Top 10 Things to do in Sichuan

I recently spent 9 days in the Sichuan province; here are the highlights!

10. really. big. buddha.
Really, there's not much else to it. This Buddha is really big. It's the biggest in the world. You could have a picnic on his big toe nail. He was also very Buddha-like: stoic, peaceful, with plants growing in his ear.
































9. take macro photography shots
Lugged my huge camera around. At times I just wanted to throw it off the mountain. But, in the end, I got a few cool pictures. Pictured here: some candles at the first monastery we stayed at, and an icicle on the roof of the temple at Emei's summit.































8. hawk merchandise
Our program arranged a 3-day homestay experience with a local family on Emei Shan. My family sold stuffed monkeys and other monkey-related merchandise for a living. It was such an interesting experience...their way of life was so totally different from life even in Shanghai, not to mention America. We had a tub of coals to keep warm (no heat), no real front door on the house. I feel like I really got to experience Real China - the way the vast majority of China lives, not just how the people in Westernized, cosmopolitan cities do. Also got to observe them selling their stuff to tourists one day, haggling over a few kuai, while most of the Americans in my program easily spend a couple hundred going out one night. Pretty sobering.














7. eat delicious pork fat
We enjoyed home-cooked meals during the homestay. Along with really spicy food, Sichuan's specialty is pork. I've never had so many varieties of pork in my life! My favorite was twice-cooked pork - I am definitely going to learn how to make it once I get back to the states! It was pretty interesting too because the dad did all the cooking and kitchen housework, while the wife seemed to be doing most of the business at work. The daughter, who was probably in her late 20's, didn't seem to do anything.














6. morning stretches with pandas
PANDAS! Who doesn't love them? We went to Chengdu's Woolong Panda Reserve and fawned over pandas and took thousands of pictures of them. Some people loved them so much that they paid 1000 kuai to hold one and take a picture with it. (1000 kuai = $135 US) Being the frugal and moderate panda-lover that I am, I opted to take pictures from afar, for free :)



























5. climb stairs for 2 straight days
Most Chinese tourists take a bus/cable car to the summit. Our group decided to tough it out and hike up the entire way. It's not normal hiking either - essentially we were climbing stairs, continuously, for 8 hours each day. It got progressively harder as we went up because of the elevation and the cold. The experience was rewarding, but definitely tiring!




















4. brave the snow
As if climbing stairs weren't hard enough, it started snowing up near the summit. It made me kind of homesick to see the snow. Minnesota - I miss you! We ended up singing some Christmas/holiday songs to make the hike more enjoyable (and keep warm).
































3. sleepover at monasteries
We stayed at a monastery at the base of the mountain, and another one somewhere in the middle during our hike. It was pretty cool hangin' with the monks. They chant every morning at sunrise - I tried to wake up to see it, but failed miserably. It was pretty cold at night too, and accommodations were pretty basic. But hey, how often do you get to sleep at a monastery?















2. gaze into misty mountains at sunrise and write classical chinese poetry
The top of Emei Shan at sunrise was absolutely beautiful. A lot of famous ancient Chinese poets made pilgrimages here, especially because of a natural phenomenon known as "Buddha's glory." Something about the elevation and angle and refraction of the sunlight at the summit makes your shadow appear on a cloud, with your head surrounded by little rainbow arcs! I didn't see this (it's pretty rare), but I did see some awesome scenery anyway.























































1. avoid rabies
I wasn't particularly fond of monkeys before, but now I am terrified of them! Emei Shan is home to the Tibetan macaque, an endangered, and in my opinion, dangerous species of monkey. They are everywhere, they are not afraid of people, they WILL steal food out of your hand (or pocket, or bag), and some of them foam at the mouth. 3 people on my program got bit by monkeys - resulting in a series of painful and expensive rabies shots. Luckily the worse that happened to me was that one of them grabbed a package of crackers I was holding and ran away.

request line

Dear everyone,

Sorry I have been so terrible at updating! Life has been very busy as of late. I also seem to be perpetually sick, either from the lack of a winter jacket (I finally invested in one yesterday), inadequate nutrition (noodles every meal), or lack of sleep (I suck at time management). Prayer would be appreciated.

Since I last updated though, some pretty exciting things have happened. I climbed a mountain in Sichuan. I met a cousin living in Shanghai I never even knew I had. My boss at work got elected Vice-Chairman of the American Chamber of Congress in Shanghai. I found the coolest office/home goods store EVER. More info and pictures will be forthcoming.

In the meantime though, I just wanted to ask if anyone has requests for anything from China. Everything is so cheap, and there is fake stuff literally lining the streets here. If you want legit stuff, I suppose I could hook you up as well. Or if you simply want a postcard, feel free to post your address. And if you would like to reciprocate the love (ie: send me cookies):

Tiffany Ng
CIEE
1281 Dingxi Road, Room 1403
Changning District
Shanghai, 200050 PRC

Miss you all!

Tiff




















p.s. - Climbing snowy mountains in a poncho (blue garbage bag with sleeves): probably the reason why I have been sick.

on the campaign trail

I recently started working for a small corporate consulting firm. My boss, Charles, is a very amiable Taiwan-born, Hong Kong-educated Chinese-American now working out of Shanghai. He is basically all kinds of Asian. Although I don't know much, or really anything, about consulting, I was hired as a "campaign intern" - Charles is currently running for Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. (AmCham)

Over the past few weeks, I've gotten a very interesting look into the world of business. And the more I look, the more convinced I become that I don't belong in it. Introvert that I am, I don't think I could handle trying to climb the corporate ladder with my power suit and business card in tow. Nothing against those of you who can - it's really a valuable skill to be able to deal with people and put yourself out there. But it's one that I don't think will ever come naturally to me.

Take the other night, for example. There I am at the Portman Ritz Carlton -- quite possibly the nicest hotel in Shanghai. I've been on the job for all of about 2 days, when my boss invites me to the US Consulate General meeting with AmCham Shanghai. (Technically you have to be an AmCham member to attend, but somehow strings got pulled and I got sneaked in.) Almost all of the other people there are male, middle-aged American business tycoons. I'm given a box of business cards and a 5-minute briefing on my boss's campaign issues, and then I am set loose on the cocktail and buffet-style banquet and told to mingle and card-drop.

A daunting task for a 20-year old undergrad intern with zero business background. After taking a defiant swig of.. orange juice (haha), I carpe diem-ed and started shakin' hands and exchangin' cards. Which isn't to say I wasn't scared out of my mind. Thankfully, people were pretty friendly. I think they were somewhat bemused by the clueless college kid trying to sound like she knew what she was talking about. By the end of the night, I'd managed to collect a dozen some name cards and keep my nerves intact.

And intimidating as it was, this was a really valuable experience for me. It also helped me come to a few conclusions:

1. Business is all about people - who you know, how you maintain your relations, whether people like you and want to do business with you. Competency is only half of the equation - business also requires finesse. I firmly believe that the ease with which you handle cocktail conversations correlates directly with the ease with which you are able to broker business deals.

2. Corporate culture (in Shanghai at least) is still very much an old boy's club. Out of 15 candidates for the new AmCham board, only 1 was a woman. There were only a handful of women at the entire meeting of some 80 people. As a young Asian-American woman, I felt an even greater contrast to the mostly older, white men -- the only other Asian females there were servers working at the hotel. It made me question a little the sincerity and seriousness with which people were treating me.

3. I wasn't made to schmooze. It takes so much out of me to make small talk and try to sell myself and the cause I am representing.

4. The only thing better than a buffet banquet is a free one at the Ritz Carlton. (pictured below)

On a somewhat related note:

American Foreign Service Officers posted at the Shanghai Consulate actually LIVE in the Ritz Carlton. Your American tax dollars hard at work :)

roughing it

DID YOU KNOW?
China used to have 6-day workweeks and just 1 day off for the weekend. It wasn't until 1995 that they switched to a 5-day system and enacted the national holiday break (Golden Week).

It's a nice chance for people to travel or go back home to visit family, but getting around can be pretty crazy. Think touristy places around spring break, except much worse because it's as if ALL OF CHINA went on spring break during the same week. So to avoid the mad rush this past Golden Week (first week of Oct), we decided to get off the beaten trail and do a very cheap and very unplanned tour of the Sichuan province. I basically left Shanghai with a one-way ticket to Chongqing, a Lonely Planet, and a very large backpack. (picture not to scale :P)


















Oh yes, and these are my travel buddies, Evan and Hana. Pictured here en route to the airport on Shanghai's Maglev (magnetic levitating train: the fastest one in the world!)












Our first stop was Chongqing, literally the biggest city in the world. Also probably the most polluted. Visibility is less than a mile in the middle of the afternoon on a normal day. I was talking to a professor about my trip just today, and he described Chongqing as a city that "looks like Hong Kong would if someone had dropped a dirty bomb on it." We ate some spicy hotpot, wandered around downtown, saw a few of the landmarks, but nothing too eventful went down.













If you look carefully you can make out a bridge and a skyline through the haze.

Next we trained to Chengdu, where we stayed at an awesome hostel before going on to Songpan. The ride there was one of the most terrifying 10.5 hours of my life -- we were winding around the mountains on a bus that was blaring some unintelligible traditional Chinese soap opera and honking every 2 minutes. Also, be warned that the yellow line in the middle of the road is more of a "suggestion" in China than it is a rule.













Our only consolation: the beautiful scenery. (photo actually taken from the bus)

Our final destination was Songpan, a sleepy little backpacking town that's famous for its horse trekking. We spent 2 days being guided through the mountains by a local Tibetan family. They didn't really speak Mandarin, or English, but they were some of the nicest, most hospitable people I've ever met. They took care of the horses, pitched the tents, cooked the food, and were generally awesome. Sleeping in the mountains though was..interesting. It rained on our only semi-waterproof tent, and a horse chewed a hole in it during the middle of the night. (we also didn't shower for 4 days, but that's another story..)














Our amazing Tibetan guides.

Definitely an amazing experience, but it's good to be back home. Shanghai sweet Shanghai!

my first typhoon!

You might have heard news reports about Shanghai being hit by what might have been "potentially the most destructive storm in a decade" - prompting the evacuation of 300,000 people from the city's outskirts, the shutdown of schools, and, (most alarmingly!), the relocation of the Women's World Cup to Hangzhou.

But thankfully, Typhoon Wypha didn't do much in my part of Shanghai except dump 7" of rain. (if you're curious, Wypha is a common girl's name in Thai) It was a bit inconvenient and wet, but it could have been much much worse. Thanks for everyone who checked up on me though. Just want to confirm that I'm alright, although I did get a few scary emails from my program director warning me to stock up on water and supplies.

I also have a pretty good typhoon story...

I have about a 20 minute walk home from school, in addition to a bus ride. Sadly, school was not cancelled for us, and I happened to get out of class on Tuesday during the height of the storm -- think ankle-deep streams on roadsides, sewers overflowing and water literally gushing out from the ground. Even though my shoes and socks and pants were entirely soaked, I managed to keep my upper torso pretty dry under my umbrella. What I completely forgot about was my backpack...

When I got back to the apartment, it was soaking. And swimming in a little puddle in the front pocket was my cell phone. Basically, Wypha broke my Razr. I was really upset at the time, but I figured that at least a typhoon is a pretty good way for a cell phone to break, if it's going to break eventually anyway. (almost as good as my cell-phone-breaking-in-China story from last summer... I left it in my pants pocket and managed to put it through the washer AND dryer without noticing)

The best part of this story is the ending though. After a few hours of not working, I let my phone dry a bit and it started making noises. A few hours later it began receiving calls, although the screen was still blank. And now, 2 days later, it suddenly started to function completely and perfectly!

No typhoon destruction, miraculous cell phone recovery - Praise God for the big things and the small.

of literacy and lakes

I started classes last week. Each week I have 8 hours of Chinese + 9 hours of area studies (in English). My Chinese class only has 5 people in it, so it's kind of fun but also kind of terrible because it is SO HARD. We are learning to read newspapers, which is pretty exciting. It's the most gratifying experience to be able to completely read something in Chinese - even if it's just a road sign or a menu item. Let's hear it for LITERACY! (and Penn)

Aside from doing excessive amounts of Chinese homework, I've gotten to explore Shanghai a bit. We went to the Oriental Pearl Tower the other weekend and got a nice view of the city. We also browsed through the Shanghai History Museum at the base of the tower. It was interesting because I feel like Chinese conceptions of museums are quite different from American ones. Instead of displaying artifacts or documents, they have a lot of dioramas, "artist renditions," and creepy wax figures. I also feel like "historical truth" is more debatable in China than it is elsewhere - and I guess wax people are easy to mold to fit official history? (haha - mold, literally)

 











View from the top of the tower. The sky in Shanghai is only blue above the clouds. Also my first "good" picture in Shanghai.


Also entertaining was an acrobatics show we attended in which the finale was called the "ball of death." (5 motorcyclists, 1 ball, lots of death potential -- see photo) By the end of the show I was exhausted from literally being on the edge of my seat the entire time.

 











In other news, went to Hangzhou for the weekend with my program. It's a city about 2 hours out of Shanghai that's famous for its beautiful lake and scenery - supposedly it's called "heaven on earth." But coming from a land of 10,000 lakes (shout out to Minnesooota), I was kind of underwhelmed with the famed West Lake. We did however get to see some cool Buddhist caves and stop by a longjing tea farm. Overall, it was a nice respite from the bustle and smog of Shanghai.

 











Hangzhou's Xi Hu, or West Lake.

 











A "perspective" picture gone terribly wrong, or alternately, Chinese water torture.
(my roommate Joey and me at the longjing tea farm)

中国-ed

Chinese lesson of the day

中国 (zhōng guó)
1. noun: the country of China
2. verb: to be cheated, to have something unexpectedly break, to be rudely treated, or to otherwise be screwed over
i.e. - After waiting for half an hour at the bank, she got zhong guo-ed when someone cut right to the front of the line.

Ok. So that second definition is made up. But it is appropriate and accurate, and something that will enter into the permanent vocabulary of anyone who has spent time in China.

The other day I bought a new blow dryer. I got greedy though and bought the cheapest one at the store - 30 kuai, compared to the higher-end ones that were 200 kuai. I was all excited to not have to sleep with wet hair that first night, but when I turned it on it started smelling like burning rubber. I realized the blow dryer was smoking. All of a sudden it popped and shut off. After a short career of about 15 seconds, this high quality piece of Chinese manufacture died.

This, friends, is what it means to be zhong guo-ed.

shanghai at last

My beautiful hardwood-floored, 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom, fully kitchened, track-lit apartment!


















Even the bathrooms are stylish.












The only strange thing about the apartment is the orange chairs, pictured here on the left. It looks as if someone couldn't figure out what to do with the back wall, so they just stole 3 chairs out of a movie theater and stuck them here.

So... yes. My standard of living in Shanghai has been quite cushy. I moved in this past Sunday and I was amazed at how nice the apartments were! I'd heard good things about them, but frankly they are a little ridiculous. Nicer than anything at Penn, by far. I had originally requested to live with one Chinese local and one American in some other apartments, but apparently they didn't have enough Chinese locals to go around. I can't complain about what I got instead though!

Aside from the rooming situation, my time in Shanghai has been interesting so far. Coming back to China has made me very nostalgic for last summer, which I spent at Peking University in Beijing. This program hasn't exactly been what I expected. It's not nearly as language-intensive as I would have liked, and the people here aren't as academically focused as I am used to at Penn or even last summer at PKU. My first few days were kind of a throwback to New Student Orientation of freshman year... meeting lots of people but forgetting most of their names, going out and being shepherded around in massive groups, seeing some people inevitably abusing their newfound freedoms. (China has no drinking age) Not exactly my cup of tea, but it's been getting better. One encouraging thing is that I met someone from Remnant West in NYC - I'm so grateful to have a fellow AMI-er out here in Shanghai! I'll also be starting classes on Monday, so I should be able to get settled in soon.

On a random note, I went to Carrefour today (the French equivalent of Walmart) and met a Scottish expat. Helped translate so that he could exchange a wok he had bought. One thing I love about China is that it really brings expats together. People who would never ordinarily meet or talk to each other just bond. We've all been cut while waiting in line, or nearly hit by a motorbike, or completely misunderstood because of language difficulties - so we can empathize with each other. It's a wonderful thing.

summer, abridged

Whenever people ask me what I did this summer, I never know quite how to respond. Usually I say, "Oh, I interned," or "I was in DC." But this just doesn't do the past 3 months justice.So in the interest of, er, justice, here are some of the more interesting highlights.

This summer, I...

worked: on writing grant proposals and editing publications at the Asia America Initiative

taught: English to foreign language teachers at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute

researched: the development of China's civil society and language learning strategies

schmoozed: with State Department officials and diplomats; also pulled some strings at the Passport Agency in order to get my passport renewed - in 2 hours, instead of 12 weeks!

spent: way too much money. DC is ridiculously expensive, especially when you're an unpaid intern

read: about the persecution and resilience of a leader of the Chinese Christian church in The Heavenly Man; later discovered that my boss at AAI has met him!

slept: pretty much every day on the Metro during my hour long commute to work; also slept during an event in which FTC Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a talk that was just as unengaging as every day of econ 2 lecture.

sweated: like a pig. DC is HOT.

lavished: Ginger with attention and dog treats. I miss her already.

saw: lots and lots of monuments and museums. Many times. My favorites: the Spy Museum and the Lincoln memorial at night

broke: not one, but TWO pairs of heels! By the end of my internship, I was tempted to stick it to the man and wear flip flops all the time instead of real shoes

learned: to SCUBA DIVE. 'nuf said.

pondered: what I will do after college. grad school? peace corps? DoS civil service? other work? my pondering was inconclusive.

Overall, it was an amazing summer of researching, sightseeing, and scuba diving, and I'm enormously thankful for the opportunities I was given. I remember frantically applying to think tanks in March - nervous that I wouldn't have anything to do this summer. But things came together in a way that I couldn't have planned better myself. I was generously provided with free, and incredibly nice, housing with my sister and her husband (and of course, their dog). I had the chance to work both in a small nongovernmental organization and within the government bureaucracy. It was humbling to be able to meet and work with such accomplished, influential, and truly passionate people.

I close today with an anecdote from Henrietta Fore, Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and Under Secretary of State for Management. As as a former Consular Officer, she was there in 1991 when the U.S. reopened the American Embassy in Lithuania. (After being shut out by the Iron Curtain for more than 50 years, the U.S. was only able to return after the fall of the Soviet Union.) She told the story of how, at the reopening ceremony, even grown Lithuanian men had tears in their eyes because they were so moved and overjoyed that the Americans had finally returned.

Melodramatic? Maybe. But I am, nonetheless, touched by stories like these. The Bush administration may be mired in scandal, our policies toward the Middle East misguided, our human rights record tarnished by Abu Gharib, and our civil liberties curtailed by the Patriot Act. Even so, I believe in the ideals America has come to stand for, and in the ability of the American political system to live up to these ideals by continually correcting itself of its failures and shortcomings.

My summer in DC has provided much food for thought. I can just say that Shanghai has some big shoes to fill.

7 days

Will be leaving for Shanghai in exactly 7 days. In the meantime, I've been busy stocking up on American-made toothpaste, breathing clean Minnesotan air, practicing putonghua, and enjoying my last days of fixed-price shopping.

Stay tuned for more...