I started today with some festive Christmas linguistics reading:

"Academic Reading" is a course title, not an idiotic statement of the obvious.

Chomsky, Radford, Cook, Ouhalla and I spent the morning together, humbug-ing away.

After that I called my parents, who had just finished eating a Norwegian Christmas dinner.

My mother is a cook of such quality that I generally don’t eat holiday meals if they’re not cooked by her. Mom always cooks Norwegian food for Christmas, and there’s nothing that could replace it.

With all that being said, I’ve not been home in a while, and I thought it would be nice to have some Scandinavian food on Christmas. I told my mother that I planned to go to the Beijing IKEA for Swedish food. She approved, but pointed out that their meatballs are Swedish, and thus inferior in taste, quality, and character to the Norwegian meatballs I’m used to. At first opportunity I’ll find her an apron with a Norwegian flag on it so to anchor  her cookbook jingoism.

(A quick aside: When the Monty Python movie Life of Brian was released, it wound up being banned in Norway. The Swedes proceeded to advertise the film as “So Funny It Was Banned In Norway.”)

The Beijing IKEA. Just 45 minutes on foot from 太阳宫 if you get lost.

The Beijing IKEA is far away from everything, at least, that’s how it seems if you arrive at the 太阳宫 (Taiyanggong) subway station (Line 10). It takes about an hour by foot to arrive at IKEA from the subway station. Of course, it might take less time if you don’t get lost.

IKEA is sort of diagonal from the subway station, on the other side of Taiyanggong Park (太阳宫公园). In fact, you can almost see the IKEA from the subway. So, it made sense to try to cut through the park to try to get there. After all, parks have more than one gate, right?

Wrong.

The park was almost completely empty, and looked like one of the sets from Children of Men. Creepy derelict toys everywhere. Signs said that the lake opens for skating tomorrow. The frozen lake is covered by a good inch of dust and dirt; I mistook the flags demarcating the skating rink for ringing off a paved go-kart course.

It was getting dark and horribly cold, so I hightailed it out of the park.

The IKEA restaurant is on the third floor. And it’s pretty great.

Swedish Christmas Dinner a la Beijing

Seconds (extra plate of salmon not pictured).

The only disappointment was the lack of that good lingonberry drink that you can get at IKEA in the States.

I was shocked to see most of the other diners eating spaghetti or Chinese food. A plate of spaghetti was ¥15. The salmon plate was also ¥15. How does it make any sort of financial sense to buy spaghetti at the same price as salmon? Had the spaghetti cost ¥6, sure. But ¥15?[1. Now you're not surprised I don't celebrate Christmas, are you?]

After stuffing myself there was a bit of walking through the store (prices are lower here on most items). Amazingly, the Beijing IKEA does have a little Swedish grocery store. There was no  bond-ost cheese or Swedish fish candy (!), but most of the other staples were available, including some Swedish vodka that I guess can’t be sold at IKEA stores in Washington State.

After some grocery shopping I caught bus 536 to 三元桥 (Line 10)…the station I should have come from in the first place.

Thank you, IKEA.

Happy Christmas and Happy New Year. Remember, religion isn’t necessary for morality: be good for goodness’ sake.

Polluted Beijing

Everything you’ve heard about Beijing’s horrible air is true. After I arrived, it took ten days before I saw blue sky.

Ten days.

On a typical day you can stare directly at the sun because there’s so much smog in the air.

When I lick my lips while outside (a favorite pastime in the cold, dry weather), they taste like saran wrap.

It seems like Beijing’s terrible air is caused by industrial pollution and car emissions more than anything else. As such, the pollution floats relatively high in the air and is non-abrasive. In contrast, the pollution in Pingyao came mostly from coal smoke and a huge copper smelter. That pollution seemed heavier, hung lower in the air, and was much more aggravating to the ENT tract.

The US Embassy in Beijing posts readings from their air quality monitors at twitter.com/BeijingAir. That link isn’t accessible from China due to censorship of twitter; however, the government’s firewall doesn’t block the site’s RSS feed.

Usually, the feed is depressing:

In all seriousness, this is some scary shit.

Every time I look at this I think, What’s it doing to my lungs?

Thanks to these, I didn't get sick in Beijing.

If I were to give one piece of advice to people coming to Beijing, it would be, Buy a sinus rinse kit before you come. The kit consists of a plastic bottle and hundreds of packs of salt and baking soda. Put the salt/soda in the bottle, fill with water, then hold the thing to your nose and squeeze. Yes, it’s embarrassing and gross to think about, but the damn things worked. I used it while in Beijing and didn’t get one sinus infection or any respiratory problems. The darn things work. Buy one before you go, or have some sent over. They’re worth it.

Yesterday I mentioned a story in The Guardian about Liu Han Hope Elementary School, whose students all survived the earthquake thanks to reliable construction (e.g. the use of building-grade concrete) and to their teachers, who led them on an overnight hike over the hills to a nearby city.
I’ve found a translation of what I think is the original Chinese article (blog post?) about Liu Han Hope Elementary. It has quite a few more details about the entire ordeal…and calls the school by a different name–Long-Han Elementary School.
According to the translated article, 483 students in total survived the earthquake, and it was a group of 71 students and ten teachers that made the hike to safety. Students on the hike were as young as five years old(!), and the teachers kept them going by promises of candy. After coming out of the mountains they were actually refused help by two households, the residents of which I’ll hopefully see in hell:

I asked how they encourage the youngs. “bite your teeth together!” Most students had never been to Mianynag city, the biggest twon arround here. “We will get to Mianyang and all the goodies are awaiting!” “Icecreams, cakes, coca colas!” ” and the uncle policement are waiting for you with all that in their hands!” All kids knew that uncle policemen are nice people and fun to be with. They all look up to their heroism of helping people. They passed two big housed, sadly, the residents in the house refused to help. The uglies.

The article also gives more details about the the problems that plagued the building process (bad cement, stolen funds, needless delays) and one man’s scrupulous inspections that forced the contractors to be honest:

I learned there had been a sponsorship group named Long-Han, they raised fund for building up this school named Long-Han good Hope Elementary, back 10 years ago. Their boss named Liu-Han, top manager Sun XiaoDong. He was the person overseeing the project back then.
Now people all know the value of a solid building and thank Long-Han. I found one of the a top person at Long-Han. He want to be called Mr.X. – he did not want to get anyone, and himself in trouble by letting his name known. I learned from him:

1. 10 year ago, Liu-Han and Sun said to X, We will not let schools fall short, you have to tightly control the project. If it is not the best quality, you are the first to go.

2. One day, 10 years ago, They found the cement quality was bad. Too much mud mixed in. Mr.X. onec worked in a cement factory and had gone through big projects with tens of thousands of tons of concrete processing. He was an expert, he knew about the cement quality. He found mud in the material, and he found the pebble stones were not all round ones. Flad pebble stone can weaken the structure, he said. So he was very angry with people. He ordered that all mud must be washed away, and pebble stone resorted and changed.

3. At one meeting, he found some people did not dare to look into his eyes. He chased to the root: funding was intercepted by some middle men – it happened often that time. He chased and traced the all banks bitterly. So all people got the good pay and could work well.

4. When it was almost done, the final build of the middle P-E square (where the 483 kids first collected together), was delayed and delayed, he was furious again. After some fight, that was finally done on time.

Mr.X insisted if I write, I should quoted the words “fight”: he did not want it to be seen as a serious fights. Someone may get into trouble.

Needless to say, the government needs to go after the profiteers.

The entire article is interesting and well worth the read. I’ve put an unedited copy of the full text of the translation up below the fold, just in case the original goes down.
Continue reading →

American Jewish World Service, my charity of choice, does not have a program set up in China, and is referring donors to InterAction.org and Charity Navigator to find charities.
Before donating to any charity, please check it out first through Charity Navigator so you can see exactly how much of your donation will actually go to help people and how much will be wasted on overhead. Every penny counts.
EastSouthWestNorth continues to have the best English-language coverage of the aftermath (physical, social, and political) of the Chengdu earthquake, and The China Beat has had some interesting posts about the history of disasters in China and the Chinese Red Cross.
Foreign bloggers have written interesting articles about surviving the quake and the nation’s mourning process.

A more upbeat story can be found in The Guardian (who have a special China Earthquake section) about a school that was built properly and didn’t collapse:

While other schools disintegrated, [the Liu Han Hope Elementary school] stood firm. Even the three-storey glass wall remained intact. When the slopes around them began to threaten their safety, staff marched pupils as young as five out of their remote home on an all-day, all-night trek.

The school’s proper construction apparently is due to the dillegance of one righteous man:

A Chinese blogger and TV commentator, Li Chengpeng, said he had spoken to the project manager. The man, who did not want to be named, said his bosses had stressed the importance of safety – but also recalled the battles that had involved. On one occasion he had to force builders to replace substandard cement. On another, he had to fight officials who had intercepted part of the funding.