when the power was on, and then hold their heat for up to several hours unplugged.

5) Wear tip-less gloves for indoor work. Outside, wear many layers, including hats, mittens, and warm boots.

6) Invest in padded vests and down jackets, long enough to cover your entire abdomen, which can get chilled by wintry winds.

7) Get the best, warmest bedding you can afford or acquire (often previous foreigners or Chinese colleagues will leave theirs behind when they move to more temperate climates).

8) When you are awake during the day, stay physically active. Come evening, take advantage of the long winter nights to get plenty of sleep.

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HIV/AIDS in China

Posted on December 1, 2014 | Leave a comment

HIV/AIDS in China        —by Jinny Batterson

Today is World AIDS Day.  Estimates of the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in China vary widely, from about 600,000 to an order of magnitude larger than that. Though the infection rate in China as a whole remains relatively low, the sheer size of China’s population (about 1.4 billion) makes it important that any outbreak there be contained.

It’s thought that the first AIDS fatality in China was that of an infected tourist during the 1980’s. By the 1990’s, AIDS had gained a foothold in local populations, primarily among intravenous drug users in southern provinces adjacent to the “Golden Triangle,” Southeast Asia’s prime poppy-growing region. Then, in a scheme in which some levels of the Chinese government played an indirect but culpable role, peasants in several rural interior provinces were infected through unsafe blood donation procedures. China had stopped accepting blood components internationally during the 1980’s (ostensibly to avoid HIV contamination of the blood supply). Local entrepreneurs began to fill the supply gaps by recruiting rural donors to sell their blood for money. These “bloodhead” recruiters promised to minimize the impact of the loss of blood by extracting only plasma and returning donors’ red blood cells to them at the close of the donation process.  In some areas, safe blood handling practices were not followed—equipment was unsanitary, blood was pooled among donors before being returned. Soon whole villages were  afflicted with the “nameless fever.”  It took over a decade before the problem was acknowledged. It is estimated that 3-5% of current HIV/AIDS infections in China originated through unsafe donations—by 2010, Chinese government sources claimed that unsafe donation centers had been shut down and that all blood products were being tested for the virus before use.

A turning point in China’s official posture toward the AIDS epidemic may have come in 2003, when large parts of the country were essentially locked down during efforts to control a more short-term but also potentially lethal virus-caused infection, SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome). As the global reaction to SARS slowed international travel and domestic tourism in China to a trickle and seriously disrupted Chinese commerce, Chinese officials realized that having a large population of HIV-infected citizens could become an economic and human rights disaster.

My exposure to the AIDS epidemic and to efforts to contain it in China was extremely limited: the only time I saw any AIDS-related publicity was once during a 2006-2007 teaching assignment in rural Xinjiang—at the far end of the college campus, tucked away behind a line of trees, was a billboard cautioning of the dangers of unsafe sex, listing a telephone number someone could call for additional HIV/AIDS information.  A few of my Chinese teaching colleagues had heard vague stories of a young woman student who had become infected, subsequently forced out of school and shunned by her family. China’s infected population continues to grow, fueled by intravenous drug use and men having sex with men, but increasingly through unprotected heterosexual sex among sex workers and migrant laborers. The Chinese government has started promoting condom use as a safeguard against transmission, but the effectiveness of condom campaigns varies widely from region to region, and results are hard to verify. Among officially recognized victims of the disease, about a third are receiving antiretroviral drugs.

The year 2010 was the first in which AIDS was the leading cause of death from communicable diseases in China, passing tuberculosis and rabies, the former record holders. That year, over 7,700 Chinese died of AIDS. HIV/AIDS cases have been confirmed in all of China’s provinces, independent cities, and autonomous regions. As is the case in much of the rest of the world, China’s efforts to contain and reduce the HIV/AIDS epidemic can be spotty and inconsistent. Local customs, stigmatization of those infected, misinformation, some local governments’ reluctance to admit there is a problem, and the huge proportion of migrant, mostly male, laborers in the country, make developing effective overall strategies difficult.

One of the most visible spokespeople for HIV/AIDS awareness in China is James Chau, a young British-born journalist who has lived for the past decade in China. Chau became a U.N. AIDS goodwill ambassador in China in 2009. Since then, he has attended numerous international conferences on the disease, and has worked within China to educate the public about the disease and to reduce the stigma experienced by those infected with the virus.

If you have contacts in the HIV/AIDS community in China, perhaps you can use today as a reminder to provide monetary and moral support for ongoing efforts there to contain the disease and to treat its victims. Regardless of where any of us live or who we know, each can each contribute a small part to the multitude of solutions that will be needed to reduce the toll of this dreadful disease worldwide. Check the World AIDS Day website (http://www.worldaidsday.org) for ideas, or find your own way to contribute within your community.

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Simple Gifts

Posted on November 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

Simple Gifts    —by Jinny Batterson

“Ruby” is a Chinese economic success story. Ruby grew up in poverty in a mountainous rural county about 5 hours’ drive across the mountains from the regional hospital in Ya’an, Sichuan, where she is now a doctor, a kidney disease specialist. Since her youth, she’s completed high school, university, and advanced training. She has earned enough to purchase an in-town apartment, one she shared with her aging parents when she wasn’t either on duty or catching a few hours’ sleep at the staff dormitory at the hospital between work shifts. She dresses well and enjoys travel, but has been somewhat limited in her leisure time because of work and family obligations.  I first met Ruby at an autumn evening’s “English corner” session, open to students, staff, and town residents in Ya’an where my husband and I were spending the 2008-2009 academic year as foreign teachers at a local university. For much of the year, when she could get time off, Ruby practiced her English with us while she showed us around many of the tourist sites and natural areas closest to our university town.

Over the course of the years when I’ve traveled in China, living standards have improved tremendously.  The “three most wanteds” list that in the 1950’s included such basics as a bicycle, a radio, and leather shoes, more recently moved up to washing machine, mobile phone, television, computer, air conditioner, and even car for China’s burgeoning urban middle class.  The poverty rate throughout China, measured as those surviving on less than $1.25 per day,  decreased from 81% in 1981 to only a third as high, 27%, by 2012. In many urban areas, the rate is even lower. Still, there are pockets in the countryside that the new affluence seems largely to have passed by. Ruby’s hometown was one of these. It was inaccessible via major road. We never had a chance to see it during our year in Ya’an. Its isolation, we heard, reinforced the largely agrarian, hardscrabble existence of its inhabitants, who grew subsistence food crops plus fruit for regional markets.

After our teaching year was over, we kept up with Ruby intermittently by email.  On a later China visit, we reconnected. We were excited when she was able to arrange a weekend in the area where she’d grown up.  During Ruby’s childhood, settlements in Hanyuan County were mostly located in a fertile alluvial plain, tucked between successive ranges of the mountains of western Sichuan. Then came the double whammy of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake plus the impending relocation of all low-lying settlements to make way for an impoundment lake that would soon flood the valley, backed up behind a hydroelectric dam being built downstream.

By the time we got to Hanyuan, most low-lying areas were abandoned. A steep, raw new city was taking shape higher along the mountain slopes. We had a hot pot dinner at one of the few remaining lowland restaurants, then went to visit one of Ruby’s friends in her new apartment block in the new city.  Not many foreigners came to this part of the country, so we were a novelty.  On Sunday, before starting the long trek back to Ya’an, Ruby took us for a walk along one of the major streets. Locals came up to her and asked her who we were and why we were in Hanyuan—she replied that we were her friends, and that she’d brought us from Ya’an on a short visit to her hometown. We were headed back uphill to the apartment block where her friend lived when still another group of locals approached us from behind.  Three little girls, dressed in warm colorful jackets against the chill, were out walking with their grandfather. The grandfather checked with Ruby to see who we were, then explained in local dialect to his granddaughters. After a block or so, the eldest girl walked up to Jim and took hold of his hand. A little later, the two younger girls, emboldened by their cousin’s example, came up beside me and each took one of my hands. Ruby used her cell phone to snap a low-resolution picture of the group of us—two foreigners, several local adults, and three adventuresome young Chinese girls, enjoying the simple gift of a weekend walk together.

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Flickering Lights, Scary Stories, and Round Pumpkins

Posted on October 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

Flickering Lights, Scary Stories and Round Pumpkins: Halloweens in China

—by Jinny Batterson

Boo!  Holidays are one of the most potent vehicles for teaching about language and culture.  I spent two Halloweens teaching English and American culture in China, each in a different part of the country. In both places, students were intrigued by the customs surrounding this holiday of ancient Celtic origin. Many had seen some of the spooky movies that Hollywood typically churns out around Halloween. Some had heard of “trick or treating;” others had seen Internet images of lighted jack-o-lanterns.

To teach about Halloween, I boned up a bit myself—the original holiday, Samhain, celebrated the end of harvest and the start of winter in parts of Ireland and Scotland. The separation between the living and the dead was thought to be thinner at this time of year, so small gifts of food and wine were left on doorsteps in the evening to appease roaming spirits.  As Christianity spread in Europe, the holiday got a make-over with a Christian overlay—November 1 became “All Saints’ Day,” and the evening before, “All Hallows Eve,” became an excuse for various kinds of deviltry and trick-playing. The tradition of pumpkin carving arose from an Irish folk tale about a con man, “Stingy Jack,” whose bargain with the devil went sour. After death, Jack wound up roaming the earth as a spirit, his way lighted by a small hot coal carried inside a carved-out turnip (or “Jack’s lantern”). Irish immigrants brought the custom to America with them, abandoning turnips for larger, easier to carve local pumpkins.

In Xinjiang, where I first spent Halloween in China, I created a small evening Halloween celebration with students at our weekly “English corner,” chased indoors earlier that month because of rapidly chilling weather in this outpost not so far from Siberia. Several Chinese colleagues, also teachers of English, picked out spooky stories in simplified English to read to participants.  I crafted a scaled-down version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” as the final story of the night. A week or so earlier, a student had brought me two fairly decent pumpkins from one of the local markets.  We’d carved them into basic jack-o-lanterns to adorn the front of the meeting room. About ten minutes into the hour-long program, the celebration got spookier when the electricity suddenly went out. Power outages were not a rare occurrence in Xinjiang, but the timing of this particular outage was interesting.  We continued by the light of the jack-o-lanterns, a couple of candles, and students’ cell phone flashlights (becoming more common everywhere). Just as I finished “Telltale Heart,” the electricity came back on. I suspect I was not the only person on campus who checked behind doors, under the bed, and in closets before going to sleep that night.

Two years later, I approached Halloween in Ya’an, Sichuan, envisioning a group pumpkin carving bonanza. I thought pumpkins would be plentiful and easy to find in this rainier, more fruitful part of China.  However, my mid-October search of local vegetable markets failed to turn up a single pumpkin suitable for carving.  There were lots of tubular pumpkins in this province noted for its fiery cuisine and wealth of winter soups and stews. It turned out that the idea of growing a pumpkin for purely decorative purposes was almost sacrilege in this heavily populated area. Tubular pumpkins were thinner skinned and could easily be sliced, then sold in appropriate family-meal sized chunks. Local wisdom went that “everything in the pig got eaten except for the squeal.”  Likewise, pumpkins—skin, pulp, seeds and all—were meant for eating, not for making jack-o-lanterns.

Eventually I enlisted the help of my students in the round pumpkin search. A couple of days later, several of the young women returned triumphant with a large round pumpkin—the best one of only three in the whole town, they swore.  We carved it carefully, saving the seeds, later awarding it to the student who’d earned the highest score on their recent mid-term exam. Instead of using a wax candle for light, we opted for a cheap LED, which also put out light. More importantly,  it didn’t put soot or smoke into the pumpkin’s flesh. After a short interval as parts of dorm Halloween decor, this mutant “Westernized” pumpkin likely served its intended Chinese purpose: a nutritious part of someone’s November dinner.

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Better City, Better Life

Posted on October 20, 2014 | Leave a comment

Better City, Better Life   —by Jinny Batterson

“Better city, better life” was the theme and mantra of Expo 2010 Shanghai China, held from May 1 through October 31 of that year in one of China’s preeminent urban areas. This international exposition, the first since 1992, was extravagant in every way. My brief visit was a drop in the bucket of the 73,000,000 visitors to the fair, a record since attendance has been tracked. On a single day in October, 2010, over a million people passed through the Expo entrance turnstiles. During the three days in which I had a chance to visit, I barely scratched the surface of the 246 national and organizational pavilions that made up this biggest of all global expositions so far (both in land area and in number of exhibitors).

Most of the time I’ve spent in China, I’ve avoided large metropolitan areas, where crowding and pollution can be detrimental to both mental and physical health.  However, increasingly in China, and globally, humans live in cities. According to the most recent update from the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in 2014 about 54% of the world’s population lived in cities. This is a big change from the 34% of global population that inhabited cities as recently as 1960. Asia is one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions. The small-scale Chinese farmer plowing his rice paddy with a water buffalo is increasingly a thing of the past.

When America was industrializing in the early 20th century, a popular song of the time wondered about the preferences of U.S. World War I veterans returning from service in Europe:  “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree (Paris)?” The same can now be said for Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and numerous other Chinese metropolises. Especially for young men, the dislocations and changes in lifestyle that accompany moving to the city can be offset by increasing economic opportunities. Urbanization is happening much more quickly in modern China and India than it did in Europe and North America last century. Those of us with rural or small-town roots may bemoan the loss of the so-called bucolic lifestyle we imaginatively remember from long-ago childhoods. What we too easily forget is the amount of hard physical labor required to do small-scale farming, or the isolation that can stalk those whose nearest neighbors may be out of sight.

Both the content of Expo 2010 and the rapid transitions of Chinese and of global populations toward urban life highlight some of the opportunities and challenges that city life presents.  How do rural-to-urban migrants develop and adapt appropriate urban life skills? How do we maintain ties with neighbors when we have millions of them? How do we create transportation systems that are convenient but minimally polluting?  How do we provide safe and reliable supplies of food and water when much of the land surface is sparsely peopled, and close to 2/3 of all humans live in urban centers of 100,000 people or more?  How do we avoid pandemics? Are there keys to sustaining “megacities” (of over 10 million population)? Are there limits to the population size of a viable urban center?

No current city, not even Shanghai, is an ideal model.  Some of Shanghai’s features were hastily and temporarily improved for the period of the exposition—factories were shut down or moved, construction of new subway lines was expedited, neighborhoods at or near the Expo site were either demolished or spruced up. Since the end of Expo, the city has had at least one spell, in December 2013, in which particulate air pollution reached such dangerous levels that school children were cautioned to stay indoors.

A transition to cleaner energy and more climate-friendly living styles is a needed part of “better city better life,”  in Shanghai, and everywhere else.

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Fall Foliage–“Huyang” Trees

Posted on October 6, 2014 | Leave a comment

Fall Foliage—“Huyang” Trees    –by Jinny Batterson

Vermont has its maples, Colorado its aspens. The Taklamakan region has its “variegated leaf poplars,” known in Chinese as “huyang” trees.  These trees are desert-hardy, and have been spotted even deep within the Taklamakan.  Their leaves at different stages and on different parts of the tree can mimic poplar, willow, and even maple leaves. In the autumn, they turn a golden yellow, lighting up the area around them. Until I went to Xinjiang, I had never heard of these trees (also called “Euphrates poplars,” though not so often in sometimes ethnically tense Xinjiang).

Recently, the trees have become increasingly endangered, and I worry they may follow the trajectory of the American chestnut trees which once formed an important part of the deciduous forests of the eastern United States. During the early 20th century, nearly all American chestnuts succumbed to a fungal blight accidentally introduced from Asia—only a few isolated stands remain.  So far, no biological blight is affecting the variegated leaf poplars, but the incursion of more and more people into the areas where they’ve grown has put increasing pressure on these “trees of the desert.”  Some of the characteristics that make them most adapted to their geographical region—deep, extensive roots and slow-decaying wood—have also made them most susceptible to human invasion.  Their harvested wood is popular for building materials; their intrusive roots make them anathema to those constructing housing or irrigation projects near stands of the trees, whose roots over time will invade foundations and pipes.

The Chinese national television network, CCTV, in 2009 broadcast a 12 part series titled in English, “The Last Stand of the Euphrates Poplars.”  Shortly afterward, in 2010, the P.R.C. applied for UNESCO World Heritage status for parts of the Taklamakan/Tarim Basin region, including the Euphrates poplar’s extensive stands there as part of the justification for a designation:

“The Tarim Basin is the world’s core area of these poplar trees which cover 352,200 ha, accounting for 90% of their total area in China and 54.29% of the global distribution. The largest natural poplar trees in the world occur in the Tarim River drainage area and large areas of undisturbed poplar forests have been preserved in this region.”

The application is still under review.

As a town resident in the Tarim River oasis settlement at Ala’er, Xinjiang, I got few initial chances to see these poplars up close. That changed one autumn weekend when a work colleague arranged a group day trip out into the desert. We packed up a small van with tarps, water, and a picnic lunch, then set out from town.  We stopped first at a fairly high set of sand dunes, took some pictures, and took turns horsing around and rolling down the sides of the dunes. A large trash heap near the dunes only slightly marred the idyllic scene. (Why bother with landfills when the desert winds will sooner or later cover your trash for you?) Even here there were a few poplars, their roots burrowing deep under the dunes.

Next we stopped at a construction site where several tributaries that flow out of the surrounding mountains meet the Tarim River. Since it was autumn, flow from the glacier-fed tributaries was minimal or nonexistent, but there was a lot of piping and several dams—trying to capture as much of the water as possible. For our picnic site, we went downstream about a third of a mile to a large grove of poplars, golden and just starting to shed their leaves. There was a slight breeze, and the trees murmured in a way I associate with aspen groves in the American West.

It is possible that ancestors of the current trees developed as much as 65 million years ago. It is my hope that, despite our busy efforts to “conquer” the desert, these beautiful trees will continue to thrive where little else can for millions of years more.

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