This entry is cross-posted at my book blog: thezhus.posterous.com.

My research on 1980s Guangzhou led me to the discovery of a 1984 Chinese film called Yamaha Fish Stall (雅马哈鱼档). It’s a story about a trio of young people who start a fish stall in early 1980s Guangzhou, just as economic reforms were encouraging many people to start their own businesses (although judging by the way the main character, Ah Long, dresses and some of the hilariously bad English subtitles on the DVD, you would swear there’s a “Guangzhou Gigolo” subtext running through the movie). The film was a big hit, in part because it was an accurate depiction of early 1980s Guangzhou, and in part because it advocated for the economic reform policies and showed the results that could come from them.

Unfortunately, I was only able to find little fragments of the film online, and there are no English subtitles in any of them. If you are interested in getting a glimpse what life was like in my hometown during the early years of my childhood, as well as a chance to keel over laughing at the unintentionally dirty subtitles (we’re not entirely sure about the “unintentional” part), I’d suggest buying the DVD.

The thing that led me to the film in the first place was an interview in one of my books with the author of the short novel upon which the movie was based. In it, he discusses the inspiration for the characters, the societal changes that were going on when the novel was written, and the impact of the film. Here’s a translated excerpt:

Yamaha Fish Stall was created against the background of the rapid development of Guangzhou’s private enterprises after economic reform and opening up.

After the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party, Guangzhou was a step ahead in reforms. Guangzhou’s private enterprises began developing very rapidly. My deepest impression was that Guangzhou’s streets were lined with peddlers selling T-shirts, socks, umbrellas, shoes. There were many peddlers. Even though the streets seemed very messy, they also conveyed a very vibrant feeling.

You couldn’t see this kind of scene before. Guangzhou may be the land of fish and rice, yet you couldn’t buy fish here. Back then, each family had several fish stamps per year, and still it wasn’t guaranteed that you would be able to buy fish. Even if there were any for you to buy, it was salt-water fish or dried fish. Back then, you would be thrilled to be able to just buy a couple dace. …

After reforms and opening up, control on fish prices were loosened up and you could buy fish anytime. At the time I was living in the dormitories of Guangzhou People’s Hospital on Bailing Road. Next to the dorm there was a market, where people sold fish, roast geese, and there was a hair salon. It was all very bright and colorful. Among all those stalls, the most interesting was the fish stall, because the stall owner rode a motorcycle. On the back of the motorcycle was a water tank, which he used to transport fish to the stall. I still remember that his motorcycle wasn’t a name brand like Yamaha, but rather a brand made in Chongqing. By today’s standards, that fish stall couldn’t be simpler. It was just a simple piece of colorful tarp with bamboo poles on the sides and a fish hanging from it as advertising. The fish was still alive and kept flapping its tail. This showed that society was slowly changing. Overall, society as a whole was beginning to become vibrant, and people’s state of mind was vastly improved as well. …

The inspiration for the main character Ah Long was one of my students. … One day I was walking along the street when suddenly someone tapped my shoulder from behind. I turned around and looked, and it was one of my students from back when I was teaching in high school. This student didn’t look like any special and didn’t carry himself well. He said, “Mr. Zhang, I haven’t seen you in a long time.” I asked him what he was doing now. He said, “I’m doing pretty well. Let me take you out for dimsum.” I tried to decline, but he said, “Mr. Zhang, you have to go. Let me take you to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum.” In 1983, the Eastern Hotel was not somewhere that ordinary citizens could go, and to be honest I hadn’t been there. So I asked him whether he had struck it rich. He told me this: “I’m living like a human being now.” That had a big impact on me, so I went with him to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum. We talked over tea, and it was then that he told me he had started his own private business.

I was this student’s home-room teacher. He used to have a problem: His conduct wasn’t very clean, his performance wasn’t good, and he didn’t do well in school. But I still was very attentive toward him. I asked him what kind of work he was doing now, and he said he was selling fish. He said he could make up to 300-some yuan a month selling fish. Good heavens! At that time my salary was just 80-some yuan, and his income was four times mine. He said he was very grateful for my kindness toward him in the past, so that’s why he wanted to treat me to dimsum. He told me some of his life experiences. At the time I thought, “This wayward kid has found a proper path, become a private entrepreneur selling fish, found a career, and found a pretty good situation for himself. To use his own words, he was living like a human being now. So I was very touched.

Actually, he represented the majority of the people who were starting private businesses. These young people’s way of thinking isn’t too high. To use my student’s words, for them this is scrounging a living. But human beings — if you can give them work, a legitimate job — generally will strive upward. Human beings can change. People don’t want to do improper, immoral things; it’s only when they have no other way out. The problem was that our society didn’t provide such a platform. That’s why once the economic reforms and opening up were implemented, many people changed.

…

Before I wrote Yamaha Fish Stall, I had already published a lot of work. … Because I was publishing a lot of fiction at the time, my work was often published in the newspapers. … Although there were a lot of people submitting their work, my submissions still were often published, such as essays, short stories, one-act plays. … I drew upon my real-life inspirations and wrote Yamaha Fish Stall as a short novel.

Yamaha refers to the motorcycle, with a equipment box on the back. My thinking is relatively liberated. Even now I think my thinking was even ahead of the young people at the time. Liberation of thought is very important to a writer. So why use Yamaha? I was thinking: One, this name sounds good, very unusual, very strong. Second, Yamaha motorcycles is a foreign business. In our reforms and opening up, what we are doing is bringing in things from outside. Later, when we were making the movie, a well-known veteran editor reviewed the script and said the title won’t work. But I insisted that it would. I said you can edit the story, but the title cannot change. So in the end they kept the title. …

The draft of the novel was about 6,000 characters, and I submitted it to the Yangcheng Evening News. A well-known editor at the newspaper wrote me a letter after he read it and asked me to go to his office to discuss it with him in person. He said this story was about a fresh topic and full of life. However, the Yangcheng Evening News only had four pages for submitted content, and to run the entire 6,000-some characters would take up an entire page. So he suggested that I shorten the draft. I asked if it would be possible to run it on an entire page. He said, “You’re not famous. How can we give you an entire page?” … He suggested I condense the story to 3,000 characters. But I felt if I took out that much, the story would lose its flavor. He gave me a few days to think it over. A few days later, he wrote me a very long letter. I was so moved; he was such a dutiful editor. His handwriting was very neat, and he wrote about six or seven pages. His letter said that my view was correct, that to turn 6,000 characters to 3,000 will leave only the skeleton, without flesh or blood, without meaning. He suggested I turn this into a medium-length novel and submitted to the publishing house, otherwise such a good subject would be wasted.

After returning to campus, I collaborated with one of my students and turned Yamaha Fish Stall into a medium-length novel and submitted it to Flower City magazine. Later this novel received the inaugural Flower City Literary Award, and Flower City magazine’s readership base was very large. An executive from Pearl River Films saw this novel and said it was very good.

At the time, Zhang Liang was a nationally known directory. When he saw this novel, he said I should turn it into a movie script because they would like to make it into a movie. Later, Pearl River Films put us up in their guest house to let us turn the novel into a script. We stayed for about a month, and the script was approved after only one round. It went very smoothly.

Zhang Liang’s thinking was very liberated, very innovative, and he embraced new things. He suggested that this movie should be as authentic as possible, so we should use real independent shopkeepers as actors. … Only the main character Ah Long and one other role used professional actors; everyone else was an amateur.

In using amateur actors, I felt Zhang Liang was very brave, very bold. This was no simple matter. What if they didn’t do a good job and ruined the film? So everyone was still a little worried at the time. These amateur actors received one week of training. During the shooting, usually the director showed them how to do something, and then they just went along by feel, and in the process, they showed their authenticity.

…

After Yamaha Fish Stall was released, most people’s reaction was pretty good. They held a film festival at Beijing at the time, and we showed this movie at Beijing University. It played nonstop from 7 p.m. one night to 6 a.m. the next morning. After the movie, many of the leading figures and famous directors on the Beijing movie scene, about 200-some people, all stood up and applauded for a long time. … They said they had never seen a movie so full of life..This movie reflected our lives, our time. This story, these things were happening in Guangzhou. At that time Beijing had not yet had such scenes. Upon seeing this movie, they said it was as if they could smell the stench of Guangzhou’s fish. They joked that it would be great when you can smell that in Beijing as well. More importantly, the movie let them experience something — economic reforms and opening up. Back then the slogan was there, but there still weren’t many tangibles and the people didn’t have a deep impression of reforms and opening up. But movies are imitative, and this movie gave people a strong experience. At the film festival, Beijing University students said, “Guangzhou’s present is our future. We love this kind of life.”

…

Later this movie was even selected as one of the 100 most influential movies in the history of Chinese cinematography. … Why? Because it was very representative. It was the first movie to reflect reforms and opening up and acted like a mile marker. Looking at it today, this film also had another special quality — it reflected the lives of the Cantonese people during reforms and opening up in the early 80s. … To understand life in Guangzhou in the 80s, to understand their attitudes toward life, you have to watch Yamaha Fish Stall.

…

Of course, there were dissenting opinions about the film at the time. Some said this movie was about money, and what is money? It’s the source of all evil, and that this was a revisionist film. This showed that at the time people’s way of thinking hadn’t changed completely yet. I felt that such opinions were normal at the time, because people’s views were still relatively traditional.

For a piece of work to be able to illicit such a big reaction from the audience and leave a deep impression, it’s because of one of two reasons: One, it really is a classic, such as War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and such. Second, some work can’t qualify as classics, but they were created at certain key turning points in history and carried a big message. Yamaha Fish Stall became such a hit because it was created at such a turning point — the key moment in China’s shift from planned planned economy to market economy.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at my book blog: http://thezhus.posterous.com.

The previous excerpt I translated from the book of interviews with pioneers in Guangzhou’s reform-and-opening-up period looked at one small Cantonese restaurateur’s experience. This time, I’ll offer a glimpse at one aspect of the cultural changes happening at that time by translating excerpts from another interview from the same book. This one is with Lü Nianzu, one of the earliest pop stars from this period. I still remember some of his biggest hits, including the title song from a TV series about the life of a famous Kung Fu master from the early 1900s. The gist of the TV series was basically: Awesome Kung Fu master defends his country’s honor in a time of crisis by thoroughly and repeatedly pummeling cartoonish foreign devils from Europe, Russia, and Japan with his bare fists. Here’s a video of the title sequence, with the song performed by Lü Nianzu, a stirring, nationalistic/patriotic, and incredibly catchy tune called “The Great Wall Will Never Crumble.”

And here’s Lü Nianzu performing the song live on CCTV’s Chinese New Year’s Gala 1985, a performance that played a key role in making him a national star.

Lü Nianzu was special because he was among one of the first singers in mainland China to sing pop music in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and during the 1980s Guangzhou was a hotbed for the burgeoning pop-music scene in China. Much of that, however, has disappeared since the 90s as pop singers who sang in Mandarin shifted north to Beijing, which offered a much bigger market, while those who sang in Cantonese moved south to Hong Kong and a potential international audience. Still, it is interesting to read about the early days of Cantonese pop on the mainland, which sprang up in the newly created music lounges that were a shiny novelty in China and an appalling sight for many with more traditional mindsets (singers walking around on stage with the microphone?! Perish the thought!).

Here’s the interview excerpt:

When reform and opening up first began in Guangdong, there were many foreigners and out-of-towners who came to Guangzhou for business trips or to work, and most of them stayed at the Eastern Hotel. At the time, the Eastern Hotel was a pretty  high-class place, not a place that commoners could go into. Because reforms had just begun, in the entire city of Guangzhou there were basically no recreational facilities or venues. Even a high-class place like the Eastern Hotel didn’t have any recreational activities. Therefore when those people got off work in the evening, they were bored and could only sit at the hotel and stare at the ceiling.

In order to provide its guests with some decent recreation and diversion, the Eastern Hotel renovated its existing restaurant to create a music lounge where people could gather to drink tea and listen to live music. The new restaurant had a standalone stage and relatively modern audio equipment. During the day the restaurant served food, and at 9:30 at night, it turned into a music lounge.

The creation of the music lounge at the Eastern Hotel caused a big stir in Guangzhou and a lot of people wanted to go. But at that time, music lounge wasn’t something just anyone could attend. You must have a “homecoming certificate” to be able to buy tickets. A “homecoming certificate” is a special certificate that the government issued to Chinese in Hong Kong or Macao who were coming back to China to visit their relatives. After the Eastern Hotel, the second music lounge to appear was at the China tourism bureau’s Overseas Chinese Tower, because at the time many overseas Chinese who were coming back to visit were staying there. Therefore, in some ways, you can say that the music lounge grew out of trying to enrich the night life of the overseas Chinese who were coming back and the Chinese from Hong Kong and Macao who were working in China.

I remember that back then the Eastern Hotel charged five yuan for a ticket, and the Overseas Chinese Tower charged three yuan per ticket. At the time our monthly income was 36 yuan, so a five-yuan ticket was a very extravagant expense for many people back then. Nonetheless, there were a lot of people who came to listen to music. Basically you couldn’t buy a ticket on the day of the show.

When the music lounges first started, a lot of people couldn’t accept them. At the time they saw us as a scourge. For instance, in the past the microphone on stage was fixed in place. But it was different in the music lounge; you could hold the microphone in your hand and walk all around the stage. The newspapers made a big bruhaha over this. A lot of culture critics bashed us, saying we were learning the ways of capitalists. They felt that the stage is a dignified place and that it’s not dignified to walk around with the microphone. In addition, at that time the songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan naturally had a different style than those from China, so someone said the songs we were singing were “simply wasted notes.”

Later even the Cultural Department got involved and began to monitor and regulate the lounges, including imposing some restrictions on the performers’ attire, on-stage demeanor, and song selection. For instance, for every five songs that a performer sings, at least one of them must be a folk song. Each night the Cultural Department also sent a small team to come check for violations. Fortunately, the lounges weren’t subject to any really strict regulations.

At the time I was an actor in the Guangzhou Theater Group. The plays we performed included some songs, and I would occasionally do some singing. I remember singing in a play called “The Prodigal Son”. Perhaps because of my interest in music, in my spare time I would sing the songs from the plays and record it. Later someone discovered that I could sing pretty well, so they hooked me up with a gig at the music lounge.

Back then, you could make 10 yuan for each performance at a music lounge. At a time when our monthly salary was just 36 yuan, 10 yuan was a rather big figure for me, so it goes without saying that I was thrilled!

When we first started, because none of us were familiar with pop music, we performers looked everywhere to collect songs, such as some of the pop songs being sung by stars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and some Chinese songs from the 1950s. At that time the special economic zone of Shenzhen received the biggest direct influence from Hong Kong and Macao. When we went to Shenzhen, we saw a lot of Hong Kong TV shows. The first time I heard the Hong Kongnese sing a song in Cantonese, I was stunned. I had heard Cantonese operas, but had never heard a Cantonese song before. It was a duet by Luo Min and “Fei Fei”, and it was very pleasing to the ear, so I really wanted to learn. The songs I had heard up till then were basically all red revolutionary songs, and love songs like this was pretty rare, so they were a new sensation to me.

Because I had built a pretty solid musical foundation at the theater group, when I learned these songs and performed them in the music lounges, I generally did pretty well and was often the closing act. Speaking of learning the songs, there is also an unforgettable experience related to that. Back then learning the songs mainly involved listening to tapes, but in Guangzhou you basically couldn’t buy such tapes. A friend of mine, after she went to Hong Kong, used her first month’s salary to buy a tape player and several tapes of Liu Wenzheng for me. I was really moved. She really helped me learn so many songs and made it possible for me to leave an impression on the music scene.

As far as pop singers go, we were the first group in the nation who dared to take on that challenge. There was a lot of pressure, and my theater group also criticized me and cut my pay. But I wasn’t afraid of anything back then. Perhaps ignorance was bliss. I was trying to make some extra money to help the family, and that motivation kept me going. Typically, each night around 7 p.m. the theater group would stage a play, and the subsidy for each play was about four mao (0.4 yuan). The music lounges generally started at 9 or 9:30, so after the play, I would rush to the music lounge to sing. When I was a performer at the music lounges, it was a great help to my family. Each month I could make two or three thousand yuan. Back then 3,000 yuan was probably unfathomable to many people. Through that, I quickly became a “Man of Ten Thousand Yuan”. On our street, we were the first household to buy a color TV. At the same time, I was among the earliest people in Guangzhou to have a motorcycle.

Perhaps because I sang pretty well, Li Huayong, Chen Gaoguang, Chen Dong, and I were dubbed the “Four Kings” of Guangzhou, and you could say we were kind of famous in Guangzhou. After you got “famous”, all the music lounges wanted to hire you, so sometimes I would do three or four shows a night, and I’ve been to the Overseas Chinese Tower and the Overseas Chinese Restaurant. Sometimes it was tough running all around. …

…

Perhaps because everyone saw that music lounges were big money makers — they were charging 10 yuan ticket — a lot of restaurant and hotel owners saw this opportunity and opened music lounges. … In the blink of an eye almost all the hotels in Guangzhou had opened music lounges. More unexpectedly, this caught on at the Guangzhou Song and Dance Troupe, the folk music group, and other trade groups. Even the Guangzhou acrobatics group formed a pop music troupe. But the one that was the best and the most influential was still the Eastern Hotel.

Later, even the common citizens could buy tickets to listen to pop music. I remember the first time I performed at a venue that was pretty public — it was at the Friendship Theater. It was also the first time they had invited a star from the music lounge scene to perform on a big stage. That really caused a huge stir in Guangzhou, and tickets were sold out quickly, because people had never heard pop music before. The day of the show, there were almost 10,000 people there, and my rendition of “Childhood” caused an eruption of screams, whistles, and applause from the audience.

The storm that was the Guangzhou music lounges caused rumbling around the country, because at that time, for a lot of people, walking around on stage with a microphone and singing pop music was very new, very hip, so a lot of people came from other places to Guangzhou to see this. CCTV also thought the music lounge was something new and came to Guangzhou to report on it. …

…

Back then the singers who were born in Guangdong generally tended to sing in Cantonese, because a number of them didn’t have very standard Mandarin accents. But I grew up in the north and lived in the south, so I was pretty fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. …

Later, when I began performing in the interior of the country, for some unknown reason, the people there loved to hear Cantonese songs. Perhaps they felt this was hip and that listening to Cantonese songs meant they were “with it,” even though nine out of ten of them couldn’t understand the songs. Because the lyrics, singing style, and pronounciation of Cantonese songs are very different from Mandarin, before I sang a Cantonese song, I had to briefly explain the lyrics to the audience. It’s really hard to picture the craze for Cantonese songs back then, especially in the Hunan area. If you don’t have any Cantonese songs in your repertoire, you might as well not go there.

For me, singing was a very enjoyable thing. Later, I felt that my prospects for development in the theater group weren’t that great, and the market for stage plays was starting to wither, so I left the theater group and joined China Records. During this period, I went on numerous tours with the company’s performing troupe to various places in China and left an influence around the country. I also released a lot of albums, which all sold one or two million copies. Nowadays most stars would have done really well to sell 200,000 albums. I think perhaps the reason my albums sold so well back then was that piracy still wasn’t as rampant. Even though people were recording and copying cassette tapes back then, it wasn’t as well done as now. And back then, the common citizen could also afford a legit tape at five or six yuan each.

…

At the end of the 80s and early 90s, music lounges were gradually replaced by karaoke. Many of us in the first wave of lounge singers don’t perform anymore. … I sang for about 10 years and have also quit. In 1991 I left the music scene and went to Guangzhou Television Station and became a TV host. Even though I occasionally make an appearance on some CCTV “lookback” specials, I very rarely sing these days.

Most of Guangdong’s performers have gone elsewhere, and the locally produced music has gradually vanished. … Almost no one sings in Cantonese anymore. …

As for the reasons for the decline of Guangdong’s music scene in recent years, firstly, I think it’s related to our market. Even though there’s a big market, Guangdong performers can’t command big money for performances. Some of the famous stars from Beijing get 200 thousand yuan for an appearance, while a star from Guangdong would have done well to get 20 or 30 thousand yuan.

Second, I feel that there’s not much unity in the Guangdong pop music scene. There’s no unifying force. Many of Guangdong’s popular singers, songwriters, and composers have all gone to Beijing to build their careers, because Beijing’s market is bigger. It is, after all, China’s center of politics and culture. It not only has a lot of cultural resources, but has also gathered top talents from around the country. This is very advantageous, whether for individual development or the advancement of the industry.

…

I’m currently reading a book about the education system in China from 1960 to 1980. It kind of reads like somebody’s dissertation (which it probably was), but I’ve found it to be an interesting read with some nice insights (and it specifically looks at the schools in Guangzhou, my hometown). One part of the book discusses how the classroom curriculum in the 1960s emphasized political ideology starting from primary school. While doing some additional research into the topic, I came across some images of Chinese textbook covers from different eras in the last 60 years. These are textbooks for first-grade Chinese class.

1950s

1960s

1980s to 90s

2000s

It’s interesting, and kind of disturbing, how clearly you can deduce the political mood of the respective eras just by looking at the covers of first-grade textbooks. Also quite telling are the first sentences of the first lesson in each of these books (translations below the original passage):

During the Great Leap era (late 1950s to early 1960s):

爷爷六岁去放羊，爸爸六岁去逃荒。今年我也六岁了，公社送我上学堂。

When my grandfather was six, he went to herd goats. When my father was six, he fled famine. I’m six this year, and the commune is sending me to school.

During the mid-1960s (beginning of the Cultural Revolution):

毛主席教导我们：在现在世界上，一切文化或文学艺术都是属于一定阶级，属于一定政治路线的。

Chairman Mao teaches us: In the world today, all culture or literature and art belong to a certain class, to a certain political line.”

1970s (latter stages of the Cultural Revolution):

最高指示：学习马克思主义，不但要从书本上学，主要还要通过阶级斗争、工作实践和接近工农群众，才能真正学到。

Highest directive: In order to study Marxism, one must not only study from books. Only primarily through class struggle, practical work and being close to the workers and peasants can we truly learn Marxism.

According to one source I found, the “highest directive” was at the beginning of every chapter in Chinese and math textbooks from the era.

1980s-90s (Beginning of new economic policies and China’s opening up to the world)

冰雪融化，种子发芽，果树开花，我们来到小河边，来到田野里，来到山岗上。我们找到了春天。

The ice and snow have melted. The seeds are sprouting. The fruit trees are flowering. We come to the bank of the stream, to the fields, and to the hills. We’ve found spring.

2000s

一去二三里，烟村四五家。亭台六七座，八九十枝花。

远看山有色，近听水无声。春去花还在，人来鸟不惊。

Both of these are classic Chinese poems and they are the first lessons in the reading and literature sections of the first-grade Chinese textbook for the new millennium, respectively. The first poem, which was written in the Song dynasty and is about a sightseeing trip, goes something like this:

Without realizing it, I had already gone two or three li. In the distance I see four or five houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys. As I walk, I see six or seven pavilions on the side of the road, and eight, nine, no, ten flowers on a branch near me.

The second poem, a Tang dynasty piece titled “Painting”, goes something like this:

From a distance, I can see the colors of the mountains, yet when I get close I cannot hear the sound of the waters. Even after spring has passed the flowers still remain, and when one approaches, the birds are not startled.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these two poems are the lack of political undertones in them. Both of these poems, by the way, are brilliant examples of classic Chinese poetry in terms of efficiency of words and the vivid imageries they convey with a meager 20 characters.

Side note: The book covers from the 1980s triggered a bout of nostalgia for me, as those were the books I used while in elementary school. Looking at the scans of the inside pages and reading the text from the chapters that people have posted online, it’s amazing how much of it seems so familiar to me even though until last week I had forgotten about all of it. There might be another blog post on the topic of Chinese textbooks as I scroll down memory lane.

I had previously written about my displeasure with the fact that J. Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China called my hometown, Guangzhou, an urban cesspool. I just finished the book, and despite that transgression, I found Lost on Planet China to be an entertaining travelogue.

Troost pulls no punches in recounting his trip through China, including his admission right in the introduction that he is no expert about China. He even wonders aloud how someone who speaks virtually no Chinese and knows little little the country can write a “biggish book” about it. He then proceeds to do what he said he would — offer an honest account of what he saw and what he felt during his trip, and his irreverent and self-effacing style makes him a terrific travel companion.

Troost undertook the journey through China as a scouting mission to determine whether he should move his family there (since he’s still living in America, I guess his conclusion was “no”). Thus begins the quintessential fish-out-of-water, laowai-in-China story. Troost starts the trip in Beijing, where he is immediately overwhelmed by the immense mass of humanity, terrified by the chaotic traffic, and astonished by the air pollution. Speaking nary a word of mandarin, he has to be chauffeured around China’s capital city, either by an old friend or by a “take-out girl”/student his friend hired for him as a translator.

Despite the language barrier, however, Troost soon adapts. He leaves Beijing alone and commences his exploration of the rest of the vast country. He learns how to bargain and by the end of the book he had wised up enough to be able to shame a taxi cab driver into actually charging him honest fare. He discovers locals who know enough English to converse with and get some explanation for the sights and sounds he was bombarded with. He even comes off as a grizzled China veteran at times while leading his “professional Republican friend” around southern and western China. It all makes for a often-hilarious and sometimes insightful read as he stumbles in and out of a brothel in Hangzhou, a gay bar in Xi’an, tourist traps everywhere, and the awe-spiring mountains of Tibet.

While Troost gained an increasing comfort level during his trek, he never lost his laowai perspective or sensibilities. He never stopped being astonished by the bad air quality, and he never, as he said many suggested to him during his trip, took off his glasses to see things from the Chinese perspective. It’s no surprise that he was most content in Hong Kong — which offers more Western culture than anywhere else in China — and the relatively sparsely populated areas of western China.

In some ways, Troost’s retention of his Western viewpoint is both the book’s biggest appeal and its greatest shortcoming. It’s appealing because it enhances the book as a travelogue of an experience in a totally foreign environment. Often, Troost is doing what your typical foreign visitor to China would be doing — seeing the must-see sights, being bused to destinations designed to fleece laowai visitors, gaping at the sight of people unleashing gobs of phlegm on the sidewalks. The fact that he retains his foreign point-of-view makes the book easier to relate to for his fellow laowais.

The same quality, however, is a shortcoming in that it prevents him from truly understanding the “why” behind the “what”. While the book was never intended to be an in-depth analysis, it is still nevertheless a tad annoying for someone like me, a native-born Chinese, who knows the “why” and does understand the Chinese perspective.

There’s a Chinese saying: “Looking at flowers while galloping by on a horse,” referring to seeing only what’s on the surface while rushing by, and Troost was definitely rushing through China as he was constantly on the move, going from one place to the next on planes, buses, trains, taxis, camels, and ships. While he draws some keen observations about the people and the places from these passing glances, they still often come off as lacking real insight, and he gets a number of wrong impressions. For instance, he observed that no one in China seems to participate in sports for recreation, which it’s just flat out not true, as I vividly remember the crowded ping pong tables and badminton courts of my childhood and seeing people play pickup basketball on my trip in 2008-09. And then of course, there’s the whole “Guangzhou is an urban cesspool” thing, which I shall try not to dwell on again here.

While Lost on Planet China may slightly aggravate Chinese readers like me, it is nonetheless a terrific travel book, offering an entertaining look at what to expect when you visit China, even if it’s wrong about as often as it’s right.

It was worse even than Beijing. The air in Guangzhou is brown. No, not brown. Yellow. No, not yellow. The air in Guangzhou is sick. It is unwell.

Children of the Chen clan, circa 1909.

Courtney and I standing on the same grounds as those Chen descendants in 2009.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at http://thezhus.tumblr.com, the blog focusing on my book-writing effort.

Note: I’m going to start cross-posting some blog entries about my book-writing process on both my primary blog, Matters of Varying Insignificance, and the Tumblr blog I set up specifically for the book.

A major figure in my book will be my paternal grandfather, who was a renowned practitioner of Chinese medicine in his hometown. The first time I sat down and talked to my dad about grandpa for the book, our talk quickly turned into an hour-long crash-course introduction to Chinese medicine, and I thought I would share a couple of the interesting points here.

My dad, who read a lot of my grandfather’s writings about practicing Chinese medicine, explained some of the basic fundamental differences between Chinese and Western medicine. The biggest is that while Chinese medicine has terms such as lung, heart, kidney, and liver, they refer to functions rather than specifics organ. Also, in Chinese medicine, a disease within one function is viewed as a result of problems in another.

Therefore, the approach to treatment is quite different. One of the basic principles of Chinese medicine is “Pouring water from above to keep a pot from boiling over is not as effective as pulling out firewood from below.” In that saying, the boiling pot is a local symptom, whereas the fire is the true cause of the ailment. Therefore, simply pouring cold water into the pot to cool it off doesn’t solve the problem, as the fire still rages and will boil the pot again soon. On the other hand, if you remove firewood, it’ll reduce the fire and cool off the water, treating the ailment at its root.

My dad gave me an example to illustrate how this philosophy is practiced: If someone is coughing up blood, Chinese medicine would say it’s caused by “fire” in the liver rising upward through the body, meaning that the liver function is too strong. However, instead of applying treatment to the liver or the lung, where the cough is coming from, a Chinese doctor might prescribe medicine that affects the kidney function. Why? Because in Chinese medicine, there are five elements: gold, water, fire, wood, and soil. The liver is classified as “wood”, the lung is classified as “gold”, and the kidney belongs to “water”. So when the wood (liver) catches on fire and gets too hot, it will melt the gold (lung), hence the coughing up of blood. The wood is catching fire because it is too dry, therefore the treatment would be to add water (strengthen the kidney function).

To a Westerner, this might sound like rubbish, not to mention backward, Dark Ages-esque pseudo-science, but as someone who grew up being a beneficiary of Chinese medicine, I can say that it does work for a surprising array of ailments. A part of my book will discuss my grandfather’s view toward the roles of Chinese and Western medicine — a relationship that hasn’t always been smooth in Chinese history.

I’ve started working on a book about the history of my father’s side of the family. It’s an idea that I’ve been toying with for a few years now, and our trip back to China in 2008-09 convinced me to do it. I’ve started a Tumblr blog to post updates about my progress with the book, and I’m hoping having to post to that blog on a regular basis will help keep me on track with the book. I don’t know if the book will have mass appeal or not, though I’m writing it for a broader audience than just my family. In any case, even if my family and I are the only people to read it, I would still want to do this. I’ve put up an introductory post on the Tumblr blog giving more details about the book and why I want to write it. I’m going to add a widget on the side of this blog to pipe in the updates from that blog. Stay tuned for more.

Here’s the front, back, and inside flaps of the dust jacket for the book:

It took almost a year after the trip, but I’ve finally managed to finish the photo book for our China trip. In hindsight, I’m glad I procrastinated on this project, as Blurb, where I’m ordering the book from, only started offering PDF-to-book printing a few months ago, freeing me from the confines of its book-design software and just use InDesign to do whatever I want. You can see a preview of the book here. Oh yeah, and BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY … Actually, I don’t expect anyone other than me to shell out $85 for this book.

Speaking of the China pictures, Courtney and I each entered three in a photo contest by the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC. We got word yesterday that even though we didn’t win, we would each have a photo displayed at the UNC Center for Global Education starting Monday. I love ribbons-for-all contests.

While dropping off some stuff at the local PTA store a little while back, we browsed through the collection of used books and picked up a bunch, including “China: Alive in the Bitter Sea”, a 1982 book by Fox Butterfield, the New York Times’ first Beijing bureau chief. I’m almost through the book, and it’s been an extremely enjoyable read and a must-read for anyone interested in China.

The book, which draws its title from a Chinese phrase that means surviving in difficult circumstances, paints a vivid and sometimes gritty picture of life in China in the late 1970s, relaying the stories from a nation recovering from a decade lost to the madness and destruction of the Cultural Revolution, which raged from 1966 to 1976. Butterfield addresses seemingly every aspect of Chinese life, from erotic literature to tales of horror from labor camps.

Aside from pulling from his own experiences in China in the late 70s and early 80s, Butterfield also draws upon stories of earlier times from the many Chinese people he got to know. In retelling their stories, he demonstrates an amazing ability to get people who are living under a paranoid government that controls seemingly every aspect of daily life to open up to him. This is even more impressive considering the risks that many of these people were taking in even talking to a foreigner, much less giving personal, and sometimes sensitive, information to a foreign journalist (in fact, one of Butterfield’s interviewees was imprisoned for her actions). As someone who grew up in China in the 1980s, I can definitely relate to some of the stories while being taken aback by others, especially some of the ones about atrocities during the Cultural Revolution.

I’ve always believed that in order to truly understand what the breakneck-speed economic development of the last 20 years mean for China and its people, one must first understand where they were before that. Reading Butterfield’s book would be a good first step in gaining that understanding.

I love Blurb. I started using it a couple years ago and have made several photo books with it. The only drawback was the limitations of its bookmaking software. While it does make the process of designing a book very easy for non-designers and offers a fair number of options, those of us who are designers still feel handcuffed by its limitations.

That’s why I’m so excited about the newest feature from Blurb: a PDF-to-book option. Instead of using their software, you can now design your book in any program and output a PDF to be uploaded to Blurb for printing. This removes all limitations, and it also means you can keep your images in CMYK throughout the process (Blurb’s own software required RGB). Plus, I’ll be able to work much faster in InDesign than in Blurb’s software. This rolls out right as I’m almost done with a photo book from our China trip, but I think I’m going to start over and redo the book in InDesign.

The New York Times is reporting that Amazon.com is coming out with a bigger Kindle for textbooks and newspapers (pictured right). Try as I may, I just can’t get that excited right now about the Kindle, large or small. Here’s why:

• Cost: The latest Kindle is $359. For someone like me, who read about one book every month and a half, that’s the price for almost three years worth of books, just for the device to read them on. For me to consider getting a Kindle, the price has got to come down, a lot.
• I love the tactile feel of books. I love flipping through pages. I do a ton of digital reading every day, but when it comes to literature, I still prefer the paper version.
• Digital fatigue: I’m surrounded by gadgets and digital devices on a daily basis. The 30-60 minutes I spend each day reading on the bus or at lunch is an escape from that, and I don’t want to lose that.
• I’m out of power outlets. Seriously, with all my computers and other electronics, last thing I need is one more thing to have to recharge every night.
• Until I can’t read newspaper stories online, I’m not going to read it on a Kindle. Furthermore, the idea that a BIGGER Kindle could help newspapers seems rather silly to me. Converting to digital form doesn’t do you much good if you still have to lug around a large delivery system. The current Kindle’s screen may be small for reading a newsPAPER, but not a news story. I can see the large Kindle screen being useful for textbooks as it would be a reduction in size and bulk, but it seems a step backward for news, which is already being delivered to much smaller mobile devices.

What I can see myself using a Kindle for is taking a bunch of books with me when I’m on a trip somewhere. But then again, if I’m on a trip, chances are I would spend less time reading and more time enjoying whatever destination I’m at. I’ve thought about getting a Kindle for my wife, who’s an avid reader and total literature geek. Yet she doesn’t want one. She likes books, in part because she loves to underline and make other notations while she reads. Maybe when the Kindle includes a Stylus pen for doing just that, she might convert.

Of course, we would rush out and buy a Kindle today if it looked like this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And when he finds that wife, and she happens be pursuing her PhD in English, she’s sure to get him to read Jane Austen novels.

In part due to Courtney’s influence, I’ve been reading quite a bit of Austen in the past few months. I’ve finished “Pride & Prejudice” and “Emma” and probably will start “Sense & Sensibility” during my 20-some-hour flight to China in a couple months. I enjoy Austen’s writing, but something else has struck me about her novels: The fictional English countryside communities in which her novels are set would be tailor-made markets for a newspaper with a hyperlocal philosophy. They are small, the people all know each other, and most importantly, everybody is all up in everybody else’s business. In fact, I can’t think of a more perfect scenario in which hyperlocal would flourish.

Alas, when I look at most communities that are served by metro papers in the United States, I don’t see anything resembling the sort of communities found in Austen novels. People commute to work, often over great distances. There’s also less of a sense of belonging to the community in which one lives. In fact, I would argue that people are forming stronger connections with people and communities online — based on common interests — than the kind of connections they form with their neighbors based on geographic proximity. In short, I’m not as interested in news about my immediate neighbors as I am in news that impact my friends or groups of people who share my interests, no matter where they may reside.

I’m sure that there are still small towns in America that resemble those in Austen novels or the ones visited by Bill Bryson in his 1989 book, “The Lost Continent”, where the hyperlocal approach would serve the newspaper’s readership. But when it comes to large papers in metropolitan areas or even just cities that are more than tiny little burgs in the wilderness, the hyperlocal approach seems ill-suited for the lifestyle and interests of its readership. And according to this piece by Andrew Grant-Adamson, even the English countryside is changing into something where reader interests encompass much more than the immediate town in which they reside.