Street Fighter: Harbin Edition

China's a vast country, but only a relatively small percentage of that is readily habitable. With 1.3 billion people crowding limited space, it's perhaps not surprising, then, that tempers sometimes flare up.

Despite (or perhaps due to) inventing martial arts, shouting matches in the street rarely turn to violence. Before I describe today's events, a quick word in this country's defense. I can't say enough how much safer I've felt in Shanghai and Harbin than I do back in London.

Before this week, I've only ever seen one fight in well over two years in China, even in the drunkest or poorest districts in both cities. That 'fight' if it can be described as such, occurred outside Pegasus Club in Shanghai, and involved some impressive Thai-boxing knees to the body and side of the head but quickly fizzled out.

Noone I've met in this country, from the most clueless ex-pat, to the smallest defenseless colleague, has ever had a problem with getting home to or from either city centre in the small hours.

It's by no means because China is some sort of Communist Utopia though. My guess is that it's due to a combination of a justice system best described as 'draconian', economic conditions which make 'the chav' a totally alien concept, and cultural and societal expectations which make Friday-night fighting on the high street (not that there are 'high streets' here) something completely unacceptable.

On the other hand, the concept of 'face' permeates every aspect of Chinese culture, including public disputes, and I've seen my fair share of slanging matches. For example, in case of a car accident, 'face' dictates that apologising constitutes an admission of guilt, so the natural reaction is to attack the other person as at fault, or if that's not possible, pretend nothing happened.

On my usual way route back home, I came across a crowd of perhaps two hundred spectators, crowding a vegetable stall in a rough circle, and comprehensively blocking traffic, going both ways on the intersection.

Intrepid wannabe photo-journalist that I am, I whipped out my camera and jostled my way to the front. A group of five or six men in their late-twenties and above were having a heated argument with a young Pony-Tailed Woman and an Older Man in Overalls perhaps in his sixties.

P-TW and OMiO looked like they were the owners of this vegetable stall - not much more than a little wooden box, wheels parked on a few bricks.

As the argument continued, I noticed with a start all the broken glass covering the ground - the stall's windows had all been smashed. I circled around for a closer look, and noticed a neighbouring stall had also been comprehensively battered. Maybe there'd been a car accident, and the argument was over compensation?

By now, both sides were yelling at their top of their voices. Annoyingly, the crowd was chatting away animatedly and I couldn't get close enough to figure out the finer points of the debate. Suddenly, a white pickup truck pulled up, parting the crowd, and the gang started grabbing polystyrene crates of vegetables from the stall and hefting them into the back. P-TW and OMiO were none too pleased and things got physical as they tried to wrestle back their merchandise.

Suddenly, with a chill, I noticed that some of the gang were brandishing poles, evidently taken from the neighbouring wrecked stall. They'd smashed the windows, not some out-of-control car!

The two factions continued to jostle and shove. The polystyrene crates weren't built for this kind of abuse and cabbages spilt out from the broken boxes and into the street as we all continued to watch impassively.

Suddenly, one of the gang felt he'd escalate things a bit. He jumped up onto a table, recently vacated of its wares, and launched a flying stomp into OMiO's face. OMiO staggered back, face a spider's web of crimson, but stayed on his feet. My mind raced: "Nice kick - definitely some 散打 training", "This is one really tough old man", "How can you do that to a sixty year-old?" and "I guess it's harder to knock people out than the movies say".

The crowd's chatter increased in pitch and tempo. I looked around for the cops, and noticed we were standing right outside the local police station.

"How about some help here?" I climbed the stairs and looked through the window. Not a soul in sight. Well, they're either out here trying to help, or they're at lunch. I scanned the massed audience. Sure enough, I spied a police cap at the back of the crowd, and headed over to see what he was up to.

It was one of the guys that had been so unhelpful in letting me register my residence. He was chomping away on some melon seeds, smiling and chatting away. Useless!

Suddenly I heard the distinctive tinkle of glass smashing, and pushed my way back through to the front of the crowd again to have a look. A man in his twenties was using a metal bar to smash at the remaining jagged remnants of window in the battered vegetable stall. Not for the humble vegetable seller Kite-marked safety glass - this stuff came down in big splinters which hit the ground and shot out in spray after spray of white shards.

The gang had cleared off while I'd been trying to locate the police, and P-TW was tending to OMiO's crushed nose. The new guy appeared to be an ally of P-TW and OMiO, and was trying to clean things up a bit. Action over, the crowd started to disperse, and I caught excited snippets of punditry as they went.

Some post-fight punditry:
1) At first, I thought that there'd been a car accident. The flying kick and the brandishing of metal poles put paid to that idea.
2) Enxi suggested that the stall-owners owed money. She related a similar story from her time back in Jilin, where her neighbours had had their flat turned over because of an unpaid debt. The police had sat back and watched on that occasion too, unwilling to get involved in a 'private' dispute.
3) I suggested that the police were themselves involved. Maybe OMiO hadn't paid his protection money, or didn't have the correct license, and the powers-that-be had called on some goons to sort them out.
4) Meisong had a different slant on the story. The goons were local mafia, and the cops didn't get involved because the gangs owned the police!

Whatever the reason, it was a sobering and surprisingly violent episode, that served as a reminder to be careful, despite how reassuringly safe this city feels normally.

Back to Bowling

I'm definitely disappointed how little bowling (or similar pointlessly competitive activities) I've been getting done since arriving in Harbin.

After Wang Lei treated us to some Sichuanese food at the poetically named 雾都 ("The Foggy Capital" referring to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province) I set out to put that right by heading for the bowling alley in the Post Hotel near Qiulin.

The place was packed with Koreans for some reason, yelling "Fighting! Fighting!" and high-fiving all over the place. After a wait for our two lanes, I instituted the Rule of Embarassing Punishment: ten press-ups, sit-ups or star-jumps for the loser in each lane.

Even though Wang Lei had never bowled before, he was convinced he'd win. Pah! Pumped with immature competitive spirit, I bowled this respectable 194, including a four-bagger. Note that if it weren't for choking badly on frames 9 and 10, I'd have had an easy 200!

True to his word, Wang Lei assumed the position, and pumped out ten respectable press-ups. I win! I win! You're the loser! I'm the winner!

鲁福楼

On a tip from Yudi - who could and probably should write a book on Harbin Restaurants - I arranged to go to 鲁福楼 (Lu Fu Lou), a Shandong-style restaurant, with university and TKD classmates.
Frustratingly, I asked several people for restaurant recommendations, and received nothing more than shrugs and assurances that they'd think about it in return. As soon as I mentioned Lu Fu Lou though, all agreed without exception that it was an excellent choice, even people that had only lived in Harbin for a year or so! A reluctance to take responsibility for a poor restaurant choice? Selective amnesia? A cultural quirk? More research needed!

A plaque above the door announced that Lu Fu Lou was proud to have a famous chef. Sure enough the food was tasty stuff. Meisong brought along a couple of his flatmates. One had his foot in a cast (pictured centre) but slugged back the beers like a champ.

"Should he drink so much with his leg like that?" Enxi asked, looking worried, when he'd left the room.

"Maybe it helps with the pain?" I suggested.

"What happened to your friend's foot?" I asked Meisong later.

"Oh, he got really drunk and kicked a rock" he replied matter-of-factly.

Meisong continued with a series of drunken flatmate stories.

"Last week, he got drunk and shouted at me for four hours for no reason. Once he peed on his monitor until it caught on fire, and another time he passed out in the street. Someone stole all his clothes including his shoes, leaving him in his underwear."

"How did he get home?"

"Running."

"Don't you worry about him? About his drinking?"

"Oh sure, but we keep him around because something funny always happens".
In my defence, I only found out Meisong's flatmate was a dangerous alcoholic after we'd got through these four crates of Harbin Beer .

After we'd eaten, we stood outside in the cold debating what to do next. Meisong flashed a lazy, drunken kick at my head so I tripped him to the carpark tarmac and applied an armbar. An object lesson in the need for ground-fighting techniques to supplement TKD. He was impressed even as he squirmed and yelled on the ground, but not enough to want to stay out.

As everyone else headed home, I checked out a small underground bar near HIT called 49, with Zhener, Tai Guang and Enxi.

Some cultural notes:

1) Even though it's 1.5RMB (10p) for a big bottle of Hapi or Sanxing beer in the supermarket, and not much more in a restaurant, people (including myself) will gladly go to a dingy little bar and spend 15RMB for a small bottle of the exact same stuff.

2) Why? Well it's not the decor. The handful of bars surrounding HIT all seem to have little swing benches suspended from the ceiling by chains, and an incongruous theme - in 49's case, a naval flavour. Maybe it's the entertainment? Apart from cheesy pop and some surprising classics (apart from The Beatles and Elvis standards, Country Roads seems to be popular), most seem to have a karaoke screen, at which drunken businessmen, drunken students, and the occasional semi-professional middle-aged man like to warble at, loudly.

3) It seems almost obligatory to buy some sort of snack with one's beverages. Not for the Harbinese a small plate of salty peanuts though! 49's snack menu runs many times longer than its drinks menu - nuts, crisps, seeds, ice-cream, popcorn, dried fruit and even fruit platters are all on offer to satisfy the beer-munchies.

Speaking of entertainment, there were quite a few people clustered around the bar before this guy stepped up and took the mike. He was so bad, he caused a mass exodus from the bar. I took this while fleeing the aural assault.

Dormitory 13: Unlucky For Some

I've been quite sceptical about university accommodation in China.

Perhaps understandably, the typical six- or eight-bed rooms typical for domestic students aren't an acceptable choice for many foreign students, so most places seem to dedicate a building to foreigners, and offer twin rooms with shared bathroom or cooking facilities.

I can understand the policy of jacking up prices for the foreigner dormitories. Most are willing to pay because they're not aware of the alternatives, because cutting through the paperwork and living off-campus can be a daunting experience, especially for the undergraduate exchange students who could probably do without the hassle, and because of better economic backgrounds.

It's not even a problem unique to HIT. As far as I'm aware, all universities in Shanghai that offered a Chinese programme to foreigners had a similar policy of shared rooms (or at least shared bathrooms) at rates well above the market price.

But understanding isn't the same as agreeing, and there's no need to provide rooms that are cramped, inconvenient (a midnight curfew!), and lack privacy. Looking into Harbin accommodation, I heard one paranoid netizen suggest that the police and universities are in cahoots, deliberately making it difficult for foreigners to register their off-campus registration. Less paperwork for the cops, and more money for university. I doubt it's as sinister as that, but there's definitely an element of deliberate obtuseness, whether it's from laziness or malice.

Mingrui started coming to classes late, and looking tired and distressed. In between naps, he explained why.

Dormitory staff had decided to give him a flatmate - a Malinese doctorate student called 马龙 ("Ma Long" (a transliteration of Malone? Marlon?), and literally "Horse Dragon").

He'd sleep with his door wide open and lights on; cook 'funny-smelling' food; and flood the bathroom floor.

As the days went on, the list of complaints got weirder. Mingrui overheard the dormitory cleaners saying that they'd heard Ma Long mutter to himself about killing people; he'd rant aggressively and unintelligibly at Mingrui; and rumour had it that he'd gone on a naked walkabout in the city.

Teacher Wang Lie checked with the dormitory staff for Mingrui... and it turned out that all the rumours were true! In fact, local government and the Malinese Embassy were in the process of sending Ma Long home, but the paperwork was taking some time.

Alarmingly, the university leadership was so worried that Ma Long would do something crazy living on his own that they moved him in with Mingrui.

Out of curiosity, I sneaked a look through the dormitory register. Sure enough, Ma Long had the unsmiling, deathly stare of a serial killer.

The only member of HIT staff that emerged from this whole sorry state of affairs was Teacher Wang Lie who looked into Ma Long's history for Mingrui; forced the dormitory to find another room for Mingrui to sleep in at night; and pushed the university leadership to expedite Ma Long's return home. Meanwhile, the university pretended they didn't have any rooms free to save some money; moved a certifiably odd young man in to live with a total stranger; and all the while charged sums well-above the local market rate for substandard accommodation - no fridge, no washing machine, no cooking facilities, and utilities most definitely not included!

Northerners have a reputation for being witty speakers - a trait apparently much admired in a country still significantly divided in terms of a standard, unified language. A great example came a few days later, when up came the idiom: 龙马精神 ("Long Ma Jing Shen" or "The vigour of a dragon or a horse"). Quick as a whip, Teacher Wang Lie, flipped the sentence on its head and punned:

"Of course, Mingrui might know a thing or two about 神经马龙 ("Shen Jing Ma Long" or "Crazy Ma Long")." Amazing!

蛋糕 Day

To celebrate the taking of the HSK (and because among the only three students that regularly attend class, noone is having a birthday this term) I went out to order a cake on Sunday. A bakery near university was offering 8-inch cakes for 25RMB (£1.70).

"How much to add fruit to that?"

"10RMB" the boss replied.

"What!? That's almost as much as the cake itself!"

"Well, you try buying two strawberries, half a kiwi, and two cherries. Noone will sell so little to you".

I didn't believe the guy but was too lazy to try. Fine, I'll blow 35RMB (£2.30) on a stupid cake then.

In the end, it was worth every penny. The sponge was light and fluffy, the presentation perfect, and uncharacteristically, for baked products in China, the cream was proper dairy stuff, not the plastic-tasting rubbish found in most shops. The baker had even piped on 学业有成 ("Success in your exams") for us.

The reddy-orange things in the middle, randomly enough, two cherry tomatoes she'd also seen fit to throw in - technically fruit, I know.

A quick aside: Tomatoes are called 西红柿, literally "Western Red Persimmons". My guess is they came quite late to China, because with the notable exception of Xinjiang cuisine (which use them to make excellent noodle sauce) Chinese cuisine seems to have trouble knowing what to do with them. They'll occasionally find their way into salads, but the most common use seems to be serving them coarsely sliced, chilled and served with sugar as a kind of refreshing dessert.

We sliced the cake using the tiny plastic knives provided, on to even smaller paper plates - soft cake flopping over the edge, and cream getting everywhere. The tiny two-pronged pieces of plastic included were more like mutant toothpicks than forks, so the three students and our two teachers ended up using our hands to stuff fistfuls of cake into our greedy mouths. In short, 35RMB well spent!

HSK Horrors

The last time HIT tried to hold the HSK, they were apparently so ill-prepared that the listening section sounded like a third-generation tape of a couple of people with confidence problems making an international call from the bottom of a well. While eating a packet of Jacob's crackers. Each.

Needless to say, even language savant Mingrui failed to score well. Embarassed, yet ever mindful of 'losing face', the school declined to tell Beijing, which might have led to some consideration for the student's poor listening scores. Outraged, a Korean student vehemently complained. HIT caved... to an extent. A refund for the students, but Beijing wouldn't be informed. The price of silence? A couple of hundred RMB each.

All this serves as preamble to saying that HIT no longer dares to hold the HSK exam for its own students. HIT students all have to go to rival Heilongjiang University (HLJU) for their HSK-taking needs.

The examination itself was held in a series of pristine recording rooms, each desk equipped with a headphone and microphone headset, and a tape recorder sunk unevenly into the grey plastic.

First up, Listening. The first passage began "第一到第八题". Eight questions on the trot? Something about crows picking up stones and disrupting trains. By the time it had finished, I was totally lost, and had forgotten the content at the start of the passage. An annoying girl in the row behind kept asking inane questions in a loud whisper. I don't care if you've got an HB pencil or a 2B! Shut up! I'm trying to think here!

Reading was about as tough as expected. One minute per question, involving fifteen written answers and twenty-five multiple choice. Guess... definitely this one... guess... guess and more guesses. A guy next to me, a Korean from the green of his passport, shook the table furiously as he wrote, erased and re-wrote questions furiously. Stop it!

A mixed bag in the comprehensive section. Find the mistake, multiple choice cloze, put the sentences in order, and finally cloze writing. The six weeks of weekend mornings given up to specially preparing this section had paid off. Overall, not too shabby!

We had a ten-minute break, which the predominantly Korean students spent milling around outside smoking, and telling each other how badly they'd done, each more humble than the next.

"You must have done much better than me, I'm a terrible student" and "How did you think it went? You had no problems, right?"

Exactly ten minutes later and we took our seats again. Essay time. A short passage about young people being increasingly under pressure. "How do you relieve pressure?" Easy! I drink, and sometimes I get angry and punch trees! I recalled Teacher Wang telling me that the examiners were also very concerned with moral fortitude - you can make contrarian arguments, but try and express opinions in line with traditional Chinese morality. Oh, and where possible, toe the party line. Hmm...

I scrubbed out my essay plan and scrawled something about exercise and setting realistic expectations. Then I rambled for what was easily 300 words about the increasingly unbalanced male-female ratio here, how this leads to the so-called 1-2-4 problem, and how great it is that the government is taking steps to alleviate the problem. Short on time, I slapped on a closing section about how I exercise if I'm feeling stressed, and concluded with a poorly-worded description of the Buddhist belief that desire leads to unhappiness. A good 450 words of poorly-connected but morally fortitudinous streams of consciousness. I felt pretty pleased with myself.

I was dreading the last section - Speaking. Firstly, two minutes of reading aloud a passage on the Olympics into a microphone. Then two three-minute questions on a related theme. "Describe a game you used to play growing up." and "What's more important in competition, taking part or the winning?" I tripped up a couple of times on the reading. Teacher Wang Shuangxi was right. I did sound terrible. Then, without a watch to mark three minutes, and too anxious to look up at the clock, I rambled on desperately until I truly had nothing left to add on each question in turn. I slipped off the headphones to hear a good half of my fellow examinees still talking. Not good.

We checked our tapes. Mine, and three other students', were still blank. A lucky break! We were taken next door to re-record our Speaking parts. Enxi scowled at me from the back. Not fair! I tried to incorporate what I'd overheard other students saying, and improve my reading aloud, but to no avail. The second performance was even worse than the first. With a heavy heart, I left the examination hall. How to relieve all this exam pressure? Exercise didn't seem too appealing right then. Getting angry and punching trees? Even less so.

I ditched the "moral fortitude", and found a Korean restaurant to hit the soju.

这下面没有水，再换个地方挖

The essay-writing section of the HSK can take various forms. Sometimes the question will provide a short passage or a picture to provide inspiration, sometimes not. Sometimes it will ask the candidate to debate a hot topic, sometimes to describe an old friend.

One particularly unpopular question in the mock exam textbook shows five shapes - circles in various states of deformation, and one right-angled triangle. The paper demands the candidate (in Chinese, for the entire paper is set in Chinese) to "Describe each shape's appearance and position".

I had a go: "The fourth shape from the left looks like a giant biscuit, bitten by an old woman with no teeth. On the other hand, the fifth looks like a small tent has collapsed on a very thin man". Not easy.

I much prefer this question. With the help of my tutor, Teacher Wang, and several hours wracking my brains, I came up with this response, (recorded here as a record of my two and a bit years spent in the Middle Kingdom).
The caption reads: 这下面没有水，再换个地方挖 or "There's no water under here, I'll find yet another place to dig".

《这下面没有水》

漫画上画了一个男人。 他嘴里叼着一支香烟，手里拿这一把铲子。他正在说“这下面没有水，再换个地方挖”，悠闲自得地向前走。 他已经挖了五个深度各不相同的地方，但是都挖不到水。 有的地方他只挖了一点点，有的地方他再挖一点点就见到水了。 总之，虽然地下有水，但这个男人却没挖到够深的地方。
其实，男人再挖一点，或者一直在一个地方挖，他就会挖到有水的地方。 但是因为不仅挖了很多井，而且井都挖了一半就放弃了，所以没有成功。
这幅漫画有什么意义呢？ 有时候，成功只有一步之遥，有时候我们累得只有一口气，在坚持一下就会成功，所以做什么事情，都要坚持到底。 换句话说，我们没有毅力，没有耐心，就没有成功。
例如，我有一个朋友喜欢学外语。 他曾经学过中文，日语，俄语，西班牙语和意大利语。 有的语言踏雪了几天，有的语言他学了几年，一共花了不可胜数的数，花了无数的英镑买教材。 实则，我的朋友或多或少除了几个简单的句子以外，并不能用这几门外语人沟通。 也就是说，他连一门外语也没有掌握。
再举个例子，成龙摄影《警察故事》时，虽然受了很多次伤，但是没有放弃而坚持到底摄完那部电影。 所以，那不《警察故事》能上票房的十佳排行榜， 算是香港最成功的功夫片之一。
我不要做漫画上的这个小伙子。 我要坚持不懈地努力学好汉语，即使困难重重，我也相信总有一天我会说得和中国人一样好。 （其实，会说的和成龙一样好就行了！）

Even though the word count requirement is 400-600 words in half an hour, this isn't as hard as it sounds, even in the character-based nightmare that is learning Chinese. Spaces, paragraph indents, even full-stops and commas all count towards that all important word count.

I submitted this to Teacher Wang who got back to me a few days later with a handful of small changes and a “很好！” Disappointingly, no smiley face in sight. I suspected he hadn't really spent much time looking at it.

"What are my chances in the exam?" reminding myself exactly how much longer than thirty minutes I had spent writing, checking, correcting, and re-writing.

"Oh that'll be a [minimum level] 9, I'm sure," he reassured me, beaming "but nowhere near a [intermediate] 10". I think the exam's going to be tough.

Blogging About Blogs: A Meta-Post

To celebrate my 100th post, I thought I'd reflect a bit on the blog concept itself.

What is this blog, other than a public diary with (often not very) pretty pictures? Well, I can add hyperlink citations, thumbnail pictures can be instantly expanded to their original size, viewers can leave comments, and the so-called Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds and tags make it easy to categorise and search... That is, if I can be bothered to ascribe tags accurately and consistently. As the old computing axiom goes: Garbage In - Garbage Out. The technology can only be as good as the human input involved.

After all, 'blog' is just a catchy neologism for the term 'web log' - mundanely, the idea of logging something, anything, online. It seems to me, then that in the technological respect at least, blogs are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

How about blogging as a cultural concept? The Guardian ran a reasonable article recently to mark the 10th anniversary of the technology. The vast majority of blogs, I suspect, are personal diaries, used just like this one to keep friends, family, and interested creepy strangers informed of the blogger's day-to-day life. Then there are the breaking news, technology, and economic sites, blogs dedicated to certain cities and minority interest sites about anything you could think of.

What do they have in common? How about, a common reverse-chronological format, addition of citations, and the ability to post? Well, these things aren't common to all blogs, and aren't exclusive to them either. Ultimately, the 'blog' is too nebulous a concept to pin down as a single entity. Is it a set of tools? Just a pointless exercise in time-wasting? A cultural phenomenon. A noun? A verb?

As for writing itself, when talking about another country, another culture, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of ascribing homogenous properties to something which is obviously much more complex and multi-faceted. I'm all too guilty of this flaw: "The Chinese think X", or "In China, Y does Z". It annoys me when I see it elsewhere, and it's sloppy, lazy and more than a little bigoted.

Blogs have at various times been accused of causing, or being symptomatic of, an increasing narcissism among the netizen population. I don't know about that. I'm not vain enough to expect my day-to-day life to be of captivating interest to anyone, but I hope at least some people take a peek to while away some time at work, or occasionally have a look to see what I'm up to. At the very least, I hope that I'll be reading this in a few years, not just as a reminder of what I did, but hopefully as a bit of an insight into how I used to think. (Also, of how much I used to eat).

Publishing online also keeps me more honest than I'd be in an offline personal diary. I'm constantly reviewing and self-censoring, and it stops me going off on teenage angsty rants against the pointlessness/unfairness of it all. Lies then, if any, are by omission more than anything else.

On the other hand, it's because I want this blog to be as complete a snapshot of my half year or so in the Ice City, that I've delved into the mundanities of everyday life. Hopefully, there's a gem or two among all the triviality - things that have shocked or disturbed me: dogmeat, alcoholism, countless cultural quirks. I'm also firmly of the belief that a Pinteresque capturing of the little idiosyncrancies of daily life, daily speech, can all build up to something beautiful and meaningful.

What then, of the next 100 posts? Well, this is a Harbin blog, which will be retired once I get home. In keeping with my irrational superstition, I'd like to hit a nice round and/or auspicious number with my posts. 168, 188 or 200 maybe?

Writing for me is a guilty pleasure. I know I should be studying, out doing something more useful, or even posting in Chinese, but I love the flavour of the English language. I try to rationalise the time-wasting: Maybe I'll write the novel I have inside me, and this is all good writing practice! I'm actually saving time on all the letters I'd write home! This blog is the only thing keeping me sane in a far-off land!

In the end, I guess there really is no '为什么?' of 冰冰宝贝.

Bi Feng Tang

After the deliciousness of last time's Dim Sum, I had high hopes going to Bi Feng Tang on Central Street (which I've mentioned previously here).

The food was nothing spectacular - on a par with my previous experiences with Bi Feng Tang in Shanghai, but without the food poisoning!

The next day was Ren Zhen's birthday so we decided to stay until after midnight, ordering bottle after bottle of the cheapest Harbin Beer, and chatting happily away about nothing much. As midnight neared, the 味精 low kicked in, and we ordered a plate of duck heads.

Anatomically, the dish was a mystery to me.

"This bit's the tongue" Ren Zhen informed me, cheerfully tearing at a strip of meat in the centre of what appeared to be two halves of beak. I understand that the heads have been sliced down the centre and flattened out, but I still had no idea what was cheek, what was chin and where the eyes had gone. Still, in keeping with my steadfast commitment to eating absolutely anything, I chomped down on one.


It was surprisingly meaty, but the flavour was mostly obscured by the cooking - deep-fried and heavily-seasoned.

I was reminded by a conversation I'd had with Meisong a few weeks before.

"I hear that Americans eat just the breast of the chicken..." A puzzled look as the statement was worked through to its logical conclusion. "... and throw the rest away?"

I reassured him that it wasn't quite as bad as that, but certainly, most Westerners wouldn't willingly eat feet, butt, neck, head or most of the innards... at least if it wasn't water-blasted from the bones, pulped, reconstituted and made into hamburgers, sausages, or pies!

We didn't leave until well after midnight. The normally bustling Central Street was completely deserted.

We passed a shop which was in the process of being renovated. A team of four or five guys were busy ripping the place to pieces - heavy work gloves the only concession to health and safety in sight.

This is the reason it takes three years to install an island and a set of traffic lights back home, and why an entire residential street in Shanghai can be repaved noisily on a Sunday morning in less time than it takes to sleep off a hangover.

I won't gripe too much, because continous overnight shifts with tired and poorly-trained workers with a minimal grasp of health and safety is obviously a little far in the opposite direction. Then again, I'm sure there's a happy medium to be found somewhere. Dad tells me that every time he goes to do some work in a tunnel on the Underground, he has to go through the same training talk!

I took a shot of the street in the most pretentious way I could think. Dead-centre, ultra-low, and with a long exposure. I don't pretend to know much about photography but I like how the street lamps are reflected in the cobblestones. I could have done without the neon signs on the right though.

Tai Chi Training

As part of my continuing battle against an encroaching 啤酒肚, and in order to prepare myself to one day possibly begin thinking about starting to train to eventually win the first-to-a-six-pack competition, I've been taking the University-sponsored 太极拳 (Tai Chi) classes.

A word about the art. 太极拳 comprises the characters for 'too', 'extreme' and 'fist'. If that makes it sound pretty hard-core, it's really not. In fact, it's the sport of choice for pensioners here. At daybreak, scores of (mostly female) retirees can be seen in parks and public squares across the Middle Kingdom practising the martial art - exercise and social gathering in one handy package.

There are also competition styles which I understand are government-approved demartialised versions of traditional patterns and movements. These often up the difficulty level by featuring such movements as kicks held for extended periods far above waist height.

There are even combat versions featuring 'pushing-hands'. It's somewhat similar to wrestling. Strikes are not allowed, and combatants try to floor their opponent or hurl them out of the ring by using their foe's momentum and weight against themselves. It involves a lot of pushing and pulling, and manoevering of knees. The sport is in turns oddly elegant and surprisingly brutal.

The 师傅 is a relaxed guy in his fifties, who likes telling us his blood pressure is that of a thirty year-old, and boasting of his feats of physical prowess (Shaolin-style Kung Fu, riding a bicycle backwards). He's so relaxed, in fact, that I don't think he's ever bothered to tell us his name.

Like most practitioners of traditional arts, he attributes Tai Chi with mystical properties. To be sure, it has scientifically-proven, peer-reviewed benefits, but I'm definitely more than a little sceptical about his claims of its self-defence uses.

On the other hand, he wears a permanently glazed expression - a product of the meditative calm which Tai Chi produces in expert practitioners - which only goes to prove that he has Real Ultimate Power.

To my surprise, Tai Chi actually feels like a good work out - it involves a lot of slow, controlled movements and holding one-footed stances, interspersed with defensive and attacking hand movements such as the 包球 (hugging a ball) and bird-beak movements (pictured).

Dimsum Dinner

Much as I'm enjoying Harbin food, and despite the proliferation of hotpot restaurants (a class of cuisine originating in China's south), I didn't realise to what extent I'd grown up on southern food until I had my first taste of dimsum since arriving in the Ice City.

Like all manner of terrible restaurants in London's Chinatown, the dimsum at this place comes carted around on little metal trolleys. Despite the small selection, all the familiar favourites were represented - ha gau, siu mai, cha siu bao...

Unlike in Chinatown, a separate trolley stacked with cold dishes also toured the restaurant. We ordered seaweed, and a beef salad.

While northern cuisine also has 粥 (normally translated as 'porridge'), it's often a tepid watery affair, made from corn rather than rice. Southern 粥 is a heavy, warming affair, at its best made using chicken stock, and boiling the rice until it's soft enough to melt in the mouth.

While it's a substantial meal in its own right, a lasting memory, and favourite tradition of mine, will always be snacking on turkey 粥 on Christmas Day, late in the evening after the heavy lunch has started to wear off, and preferably after a nice nap. In that case, it's often topped with onions fried to a crispy deep-brown, sprinkled with finely chopped spring onion, and filled with coarse chunks of leftover turkey meat.

This was pretty good too - 皮蛋瘦肉 (Thousand-year egg, lean meat) flavour. Rough pieces of pungent egg and slivers of pork, in a hearty mix of rice and soup.

Stuffed Snacks

One thing I feel London sorely needs more of is outdoor food markets. Looking for snacks, I stumbled on this husband-and-wife duo selling 'gezi'. I can't say I'm 100% sure what the literal translation is, because I can't find a dictionary that lists the word, but essential they're doughy pancakes stuffed with vegetables (in this case, I think its chives and egg), and/or meat.

Let me draw your attention to the shop itself - a Chinese Fuyada motorcycle which has been chopped up and grafted on to a mobile gezi factory. It's a 21st Century Chinese centaur of sorts, providing little handy-to-eat pockets of tastiness, wherever they are needed.

While the wife rolls out the dough and stuffs the pancakes, the husband fries the little packages on a pan. In fact, the pancakes are swimming in so much oil the gezi are effectively deep-fried, one side at a time. I'm not complaining though - crispy deliciousness!

Mixed Markets

Just outside the hole in a fence which I use as a gate out of school, stands, squats, or sits a man selling 地瓜 (sweet potatoes) out of a big rusty barrel filled with burning coals, mounted on a little cart.

Or at least he used to. But suddenly, the icy weather thawed, and people stopped buying nice, warming root vegetables.

"What to do?" he might have pondered to himself. "I know, I'll sell animals!" he probably answered in reply to his own question.

So Potato-Selling Man sold his Potato Barrel, and traded it in for a little cart, which he filled with fluffy little hamsters, cute little turtles, adorable rabbits, a litter of puppies in a tiny cage, and a kitten with poo in its fur.

The first time I walked past I found myself thinking, "How much per pound for puppy?" and "There can't be much meat on a gerbil. Better to get a rabbit."

As it turns out, people are buying them as pets, rather than tasty, tasty snackettes.

Today, Y-SM was down to a couple of rodents and his last puppy and kitten, which he'd stuffed into a single cage (evidently, rental charges on two separate cages weren't economic) which got me thinking? What would Y-SM sell next? Life Insurance? Some of these? Back to tubers? To be continued...!

上岛咖啡西餐厅

A quick restaurant review:

One of the first things Shanghai Foreign Language School did for me when I started teaching there was to take me to 上岛咖啡 (UBC Coffee) - an inexplicably popular, upmarket chain of coffeeshops, which seems to have carved a lucrative niche for itself in a market hungry for (perceived) Western sophistication.

The name literally means 'Up Island Coffee', so I can only assume that the letters UBC were chosen arbitrarily in order to give the impression of some sort of international cachet. The sign above is of a branch in Daoli district, Harbin. It reads 上岛咖啡西餐厅 (Up Island Coffee, Western Dining) which is a bit of a stretch for its peculiar brand of pseudo-international cuisine.

I suggested a coffee shop to Yudi for our language exchange, looking for a change of venue to keep things fresh. When she replied with UBC Coffee I was a bit sceptical, given my past experience, but Yudi protested that the food was good, so I put aside my reservations and resolved to give the place another chance.

First up I ordered an iced coffee which was terrible. The coffee itself had an overpowering synthetic flavour, and the chocolate sauce was a syrupy concoction that could most charitably be described as chocolate-coloured. The cream was satisfactory though.

Bread came in little baskets, but this being China, was sweetened and accompanied with butter and jam. The soup was similarly sweet and unappealing. My Japanese curry chicken comprised a few chunks of gristly chicken in a sweet curry sauce, accompanied by sickly sweet pickles.

The restaurant featured an impressive white grand piano on a raised stage in the centre of the second floor. On closer inspection though, a single electric pedal replaced the central column. I sneaked a peek inside only to find the harp had been replaced with some sort of electronic music box! Bizarre!

Restaurant Reviews 101: Be balanced in one's opinions.

So what was good about the place? One, they let us sit there chatting bilingual nonsense for almost six hours. Two, the bathrooms were immaculate. Three, they featured these goldfish. Despite the tiny bowl, and the constant view of either wall, or people peeing, these are probably among the best-kept pet fish in all of Harbin - Auntie Xiao has a couple of tanks so murky, it's hard to see the fish when they swim to the back!

Serious Signage

A quick supplementary note to a previous post on the one-child policy.

The sign reads as follows:

Friend, for the sake of your family's happiness, please comply with the planned birth policy.

A girl is just as good as a boy. A daughter will also carry on your family line.

The bottom right indicates that the sign is provided by the Nangang District Planned Birth Committee.

There seems to be something very politically-charged in a sign like this. I'm not sure if it's the way in which it addresses readers as "Friend", or the "Committee" authorship. Regardless, I'm more interested in the cultural implications. To my mind, and I suspect the minds of most Westerners, the idea that a girl is as good as a boy is self-evident. However the cultural bias here seems so deeply in-grained that it must be spelt out explicitly.

I described the spate of 'Happy Slapping' which inexplicably plagued London a couple of years ago to Teacher Zhang, and from her expression, I suspect I'm feeling a similar level of incredulity.

Imagine the sign!

Friend, please be a law-abiding citizen and don't go round happy-slapping.

Hitting someone in the face while your chav mate records it on his stolen Nokia is not very nice.

Badminton Bothers

Activity-based fun for Wednesday was badminton.

I met up with Shuoyou, Guanchen and Xiuli at the dormitory where we all changed out of our sports shoes and into something less comfortable.

"You have to change when you get there. It doesn't matter what you wear, and you can even just pretend to change, but they don't like you wearing shoes from outside." Guanchen warned us, as he slipped out of his trainers and into some battered leather shoes.

We went to the campus badminton hall, but we were barely through the door when a stony-faced pensioner barked at us to stop.

"Post-graduates only today."

We all paused, just long enough to make claiming to be post-graduates unconvincing. The silence was punctuated by the distant and enticing "thwack thwack" of racquet striking shuttlecock.

Guanchen went to have a sneaky peek at the hall, pretending to need the loo. The rest of us waited - glowering at S-FP and trying to look like doctorate students. Frustratingly, mere metres away, beyond a featureless wall and a set of swing-doors, battles were fought, one game, one set, one match at a time. War waged with arms of carbon fibre and artificial catgut, bullets of feather and rubber.

Guanchen came back and tried reasoning with S-FP:

"It's not even full. I used to come all the time last term. Let us in, ok?

While absolute power might corrupt absolutely, it's a curious fact of life that possessing petty power will inevitably lead to petty powertrips. S-FP was having none of it, and resorted to tried and tested tactics of being rude ("Who are you anyway? You should know the rules") before ignoring us entirely.

I shook a mental fist in his general direction and we went off to play ping pong instead.

After another comprehensive beating by pretty much everyone present, I introduced everyone to an alternate version of the game in lieu of trying to improve my own performance. Equal numbers of players stand at each end of the table, and each player runs around the table in ay clockwise direction every time they take a shot.

It was an instant 'smash' hit, attracting the stares, then giggles, and finally participation of a group of five girls at the neighbouring tables. We soon had as many as nine people playing in one game, racing and sliding round and round and playing smash after spin after drop: Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong.

Guanchen suggested rearranging the tables so we could incorporate even more players. Great idea! He grabbed an edge of one table ... which promptly collapsed, the legs from both halves of the table sprawling and the net, under tension, flinging itself a good few metres to the side.

The attendant ran in and we froze, guiltily, feeling very much like naughty school kids. The fine for damaging tables was 10RMB (67p). After we'd paid though, and while the repair guy laboured away in the background screwing the legs back on, one feisty ping pong girl argued vehemently with the attendant that the tables themselves were already defective. Suddenly, FPPG girl-handled the attendant and snatched back the money! This incurred the wrath of PPRG who jumped up and joined in the argument before throwing down his screwdriver and storming off, shouting "Forget it! I'm not fixing it then" over his shoulder as he went.

An HIT teacher who had apparently been playing in the next room came over and fixed the tables for us instead, for free. Problem solved! By then, the fight had gone out of everyone, and we went our separated ways.

A few of us went to a local Sichuanese restaurant that specialised in 水煮活鱼片 (literally "water boiled live fish pieces") which is a lot better than it sounds. 活鱼 means that the fish are alive until they're killed (which, if you think about it, applies to most things we eat) and they're kept in big tanks at the front of the store, swimming round and round a little forlornly, which proves their freshness. The 水煮 cooking method, for its part, doesn't involve much water at all, but instead it does seem to require a huge amount of oil.

One of Sichuan's characteristic flavours is 麻辣 (numbing spiciness) which is imparted by the combination of some lethal red chillis and the addictive 花椒 or "Sichuan peppercorns".

The joy lies in the contrast of textures and flavours. Little clusters of smooth garlic paste mingle with the crackle of peppercorns, while the al dente crunch of the cabbage sits nicely against the smooth creaminess of the fish. The dish was painfully hot but irresistible, and soon, sweat was pouring off my face.

A quick aside about the concept of 面子 or 'face'. Certainly the concept exists in the West, but all too often it's taken to extremes here. One example is the notion that men must be able to drink (but not necessarily hold their drink). At meals, this manifests itself as continously accepting and giving toasts in a relatively complicated system of etiquette, where draining one's cup is a much higher sign of respect than taking a mere sip. At the same time, a genetic disposition to lacking the enzyme alcoholase means many Chinese are simply unable to drink too much or too fast.

Back to the restaurant, and we'd just about finished eating when a man burst out of a 包房 (private dining room) at the back of the restaurant, steadied himself with one hand on the back of a chair, then gushed copious amounts of vomit all over himself and a sizeable corner of the restaurant. The nearest two waiters looked annoyed but resolutely blase, and one set off, wearing a resigned expression, to find a mop and bucket. The two nearest tables immediately evacuated and we followed them seconds later. The whole time there wasn't a single word of surprise or disgust from either the staff or customers! What a country! What a culture!

Little Emperors

I sometimes grab lunch in a little restaurant next to a primary school halfway between university and the flat.

Today there was a little kid, must have been about ten, sitting across from me, fiddling with the television remote and flicking channels every three seconds. He had this mean, squinty scowl on his face, and he'd pause every so often on some inane soap, or a special report on giraffes, squint even harder, then continue his channel-hopping.

Now, I don't blame him for being unsatisfied with the state of free-to-air television - it is, as I suspect is the case in most countries - consistently terrible* - but the way he demanded his food in a high-pitched whine; receiving his food without even acknowledging the waitress; his double-fisted stuffing of egg after egg and dumpling after dumpling into his slack, sauce-smeared jaw; and his cocky little swagger on his way out just made me want to punch him his pudgy little face.

A related issue got raised in Speaking Class. The 80后 generation - kids born after the turmoil of the 1970's and since the institution of the 计划生育政策 (commonly called the One Child Policy, but more accurately 'Planned Birth Policy') - are China's Generation X: A whole generation of supposedly terminally arrogant, aggravatingly spoiled only-children, who, nonetheless, are facing the pressure of "1-2-4": Each child responsible for the well-being of two parents and four grandparents in their old age.

There's even a nickname for these brats: 小皇帝 or 'Little Emperors'. The social, economic and political ramifications are numerous and weighty enough to write a whole series of books on, but let me single out one aspect that has particularly caught my attention.

Although there are exceptions - non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities, farmers, doctorates, and (in the most recent revision of the policy) only-children** are all at least partially exempt - the vast majority of the population face economic sanctions in the form of a hefty fine, or even the loss of their job, if they have more than one child.

At the same time, there is a strong traditional bias in favour of boys. According to the ancient Book of Songs '诗经':

So he bears a son,
And puts him to sleep upon a bed,
Clothes him in robes,
Give him a jade sceptre to play with.
The child's howling is very lusty
In red greaves shall he flare,
Be lord and king of house and home.

Then he bears a daughter,
And puts her upon the ground,
Clothes her in swaddling-clothes,
Give her a loom-whorl to play with.
For her no decorations, no emblems;
Her only care, the wine and food,
And how to give no trouble to father and mother.

Through various means, the male-female ratio now stands at over 120:100 in favour of the fairer sex, and in some areas is as high as 140:100. In 2000, there were 19 million - that's 19,000,000! - more Chinese boys than girls in the 0-15 year old age range.

Clearly, twenty years down the line, China will be facing a massive demographic crisis. Literally millions of 光棍儿 ('bright-sticks' or bachelors) will be unable to find a wife. My predictions for the year 2027? Hordes of horny single men streaming over the borders into India and Russia in order to find a bride; history's first large-scale polyandrous communities; a heterosexual lifestyle becoming deeply unfashionable; and the Chinese invention of human-like, sexy, sexy robots.

All this said, it's perhaps a little easier to sympathise a little with that kid. He's facing a future of increased competition for a limited pool of potential wives, as well as the responsibilities of caring for a rapidly aging society. Then again, I still think he deserves a smack upside his greedy, fat head.

*One honorable exception: Comedy-faced, speech-impeded, James Chau of English-language CCTV 9 News is, to abuse and misuse a colourful Chinese idiom, an unlikely 'fresh flower' in the 'cow dung' of state-broadcast television, with his man-boy features and his unusual delivery [Image courtesy of CCTV.com]

** Actually, I'm not sure I support this part of the policy. As Jack Handey said: "I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex."

Sushi, Spooks & Snaps

I've had a hankering for sushi for weeks now, and Yudi - who knows a whole lot about Harbin eateries - finally had time to show me to this place: an upscale 日本料理 restaurant.

The weather was abysmal - a driving, sleety, cold slush - and the picture correspondingly bad, as I rushed from taxi to restaurant.

Inside it was all paper screen walls and sliding doors, ornate scrolls and traditional uniforms. The surly waitresses ignored us on the way in though - no traditional shout of "Irasshaimase!" which I've come to expect and demand!

We took off our shoes and sat down at a low-table, hollowed out underneath so as to avoid uncomfortable kneeling. The menu was a heavily-bound tome filled with well-photographed deliciousness. Platters of sashimi and sushi, hand-rolls, tempura, soups, noodles, dumplings, teppanyaki, beers (Asahi, Kirin AND Sapporo!), several types of sake, all the way down to a page full of bento. Less authentically, they even had foie gras and raw oysters on the shell.

We discussed theories as to why I was having so little luck with finding a flatmate. The going rate for an English teacher seems to be upwards of 100RMB (£7) an hour here, yet I was being begrudged a couple of hundred RMB/month rent for free language exchange (and of course, some great company)?

Was my advert written badly? To be sure, I have the handwriting of a developmentally-challenged three year-old but surely it's legible enough? Were Harbiners wary of living with a foreign devil? Ren Zhen and Yudi eventually came to the consensus that HIT students were both too hardworking and predominantly poor to waste time spending time with a foreigner and learning English, instead preferring to concentrate on their major.

As we ate, we exchanged ghost stories - I related the time I saw a girl standing at the foot of my bed, watching me, while staying in Tibet, only for her to vanish in the blink of an eye. Yudi responded with a story about a boy from Yunnan that could see ghosts. Her story ended with the oddly anticlimactic

"Then he went to University, found a girlfriend, and couldn't see ghosts any more."

Possibly under the influence of sake, Ren Zhen suggested at some point that I looked a bit like model and actor (New Police Story, The Banquet) Daniel Wu (吴彦祖) (pictured left). I wish!

I didn't know enough Chinese stars to make a corresponding comment in return, so I snapped this shot while she was trying to shoot me with her phone. You decide.

How was the food? Competently prepared but uninspired. After we'd eaten, a waitress came in and placed a single stick of gum in front of each of us. Oddly enough, it wasn't even a Japanese brand, but 足球王 - Football King! What does it say about confidence in your own food if you want customers to cover up the after-taste straight away? And with some cheap gum at that!

Manly Meats

I've mentioned the concept of 吃什么， 补什么 ("eat what, nourish what") before, and here's another great example.

This is a picture of bull penis （牛鞭). It's been cut up and skewered, then barbecued and sprinkled with chilli. Ouch!

Language trivia alert: Evocatively, 鞭 is also the word for 'whip'!

I'm reminded of the time I ate snakemeat with some friends in Taipei. After we'd eaten, the shop owner came over and gave us each a small aspirin-sized lump each.

"What's this?"

The shopkeeper said something that I didn't catch. Blank looks all around. I guess we hadn't covered much body-part slang in class. After some minutes, failing to communicate verbally, the boss sighed and placed a fist over his crotch, then extended one finger and shouted

"It will help you POW! POW!" while waving his finger around suggestively and thrusting his hips. A nervous laughter before realisation dawned. Someone shouted out

“Ohhhh! It's snake willy!?" and the boss made the international gesture for "You got it!" - a vigourous pointing, nodding combination.

More nervous laughter, and amid calls of　"I don't need this!" and "Does it really work?", we handed the product back to the boss.

"No thanks! We're full!"

Memories Of Music

One of the things I've missed the most here in Harbin is anything resembling a decent music scene.

I'm not talking about blockbuster stadium acts coming to town - Elton John was around when I first arrived in Shanghai, and there was a big fuss about The Rolling Stones coming to town.

It's not even about talented big names playing such as DJ Krush, whom I was lucky enough to see frantically scratching away in Pegasus.

And it's definitely not about the Filipino cover-bands who whore themselves out to any old bar willy-nilly, churning out surprisingly slick, but soulless versions of all your Karaoke favourites.

I'm talking about the small venues showcasing bands ranging from the wretched to the not-so-awful. The point was not good music (which is lucky, because it rarely was), but that there is a raw, entertaining energy to live performances, however bad.

The appeal is helped enormously by the relaxed, unpretentious attitude to music and bands. There's none of the silly fuss about dress-codes and extortionate cover charges.

Yudi, Renzhen and Jia Shuze took me to 布鲁斯 ('Bruce') Club after a debate on which of several pointless activities to indulge in (pool, bowling, karaoke) on a Friday night ended in stalemate.

We did the whole local thing of playing cards, with losses incurring a drinking penalty AND a stupid dare, before a couple of guys with guitars took the stage.

They were competent more than anything else. In short, they weren't going to get signed to a major record label any time soon, but they assiduously avoided the cheesy cover-song route.

If this were an English lesson, this would be a perfect time to explain "Beggars can't be choosers" and "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" because I loved every heart-felt second.

Donkey In Distress II: Harassed Horse

I've posted about the use of donkeys to pull carts before, but I was still taken aback to see a full-on horse on the streets of this wonderfully weird metropolis.


This guy must be a big name in the hauling-recyclable-rubbish-around-town business.

Note: According to the sign, this horse is illegally parked.

Ping Pong

Ping Pong is one of those sports that's good even when it's bad. I met up with Guanchen and Shuoyou for some quasi-sports action in the basement of one of the buildings near the back gate of HIT. Guanchen treated us: 2RMB (13p) for two hours fun!

Having not played in years (and being rubbish even then) and facing some determined Asian opposition, I got thrashed by Guanchen in the warmup, before facing some random Chinese guy we'd just met ... and losing 5 games to 0.

Next Shuoyou stepped up. Despite desperately trying to let me win by floating all his returns to a nice smashable height, he crushed me 4 to 1.

For our last game before dinner, Guanchen paired up with a girl from a neighbouring table, and I partnered with Shuoyou for some doubles action. Twenty minutes of frantic sliding around on the dangerously well-buffed floor later and the Doun-Shuoyou duo had triumphed against the Chinese pair 2 games to 1! A massive reversal of the usual Ping Pong World Order.

To celebrate, we went to a pancake restaurant for dinner. Smoked pork, a vegetable stir-fry, some sort of omelette and spring onion, slathered in plum sauce and wrapped up in one of two types of pancake. Then the whole thing washed down with big bowls of savoury porridge, or if the porridge is rubbish, fresh Harbin Beer. Happy times!

A Foray Into Fruit

A quick post about fruit in Harbin, and in China more generally.

Fruit sellers are everywhere. Sometimes they operate out of little shops, sometimes a little cart like a market from ye olden times, and sometimes they're found in something of a halfway house - a little mobile metal shack, like a caravan.

Mostly fruit is sold by the 斤 (jin) - a Chinese measurement which corresponds to 500g.

"这个怎么卖 (how is this sold)?" you can ask, while pointing. The reply will come "一块五 (1.5RMB)" if it's some oranges, or "七块 (7RMB)" if it's something fancy like mangoes, meaning cost per jin.

The fruit is measured on scales which range from regular mechanical kitchen scales to fancy electronic machines to a little hand-held contraption that uses metal weights and string. If you're just short of a round number, the seller will throw in something extra to round it up, unbidden. It can be some completely different fruit too.

Fruit also seems to have a significant presence in Chinese consciousness. For example, yesterday's 哈尔滨日报 (Harbin Daily) ran a story on its back page concerning getting ripped off several RMB on a fruit purchase, and a common gift when visiting a friend's house is to bring a basket of fruit.

Sometimes the range is astounding too. I still run into fruit I'm unfamiliar with. You can buy Dragon Fruit, Hawthorns, and Starfruit, even in the depths of winter, when the ground everywhere seems to be harder than old Chinese women's elbows.

China doesn't seem to have the concept of 'Five fruit or veg a day' either, whereby you eat five healthy items a day, whether it be a portion of veggies or a piece of fruit. Fruit is further towards the luxury end of the food scale, whereas vegetables are often a poor man's substitute for meat.

Saying that, fruit, along with most everything else in this strange and wonderful land, is frighteningly cheap. These ten satsumas, pineapple (peeled and with the eyes removed), and an 伊利沙白瓜 (Elizabeth Melon) came to a grand total of 9RMB (60p).

I've never eaten 'Elizabeth Melon' before, but I had to buy this after hearing its name. When I worked at Shanghai Foreign Languages School, the other foreign teacher was called Elizabeth. She quickly earned a reputation for uselessness and was given the nickname (behind her back) of 伊利沙白瓜 which was quickly shortened to 瓜 or melon.

It carries even more resonance in Chinese because 瓜 is often affixed to 傻 or 'stupid' to criticise a person. Calling someone 傻瓜 or 'stupid melon' is like saying 'you idiot'! Similar food-based terms of abuse include 笨蛋 (clumsy egg) and 饭桶 (rice bucket, meaning good-for-nothing although my dictionary further carries the definition 'fathead'). Yet another great example of the weight of food in culture here!

Tomb Sweeping Day

It's 清明节 (Qing Ming Jie, "Clear Bright Festival" or "Tomb Sweeping Day") a day on which families traditionally travel to their ancestors' graves and have a bit of a tidy.

It's customary to burn money to send into the 来世 or afterlife, for your deceased relatives to spend. It would be crazy to burn real money, but it's not enough to just scrawl 'a gazillion pounds' on a piece of scrap paper in biro either. In fact, there's a lively market for afterlife currency.

As any elementary Economics student can tell you, the printing of paper money will inevitably lead to some degree of inflation unless attached to a fixed standard (e.g. gold) or strictly regulated. In other words, the price of goods will go up in nominal terms and the value of the paper will decrease.

Here's a fine example. Unrestricted by either laws or common sense, these stacks of notes come in denominations of 50万， 1000万， and 20亿 RMB (£33,000, £670,000 and £130m). Why anyone would opt for just £33,000 when they could be sending Uncle Freddy a stack of £130m's I don't know - I can only assume that the cost of the afterlife money is also reflected in the real-life price.

Speaking Teacher Wang brought up Qing Ming Jie in class and we fired questions at her.

"Actually, it's not just Chinese Yuan, you can also buy American Dollars and Euros to burn too, and of course you don't just burn it, you have to write an address on it so the money will find its way to your relatives".

"What would they spend it on?"

"Well, the idea is that your relatives are enjoying an afterlife which is just like this one".

"How come no-one's sending me money from my previous life then?"

She laughed. "Actually, noone thinks it's real, it's just a way of remembering your ancestors".

Someone brought up burning paper cars.

"Sure. Before, people would burn paper horses, but now you can buy paper cars, houses, electrical goods..."

"Well, what about a paper wife?"

Another laugh. "Impossible. If they've married in this life, then you can't just send a wife like that." A pause. "Actually, you can send paper 小姐 but a lot of people criticise this".

安娜 furrows her brow and mouths "Paper 小姐?"

I look quizzical too and mouth back "Paper hookers? Really?" Speaking Teacher Wang confirmed that she was indeed talking about women of negotiable virtue.

So, just for the record: When I go, I'd like a paper jacuzzi and a few issues of Playboy burnt in my memory.