So Long, Farewell, Goodbye, Amen

Well folks, that’s it.

We set up this blog to chronicle our adventures and misadventures in China and now that time has come to an end. After two years and over 900 blog posts, this is our last. I have set the timer so that this last entry will be posted at the same time that our plane takes off. By the time your read this, we should be in the air bound for The States.

Thanks to all our friends in Hong Kong who made the last two years so memorable. And thanks to all of you readers for tuning in on a regular basis.

Until we meet again,

Jack, Julie, Annika, and Elise

Identity

When I was younger, identity was a much simpler concept.

For example, I had a clear idea of what it meant to be German: spoke German, ate sauerkraut, grandfather used to wear lederhosen. But what about the Turkish immigrant who has lived in Germany for twenty years? What about his seven year old son who has spent his entire life in Germany and grew up speaking German?

What about the white farmer in Zimbabwe? How long does she have to live there before she gets to assert that she is in fact a Zimbabwean?

Or the how about Alberto Fujimori son of Japanese immigrants to Peru? At what point does he get to claim to be a Peruvian? Was it when he became President of Peru, or did he secure his Peruvian-ness at some point before that?

Like I said, concepts of identity where a lot simpler when I was young.

Shortly after arriving in Hong Kong, I remember asking somebody “So what do you call a person from Hong Kong, anyways? A Hong Kongan? a Hong Kongite?”

Well, it turns out the preferred term is Hong Kongers. That’s cool, I thought. I can work with that.

If I had been an American living in Beijing or Shenzhen or Fuling for two years, it would never presume to claim that I was now Chinese. But Hong Kong isn’t Beijing or Fuling. Despite her return to China in 1997, Hong Kong is not just another Chinese city or province. It is a Special Administrative Region with the operative word being special.

Hong has always been a mash-up of many things. From the day it was established as a British colony over 150 years ago it has been a blend of Chinese and Western influences. Many of the places in Hong Kong bear very English names: Chatham, Queensway, Aberdeen, Victoria. Many observers thought that after the handover, one of the first orders of business would be to start changing place names in an attempt to China-fy Hong Kong and scrub it of her colonial past. But that didn’t happen. There was no rush to shrug of names like Glouchester and Hennessey. Hong Kong knows who she is and that is a mix of East and West. No sense denying it. No sense trying to change it.

What’s more, the population in Hong Kong is very fluid. In an end-of-the-year goodbye note my principal started by writing “I have lived here long enough to know the drill.” He went on to say that people leaving Hong Kong was in inevitable part of life here. There does seem to be a constant stream of people settling down in Hong Kong and of people pulling up stakes and going to university in Toronto or taking a promotion with their employer in London or reverting back to a teaching job in Chicago.

As a result departing isn’t a barrier to being a member of this city. Rather, transience seems to be part of the definition of what a means to be a Hong Kong-er.

I spent my youth living in three different cities in Michigan. For the last twenty years I have lived in Chicago. But I can honestly say that I have never engaged and embraced a city the way that I engaged Hong Kong. Maybe it was because I traversed so much of it on foot. Maybe it was because I knew that our tenured here came with a deadline and I was committed to soaking up as much as this city had to offer.

Hong Kong wormed its way into my heart and has become a part of who I am. And I like to think that maybe in a small way, I impacted my little corner of Hong Kong through the students that I taught and the people I worked and lived with for two years.

So at what point does the young man from Turkey get to call himself German? I don’t know. I guess I will have to leave it up to him to decide.

But here is what I do know.

For two years I was –and I suspect that to some degree, I always will be- a Hong Konger.

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday part 2 of 2

-seeing young men who spent more time on their hair than their girlfriends did
-embarrassing my daughters on the MTR by making faces at little local kids
-having a backpack of one size or another strapped to my back almost every time I leave the house
-old dudes with multiple long hairs growing out of that one mole on their cheek
-seeing flowering bushes year round in this subtropical clime
-seeing young people wearing thick black frames with no glass in them simply as a fashion accessory
-living in –and having to clean- just 900 square feet
-bottled water advertising wars between Watsons and Cool
-getting pinged by Chinese cell phone carriers every time I take a hike in the mountains near the Chinese border
-old women doing early morning tai chi while wearing a clashing mix of brown checks and gray stripes

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday part 1 of 2

Some of the aspects of life in Hong Kong that I will miss once we leave:

-living without a car
-my multi-purpose Octopus card
-good cheap Indian food
-riding double-decker buses
-watching soccer highlight on the MTR
-living and working in the same building
-standing on the street corner in Tsim Sha Tsui in the evening and watching people of every nationality walk by under the electrifying neon lights
-being able to leave my house and twenty minutes later be hiking in the mountains
-old men playing Chinese chess in the not-quite-a-park area under the highway access ramp
-seeing six or seven old guys watching said game of chess with the intensity of world cup fans

A little adventure

In part, I wanted to live and work overseas for the sheer adventure of it all. It’s been quite a ride. In the last 24 months, I:

-ate eel, chicken feet, squid, pig’s ear, jelly fish, cow tongue, and yak
-speared shrimp in the waters off the coast of Sumatra
-slept on the roof of a wooden boat in Halong Bay in northern Viet Nam
-smuggled Bibles into China
-dined and slept in the home of a traditional Hmong family in the hills of Sapa
-rode elephants in Northern Thailand
-had -not one but two- very large boa constrictor draped around my neck
-walked through the slums of Manila
-motored through the Mekong Delta
-stood in a Chinese police line-up
-floated down a Thai river on a bamboo raft
-was nibbled by a rat as I slept while stranded in an Indonesian village
-hiked the terraced riced patties in the mountains of Northern Vietnam
-crawled through WWII bunkers built to repel the invading Japanese
-got hustled –not once, but twice- on the streets of Bangkok
-zip-lined through the jungle canopy of Southeast Asia
-saw orung utans up close and in the wild in Borneo
-watched the sun rise over an 800-year-old village in China
-rode sampans, cyclos, tuk-tuks, trams, cable cars, sleeper trains, overnight buses, and motorcycle sidecars
-climbed on and among the ancient ruins of Ankor Wat
-hiked the Great Wall of China
-bicycled atop the wall of an ancient Chinese city
-was stung by a sea urchin in the Gulf of Thailand

I would say that that is about enough adventure to keep me sated.

At least for a while.

Stepping Up

No doubt about it, I was agitating for an overseas experience. My wife and two daughters would have been perfectly content for us to stay on the trajectory we were on. But Dad had some half-baked ideas about pulling up stake and moving half way around the world. My wife and daughters were gracious enough to line up behind me and support this whole undertaking even when it wasn’t easy.

I remember vividly the first day of school last year. It was just six days after we arrived in Hong Kong. Because Annika’s entry-level Mandarin class conflicted with the math class she needed to be in, somehow in the midst of all the first-of-the-year start-up, she did not have a class schedule as the school day began.

Thirty-five minutes into the school day, I found her wandering around looking absolutely shell-shocked. I could tell that she was barely holding it together. I had a room full of students waiting for their teacher, but I decided at that moment that Daddy trumped Teacher. Annika and I found a sofa, sat down, and I put my arm around her. I don’t know who was closer to being in tears -her or me. I thought to myself, My God, what have I done? What have I done to my family? I have to be honest, if somebody knocked on our door that night during dinner with four one-way tickets back to Chicago, I think that we would have jumped at them.

But oh, what a difference a couple of years make. We not only survived a tough transition, but my family thrived. I asked a lot of them and they stepped up in big and small ways. This experience has stretched us all in ways that we could never have imagined when we climbed aboard that United Airline flight two years ago.

Elise was just nine when we left, now she will be entering middle school when we return. Annika was a thirteen-year-old kid who had just finished seventh grade. When we get back she will be sixth months from getting her driver’s license.

I asked a lot of my family. I turned their world upside down. We changed cities, continents, jobs. We had to meet all new people. The girls went from home-schooling to having school five days a week in an insanely academically rigorous environment. But they stepped up in big and small ways.

Before we left, somebody in Chicago said that this experience would forever change my girls; that they would come back different people than when we left.

I know for a fact that this is true. Their horizons have been broadened. They have been given a taste of what it is like to be part of an international community. And they know that when God leads, it is possible to do really bold, really big things in life.

God used me to ask a lot of family and they stepped up in big and small ways.

Thy Will Be Done . . . (whatever that might be)

I tend to push a little hard for things that I want to see happen. Oh let’s see if I can come up with a recent example . . . I guess living and working overseas would be one example that comes to mind.

One night at the dinner table when it was looking as if this move to China might actually happen, Julie opened the meal in prayer. At the very end, she prayed, “. . . and may Your will be done. Not Jack’s. Amen.”

Fair enough.

We all snickered, but there was a lot of truth in her last-second addendum.

My wife is a pretty wise woman. Once in a while when I am not too busy focusing on myself, I find it beneficial to look at the situation at hand from her perspective.

From my vantage point, the process all too often looks like this: God, I want to live abroad. I am even willing to uproot my family and drag them away from family and friends in order to do so. I am willing to work really hard and take some big risks to make it happen. God, I would really appreciate it if you would be gracious enough to step aside and allowed me to do my thing.

In general, I struggle in life knowing where the balance is between embracing the fact that God wants to satisfy the deepest longings of my heart and knowing when I am just being selfish and destructive to the people I love. God calls me to offer up my desires as a living sacrifice, but I know that God also calls us to do big things. I struggle trying to know where God’s will ends and my ego begins.

From Julie’s perspective it goes a lot more like this: God, I am not in control. I never have been. God, I am confident, that in your wisdom, you will put us exactly where you want us and you will get us there in your own way. You are so amazing, that you can even use the misguided, myopic impulses of a knucklehead like my husband to keep our family in the center of your will.

I guess I should take my cues from my wife. As I bumble my way through life, this has become my prayer. God, I am idiot. On that we all agree. But I really want to be exactly where you want me to be. You have created in me longings and desires. I am just going to go ahead and pursue those and if it’s not what you want, please, please, please close doors as necessary. And feel free to use my wife to slap me upside the back of the head when I need to have some sense knocked into me. She’s pretty good at it.

I find peace in knowing that God can use even a knucklehead like me to achieve his ends.

It’s been a great two years filled with adventure, friendship, challenges, and growth. As much as I pushed and conspired to make these last two years happen, I realize that they happened in spite of me, not because of me.

Deferral

Langston Hughes asked:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-- And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Twenty years ago, straight out of college, I took a job teaching conversational English in Japan for a year. If you had told me when I returned home that it would be twenty years before I would leave North America again, I would have been surprised and disappointed. After living in and exploring a far corner of the globe, I was ready for more. I had decided that this was who I was. But then life happened: marriage, first real teaching job, car payments, home, mortgage, church commitments, photography career, credit card payments.

By all measures, I had every reason to be content with my life. Wonderful wife, great kids, good health, good job. In fact, I loved my teaching job in Chicago. But sixteen years is an awfully long time to teach eleven-year-olds how to divide fractions by flipping the second fraction and multiplying top times top, bottom times bottom. Professionally, I felt I was starting to plateau. I was getting antsy and suffering from a large-scale case of cabin fever. I felt that it was time to mix it up and take on some new challenges. I was looking for some dragons to slay.

In the fall of 2008, I started snooping around the internet to see what overseas teaching opportunities were out there. Then, in about October I started to get more systematic in my efforts. I started sending out resumes and cover letters. When I started to hear back from a couple of the schools expressing interested, I let my wife know what I was up to.

On Thursday, December 18, during my lunch hour I sent out my 65^th cover letter and resume to International Christian School in Hong Kong. At 7:00 that night I got a call from Donna in human resources. We talked for an hour. That was followed a week later with a two-hour phone interview with the principal. Julie and I were offered a middle school teaching position and a part-time nursing position.

I was moving my family to China for the next two years.

A few months before our departure, I stopped by to see David –a friend of mine from church- at his office. He introduced me to one of his clients who was on the way out the door. David explained that my wife and I were going to the mission field to serve in China for two years. This wasn’t the first time I had heard one of my more earnest church friends put this spin on our imminent departure. I understood the inclination since we were going to work in a Christian school, but his depiction still made me uncomfortable. It ascribed to me motives that were all-together too selfless.

When people in The States or in Hong Kong asked me why my wife and I why were moving our family half way around the world, I found it easiest to explain that we wanted to give our daughters a long-term international experience. Which was true –in part.

The truth was, I was trying to satiate my incurable wanderlust.

Was it fair or reasonable for a guy who had been blessed with so much to ask for even more out of life? There was a definite undercurrent of self-indulgence to the whole endeavor. But how do I begin to explain that to a friend who is trying to ascribe to me noble intentions or to an acquaintance who thinks that I am willing to make tremendous sacrifices for my daughters’ betterment?

Better to just let them think that I am more selfless than I really am.

The D.T.s and Shifting Gears

I’ve got the detox jitters. I am going through a serious case of withdrawal. After spending my weekends viewing the world through the lens of my camera during my twenty-year career as a wedding and portrait photographer, I traded in my professional gear for a mid-range point and shoot. I took over 30,000 during my two years in Hong Kong. Then my camera was stolen on an overnight bus in China. I survived the remainder of our China trip by commandeering my daughter Annika’s little $60 camera. Now that she has taken that camera back to The States with her, I have found myself without a camera. After averaging 1,500 pictures a week for two years, I have now gone three weeks without taking a single picture. My finger sometimes twitches.

But old habits die hard. Everywhere I go, I keep framing pictures in my head. Mentally, I continue to take pictures.

My wife keeps asking me if I want to squeeze in this or that Hong Kong attraction. I keep turning her down. What’s the point of going to see something, if you can’t take any pictures to chronicle the experience?

*******

When we first game to Hong Kong, I think the excitement and adrenaline of living in a new city shifted us into overdrive. When I look back at all that we did those first two months –weekend at Cheung Chau Island, climbing Sunset peak, visiting Kadoorie Farms- it’s a little insane. Eventually, we realized that we couldn’t maintain that manic pace and settled into a more realistic rhythm.

Knowing that once this school year ended and we returned from our recent foray to the Mainland that we would only have one final month in Hong Kong, I fully expected to find myself shifting into high gear in a panicked attempt to soak up every last bit of all that Hong Kong has to offer.

But much to my surprise that hasn’t happened. I have been pretty laconic as our final days in Hong Kong wind down.

Maybe it’s the fact that teaching kindergartener and first graders in summer school leaves me absolutely exhausted by 1:00 when they go home. Maybe it’s that I am enjoying the slower pace of life now that our girls are back in The States and it's just Julie and me.

Maybe its that I have no camera –so what’s the point anyways, right?

The Tail that Wags the Dog part 2 of 2

The Old Guard that currently runs the country will one day be replaced by a new generation of leadership that did not come to power in the shadow of Mao’s legacy. A new generation is coming down the line that has managed work-arounds to get past China’s notorious Great Fire Wall that limits access to the internet and they’ve seen the movie “To Live.” They have a much fuller pictures of where China has been and what alternative futures could look like.

The big fear at the time of the handover was that Hong Kong was going to be absorbed into and become indistinguishable from the rest of China. But fourteen years into the fifty-year grace period, Hong Kong is holding steady. It is China that is changing. It’s not necessarily that Hong Kong with her seven million people exerts undue influence on the rest of China with its 1.3 billion. Rather, as China seeks to become a more fully integrated member of the world community, its people will start to demand some of the same freedoms and rights that so many of their compatriots form around the world –including in Hong Kong- have been enjoying for years.

Thomas Jefferson observed that the natural order of things is for the State to encroach and for individual liberty to recede. While Jefferson was right, it is also true that humans have never stood by idly and let nature have it way. We fight back against the forces of nature. It is why the people of China built an enormous damn to control the raging floodwaters of the Yangtze. It is how the people of Hong Kong have carved out for themselves a secure and prosperous future from an oversized rock with few natural resources in the South China Sea.

An argument can be made that the ninetieth century belonged to the British, the twentieth century to The United State, and that the Twenty-first century will belong to China. In the least, with her sustained eight-percent annual growth, China will play an increased role in the world. How big of a role is yet to be determined. More importantly, it is yet to be determined what exactly this new, more prominent China will look like.

China has learned from the missteps in the 1960 and 70s that grew out of it experiments with a command-and-control economy. It has started to liberalize it markets. So far, so good. Now we can only hope that Beijing sees the benefits and rightness of bringing the same liberalization to the personal lives of its people.

My prediction? Free minds are an inevitable companion to free markets. Liberty will prevail.

When the handover happened in 1997, the question that lingering in the air on that rainy July day was “Who will change who?” Where on the field of history will these two divergent societies converge?

Thirty-six years from now, when the handover is complete, China in 2047 –with its greater prosperity and inevitable gains in personal freedoms- will resemble Hong Kong at the time of the hand-over more than Hong Kong of 2047 will resemble the China of 1997.

The Tail that Wags the Dog part 1 of 2

After 150 years of holding it as a colony, Great Britain handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese with great fanfare on July 1, 1997. Hong Kong’s laissez fair capitalism and China’s command-and-control economy could not have been more different. As part of the handover agreement Beijing promised that they would leave Hong Kong the way it was for the next 50 years. “One country, two systems.” Hong Kong was to be a Special Administrative Region and would retain a large degree of autonomy.

The skeptics were dubious, at best. But happily –and somewhat surprisingly- that is exactly what has happened. For the last fourteen years, things have been merrily chugging along.

Which for Hong Kong means they have been busying doing what they do best: living their lives and growing prosperous.

For the Chinese, it means that they have been steadily trying to implement Capitalism with Chinese characteristics. It’s an interesting experiment.

It has always been my contention that economic freedom and individual freedom go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. At least, that's my belief. China -of course- is doing its darnedest to prove me wrong. For the last twenty years, Beijing has been liberalizing markets while simultaneously maintaining an iron grip on the hearts and minds of its people.

This Spring, a handful of would-be Chinese dissidents tried to bring the Middle Eastern/North African Jasmine Revolution to China. It lasted all of about seven minutes. This past weekend, a Beijing minister and members of his congregation were once again arrested when they tried to worship in a park. They are without a church building because the Communist government put extreme pressure on the landlord to not renew their lease. While China may be liberalizing markets, the rest of Chinese society remains quite illiberal.

But personal freedoms will find their way to China. It’s inevitable. As goods and people move back and forth across borders, they have a pesky little habit of bringing ideas along with them. And ideas have power. As a trip over the border to Shenzhen on any random Tuesday morning will confirm, the border between Hong Kong and China is incredibly fluid and porous. Goods, people –and yes, ideas- move back and forth freely between Hong Kong and China.

The quest for individual freedom is too universal and too powerful. The desire to speak and read and publish as you see fit, the human instinct to assemble with other like-minded people, the thirst to worship –or not worship- as one sees fit are all too fundamentally human to be repressed indefinitely.a

Mao & Me

History's Palate Cleanser part 3 of 3

All that Mao memorabilia? I think that short of an outside force coming in and completely vanquishing a regime and it leader, the people of a nation are never going to fully turn their back on the founder of their modern nation-state no matter how mixed his legacy may be. Perhaps, we’ll just have to chalk that up to “Yes, he was a dictator, but at least he was our dictator.”

And my portrait with Mao? After three days, the city of Lijiang wore down my resolve. I had my picture taken with Mao Zedong –well at least his wax likeness. But just for the record, I was pointing out to him a particularly heart-wrenching passage from “Wild Swans,” waging my finger, and asking him to give account for his actions.

Later, as I examined the picture, I noticed that waxy Mao was freakishly large. The sculptors had made him ever so slightly bigger than life-size. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The currently regime in Beijing has a vested interested in making sure that Mao Zedong looms large in the minds of the people. After all, they are direct beneficiaries of Mao’s legacy. Continued veneration of Mao helps to solidify their hold on power.

Mao Zedong: bigger than life. Literally.

History's Palate Cleanser part 2 of 3

As my family and I traveled through China, I read two autobiographies each by Chinese women. The first, “Wild Swans” chronicles the life of three generations of Chinese women from the 1920 to the 1970s. The author’s parents were high-ranking officials in the Communist Party but that didn’t prevent them from being denounced and purged as “capitalist roaders” when they fell out of political favor. In her youth, the author was a member of the infamous Red Guard –a nation-wide mob of idealistic youth who Mao manipulated and leveraged to shore up his faltering popularity. (Wild Swans is illegal in China and I felt a little subversive carrying around my English-language copy.)

The second book, the ironically-titled “Socialism is Great!” is set in the 1980s and tells of the author’s coming of age and her growing disillusionment with the Regime in the years when China was just starting to emerge from its dark years of self-imposed isolation.

Both books chronicle not only the tragic consequences of communism on a national scale, but on the personal level as well. As the nation blindly followed communist ideology and Mao Zedong’s collectivist policies, the economy was devastated. Families were debased. Neighbor turned on neighbor, student on teacher.

During the decades when so many nations from Africa. South America, and Asia were embracing communism, alternatives existed. These nations could have followed any of the numerous examples from around the world and built their societies on free markets, the rule of law, and individual property rights. But they chose a different path for themselves. Eventually they found that communism is not only an ineffective way to organize a society, but it actually makes life worse for the people it claims to help. As a result, almost all of these nations have abandoned communism. Even China is undergoing rapid market reforms. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Deng Xiaoping put China on the path –albeit a slow and highly controlled path- away from communism and toward markets and private profit. If China continues on the trajectory she is on, within a generation or two she will be communist in name only.

It just seems so tragic that so much of the world’s population had to suffer through years of communist oppression before realizing the hollowness of its rhetoric and the emptiness of its promises. If only history had unfolded differently, it wouldn’t have been necessary for so many to have toiled and suffered at the hands of dictators who used sheer force to impose their vision and will on the people.

I struggle with this. Why couldn’t they have seen then what they see now? The lost years and the lost lives seem like such as waste. These countries have ended up in a place where they could have been decades ago. Seeing all those Mao ashtrays and lighters in the Night Market certainly doesn't help ease my frustration.

But, as people in the twentieth century tried to overcome colonialism, poverty, and feudalism, I guess the rhetoric and promises of communists were just too appealing to avoid.

Perhaps that’s it.

Maybe that's the role that communism plays in human history. Communism was never a sustainable system to organize ourselves; but maybe the radical revolutionary rhetoric and the utopian promises of communism were what was needed for some societies to rise up and throw off their past.

There is no love lost between me and communism. It is a failed ideology that increases human suffering. But maybe –just maybe- communism has played a role in moving nations from where they were to where they need to be. Maybe Marx got it backwards. The natural progress is not for nations to go from pre-industrialized to industrialized to communist as he predicted. But instead, the natural progression –for some nations- is to go from feudalism, poverty, and colonialism to communisms to market-based economies rooted in individual rights and private property.

Taking this perspective, it is possible to think of communism as a cosmic solvent that washed away so many of the antiquated structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just as leaders such as Nehru, Ho Chi Mihn, and Lumumba were great at rallying the masses to revolution but were not effective at administering once they were in charge; so it is with communism. Communism didn’t offer a better alternative to what came before, but it cleared the slate. It is not a good way to govern, but it sure has great rhetoric if you are trying to foment revolution and make a break with the past.

Perhaps communism is history’s great palate cleanser.

If that’s the case, it still seems tragic and avoidable, but I guess I can wrap my brain around that. As we wait for the last remnants of communism to be shrugged off and to fade away, I think I can make my fragile peace with communism and the role it has played in world history.

History's Palate Cleanser part 1 of 3

I stood in the doorway conflicted. The history buff in me with his weak spot for kitsch was doing battle with my better judgment. To my wife’s credit, she was doing her best to protect me from myself. It was our first evening in the old town of Lijiang and we had stumbled upon a photo studio. For a dollar a person could have his or her picture taken with a life-size wax figure of Mao Zedong. The wall behind the cashier’s counter was lined with 8x10 photos of groups of smiling friends, families, and couples all cheerfully gathering around The Great Helmsman.

Whether I’ve seen it Hong Kong or in the Mainland, I continue to be taken aback by the amount to Mao Zedong, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution memorabilia that’s for sale. There must be a fairly robust demand for it based on the sheer volume that‘s available. Pins, posters, figurines, Mao’s little red book, t-shirts with the benevolent visage of The Chairman beaming down upon the masses. In Berlin the wall may have come down over twenty years ago, but here in China, echoes of Mao’s cult of personality still resonate.

Given communism’s track record, I stood by a little perplexed shortly after we move here while Hong Kong –who purports to still be fairly independent from Beijing- pulled out all the stops to celebrate the 60th anniversary of birth of communist China.

In the 1840s, Karl Marx, the German philosopher and father of modern communism, predicted that communism would take hold in the industrialized nations of the world such as England and Germany. As with so many other things, Marx got it wrong. Instead, communism took hold in pre-industrialized, feudal nations (such as Russia) and in impoverished and colonialized nations (such as Vietnam).

The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history primarily because governments –predominantly communist governments- turned guns on their own people. Fascists in Germany exterminated six million people, but Stalin in communist Russia was responsible for the death of 10 million of his countrymen. Mao Zedong was responsible for the death of 20 million of his people - in just one year.

But for some reason, communism doesn’t seem to draw down upon itself the same type of unequivocal condemnation that other failed, brutal ideologies do. In Germany, not only is memorabilia from their dark, mid-century past not collected as kitsch, it is actually illegal to do so. Yet, five train stops from our apartment, I could go to the Mong Kok market tonight and buy a Che Guevara shower curtain or a Mao Zedong mouse pad.

Don't Look Back

Julie and I are sticking around until the first of August in order to teach summer school. But on July 9, we put the girls on a plane for Chicago so they could re-connect with friends and start to get acclimated to life back in The States. Since they were traveling as unaccompanied minors, we had to pay Continental a little extra so they would have and escort at either end of their journey.

Continental's Hong Kong escort met us at the ticket counter and we walked together to security. Julie and I with no boarding passes, were not allowed any further. Annika, Elise and the escort were fast-tracked through security. We could just see their heads through the crowds. They had to stop on the far side of securty as the escort took care of some business in a side office. Just before they sat down to wait, both girls turned to give us a little wave and thumbs up. We could just barely catch glimpses of them as they sat on the chairs outside the office.

The escort emerged and the girls were moving again pulling their rolling carry-on suitcases behind them.

Julie whispered under her breath “Turn around, turn around. One more time . . . ”

I whispered under my breath “Don’t turn around, keep walking. You’re fine . . . ”

The girls disappeared around the corner without looking back.

“Awe, they didn’t turn around.”

“Yes! Well done girls.”

I took Julie’s hand as we went to go get some coffee and wait until their flight was in the air.

Sticking it to the Man

Our flight out of Beijing had a layover in the coastal city of Wanzhou. As we went through security, I was once again pulled aside and brought to the security desk where the security guard handed me over to his supervisor. He placed my Chinese farmer’s bamboo shoulder stick on the counter. The supervisor picked it up, smiled, and shook her head. I started to protest, but realized my efforts were futile. My bamboo shoulder stick had made it all the way from Dali to Lijiang to Xi’an to Beijing. We had hauled it all over China. My daughters had taken turns lugging it from one city to the next. And now it had been confiscated on the very last leg of our journey. I guess my future students will not be carrying buckets of sand from one side of the room to the other. The loss of my bamboo stick put me in depressive funk for the for the first hour of our flight home.

Lost cameras and bamboo shoulder sticks aside, it had been a fabulous journey across the expanse of China. With seventeen days we had barely scratched the surface of the world’s biggest country and her 1.3 billion people and her 3,000 years of uninterrupted history. But we had gotten to see China past and present from the south to the north. We had been able to clomped through her mountains and felt her rivers pulsating in our chests; we had wandered the countryside, ambled through villages, and immersed ourselves in the hustle and bustle of her cities. And we had met some amazing people along the way and managed to learn just a little bit of their stories and where they had been and where they were going.

It made us hungry for more. Seventeen days had only served to whet our appetite. But, alas life in Hong Kong –and beyond that, life in back in the States- was beckoning.

We arrived back in Hong Kong where we no longer had a home. Staff housing was now being prepped for all the new staff that would be arriving in a few short weeks. As we settled down into our seat on the upper level of the A-41 bus from the airport, Julie rummaged around in the bottom of her purse for the keys to the apartment where we would be flopping while our friend was back in New Zealand for the summer. We were going to spend our last five weeks in Hong Kong once again living out of a suitcase.

Beijing assorted pictures

An Olympian Effort part 2 of 2

After spending the better part of the day fighting the crowds at the waterpark, we showered up, exited the Water Cube, and set out on foot in search of some dinner. We had come into the Olympic Plaza from the south so we decided to continued north through the plaza. It was huge. It was a hundred meters wide and a kilometer or more long. It was one broad, empty plaza.

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the powers that be bulldozed large swatches of Beijing including dozens of hutongs –or traditional neighborhoods made up of courtyard houses. I’m sure that in order to hold the number of visitors they expected for the Olympics it made sense to create such a massively large plaza, but three years out, that decision was starting to look a little dubious.

A few early evening revelers wandered about, an old man had a string of a sixty miniature kits high in the air, two young men sang and played guitar into a portable amp and had a dozen peopled gathered around them. But for the most part, it was a large paver-lined desert in the middle of the city.

I am sure that Beijing is probably looking at this plaza as a giant blank slate upon which they can continue to recast Beijing according to their vision.

Sadly, former host cities around the world are littered with the decaying, underused carcasses of expensive infrastructure that promised to be a catalyst to future development. Beijing –as successful as her Olympics were- does not seem to be the exception. We wandered until we found signs for a mall on the plaza. It was an subterranean mall consisting of a McDonalds , a movie theater and a lot of empty store fronts.

We made our way back above ground and to the edge of the Olympic plaza where we hailed a taxi. I put my Pictionary skills to use, sketched a picture on the back of a scrap of paper and managed to communicate to our driver that we were interested in eating some of Beijing’s celebrated Peking Duck. Twenty minutes later he pulled up to an excellent Peking Duck restaurant –far from the Olympic Plaza.

An Olympian Effort part 1 of 2

Somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s, it became a pretty common rite of passage for young Americans such as myself to buy a Eurail Pass and spend a summer backpacking through Europe. As much as I would have loved to have done this, somehow, it never happened. I missed out and for the last two years my daughters have been paying the price. I have been dragging them all over southeast Asia with packs strapped to their backs. I have made them wander through countless villages, hike mountains, sleep in tents, and ride rivers on bamboo rafts.

The end of our four days in Beijing was marking the end of our seventeen-day trek through China which was marking the end of our two years in China. I told them that on the last day I was going to let them decide what we did for the day.

How generous of me.

Options included a couple of amusement parks, the aquarium, and the Beijing Zoo with its pandas. But the girls decided they wanted to go to an indoor water park housed in the famous Water Cube building that was the site of the swimming and diving events in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. One portion of the Water Cube has been re-purposed as a mid-sized, indoor water park.

We managed to figure out the Beijing subway system and got ourselves to the Olympic complex on the northwest side of town for just twenty-five cents each rather than taking a more expensive taxi or –heaven forbid- joining a tour bus.

The afterglow that Beijing is continuing to enjoy almost three years after wrapping up what were arguably one of the most successful Olympics in recent memory is palpable. As we entered the broad plaza, the horizon was dominated by the Water Cube to the west and the Bird’s Nest stadium to the east. They were impressive. We joined the faithful making their pilgrimages and took turns taking pictures of each other in front of these two wonders of modern architecture. What should have taken two or three minutes, took twenty, because the girls insisted on pictures of themselves simultaneously jumping in front of each building.

Easier said, than done.

Great Wall assorted pictures

Tiananmen Square part 2 of 2

For many people, a trip to Tiananmen Square is nothing short of a sacred pilgrimage to hallowed grounds –not that any of us would dare to lay down a wreath or light a candle. It is a place to learn, commemorate, reflect, honor, mourn, hope and pray.

And in light of all this, how does the Lonely Planet China guidebook capture the spirit and summarize the hope-filled and tragic events that happened in Tiananmen Square just over twenty years ago? Lonely Planet –who commits an entire shaded sidebar talking about some modern skyscraper primarily because the locals have dubbed it “Big Underpants”- gives the actual Square three quarters of a page. After rambling on for several paragraphs about the layout and the architecture of the Square, the grand sum of Lonely Planet’s comments on the events of June 1989 is the following single sentence:

“In 1989, army tanks forced pro-democracy demonstrators out of the plaza.”

What?

That’s it?

“In 1989, Army tanks forced pro-democracy protestors out of the plaza”?

A 1056-page guide to China, and that’s all they can muster up to say about the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989? The notice in my local MTR station reminding me to hold the handrail as I ride the escalator uses more words.

Unbelievable.

Lonely Planet: lapdog for despotism and suppression the world over.

While their self-censored guidebooks continue to reach millions every year, I guess I will just continue to plug away reaching young people twenty-five at a time with an inspirational story of one generation’s quest for something more, something better.

I have a grainy, black and white poster to help.

Tiananmen Square part 1 of 2

Immediately south of the three-hundred-year-old Forbidden City is the relatively new Tiananmen Square conceived and built by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to showcase the scope and power of the communist party which had recently come to power. It is the largest urban plaza in the world. Over the years, Tiananmen Square has been home to many key events in modern Chinese history. To the western mind, the most famous is probably the prodemocracy crack down of June, 1989.

My Chicago classroom is chocked full of artifacts from around the world. Hanging high and prominently in the back of my classroom is a poster of the iconic photograph of Tank Man –the unidentified, lone protestor who stood before a column of sixty Red Army tanks and silently used his body to say “If you want access to these protestors, you are going to have to roll over my body.” It hangs in my classroom year round.

I use this poster as Exhibit A when telling my students the story of the events of late spring 1989 that led to the June 4 crackdown. Triggered by their desire to mourn the death of the relatively tolerant former General Secretary Hu Yaobang, Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square. Then things gained momentum. In the spirit of Gandhi and King, students used non-violence and civil disobedience to call for more freedoms. A movement took shape.

Chinese students poured into Tiananmen Square by the bus load from around the country to join the month-long demonstrations. Students went on hunger strikes. The demonstrators were joined by factory workers and eventually farmers. Art students made a papier-mâché statue of the Goddess of Democracy. When one student leader realized that others wanted to speak out but were afraid to do so, he had them write down what they wanted to say, pass it forward, and he read it out on their behalf. At its peak, the crowds swelled to hundreds of thousands of people. One couple got married in the Square. When the Chinese army started to move toward Tiananmen Square in early June, local Beijing residents moved trucks and wagons into the street in an attempt to block the army’s access to the protestors. Smaller demonstration were held in factories and on campuses around China. Hope had sprung that spring.

While the protests were going on in Beijing, 1.5 million Hong Kongers participated in an organized march in support of the students in Tiananmen Square. 1.5 million: that’s one fourth of the population of Hong Kong at the time!

When I am telling this story to my students, I usually have to pause several times to compose myself. That stark image of Tank Man in the back of my room gets to me every time.

The demonstrations in the spring of 1989 are generally referred to as prodemocracy demonstrations. But at their core, they were so much more than just a call for democratic processes. They were fundamentally a collective expression of the yearning for autonomy and a modicum of control over one’s life. It was a flexing of the natural desire to be able to gather together with like-minded people and express yourselves without fear of reprisal. Essentially, the demonstrations were a longing to be free from oppression. It was one of the most organic, beautiful, and ultimately tragic expressions of the desire for freedom the world had seen in modern times.

But then, on June 4, 1989, the tanks rolled in and while the world watched the Chinese government turned its guns on its own people. The official government estimate is that several hundred protestors die, but several international organizations put the death toll in the thousands.

Beijing's Forbidden City

Hostels can be cheap. But you have to be careful, many charge not by the room, but by the person. If you are traveling alone, US$12 a night is a great deal. But times that by four and you’re talking a decent chunk of change. For US$50, you can get yourself a pretty nice hotel room, which is exactly what we did in Beijing. We stayed in a hotel just north of the Forbidden City. Our train arrived midmorning and we hailed a taxi for our hotel. After checking in and dropping our bags, we headed out again. With just four days in Beijing, we couldn’t afford to use a morning to rest up.

Our first stop was the Forbidden City.

For the seven years prior to moving to Hong Kong, I taught one section of sixth-grade world cultures which included six weeks on China. I was not a history major in college, and the class was a journey of discovery for me and the my students.

The 1987 movie “The Last Emperor” won nine academy awards including best picture. The opening scene shows the young emperor Puyi being coronated in an elaborately staged sequence with a cast of hundreds that was shot on location in the Forbidden City. It is a great scene that captures a China on the cusp of major change. I show this ten-minute opening scene to my students who have always responded very favorably. It helps that the three-year-old Puyi is unbelievably cute. Over the years, I have probably watched this scene thirty times.

To say that I was pretty stoked to see the Forbidden City in person, would be an understatement.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to show The Last Emperor to my own daughters before we embarked on our China tour. While on the steps of the Hall of Supreme Purity, I tried to describe to them the significance of what they were seeing and I tried to paint a picture of what that last coronation ceremony was like. But it just wasn’t the same as the scope and pageantry that Bernardo Bertolucci captured in his epic movie. But now the girls have pictures of themselves in front of the Hall of Middle Harmony and when they eventually do watch The Last Emperor, they will be able to say, Hey, I was there.

Likewise, not only will I be able to show my future students back in Chicago the open scene from The Last Emperor, but I will be able to show them pictures of their dear old social studies teacher in front of the Palace of Heavenly Purity.

Xi'an to Beijing Sleeper Train

Booking flights in China is like booking them anywhere else. Go online, use Travelocity, book your flight. Very efficient.

Long-distant trains, not so much.

While China is updating its network of trains and bringing online some high-tech, high-speed trains, the ticket booking system has a ways to go.

First, unlike airlines, they don’t issue e-tickets. They will only issue paper tickets that they insist be delivered by courier to the hotel where you will be staying in the city from which your train will be departing. This means you have to book your hotel rooms before you can book your train tickets, which is the reverse of the standard order.

Second, train tickets in China only go on sale ten days before the day of use. The work-around is that you can go through a ticket broker. You “buy” your tickets from him several weeks or even months ahead and then the day that your tickets go on sale, he makes the actual purchase on your behalf. The risk is that the broker has your money weeks in advance, with no guarantee that he’ll get your tickets.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. The day after our overnight train tickets from Xi’an to Beijing went on sale, we got an email from the broker saying tickets were not available for the class of seats that we wanted on the day that we requested. In the same email, he mentioned that on the day of our choice the deluxe berths were still available for US$60 more per person. We were already on the road traveling through China at this point with limited email access and the rest of our itinerary –including hotel rooms- was already set. What were we going to do? We bought the more expensive tickets. It threw our budget off kilter to the tune of an extra US$240.

But man, what an upgrade it was.

Rather than staying in a four-person cabin with access to a communal squatty potty, we got two two-person rooms with private baths. They looked like cabins on a cruise ship. They were new, clean, and modern. It completely ruined train travel for my family. I will never get them to travel in economy class again.

Not sure it was worth and extra US$240, but we arrived in Beijing in style and well rested.