Susan Blumberg-Kason » China

Once upon a time in Hong Kong

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:25:16 +0000

Since booking my trip to Hong Kong, I’ve been thinking about the places I hope to see in those four short days this April. But I’ve also been recalling my first year in Hong Kong when I moved there as a 19 year-old in the summer of 1990.

This photo was taken days after my arrival. Here I am standing at Lok Ma Chau with China looming in the background. I’d visited China in 1988, but it still felt like a world away even in Hong Kong.

Lok Ma Chau, 1990

A month into that first year, I learned about the Mid-Autumn Festival. It quickly became one of my favorite holidays. I kept this lantern on my desk until the cellophane melted from the sunlight that poured in through my dorm room window.

My first Mid-Autumn Festival, 1990

I moved to Hong Kong to study, so here I am in the Office of International Studies Programme. This was well before e-mail, texting, and cell phones, so all my communication with the outside world came through snail mail. I had a mail box in one of those slots to my left. My dad wrote to me weekly.

Hong Kong, 1991

My first residence in Hong Kong was the Adam Schall Hall, named after a 16th-17th century German Jesuit who spent 47 years in China.

In front of dorm at Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991

To earn some spending money, I taught English under the table. Every Saturday I trekked down to Taikoo Shing to teach a Japanese housewife and her two young children. Here I am at their flat playing a pinata-like game, but with a watermelon.

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I also volunteered at a Vietnamese refugee camp in Kowloon, where I taught English to adults. I had to pester International Social Services before they’d let me volunteer, but it was worth every phone call and written letter. The classes were housed in old British barracks that once held POWs during the Japanese occupation. That land is now littered with luxury high-rises.

With Do'an at the Argyle Street Detention Centre, 1991

This is the Hong Kong I knew and loved from back then. Three years later, I moved back for what I thought would be for good. As fate would have it, I only stayed for four more years. And soon I’ll be returning for the first time since I left in 1998.

Postcard from Hong Kong, 1991

I can’t wait to see Hong Kong as it is today.

Book of the week–Escape from Hong Kong

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:06:52 +0000

After much anticipation, I finally received and read Tim Luard‘s fabulous Escape from Hong Kong: Admiral Chan Chak’s Christmas Day Dash, 1941 (Hong Kong University Press, 2012).

And boy did it not disappoint.

This has to be one of the most exciting wartime escape stories–and probably the most underreported one.

To start, the cast of characters couldn’t be more fascinating. As the title states, it was Admiral Chan Chak who led the escape. But Chan wasn’t just another career military man.

He was stationed in Hong Kong and presided over the Chinese (Nationalist) Navy’s southern forces. Oh, and he only had one leg.

Chan’s aide-de-camp was the dashing, devout Christian, six-foot-three-inch Henry Hsu, born in southern China, trained at the famed Whampoa Military Academy, and educated in the law in Shanghai.

The British Navy agreed to help Chan, Henry Hsu, and Chan’s bodyguard escape Hong Kong as soon as the colony fell to the Japanese because the Admiral couldn’t be captured, what with all the classified information he possessed. Plus, he had excellent connections in southern China, even in the Japanese-occupied areas just north of Hong Kong, and could be of great help to the top British Navy personnel (which included a Canadian, a New Zealander, some Scots, and a Russian Jewish refugee by way of Shanghai)–and others who tagged along for the ride.

But the escape didn’t start off as planned. When a boat carrying the Admiral, Henry Hsu, his bodyguard, and Colonel SK Yee was attacked by the Japanese, the three men stripped to their underwear and jumped overboard while the non-swimmer Colonel Yee stayed on the boat–with Chan Chak’s wooden leg (and a couple hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars stuffed inside the leg).

After the trio met up with five British torpedo speed boats, they made their way north to Mirs Bay. In all, more than sixty men escaped together in this group. They walked and rode overland through occupied China, dodging Japanese patrols and wading through paddy fields, until they reached Free China–all guided by Admiral Chan and his guerilla devotees north of Hong Kong. Many of the escapees made their way to Chungking and some on to Burma, where they once again fled the Japanese.

For more about this harrowing tale, check out the Escape From Hong Kong blog at http://www.hongkongescape.org/.

Spring Festival in Tianjin

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:07:33 +0000

Former China Daily columnist Stuart Beaton is back guest blogging about his trip to his in-laws’ over Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival. Stu’s podcasts can be found at http://rastous.podomatic.com/. I have many a Chinese New Year memory at my former in-laws’, so this really hit home. I hope you enjoy his post as much as I do! Here’s Stu:

My wife is lucky in that she doesn’t have to travel far to visit her parents for Lunar New Year – we live and work less than an hour away from them by bus, the route of which pretty much runs door to door.

However, she only has five or six days off for Spring Festival each year, so we have to make the most of it. Last year we spent part of the time in Adelaide, and returned to spend the rest of it in China, but this year we just didn’t have the resources to make that a possibility (and breaking my Nan’s heart in the bargain, but that is a long tale best left untold).

So we set off bright and early for Ellen’s parents’ place on the 22^nd… well… Ellen was bright. I was already missing coffee, and yet I was still clutching my cup in the hope of a miracle. Ellen’s Dad drives a taxi on the mean streets of Tianjin for a living, so he collected us from our apartment, and dropped us at theirs, before heading back to work.

Immediately I was pressed into service putting up the decorations. Ellen’s Mum knows that I have an Arts background, but unfortunately she thinks that it’s in the Fine Arts, which should give me a wonderful eye for such things. I don’t think Art History is training in itself to hang things on walls, but maybe it helps.

With the paper cuts and Dragon motifs in position, I was told to get my Docs and jacket back on, as we were going to visit Ellen’s Godfather. A huge container of oil was stuck in my right hand, and a bag of just dead fish in the other, and we walked to some of the last remaining Hutongs in Tianjin.

These courtyard style homes have been systematically bulldozed in recent years around the city, despite their historical significance, and those remaining are on the outskirts of the city proper. Ellen’s Godfather’s family lives in a narrow, cobbled stone paved alley of Hutongs, kept meticulously clean by what seems like an army of broom wielding housewives, eager to see who is approaching and entering their neighbour’s homes.

Heating consisted of an old stove in the bedroom – which doubled as the living room, as it was the warmest in the house. When we visited last year, a chicken spent the whole time warming itself by the stove, resisting any effort to move it. I asked Ellen where the chicken was this time, and she just pointed to the pot on the stove…

After a while, we returned to Ellen’s parent’s apartment, to find that heating to the building had been shut off. It seems that someone had gotten too enthusiastic with their fireworks, and set them off in the middle of the day – underneath the main pipe carrying hot water to the radiator system. A crew turned up eight hours later to patch it, whilst we huddled under coats and blankets to keep warm.

At least the power wasn’t out, so we could still make dumplings – bao zi. I’m not a bad cook, and so I pounded up the dough for the dumpling wrappers, and then made the filling, while Ellen and her Mum happily nattered in front of the TV. Unfortunately I can’t roll the wrappers out fast enough, or crimp them properly, so they took over – wrapping and folding with practiced ease.

With Ellen’s Dad returning home, I was pressed into service to set up and light the rolls of firecrackers. This year I’d begged Ellen to ask her Mum not to spend a lot of money on them, as they’re just a wicked waste – they only go bang once, and you can always look out the window and see other people’s money going up in smoke!

We spent the next couple of days there, wandering about and saying hello to people, before returning to our apartment – and although the Spring Festival holiday is now officially over, the sound of fireworks is still filling the air.

Book of the week–Dream of Ding Village

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:22:03 +0000

With all the Great Leap Forward books I’ve been reading, I thought I’d take a break and try something contemporary. So last week I picked up Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (Grove Press, 2011), which has been listed as a finalist for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Several weeks ago I read and enjoyed Yan’s novel, Serve the People (Grove Press, 2008). What stood out in both these novels was Yan’s ability to depict love stories in times of crisis. Serve the People takes place during the Cultural Revolution while Dream of Ding Village is set in the present. But Dream could have been written about the Great Leap Forward. The story is a present day version of the helplessness from back then.

The narrator is Ding Qiang, a deceased 12 year old boy from rural Henan province. The boy dies after some villagers poison him to get back at his father, Ding Hui, an entrepreneur who made a fortune on the sale of his fellow villagers’ blood.

Not only does Ding Hui profit from the blood sales–which result in an HIV/AIDS epidemic–but he also intercepts the free coffins the government aims to provide villagers who die from AIDS, and sells them at a profit. Ding Hui finds yet another venture to profit off the dead. In the end, he’s risen in the government and is wealthier than anyone else in that area.

Ding Hui’s brother, simply named Uncle, contracts HIV in his thirties. His wife leaves him, so rather than suffering alone, he starts an affair with a young woman who also has HIV and is abandoned by her husband. But since Uncle and Lingling are still married to other people, the villagers frown upon their affair. They move in together and later marry. Uncle and Lingling’s relationship is my favorite part of the book.

As you can imagine, the residents of Ding Village don’t fare well. Grandpa, or Ding Shuiyang, is the hero of the story and quite a sympathetic character.

While reading Dream of Ding Village, I could picture the same scenario set some forty years earlier as cadres profited while peasants whittled away to nothing.

Yan Lianke’s books are by and large banned in China. This one is no exception.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:18:35 +0000

It’s now the day of Chinese New Year Eve across the Pacific. Families all over China are preparing for a big meal followed by the CCTV song-dance-skit variety show and a night of fireworks to last until daybreak.

Here in the calmer suburbs of Chicago, I’ve been reading to my kids about the Chinese New Year. A couple weeks ago I blogged about dragon books. Now here’s a short list of picture books about the Chinese New Year in general.

One of my favorites is Karen Katz’s My First Chinese New Year (Henry Holt, 2004). My kids love the red envelopes, the delicious Chinese banquet, and the Chinatown parade. I hope the weather holds out in Chicago so I can take them to our parade this year. If not, we’ll try again next year.

My two and four year olds love My Mom is a Dragon (ThingsAsian Press, 2005) by Tricia Morrissey. Each pages features an image of a Chinese cutout depicting one of the twelve animals in the Chinese zodiac. My kids have memorized which zodiac animal belongs to which family member–even great uncles and their great grandma! When we get to the ox and pig–their signs–they listen closely as I read their personality descriptions.

Another fun book is Hiss! Pop! Boom! Celebrating Chinese New Year (ThingsAsian Press, 2006), also by Tricia Morrissey. The beautiful Chinese brushstroke illustrations show goldfish, lion dancers, lucky red envelopes, lanterns, and more.

Finally, we can’t read enough of Happy Chinese New Year, Kai-lan (Simon Spotlight, 2009) by Lauryn Silverhardt. Kai-lan and her friends participate in the dragon dance and learn the value of teamwork. After the parade, they eat Yeye’s delicious dumplings. Yum!

Most of these books are recommended for kids five and up, but kids of all ages will enjoy them. Happy Reading and Happy New Year!

Letter from Tianjin: Chinese New Year, 2012

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:31:40 +0000

Stuart Beaton guest blogs here about the festivities and customs surrounding the Spring Festival in China. Stu also has his own site at http://rastous.podomatic.com/. I’m excited to share his latest post as we approach the start of the Year of the Dragon. Here’s Stu:

As I sit here, writing this, the still night outside is being rent by short, crackling bursts, punctuated by the loud “crump” of explosions. Rockets scream in arcs over buildings, and the smell of black powder is everywhere.

I am not crouched in a shellscrape in the Helmand Province, but at my desk in downtown Tianjin – currently doubling for early Eighties Beirut, it seems.

Spring Festival is here, not with a whimper, but with a bang – and there are many more to come. The official holiday starts on the 22^nd of January, but already the place feels like it’s on a break.

Local courier companies, much to my wife’s chagrin, ceased deliveries on the 10^th, and many online businesses have been forced to put up their virtual shutters until the holiday is over.

My wallet thanks them, too.

Spare a thought, however, for the millions of migrant workers who make up the vast majority of the urban construction crews that are building the “Miracle Economy”.

Most Chinese, rich or poor, want to travel to their hometowns, and spend the Festival with their parents and relatives. The usual method is to travel by the backbone of Chinese transport – the railways.

Unfortunately, this year saw the implementation of a new Internet based ticket reservation system, designed to streamline ticket sales, and reduce waiting times.

Which it hasn’t.

Migrant workers, by their very nature, are those least likely to have access to a computer, let alone the Internet. Unskilled, underpaid, and more often than not poorly educated, these workers are the ones that are now having the most difficulty getting home to their families.

This is also the season that construction crew bosses tend to abscond with suitcases packed with their workers’ wages, so you can see that it’s not going to be a very happy time for some people – stranded in terrible conditions, far from home.

It’s also a time of gifting and excess, when little red envelopes (Hong Bao) come into their own. Originally given by parents to children, Hong Bao are now the grease that oils almost all parts of Chinese society.

Can’t get a promotion on merit? Buy it with a bundle of used yuan. Your kid can’t get a place at a school? A nice wedge will get their bum on a seat. Facing an investigation for bribery? Buy your way out of it with a pretty red envelope.

This happens all the time, and it’s not even seen as the corruption as it is – it’s just another tradition… one that I am yet to take part in.

Another emerging trend is the “contract girlfriend” (or boyfriend).

No one wants to travel back home, and display their sad, lonely status (or display their “perverted” sexual orientation) – so why not hire a companion for the journey? For a carefully negotiated fee, which includes just how much “hand holding” will occur, you too can have a pretty partner to display to everyone you know.

After the holiday, you can simply tell all and sundry that you broke up with them… then hire someone else next year.

Finally, it’s the time to eat until you burst – and then eat some more. I’ve seen far too much food wasted here than I care to dwell on, and the image of half a dozen untouched roast duck being discarded will go with me to my grave.

But our house is decorated with paper seals on the windows and door, and red lanterns in the window, and we’ve planned to spend a few days at Ellen’s parents’ house…

Luckily it’s only a short bus ride away.

Xin nian kuai le, folks.

Once Upon a Time in Jiangsu Province

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:14:36 +0000

This Saturday I’m going to a Chinese New Year banquet, one I attend each year with friends from Hong Kong and China. Lots of good food and catching up, all in the comforts of my friends’ beautiful suburban home. The American Dream.

But that wasn’t always the case with Chinese New Year and me.

I can still feel the bone-chilling cold of the Lunar New Year, 1991, during my junior year in college. This photo was taken in the countryside about an hour from Nanjing. My Nanjing friends’ family didn’t own a toilet. Not even a squatter. We went outside for that.

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There’s nothing like a New Year’s fair. No Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse here.

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Back before people owned cars, streets looked like this. Usually there’d be bicycles, but during the New Year, it was more fashionable to stroll around the markets and visit friends and family en masse. Mr.Chen, my high school tour guide, is on the far right with his nephew. His wife is next to him with their daughter, and I’m standing near his brother and two sisters-in-law.

Video games? Who needs them (and who had them back in 1991?) when you have a yard to yourself and this new well. While the adults played cards and mahjong, I made sure the kids stayed out of the well. Scary.

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As I look toward the Year of the Dragon, I remember my friends in Nanjing and its outlaying cities and villages. Gongxi facai. Happy New Year!

A Café Cultural Revolution

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 04:54:36 +0000

Stuart Beaton’s latest guest blog hits home. I never became a coffee drinker precisely because of the huge Nescafe presence in China. When I needed to warm up, my choices in China were hot water, tea, or Nescafe. I quickly learned to become a tea drinker, although I was known to drink hot water in Hong Kong. Stuart has a great author interview site at http://rastous.podomatic.com/. Here’s his fabulous guest post about coffee in China. Enjoy!

My day here in Tianjin starts with a coffee – without exception. There could be rioting in the streets, the World might be coming to an end, but I will face it with a cup of coffee in me first.

Ellen has long since stopped wondering about the mechanics of this daily ritual – measuring the coffee into the cafetière, pouring in the no longer boiling water, stirring it and standing the pot, before plunging the grounds to the bottom. To her it’s just another one of those strange habits I have…

But she likes the coffee it produces.

Before she met me, Ellen had never drunk coffee. Tea is still the most popular drink (aside from hot water), and the streets are awash with it.

Coffee was viewed with distrust, as if the strange, foreign beverage would poison those who consumed it.

Mind you, I thought the same thing when I was first confronted with what passed for coffee in China.

Nestle were attempting to influence Chinese tastebuds by presenting coffee in an instant, easy to carry and consume form. They introduced sachets designed to be dumped into a cup or tea bottle, and have hot water added – coffee, whitener and sugar all pulverised into a fine powder.

The result tasted like coffee, if your only experience with coffee was to have it described to you by someone who’d once had a rather bad cup of lukewarm coffee tipped over their head. Utterly without charm or character, it is still haunting supermarket shelves as I type – luring unsuspecting potential coffee drinkers in, only to leave them never fancying anything to do with “coffee” ever again.

The only alternative to this “2+1” blend was to try and find a jar of “instant” coffee, which would crop up in Spring Festival gift sets. For Y300 (10% of my take home salary), I could get a 50 gram jar of Nescafe, flanked by two cups and saucers, in a presentation box.

At that price, I never weakened and bought one. I spent most of that year decaffeinated and dejected, wondering what was wrong with a country that had no cheese, coffee or even black tea to take the edge off.

When I moved to Tianjin, things began to improve. A bigger city meant more diversity, and so more places to shop around and try and find the things I had been missing. I also had a far bigger disposable income, so I didn’t mind paying a bit more for things to make me comfortable.

And yet coffee was still hard to get. Oh, I could buy small bags of beans at truly astronomical prices (at one point I was convinced that they had the price of coffee pegged to the price of gold), but without a grinder, let alone a press, they weren’t of much use to me. Instant coffee was the only choice, but at least it was now better blends.

Then Starbucks rolled onto the Chinese scene, and I was grateful.

Not because I was going and paying almost Y30 for a cup of coffee – I wasn’t even going through their doors – but because they made coffee an aspirational item. Other cafes opened, cheaper and less organised, who needed to buy beans and equipment at wholesale rates.

Having discovered “Kitchen Street”, I was able to access this market. When I run out of Mahalia #1 Blend (shipped from Robe, in South Australia), I can get cans of Illy coffee for Y80 – half the going price in the upmarket supermarkets.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that coffee is really that much more popular here. It’s not uncommon to see almost full cups of coffee abandoned outside Starbucks or Costa Coffee shops, when first time buyers discover that they don’t like coffee at all.

But these huge chains don’t care – they’re not really selling coffee.

They’re selling a dream.

Reading in the Year of the Dragon

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 02:39:47 +0000

In two and a half weeks, we’ll be leaving the Year of the Rabbit for the Year of the Dragon. And to usher in the new year and its mighty dragon, here’s a short list of dragon-inspired books for kids and adults.

One of my kids’ favorite new acquisitions is this fun picture book illustrated by Grace Lin.

The Seven Chinese Sisters (Albert Whitman and Co., 2003) by Kathy Tucker is a contemporary take on The Five Chinese Brothers from way back in 1938. When a big dragon sweeps down on the sisters’ home and swipes the baby sister, the other sisters work together to save her. It turns out the dragon is skinny and hungry, so the sixth sister–the chef of the family–promises a bowl of her noodle soup the next day.

My kids also love Christoph Niemann’s The Pet Dragon (Greenwillow Books, 2008).

The book tells the story of a girl named Lin who has a pet dragon. The illustrations incorporate one of a couple dozen Chinese characters.

How cool is that? My four year old can already recognize many of these characters.

One of my favorite memoirs is Linda Furiya‘s How to Cook a Dragon: Living, Loving, and Eating in China (Seal Press, 2009). Furiya moves to China to follow her boyfriend and learns to navigate Beijing and Shanghai as a Asian-American who doesn’t speak Chinese. She experiences ups and downs in her relationship, but finds her niche at a Chinese culinary academy. Each chapter ends with a delicious recipe.

If you like a little spice in your reading, check out Jeannie Lin‘s latest romance novel, The Dragon and the Pearl (Harlequin Historical, 2011). When Li Tao, the warlord from her first novel, Butterfly Swords (Harlequin Historical, 2010), kidnaps courtesan Ling Suyin, he finally meets his match.

Before Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See wrote a brilliant memoir of her Chinese family as well as a three-part mystery series starring Liu Hulan, a rising star in the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, and her husband, David Stark, an American lawyer. The last in this series is Dragon Bones (Random House, 2004), which takes place on the Yangzi River and its controversial Three Gorges Dam.

Of course, there’s also Swedish blockbuster, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which has already been turned into a film twice.

Do you have a favorite dragon book?

Book of the week–Hungry Ghosts

Susan Blumberg-Kason — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:29:24 +0000

One of the most remarkable things about the famine which occurred in China between 1958 and 1962 was that for over twenty years, no one was sure whether it had even taken place.

So begins Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (The Free Press, 1996), the first account of how 30 to 45 million–or more–perished in China during a time of peace and the absence of natural disasters.

How could 35-40 million die in three or four years?

Was it the call to melt down household metal like pots, pans, spoons, and knives in backyard furnaces so China could turn this scrap metal into steel and beat out the Soviet Union in its steel production? Or was it the policy to kill the four pests–sparrows, rats, flies, and mosquitoes–in which crops died as a result?

According to Becker these policies helped contribute to the problem, but the real culprits were the men in power. Mao was at the center, of course, but also leaders we’ve come to think of as reformers: Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai.

What’s ironic is that those who did speak out about the Great Leap Forward–Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi–were ultimately killed for their stance against Mao. Both died during the Cultural Revolution.

Hungry Ghosts isn’t an easy read for a number of reasons. The subject of course is completely depressing (probably not the best reading choice on New Year’s Eve), but it’s also structured in a way that lends to repetition.

What stuck out was the opening line of the book. I’d always assumed the Cultural Revolution was the greater of the crimes, but according to Becker, it was the Great Leap Forward hands down. This book was published in 1996, and up to that time people in China still weren’t talking about the Great Leap Forward. Literature didn’t mention it and movies didn’t cover it, unlike the Cultural Revolution.

Becker explains this silence. Peasants were the ones affected during the Great Leap Forward, while intellectuals and city folks were attacked in the Cultural Revolution. The peasants didn’t have a voice back then–and they still don’t.

And when the party in power back then is the party in power now, no one in Beijing is anxious to come forth with the real story.