Entries Tagged 'Kunming, Yunnan' ↓

Thank you to the many people that have emailed me over the last year about birth control in china. I really have tried to respond to everyone who has written.

Today I tried to respond to message that I received from N.K. in Uganda, but the email you gave doesn’t work. Please email me again from the contact page! Or email a message directly to

Everyone be safe!

Well, I will be running off soon. Kunming has been my home for a year and a half, but I’m going back to the U.S. this month. I will be starting my new life in Washington, D.C. I’ve never lived in the capital before, and never really thought I would, but that’s what’s happening.

Next week we finish up classes. My final exams are on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then Jeremy and I are planning to travel around Yunnan. Hopefully we can avoid the cold weather.

Although today was pretty mild, it has been a chilly week. And I should remind you all that Kunming doesn’t have indoor heating, so everyone wears their coats inside. And once your fingers and toes turn to ice, it’s impossible to warm them back up without the aid of some sort of dangerous electric heating appliance — I have a space heater, electric blanket, and plug-in hot water bottle.

Shockingly, I have a cold that has lingered for almost two weeks. At least the fever went away, but I have that terrible chapped nose from blowing my nose constantly. Ugh.

I just finished a book my dad lent me, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki. It is a very engaging history of the U.S. from the beginnings to just after the cold war. (It was published in 1993.) Really reminds you that the U.S. has always been multicultural, and our image of a “real” American being white just doesn’t make any kind of sense at all. Of course there were plenty of white guys in early America, plenty of English-speaking Anglos, but there were so many other groups of people — immigrants and Native Americans. And it’s interesting to see how and when certain people became “us” and others remained “them.” I’m not talking about immigrants stubbornly resisting the melting pot! There were all kinds of barriers set up to prevent people from becoming citizens and to prevent people from getting an education and finding work. I guess I should make that last sentence present tense! We are still a country that loves waging war internally between “us” and “them.” And the point of the book is that “us” is “them”… and er… “them” is “us”… er… we are they. “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together… I am the walrus!…” Anyway, it isn’t really all that psychedelic, but it is highly recommended.

Oh, and here is a disturbing piece describing capital punishment and lethal injections in Yunnan. It is an interview with Liu Renwen, “a death penalty expert,” who advocates the use of lethal injection over “execution by shooting” which is still the favored method in China. How very progressive!

This is a sad story that filtered through the expat community a week and a half ago.

A longtime expat in Kunming, Michael Sutherland, died in a rafting accident August 26, 2007. At least two other people, including his girlfriend, also died in the accident. Everyone was wearing safety gear, but they capsized in a dangerous stretch of the river. It’s very likely that he died trying to save his girlfriend.

Today I found an article from Michael’s hometown newspaper in Wisconsin. This is the only written account of the story that I’ve been able to find. Other stories have made the rounds here through word-of-mouth. Nothing has appeared in the Chinese press.

Appleton Post-Crest: Former Appleton resident dies in Chinese rafting accident (September 8, 2007)

I have a new niece! But because certain family members are paranoid about stalkers, I can’t release anymore information about her existence. Anyway, I’m very excited and I hope the mom recovers soon.

I watched the 1978 vintage classic The Wiz last night. There was a lot more singing than I remember and a lot less story. And a lot of references I didn’t get last time — the (Jim) Crows, taxis that don’t stop for you, New York stuff. And wow is Michael Jackson ever awesome as the scarecrow.

It really is a miracle that kind of quality entertainment is available for less than 1USD on the streets of Kunming, China. Who knew?

It can be frustrating studying Chinese, a.k.a. “Mandarin” or “Mandarin Chinese.” Inside China, the language we study is called 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) or “the common language.” Before I came to China, I didn’t realize — or fully appreciate it anyway — that every region has a local dialect. People here in Kunming speak the Kunming dialect. It is the language you are most likely to hear on the streets — in restaurants, vegetable markets, and the corner stores. On the university and college campuses, signs are posted for students to please speak and write Mandarin. Presumably this is because the government needs to make sure educated people can speak it. It is also worth noting that classes are (supposed to be) taught in Mandarin, and furthermore the students come from a variety of places and often truly don’t share a common dialect… hence the need for Mandarin, the COMMON (i.e. SHARED) language.

According to an article in the Shanghai Daily, the Chinese government reports that “only 45.1 percent of rural residents could speak Mandarin, compared to 66 percent of urban residents.”

This article is actually about how dialects isolate migrant communities in China. It’s an interesting and worthwhile subject that shares a lot of characteristics with the situation in the U.S. with the Spanish-speaking migrants.

However, I what really surprised were these numbers! If they’re accurate, that means less than 66% of China’s total population speaks Mandarin, less than 66% of Chinese people speak (what we call) Chinese. Weird!

Does that mean I speak more Mandarin than 34% of China’s population?

PHOTO: This t-shirt is brought to you via Sinosplice and it reads: “请讲普通话” which means “please speak Mandarin.”

Yes, yes, yes, I know: I haven’t posted in quite some time. I seem to have lost all of August! There was traveling and Jeremy’s birthday (thanks for helping me with that one!) and then someone made me join facebook and… well, you understand. I’ve been distracted.

School has started again. It’s great. I’m back at Dong Fang (东方) and I lucked out with a wonderful teacher: 赵红 (Zhao4 Hong2). She is probably the most experienced Chinese teacher I’ve had so far. In the past, most of my teachers have been relatively young, uninterested women — not interested in teaching, not interested in learning. Anyway, this is our second week and I’m still happy. I’m also taking a morning class twice a week for speaking (口语) and listening (听力). The teacher for that class is also pretty good. She has a good knack for keeping everyone participating. Pretty remarkable.

These are my books:

First Year Chinese Course, Level 3, Vol. 2 [ISBN: 7-5619-1672-8]
汉语教程第三册下 (fancy new edition! 第十四课到第二十六课)

Short-term Spoken Chinese 3 [ISBN：7-5619-0705-2]
马箭飞 （2004）。汉语口语速成:提高篇。北京：北京语言文化大学出版社。

I’ve already studied the first six chapters of the second book, but I don’t think that will make me suffer too much. We’ll see.

Also, lucked out with some good 同学 (classmates). They seem really cool. Hard to say exactly who will register for the class, but I think for the most part people really like the teacher and they’ll stick around.

On an unrelated and random note… I was reading a thing on Salon.com just now when I was distracted by an ad. Now this is a good ad campaign! Check it out:

I feel cleaner and happier just looking at their website!

Online now getting ready for the holiday, searching flights on Ctrip.com and browsing photos on flickr. So many beautiful places!

This week my bike got messed up. Argh!

It wasn’t quite this bad:

It was parked outside Salvador’s Coffee Shop on Wednesday night (while we were having July 4th festivities) and someone managed to smash into it, bending the front tire to hell. Since it wouldn’t turn, I had to lift the front end and wheel it home on the back tire. Bruised my arm up in the process. Thursday I took the bus, and then Friday morning I dropped the bike off at the fancy bike shop on 一二一 (Yi1 Er4 Yi1) across from main gate of 师大 (Shi1 Da4). I ended up paying an exorbitant 50元 for the repair, but oh well. Anyway, it’s fixed now.

Well, next week is the end of classes. Sounds like our remaining class time will be used learning Mahjong and discussing some Chinese history. Only two of us are taking the exam, so our teacher sent it home with us to complete at our leisure. Yeah, 东方 (Dong1 Fang1) isn’t exactly the pinnacle of rigorous Chinese language learning institutions.

Miraculously, Jeremy not only healed my iPod, but also poisoned the cockroaches. Yes, things are looking up!

Speaking of that miraculous man, Jeremy has totally out-blogged me lately! His latest: Our friend Beth in Washington D.C. went to an exhibition at the Smithsonian yesterday which featured a Yunnan cultural extravaganza. Pretty cool. She was especially excited because she’s planning on visiting us in August. They even had Pu’er tea!

Jeremy also has a nice story about how he caught a pickpocket. Very dramatic.

Yesterday, my friend Jessie introduced me to a secondhand clothes market here in Kunming. I hesitate to mention it, because everyone I tell seems to be totally grossed-out by the notion of secondhand clothes in China. Even (maybe especially) Chinese people. Anyway, I recommend it. It’s very similar in quality and cleanliness to most thrift stores in the US. It’s set up as a cluster of small storefronts. Everything is on hangers and organized by style or size. Mostly out of style, slightly strange clothing. The best part, though, is that it has a surprising amount of Western brands and (more spectacularly) sizes. I have Western hips, and so it can be frustrating trying to find a good fit. But really it was not an issue at this market. They even have some vintage stuff, which is fun! Prices are incredible. A few stalls had a pile of clothes for 1 yuan: “Yi kuai maaaaadness!” A lot of stalls had racks of clothes — skirts, shirts, jeans — for 5 or 10 yuan.

How do you get there? Hmmm… northeast of the intersection of 人民西路 and 二环西路, it’s on 茭菱路 (jiao1ling2 lu4) just west of the slightly smaller drag 近华浦路 (Jin4hua4pu3 Lu4). It’s on the 85 bus line. I think the bus stop is called 丰宁小区 (Feng1ning2 Xiao3qu4).

Well, this week hasn’t been the greatest.

On Wednesday, Pizza left for Thailand. She’ll be gone for 9 months. She’s been tutoring me for quite a while, so I was really sorry to see her go. She set me up with one of her classmates, but it looks like her friend doesn’t actually have any free time outside of evenings and weekends. Sigh.

Yesterday, my other study partner, April, told me she’s starting some classes, so she won’t be free to study with me on Tuesdays and Wednesdays any more … at least for the next few weeks. Argh!

And now my iPod’s broken and there are gigantic, flying roaches (maybe just one… ok, two) in my home.

June 1st was Children’s Day. Jeremy and I celebrated with the kids from April’s English class. She arranged several games for us to play together. Seems a little torturous to make your kids practice English with real, live English-speakers on Children’s Day, but they seemed to have fun. We gave them a stamp on the hand every time they got something right, and then they could get prizes at the end of the day based on the number of stamps they had. It was fun. Her brother-in-law took a few photos:

And here’s a nice photo of our incredibly serious badminton team. In Chinese, it’s Yumaoqiu 羽毛球 — feather ball!

More photos on April’s blog.