Why no backlash?

It’s been remarked by some of our readers that there hasn’t been so much of a public backlash against the milk companies for their tainted products. This pretty much seems the case to us, as far as we can tell in our daily life. One possible reason is that Chinese citizens do not share the same rights as we are used to in the States. They cannot make public demonstrations, or publish unapproved editorials in newspapers. Any motion toward public protest must first be approved by the authorities, which is a severe limit on what the public response can achieve.

Culturally speaking, Chinese also have a very indirect tradition of expressing their opinions and viewpoints. We feel very different in this regard, especially when trying to have straightforward conversation with our new friends. There is so much back and forth that seems unnecessary to us, but it is the Chinese way. The process is given much more precedence than the result, whereas we just want to get to the point! This is a classic cultural difference, which we don’t think is wrong by any means, just very new to us. This also helps us to understand the public response to the milk problem.

The other reason that comes to mind that there is little public backlash is that Chinese typically trust their government to do the right thing. This is a one party system- there will only be one response to any given problem, and in a way that seems to make it the correct response. Again, there’s not so much room for public debate in China. People may air grievances in approved ways, but the solutions to their problems seems to come from the top down.

There will likely be plenty of investigation of the causes behind the tainted milk distribution, and some heavy-handed punishment. But for the majority of the billion citizens here, life goes on as usual.

More on the Tainted Milk

The number of sick children has risen to over 53,000 here in China, as a result of melamine added to milk (amongst other things – animal skin and urine being common additives to boost the protein content). The New York Times has reported that there have been massive dairy recalls all over China. Yet, when Liz went to the supermarket today, she saw aisles full of dairy products marked down for sale. Friends have reported seeing similar sales on dairy products at other supermarkets. Remarkably Liz saw plenty of people, including a mother with an 18 month old, eagerly buying the unusually underpriced products. We are not yet able to read the newspapers in Chinese, but it makes us wonder how publicized the tainted milk scandal has been and if people are taking it seriously! People also drink plenty of boiled tap water here without a thought, when the levels of toxic substances – like mercury and lead, which can not be removed by boiling – are unacceptably high.

Our Ayi has told us that mothers stop nursing their babies here by “at least 8 months old, because otherwise that’s all they ever want.” This is not surprising, since women typically only have one child and most women work in environments that we can’t imagine would be friendly to a mother who needs time to pump breastmilk! If a woman is going to have a second child (which can be done for a sum of money paid to the local authorities), she can be legally fired from her job on that basis alone. So it’s not a surprise, in the midst of this environment, that few women breastfeed beyond a certain age. Unfortunately, the alternative – feeding their babies Chinese formula – can have deadly consequences.

Money and money-making, as anywhere else in the world, are very very important here. Sometimes, it seems more important to make money than to worry about many thousands of children becoming very sick. We are hopeful that the government does more than sack a few higher-ups to make positive change in the dairy industry and in all their manufacturing sectors. Before we left for China, we read a statistic that 15% of products on any given grocery-store shelf in China are contaminated in some way. We don’t have a hard time believing this, and we consume with a great deal of care.

We hope that some kind of justice is done here for the many children and families suffering as a consequence of the tainted milk.

The dictionary according to the censors

We found an English dictionary here in town at an imported books store. JM was excited to have a volume with definitions of words like “stochasticity,” meaning it is a pretty good quality volume. It’s a normal Webster’s Collegiate dictionary, printed in America and shipped over here to China.

On arrival at home we were surprised to find some entries.. missing! Someone got to our dictionary first, and was able to remove some of the more ’sensitive’ information from the listings. If you look over at our picture site, you will see what we mean.

http://polis7.blogspot.com

We’re constantly reminded about the difference in freedom of information here. When chatting with some Chinese students about friends of ours who started their own locally circulated newspaper, they were astounded that our friend could do so on his own initiative. The point became clear when our newspaper translation class teacher told us how every single publication in China must be registered with the regional publication bureau to have an official status, or else it’s illegal, i.e.- it is potentially subversive to the national order.

We don’t ever think about the Bill of Rights until part of it seems missing in our life. This reminds us again how we can’t take it for granted what privileges we have in comparison to many others.

Tainted Milk

We came to China knowing that food quality posed a large issue. If you’ve followed the news recently you’ve seen that Chinese milk products have been pulled from the shelves, again showing that melamine (a fertilizer chemical) has been added to them by some of the dairy farmers. This has caused some infant deaths from tainted formula, and has sent thousands of other babies to the hospitals.

We only recently started letting Leo drink some milk in addition to nursing, but we only let him drink highly pasteurized organic milk from Australia. Our prudence has seemed to pay off for now. But we know that over the long run we’re all being exposed to some toxins that we’d rather not be, and we’re trying to make good choices about how best to avoid them.

You just can’t trust government regulations here to the same degree as back in the States. We really hope that China will take some initiative to correct these widespread problems, rather than just arrest and execute a few people. The scare factor is high with the latter, but it doesn’t deter people who have little scruples (or knowledge in some cases) about what harm they are doing.

Those messy people

Today in our spoken Chinese course we studied vocabulary describing rooms and their appearance (furniture pieces, messy/clean, different room names, etc.). Volunteers went to the front of the room and gave a description of their own living quarters.

One rather plump classmate described her room and its contents, making the admission that her room stays fairly messy. As she walked back to her chair our teacher stated out loud what to her seemed obvious inference:

“Fat people often have messy rooms, don’t they? Because fat people eat and drink a lot of things, they are always leaving some things here, some things there. It’s easy for them to be messy.”

Our classmate did not catch the drift of this straight-faced comment, fortunately, but some of us who did just looked at each other aghast with amazement. Did she really just say that??

Standards of politeness and frankness vary everywhere. We will think again before making a seemingly innocuous admission in front of our classmates!

Lesson of the day

Today’s lesson learned:

Don’t threaten to go over a middle man’s head when the middle man has already paid off the man over his head.

And on a side note:

Don’t allow a middle man to negotiate for you if he earns more based on how little he negotiates for you.

We’ll be sure to keep these points in mind for all of our future business arrangements. Right now, however, we’re chalking it all up to a ‘learning experience.’ Chinese business has some distinct differences from how we’re used to things. Enough said!

August pictures

Please check out our picture website to see some of our recent photos:

http://polis7.blogspot.com

Seven years later

Today is September 11th here in China, seven years after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Liz and I both remember being in grad school at the time back in the States. I was in class early that morning and went straight to the library to study immediately afterwards, oblivious for hours about any unusual events on the outside. I’ll never forget how the events of that day pulled so many people together, and continues to do so.

Seven years later, I find that I’m now.. still in school. Hmm.. Some things are slow to change, aren’t they?

By the way, your baby will be deported

So we went to the police station to renew our visas for the new term. Both of us have student status this semester, since we’ll each be in class at Nanjing University starting Monday. The visa renewal process for us is straightforward enough, with no objections by the authorities.

Leo, however, is on a tourist visa. He renewed it once since arrival, but this is his second time to do so. In passing, the guard on duty told us that at the end of this visa’s term, Leo will have to go back to a Chinese embassy in USA or Hong Kong to get a new travel visa, as the current one can only be renewed twice.

What?? We were told by the university staff that it would be no problem to keep renewing his tourist visa. Surprise! Just as on many other occasions here, the actual story didn’t match the one we’d been told in advance. This has been the case over and over again, so we shouldn’t have been so caught off guard. But deportation for little Leo??

On further discussion, the guard told us that since we didn’t have an embassy-certified copy of Leo’s birth certificate, they couldn’t put him on our visa as his parents. Thoughts rushed back to our mind of standing in the lobby of the Chinese embassy back in the US with a copy of his birth certificate in tow, but no one bothering to mention this little detail to us that day. Rats.

Talking over our options, the guard came around to suggesting that if we had family back home, they could go to the embassy in our stead with a copy of Leo’s certificate, and could get it certified in our absence. Whew! Maybe there’s a way out after all. We just need to find a willing agent and figure out how to mail Leo’s document back home before March. Hopefully this isn’t another tall tale, so we’ll be able to avoid dropping Leo off on a plane and bidding bon voyage. Can someone pick him up when he gets in to O’Hare?

The Ayi Diaries, cont…

So our Ayi has been with us for three months, and I thought it was time for another installment of “The Ayi Diaries.” We have had our share of bloopers over these past few months, as we sort out our differences and find a routine. I’ve been around the house studying the whole time, and next Monday marks the beginning of school. It’s been wonderful to have the time to get to know each other as well as work out some of the inevitable kinks in such a relationship.

Leo adores Ayi, and is happy to see her every day, which is a relief to me! I have to admit though, as a Mom, the first time he reached out his arms to her while in my arms I thought, “Oh, so soon you forget who carried you in the womb and fed you night after night!” ☺ Just kidding, sort of.

We almost parted ways when she fed him a bunch of her lunch one day without telling me. Without being too explicit, let’s just say there was “evidence” that he had been fed something very strange. We had to confront her with this (very interesting to confront anyone in China about anything, by the way) and at first she just said, “Well, he really liked it.” (I thought to myself, “Well, he would really like to eat ice cream for breakfast every day too.” ☺) I kept pushing the issue, because she knew that I wanted her to only feed him our food (I’m neurotic about food because we’ve had two bouts of food poisoning and I’m not anxious for Leo to have this experience!). Finally, she admitted that she thinks we don’t feed him the appropriate foods, and thought he needed more fiber. We then had another conversation about his poo habits (yes, at this point my potty vocabulary ROCKS), and settled the issue. She promised to never do that again. That’s the only time I thought our relationship wasn’t going to work out!

She has taught Leo how to dance and how to clap! He responds to the Chinese for “dance” and “clap” and still doesn’t know these words in English. We’re really interested to see how his language develops, and it seems he’s having no trouble. He can speak about 4 or 5 words now – all in English so far. But it’s great to see that he’s assimilating the sounds and is beginning to show understanding of some Chinese words.

Otherwise, there have been some interesting cultural encounters. We’ve made a point not to fuss too much over him when he hurts himself. In China, the babies are really fussed over when they fall, and they tend to cry quite a bit. So she likes it that he’s not quite that easily flustered. She also told my tutor that she likes my methods that I get from books (she thinks we’re a little book crazy because all we do is study and read), and that it seems that the methods work very well. She asked me to go the bookstore with her to pick out a Chinese book so she could read about it herself. I told her that I don’t think they’ve translated them into Chinese quite yet! Now that he’s walking and has turned one, he’s turned into a bundle of busy-ness – enough for any one person to handle. I’m not so sure there’s a book that covers this territory! We joke that we now live with ‘Animal’ from the Muppets ☺.

Although sometimes it’s still hard to communicate, it’s gotten so much better over the past three months. I understand her fairly well now, and she’s really patient with my choppy Chinese. It’s a complicated relationship, both because of the language and the culture. Some things don’t translate that well no matter what you say! However, we’re working it out a day at a time, and at the end of the day – she’s pretty cool. She recently came to his birthday party, and we were glad to celebrate with her. Cheng Ayi is a big part of Leo’s life and ours.