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Notes from India: from "Flatnose: The Axis of Evil Tour"

Spa life in Rishikesh

"I'm in Rishikesh, Dad! They call it the 'yoga capital of India!,'" exclaimed the girl sitting next to me at our internet cafe.

Forty years after the Beatles came to this traditionally holy town on the Ganges for their famous studies with the Maharishi, Rishikesh is now a full-blown "spiritual tourism" center. Avoiding the cow dung and ignoring the begging of the town's many religious mendicants, one soon realizes that almost all the stores around Swarg Ashram and Laxan Jhula cater to foreigners. Even the ashrams, Hindu traditional communities, seem filled with backpackers as much as local pilgrims, who have been using the town as a staging point for pilgrimages to Hinduism's holiest sites just north in the Himalayan ranges.

Ayurvedic massage and reiki, rafting and trekking, yoga and meditation: the town's billboards are a backpacker's vision laid out, or as my guesthouse neighbor Mary aptly put it, a budget "spa life" getaway from the stresses of travel in India.

But like many of India's most popular tourist locations I've visited so far, it sometimes feels like I'm in Tel Aviv, not some sacred Indian site. Hebrew letters are pasted onto the keyboards and spoken by seemingly all the foreigners around us, Israeli food is served everywhere. Upon entering the backpacker-geared "Little Buddha" cafe in town--decked out tastefully with a thatch roof and mattresses with cushions as seating--my travel partner and I, who is also ethnically Chinese, were stared down icily by several tables of young Israeli female travelers, leaving us feeling like we were second rate in the unofficial "International Hierarchy of Backpackers." I asked an Israeli-Australian hiker at the base of a Sikh pilgrim's site, Hemkund Lake, whether there were some sacred locations or some historical connection between India and Judaism.

She shook her head. "Israelis just like India!"

As do all manner of New Age spiritual sorts. Dreadlocks are more common in shades of blonde than black, and coffee table conversation resounds with comparisons of yoga instructors, meditation bowl colors and general karmic togetherness. In bookstores, Osho's treatises on sex sell next to William Sutcliffe's "Are You Experienced?"

It turns out that finding inner peace in India is big business, propeling the ever-growing commercial industry built around assisting in our attainment of true enlightenment. Or at the very least, a three-day Keralan detox session. A local reiki teacher named Soma, who grew up in an ashram here and whom I'd befriended through Couchsurfing, lamented the changes at the same time as he lived off of them.

"Fifteen years ago, nobody charged for yoga. You would just go in and ask to do it, nobody would care. Now, everything costs money," he told me matter of factly.

"Western people took our yoga knowledge and sold it for $20 classes in their countries. Of course, you can't expect to come to India and not have to pay." He also told me of how, when studying reiki in Dharamsala, he would see numerous young Tibetan men to switch clothes, donning monk robes in order to impress Western girls, then sometimes going home with them: literally, as in moving to Europe on the strength of their new girlfriend's passport and eschewing monastic life. Earlier, I'd met one of his friends, a local yoga teacher who'd moved to France to teach there, along with his French girlfriend.

"But is it also common for local guys to do the same here?," I asked cautiously, hoping not to offend.

"Yes," he acknowled. "It's common here too."

Even in the ashrams, for decades centers of Hindu learning led by famous spiritual teachers, Western influence has waved its ugly wand. According to Soma, almost all of the leadership are in-fighting, following the deaths of many of the original gurus. I asked if they were fighting over interpretations of their gurus' teachings or other questions surrounding their faith.

"Only land and money," he answered. After a while we were silent. "Things were so different before," he said simply. We shook hands, and as I walked off to continue my comfortable "spa life" in the same hills where sadhus continue to live out ascetic lives of meditation, I wondered whether he thought Rishikesh was better or worse for my being there.

--

There is a dialogue that I have with locals here on a daily basis.

"Your country?," they ask, sometimes gently, sometimes more demandingly.

"Australia," I respond, occasionally throwing a list of famous Australian cricket players at them in order to convince them that I am, despite my appearance, Australian.

"But you look like…"—and then they pause—"Japanese!"

Increasingly, I meet other trans-national floaters such as myself from other countries. A Vietnamese Frenchman working in China, a German of Indian descent studying in Washington, a Korean Kazakh on her way to Liberia (she had the hardest jumble of ethnic-national-residency for me to process). So I can understand, especially in a place where we such folk are rare, how confusing it can be.

--

"Dinner with the Commissioner" - Jodhpur, Rajasthan

When Arvind, my Couchsurfing host in Jodhpur, a city of 1.2 million located in the western state of Rajasthan, found out that I was invited to dinner with the Kiran Soni Gupta, he was amazed. He'd seen her name mentioned in local newspapers. At the time, I had no idea that she was the District Commissioner of Jodhpur, maybe the equivalent to being mayor of a city. At the time, she was just an interesting profile on Couchsurfing, who sounded like she was involved in good work regarding women's empowerment and poverty relief.

At first, we weren't sure if he should come along to dinner. I offered to call, but he rejected the idea firmly. But after his brother-in-law, who worked with her, vouched for her character, he decided to come and meet her, planning to then excuse himself from dinner. Excitedly, we washed and changed into our best clothes, before riding out by motorcycle to her house.

"Commissioner's House, Regency Road," she had told me, when I asked how to get to her place. "Everybody knows it."

The guards opened the gate, revealing a lush, shaded residency, redolent of Indian civil service opulence. It was grand by Western standards, positively other-worldly compared to regular Indian housing. We were seated in the waiting room, filled with Kiran's own artwork, images of her with George Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, Amartya Sen and other notable figures in international poverty relief, and a collection of degrees and awards. One of Kiran's personal servants brought out two glasses of water. After taking them off of the platter, the servant stood there awkwardly, bent half over, motionless. His pose resembled that of a crooked flamingo, if flamingos held silver platters. It took us a moment to realize that he would wait in that very position until we returned the glasses to the platter.

We knew that the Commissioner herself was coming when another servant returned to place three cell phones on a sofa. He lined them up precisely; parallel to each other, with one separated from the other two, before leaving the room. Arvind and I looked at each other incredulously, and I fought back a grin at the absurd pomposity of their service. In an earlier time, they probably would have worn penguin suits and bow ties, but in this day and age they were more casually dressed in long-sleeved shirts and trousers.

Soon enough, Kiran herself arrived, along with her 11-year-old son, Vishnu. Despite our initial apprehension, we found her to be incredibly inviting, convincing Arvind to stay for dinner despite his polite protestations. Dinner was suitably immense, with over a dozen different dishes that varied from local Indian to Chinese to Western, from vegetable Manchurians (Indian-Chinese-style veggie meatballs) to penne pasta to daal and chapatti. Kiran was warm and genuine, happy to speak at length about her accomplishments but also asking—and actually considering—our own careers and concerns. Her school-age daughter and son sat with us most of the time, though her husband, District Commissioner of Jaipur, a neighboring city, was not around.

We discussed her decision to return back to India after completing her graduate program at Harvard, while most of her peers choose to take on better-paying jobs in America.

"There's no other job in which I know I can make such a difference in people's lives," she explained. Such a line, so clichéd in the hands of ordinary public servants, sounded so genuine coming from this radiant woman. She also talked of the difficulties involved in getting villagers in Rajasthan—regarded as socially backward by other Indians—to let their girls leave the village to carry on their education.

Remarkably, she hosts and meets Couchsurfers often, despite her busy schedule. Even when away on business, she makes an effort to have some of her servants show guests around town. And beyond us foreigners, she regularly hosts local citizens, such as my own host, Arvind, explaining that "her door is open to everyone." And while elected officials regularly make such claims, I got the feeling that Kiran actually meant it.

On the way home, Arvind was grinning from ear to ear.

"This is the first time I've seen someone from the government like that," he gushed, explaining that all his previous encounters with public servants have been negative.

They normally treat you as if you're below their "dignity," he said.

"If India had more people in government like Kiran, even just 10 percent, this country would be so much better," he gushed.

--

"Black Town/White Town" - Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu

Arriving in Pondicherry, a former French colonial possession on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, the heart of India's south, brought difficult questions to mind. It is split, historically, into "White Town" and "Black Town," where the French and the locals respectively stayed, and the schism remains stark today. What they now call the French district, is a charming seaside village of neat, elegantly maintained cathedrals, hotels and homes in delicate pastel hues, all built in an architectural style unmistakably French. Its quietude and beauty immediately felt a world away in the Tamil part, split off by Canal Street, which is as loud, crowded and dirty as any Indian town, where beggars constantly hound and a combination of open sewers and piles of rubbish combine to form a smell quite undesirably memorable.

To be in a town in India where you actually want to linger on the street, rather than get to where you're going as quickly as possible, is a rare treat. And so we lingered, taking pictures of glorious overgrown flowers and gliding in zig zag patterns through the French town on our rented bicycles.

But in talking to Judy, who is Chinese-Canadian, about why we enjoyed the French district so much, dark post-colonial thoughts of race and inferiority were difficult to stymie. Were we merely worshipping our former oppressors in preferring their tranquility, their fresh pain au chocolat, or their language, still spoken on its streets? If so, were we acknowledging in some way that French, and with it Western culture, is better than Indian culture? And so that colonialism was in part justified, that India was better under the British, that we yellow and brown people of the Orient are still only playing catch-up to the White man?!

Such a train of increasingly-extreme concerns pored forth, as we sat in the main park of the French town with local Tamils, in a suddenly uneasy leisure. Our multi-cultural Obama-era educations taught us that black is beautiful, and my Caucasian friends often downplay their ethnic heritage as "boring." Yet my time in China and India has exposed, through its white skin-bleaching beauty products and fair-skinned Bollywood and Hong Kong superstars, a distinctly colonial-aping worldview, where if White isn't necessarily superior, it's certainly looked upon with a chip-on-the-shoulder and an ever-present acknowledgement of greatness.

I was reminded of a time walking through Sichuan university, when Ai Yan, a local friend, pointed out the foreign (mostly Western exchange student) dorms, which are significantly better kept and equipped than the ones for Chinese. When I asked why foreigners necessarily got better accommodation, her response was simply:

"Of course they do. They're foreigners."

Later, Judy argued that this wasn't necessarily the case, and that it's a matter of what one is acculturated to like. That being products of Western upbringing, it was natural for us to find the French district and its European heritage more to our liking, though not necessarily superior to India. I wanted to agree with her, looking out across the rocky shore as a homeless woman slept beneath a bronze Gandhi statue. We travelers must constantly check our conclusions: genetics and race as inherent causes should not be tied to culture and history, in considering the differences between two countries. Surely, if anything, the post-colonial era has taught us that much.

But in traveling these stretches of East and South Asia, in observing the relationship between global trade, nationalism and racial identity, I feel like these complex questions of moral righteousness and economic power are easier to rationalize and deconstruct from the Ivory and Corporate Tower, than when living within, or merely passing through, its gross divisions in India.

What the Games mean to the Chinese: Some Local Opinions

Last Friday evening, having secured two tables at a 600 RMB (about $80) minimum charge, I settled in with a group of friends, both foreign and local, to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony. The whole city—nay, country was shut down as even the taxi drivers stopped on the riverside bar street to watch the theatre, projected on to outdoor screens.

“Just for one night, I will let myself be brainwashed by the propaganda,” Luxi, my tutor, who recently returned from a month backpacking in Laos, said jokingly.

Earlier in the week, when I asked my students to give an example illustrating the term “blanket marketing,” their response came immediately: “Olympics.” This entire year leading up to the event, throughout my travels in China, “Beijing 2008” has been utterly unavoidable. From storefronts to taxi radios, revolutionary monument gift shops and ethnic minority trinkets, the government’s messaging system has comprehensively penetrated every corner of the country.

At remote Qinghai Lake in China’s northwest, an area very much ethnically and culturally Tibetan, I was bemused to find a giant statue of Jingjing the panda, one of the five fuwu mascots, standing behind bronze statues of local women churning yak butter. In a Miao minority village in Guizhou, in the country’s southern interior close to Vietnam, old women in colorful costume shoved tacky trinkets of the five rings in front of me. North of Hong Kong in Guangzhou, I stumbled into a painting academy where the students’ work was being hung: all of their paintings of course, were Olympic-themed. And whilst riding a train back into Sichuan, the speakers play “Beijing Welcomes You,” the official theme song, in between C-pop ballads and hip-hop.

The Games have been described as many things by the media: as China’s “Coming Out Party,” as the setting for the resentful host nation to demonstrate its mettle by winning the highest medal count, as an example of the West’s toothless inability to stop continued oppression and mass human rights violations.

For many Chinese, the Games does indeed provide an opportunity to take pride in their collective accomplishment, in their overcoming the dramatic missteps of Mao’s past rule to now--so improbable a few decades ago--be considered a legitimate challenge to American hegemony. The Games are as much about earning the world’s respect—particularly that of the West—as it is a celebration of progress.

But others showed less concern. A guitarist friend named Xiao Di, who I’d been playing in a short-lived Beatles cover band with, could not have been more apathetic when I asked if he planned on watching the Games.

“I’m not interested in sports, so I have no reason to watch the Olympics. But if it were a band competition, then I’d definitely watch!”

Some of my local friends are eager to see China win the most gold medals. Whilst watching the U.S. roll over China in Sunday’s men’s basketball match, Aaron, an administrator at a local university, described it as a golden opportunity for China to display it’s ability before the world.

“It would be the first time that we beat America,” he noted.

Whilst changing money at a Bank of China branch—the only bank where changing currencies is authorized—I sat in the waiting area benches, where all eyes were fixed on the blurry television above us, watching the men’s synchronized diving. They watched the other competitor’s with mild interest, but everyone—even bank staff—stopped to cheer each time the Chinese pair (who ended up winning the gold) took to the boards. You could almost feel the weight of the nation’s eyes on these two young men, as they walked out to the edge, steeling themselves before they leapt.

Nobody feels the pressure, however more than Liu Xiang, who won the 110m hurdles gold in Athens and whom people are expecting to win again in Beijing. But my students said they feel more sympathy than expectation toward him.

“I’ll just feel sorry for him if he loses, because everyone expects him to win,” Jane said. “It’s not important if he doesn’t win.”

Her comments were a good example of the reasonableness and ambivalence of many ordinary Chinese in the face of the Olympics juggernaut—so promoted by states and companies here in China as outside. Where power politics and nationalism are the dominant roles that the Games tend to act out, there are many Chinese, like my student George, a troubleshooting engineer at Canon, who look beneath the hype, and view the Games simply as a chance to watch the greatest athletes in the world competing together.

Motherland/Homeland

If China is the motherland, Guangzhou is the homeland.

Or at least, that's how it felt upon initially arriving. The Cantonese, the grocery store goods, the tropical air and low tree-lined streets, the smell of durians wafting out of fruit stands…this is the China I know! The China of New York and Kuala Lumpur, of Paris and Sydney, the cuisine the whole world knows as Chinese. South China, including Guangdong, Fujian and nearby provinces, is the place which the majority of overseas Chinese (including this one) can trace their roots back to, and after spending ten months living in the locked-in southwestern interior of Sichuan, it feels refreshing to be once again in a place so outward-facing and global.

Where as the people in Chengdu look much like the ones I grew up knowing as "Chinese," they sounded completely different, both with their incomprehensible dialect and their thick local English accents. They ate dramatically different style cooking. Even their opera songs sounded foreign.

In Guangzhou, locals not only look, but sound, dine and sing the same way that I knew from family trips to Perth's Chinese grocery shops on weekends, or summer trips back home to Malaysia. And so walking around the city, known these days more for its go-getter capitalist drive than its exported diasporic culture, I felt like, for the first time since coming to China, I'd actually, truly "returned to the homeland." It actually felt like home, sensually, rather than merely abstractly, and I embraced the feeling. Having began the process of acculturation and learned to get by in Mandarin, I was able to savor the return more fully than had I just gotten off the place from New York.

I had previously written the city off in a way. Guangzhou, and nearby overnight-superstar Shenzhen, are China's export factory capitals, where cheap plastic goods and 90 percent of the disposable crap that fills up homes throughout the West originates. I had preconceptions of a city of mere commerce and hustle, of crooks and mobsters and squabbling for pieces of the pie. But it has revealed itself, of course, to be so much more. It's a large, top-tier city, with a first-rate subway, significantly larger and more diverse expat population and—most welcomingly—excellent food.

So with such rash biases thrown aside, I'm looking forward to plunging face first into the intoxicating aromas of home, here in Guangdong.

Income Disparities: Considering the Other in Guilt-conscious Tourism

For me, living and traveling in China is a constant reminder of the fact that its people are still largely poor and needy, and that at this stage in its economic rise, there are few, if any rules of etiquette when it comes to getting ahead.

As a traveler from the West, many locals find it difficult to understand why I would choose to leave a country like Australia or America in the first place, and why, if given the choice to go somewhere like England or France, I would choose to come to live, of all places, in China.

After the earthquake struck, those of us in Chengdu--so close to the epicenter yet so fortunately unharmed--felt idle in the face of so much suffering on our doorsteps. Not being picked to go out to one of the towns reduced to rubble in the initial rescue efforts, I made do with visiting some survivors brought in to Huaxi Hospital, supposedly Chengdu's finest.

I met an eight-year-old who has lost a leg and a sixteen year-old who was slowly losing sight in her left eye, her hand having been pressed against her eyeball for 72 hours by a concrete slab that had fallen on top of her. They had lost most of their classmates. Most wrenching however, was a pretty 22-year-old who had lost not only her legs, her friends and her family, but also her still-alive boyfriend, who, upon discovering what had happened to her, decided to break up.

When we talked, on the limited subjects that my Chinese permitted, she was courageously upbeat, given what she'd recently experienced. In their colorful, soft doll-filled hospital room with the two others, each with a personal helper—all volunteers, I learned—they had formed their own family of sorts. Martin, my English colleague who had allowed me to tag along, comes to see them each day, and during my stay they were frequently visited by well-wishers bearing gifts. It was both tragic and inspiring, and gave me some hope for times to come.

Naturally, when an opportunity to go entertain children at a refugee tent village arose with a local volunteer group, I jumped. And, at first, it actually felt rather magical. The kids were ecstatic upon our arrival—in no small part, though, due to the group's mostly Caucasian foreigner body. My group presented some of them with letters written in English by students from other nearby towns—assigned by their teachers in English class—and they wrote moving responses detailing their will to recover and achieve their goals. Parents and older refugees stood behind watching, broad smiles across their faces, grateful for our presence it seemed.

The following week, problems began to arise as the group's goal—to play with and entertain children for a few hours on Sunday—took a subtle, crucial twist. One volunteer, with all the good intentions of every foreign aid program that has exacerbated problems in Africa, took out the Pandora's box: a bag of sweets. The children immediately swamped her, arms outstretched, and she reacted by throwing the sweets into the quickly-gathering crowd, where they fought crazily, like children without access to candy.

Things got nastier the following week, when, upon arrival at the camp, the group attempted to hand out t-shirts it had purchased for each child. The line they originally created quickly devolved, and soon adults were involved, pushing and shoving for t-shirts. Instantly, curious "brothers" and "other children in the tent" were dreamed up, and some of the more entrepreneurial hoarders got away with perhaps ten or so shirts. For the rest of the day, the magic was not only lost, but a new mood had swept the crowd. When playing badminton, a man came up asking not to play, but simply for our rackets. When getting the pre-schoolers to draw pictures, adults came up asking me to procure shirts for them, and one boy kept asking for volunteers' watches. Relations had, as they so often do in China, been reduced to a matter of wealth. We had things that they didn't, and they realized now that they could get some of them from us, a proposition that for many seemed much more lucrative than our mere distracting their children for a few hours.

On the road, we visited Wulingyuan, a national park as great as the Grand Canyon, if not as famous, located in China's belly in Hunan province, home to Mao. It's sheer, towering karst-formed pillars of sandstone are the most dramatic I have ever seen; from a cable car to the top, it's a scene as dramatic and transcendent as a natural landscape has perhaps ever made me feel. But besides the brief moments of respite from the tour groups and hawkers, when we could appreciate our solitude and smallness in the face of such majesty, the trip was an extended hustle. Everybody, from the park authorities themselves, to the drivers, hotel staff, and service providers appear connected in a complex web of commission-based networks. All of them, from the second you stepped out of the park, were chasing your dollar. It might not have been as aggressive as some of the hawkers in Bali or Cambodia or other poor tourist destinations, but when you've paid an enormous park admission fee (245RMB), I quickly lost patience with having to constantly dole out extortionate prices on everything else.

We had decided to go rafting, one of the park's heavily marketed attractions, but upon seeing the site originally recommended to us, it's route unremarkable and its operator's shady, we decided to take a park official's suggestion. We paid 180 RMB for a supposedly two-hour raft trip about half an hour away. The journey ended up being closer to an hour and a half, and an hour's drive away. However, it was indeed, as beautiful as we'd hoped: idyllic, verdant countryside and sheer cliffs, eroded in intricate, diagonal lines, with only dragonflies and fish to bother us.

Traveling with two Canadians, we got onto the topic of national anthems, giving renditions of our own, before asking our raftsman if he'd mind singing us a bit of the Chinese one. A shabbily-dressed man, perhaps in his late-sixties, he declined. He had been silent for almost the entire trip, when he abruptly revealed his anger towards us.

"Tai shao le, tai shao le," he kept repeating, ("Too little") explaining that the rafting company wasn't paying him enough to make his job worthwhile. He was paid for each person he steered: three in our case, whereas normally he steered eight people at a time. His pay for each person? Four RMB, or about two percent of what we had paid the company.

It was, as with many times prior, another stark reminder of the realities of contemporary China. But floating along this stunningly tranquil river, having gotten as far away from the hustlers as we could, now juxtaposed against the simple sorrow of an elderly man toiling away for a pittance in the most dog-eat-dog capitalist society I've known felt particularly crushing.

Changing Money in China

I changed 2,000 RMB to US Dollars today at a Bank of China, the only bank I know that is authorized to convert money.

Outside the bank, a woman approached me soliciting money. At another chain, a security guard had offered to do the same for me when I realized I needed my passport in order to change money (Duh!, I know).

The whole transaction took about 45 minutes.

After waiting the 25 minutes or so for my number to be called, the teller sent me to another counter to fill out a form and copy my passport. They explained that the exchange rate was (August 2008) 6.8: lower than I’d expected. They had me wait another 5-10 minutes or so before sending me back over to the teller. Originally, they handed me another number slip, explaining: “Sorry but you have to line up again.”

Then—maybe after seeing my expression—the service woman said I could see if the teller would allow me to go ahead, avoiding the line. He was nice enough to do that, and after going through the paperwork and having another teller count the greenbacks, I had the net result: $290 USD finally in hand.

In Guangzhou, a trader acquaintance showed me an illegal money converter tucked into the back of a clothing store shop front. Skipping the bureaucracy, I would have gotten the money in a fraction of the time, though with greater risk of counterfeit dollars, or worse yet, getting in trouble with the state. Such are the risks that people take.

National outpouring and Earthquake curses

On Monday, May 19th, one week after the Sichuan earthquake struck, the first of three national days of mourning begun at 2:28 pm. I was at Chengdu’s Sports University, and stood behind a small assembly of university staff, lined up in rows, heads solemnly bowed, facing the Chinese flag atop one of the campus’ administrative buildings. As had been planned, emergency sirens, joined by car horns, filled the air in mournful chorus.

That evening, a large informal gathering took place at Tianfu Square, Chengdu’s answer to Tiananmen. As is common practice in Chinese urban centers, it is—as its name infers—a giant concrete square, headed by a statue of a waving Mao and dotted with fountains and large wire coil-shaped lights. From the outside, it looked like people had organized a giant vigil of sorts, with candlelights glowing both in hands and a number of gently ascending helium baskets. But upon entering the square, we could immediately see that the gathering was far less organized, and far more raucous.

Long chains of spontaneous marchers weaved through, filled mostly with students and young adults. Many were quite fashionably dressed in heels and colorful dresses; others wore more casual garb. They pumped their fists in the air as they chanted passionately, their voices heavy with emotion.

“Zhongguo Jiayou!” (“Go China!”) they chanted, followed by “Sichuan Chungsi!” (“Go Sichuan!” in Sichuanese).

Meanwhile, others set up small memorials of candle arrangements and flowers, on the ground and in existing flowerbeds. Wherever they were set up, a huge crowd of interested watchers surrounded the small vigil in concentric circles, digital cameras and phones snapping and filming away.

Perhaps most interesting were the wax clean-ups. I have never seen anyone scrape wax off of the floor—in a public square no less--as vigorously as these small half dozen-sized groups of citizens who took it upon themselves to clean off any candle wax left on the ground, from a memorial or otherwise. When asked why they were cleaning the floor, two young women replied: “Because we saw other people doing it.”

They used their hands, and often credit cards, to get beneath the wax, which was collected into small piles and quickly thrown out. This, in a country in which it is not uncommon to see children take dumps on the sidewalks (though sometimes newspaper is placed out beneath them first); where spitting is an unofficial national pastime. If this surge of national pride means less filthy streets, I think many will welcome such change. Somehow, though, one can’t help but feel that broader changes than street sanitation may result from all of this year’s events.


My group, finally managing to reunite due to limited cell phone service, decided a patio drink at one of the city’s riverside bars would be nice on this, a pleasant spring evening. It took a phone call to remind us that all bars were closed during the three days of mourning, and then a security guard at our apartment door later than evening, to inform us of the government’s (ill-founded) prediction of another major earthquake. In the ensuing pandemonium of traffic and blankets, we slept beneath a large One Child Policy statue.


Many Chinese see the earthquake as linked to a series of cursed events, often using numbers and local superstitions as proof. 2008 is seen by some as a cursed year, just as 1998, 1988 and 1978—the year of Mao’s death—were before it. From May 12th to August 8th—the start of the Olympic ceremony—are 88 days. The day of the earthquake, May 12th, as well as the Lhasa riots, April 13th, in sum total eight. When I asked my tutor why eight might be construed as cursed when it is also commonly linked to prosperity—the two words are similar sounding in Chinese—she wasn’t sure.

Even those ever-present, stuffed doll-ready Olympic mascots have been tied to the curse. Of the five, Jingjing the panda represents the earthquake, as pandas are found here in Sichuan. The Tibetan antelope mascot represents the recent Tibetan unrest, the kite mascot represents the city of Shandong, where a recent train crash occurred and the flame-red mascot represents recent tumult surrounding the torch relay. The only remaining mascot is Beibei, a sturgeon fish, linked alternatively to the Yangtze and to Beijing and the Games themselves.