A Taste of News: Panda diplomacy ‘panda-monium’

As many in my direct circle know, I read quite some news. I try to mention at least once per day that I read something in the news, casually, in a conversation. And since commentary and reviewing is something else I like to do, I thought of starting a series where I write my thoughts about an article I read. A lot of them will be related to China, since that is one of the topics I follow most closely.

Panda Diplomacy Might Not Be Dead Just Yet
New York Times

While working at the embassy a couple of years ago, the Netherlands had the great luck to be receiving the first pandas ever from the Chinese government. Now I do not have a lot of love for zoos, and I also do not have a lot of love for pandas.

I find it somewhat baffling that China took the panda, an animal that eats bamboo because it is too lazy to hunt, as its national animal. I also remember seeing pandas 15 years ago and the small ones had some attractiveness because they also move around a lot and seem like regular cubs being cute while doing dumb stuff. However, the adult pandas really reminded me of the adult couch potato. Especially since they just collected the bamboo remains on their chest.

A quick Google search on why the panda is China’s national animal turns up something about it being a symbol for peace and friendship, perhaps because they also have dificulty mating, and the black and white representing Yin and Yang. This sounds like something a consultancy company would write, and there is possibly some truth to it, but it also sounds quite questionable.

So the fact that this animal is not only beloved in and outside of China but also useful for actual diplomacy amazes me. I remember being sceptical when the Dutch pandas were arriving in this newly built enclosure, that also won a prize for being the most beautiful animal enclosure even if it mainly resembled a Chinese temple, and supposed to bring in all this new business. And a while later I read an article vindicating my suspicion that the Dutch are not brought to the east of our country that easily, although the zoo director still defended his decision to bring the pandas to the Netherlands.

Besides the fact that pandas need highly expert care, the other thing that surprises me does not scare people away, is that they are leased. Cubs and the pandas are to return to China, as the article mentions is happening to the US pandas. I guess in one way or the other, pandas are a bigger attraction on that side of the world, maybe because they are more connected to larger wildlife or simply because there are more people for the amount of pandas available.

I think it shows how effective some aspects of Chinese politics are at blending official and informal matters. How suddenly the Chinese Communist Party can influence your enjoyment of your zoo visit.

A Taste of News: China’s singles society

Is China Drifting Toward a ‘Singles Society’?
Sixth Tone

With single’s Day coming up (because why not more consumerism 2 weeks before black Friday?), it seems more than appropriate to focus on Chinese singles today. This article hits some familiar points. The disparity between highly educated urban women and lower education rural men. The importance of marriage that permeates Chinese and many Asian societies. The difficulties that singles face regarding costs of living and income vulnerabilities.

Something different that it touches upon, is the disparity of views on singlehood between the singles and society at large. Additionally, it makes a difference between ‘choosing to be single’ and ‘drifting into singlehood’.

This first point is something I experienced when I still lived in China. I thought I had written on this before, but a few scrolls down do not reveal anything. But moving to China at 25 and leaving again at 29 revealed clear differences in perception of the age brackets. At the most extreme, it went from all is well to all is hell. From you will for sure find someone to you cannot find someone anymore. From your mind will change to your parents will be devastated. And this attitude for sure has its origins in the fact that marriage is not only socially acceptable and encouraged, it actually provides a clear path to a better life for you and your future offspring.

The second point is something I have been wondering about myself in the almost 10 years I was single. There is for sure a large grey area between these 2 states and most definitely some changing back and forth. I definitely drifted into singlehood initially, my previous breakup costing a lot of time and effort to heal from. After some half-hearted efforts at dating, I more consciously made the choice to stay single when I moved abroad. As the years passed by, the ‘happy single’ image seemed to fit better and better. It was almost movielike how surprised people were, including myself, when I got into a relationship.

I think it is this fluidity of just happening to be single, actively embracing it, and then dating again that is missing for a lot of Chinese women. The paradox is always that you should find a partner, but cannot be too overt about the process. Ideally, there is no process for you to go through, you just meet the person or are introduced to them.

When we are expected to adhere to these invisible rules, it limits not only individuals, but society as a whole. With the emphasis of the Communist Party leadership on women fulfilling certain roles, I unfortunately do not expect this to become more flexible anytime soon.

A Taste of News: 1.000 trees in Shanghai

Dezeen Awards China 2023 Shortlist: 1.000 Trees Phase 1 by Thomas Heatherwick
Dezeen

Seeing this building pass by in an awards list definitely piqued my interest. I have seen this building mainly as a collection of grey blocks and round platforms. The forms were distinct against the sky and along the river, but they seemed to stand out in the bad way many Chinese buildings will stand out. By being special but also quite ugly.

As it was on the shortlist for a new architecture award from a well-known platform, it made me look up which judges are involved. A quick scroll shows what seems to be a relatively well-balanced team of Chinese and British architects and designers. But I always have a nagging feeling that often buildings for these kinds of awards get chosen more on looks than practical use.

At the same time, somewhere a memory got triggered that I read something about a list of ugliest Chinese buildings and this one being among the top. A quick search proved me right, it was the top pick for 2021. Having read some articles by Thomas Heatherwick als made me doubtful of the attitude its founder has, and reading the quote of the Ugliest Buildings competition judges only reinforces this:

They felt it “lacked a basic understanding of Chinese culture and did not bother engaging in extensive, in-depth emotional communication with the public in advance.” Although it is written in a fuzzy way, I do agree that the building is mainly meant to be eye-catching and does not reflect or reinvent any Chinese aspects in an interesting way. With a bit of luck I will be in Shanghai next year and able to judge it with my own eyes.

How to behave really awkward at an event

If getting out of your comfort zone is part of your (Lunar) New Year’s resolutions, then you only need to follow this guide. You can only enjoy the good times more, if sometimes you have a swift experience of pure, unadulterated awkwardness. Let me show you how.

You let yourself easily be convinced to attend a certain event. Even better if it is paid so you will not want to skip on it. Even better if it is on a topic you like, but you know there is a readon you normally do not attend these things. The community aspect is not what attracts you, but you can always try right?
Follow the build-up to the eventintensely so you can imagine how you will be liking it once it happens. Realise this is not your thing but the pain of your hard-earned money just wasted hurts even more. Try to stay optimistic, you often have situations where low expectations generate the best results.
Make sure you are pretty tired and/or have any other physical inconveniences that are not bad enough to deter you from attending. A runny nose, or some muscle ache always helps. Perhaps the weather helps and it is cold or wet outside so it makes you not want to go nor leave.
Hang out with some nice people on forehand. Ideally get invited to a hangout session by your friends or some confirmed nice people but decline it for the unknown, quite reliably less entertaining option.
Create a moment of introspection by eating alone or grabbing a drink to gather some confidence. Do this near the venue, thinking you could get a sneak peek at the event, but in reality nothing will be visible.
Park your bike in front of the venue and struggle with your bike lock. Wonder if this is a sign you should not go but persist because you are a well-functioning adult.
You enter and exchange a few words but you already see the people at the entrance are busy and know each other. You try to see where the event is happening, but they tell you it is all the way in the back. You buckle up (figuratively) and go for it.
Once in the back you realise literally nobody is known to you. You try to match some people you see to faces you have seen in online posts and photos. The one person who you would recognise is also not seen.
You decide to go the toilet as an escape. But after walking 3 rounds, there is no toilet to be seen. You try to see again if you recognise somebody and walk around again thinking you know someone. It is not the case so you walk back, stand on the side and look at your phone as a substitute.
Walking around you seemed quite confused apparently because somebody approaches and asks you “Are you okay?” It makes your skin crawl a little, but you ask for the toilet and are politely pointed where to go to.
On the toilet you hear voices from people who are going to the same event but have signed up together. You are not sure what you will be doing, but it has only been a few minutes. You inhale, exhale and go out again.
You try to get a free drink, because that is one of the few tangible things you can get out of the event. The bar is busy but also weirdly ignorant of their customers. You commiserate with someone else in the line but his turn comes up earlier than yours and you just wait and get ignored for a while by the staff.
After you finally get your drink, you look around if there are people striking a conversation that clearly shows they do not know each other. You latch onto a person who is semi-interested in what you do, but also do not feel a real connection in the topics you discuss and the conversation as a whole.
The one person you recognise at the event suddenly turns up and you exchange a few words. The person you were talking with leaves, but also your new conversation partner is hauled away to take a photo. You decide to get your second drink to make sure that is at least ticked off. You are being ignored again and it seems people behind you are whispering about how long you had to wait.
Checking the program for the fifth time, you see the performance should already have taken place, but decide to wait it out just to get a good idea of how uncomfortable it is to not have someone to talk to. You think it is quite a funny paradox how this is a community event, but you feel like such an outsider especially with so many similar people around you.
You get your phone out again and someone points out you dropped something. you try to make this a conversation starter but fail. You try to listen in on some other conversations, but cannot really follow anything and just try to read something on your phone
People are clearly starting to prepare the room for the performance and you help with moving chairs to have something to do.
The performance finally takes place and it is cute but also a little bit lackluster. You decide it has been long enough that you can go to the toilet again. You spend some time there and then decide it is fine for you to go. You slip past the entrance people and deeply inhale and exhale once you are outside.
You struggle with your bike lock again and fear you may not be able to get home quickly. But fate is friendly after this evening and lets you go.
While reflecting on the event, you decide to write something about the whole thing so it was not entirely useless. You have faith if any event happens again it will be better since you should know some people by then. And you try to convince yourself of the value this experience brought to you.

It may seem like a daunting list of things to do, but the end result is guaranteed. Happy New Year everyone!

I am great at eating and average at the rest

This weekend was apparently the first Advent. The first day of Advent? Adventing? I am not sure, but something related to that most beloved holiday of Christmas was already happening.

And apparently the activity to celebrate it properly, was baking. Cookies specifically. Now I normally do not really bake. There is 1 cheesecake recipe that is quick, convenient and easy to make. I will occasionally help out others, but I do not voluntarily bake.

I do not know exactly what about baking does not interest me a lot. I think it is the fact that you are not making a whole meal. Baking can take just as long as cooking, but then you have a cake. A whole cake. Which you then probably need to share. Sure, sharing is caring but at the same time, why? I can also just make food for myself. Let alone the fact that I feel it is even sadder if you spent hours working on baking something and it turns out average. Or worse, bad.

Also, thinking about baking I feel that there is in a certain sense less baking in the traditional Chinese kitchen. There are lots of sweets like mochi, buns, cookies, but I would not make them myself. I would buy them, a lot of people would. Because many homes did not have an oven, and also some of these sweets are very intricate and complicated. I would rather spend time queuing for that than making it myself and having sub-par taste.

But of course, my grumpiness can be mitigated with good company and easy tasks. Shaping the cookies and eating the raw dough bring me joy. I am not immune to the excitement that you can get by intently looking at the oven window, although currently my oven is placed so high I barely see anything that is in there, nor to the thrill of tasting a cookie. And not that much can go wrong in the end. So I will not bke voluntarily, but I will definitely help voluntarily.

Daily tidbits: Why not make things more complicated?

I have been in touch with customer service quite a lot these days. That is always a frightening thing, although I have had my fair share of better and worse experiences. However, in this case it was Chinese customer service, because I needed to arrange some things for my phone number.

There is something amazing about the way everything is so interconnected in China. When you have an issue, there is always a way to address it. You can chat with customer service or give them a call, basically 24/7. At the same time, it never ceases me to amaze me how complicated they can make things at the same time.

When I still lived in China, I moved to Shanghai and got a new phone. I needed a new simcard, a nano one instead of the mini I had. after calling my provider’s customer service, which is totally separate in Shanghai from Beijing and provides no way to be redirected, they told me that I needed to come back to Beijing for a new simcard. So just to get something with a little bit less plastic, I needed to travel more than 1.000 kilometers. Which I did and found ridiculous.

Now that I am in the Netherlands but still using my Chinese phone number for certain occasions, it’s a different issue. I had freezed my number, but was unable to easily recover it again due to forgetting my password. I again chatted with different officers at different times in the Chinese night but in the end I was only able to finalize the process by contacting a friend in Beijing and having her directly call them.

I am not sure if this is arranged in this way for a specific reason. Is it to ensure that the physical staff still has a role to play? Is it because they want take customer service difficulty to the next level? Is it because they are available 24/7 that all staff is so tired they cannot think of any customer-friendly alternatives? To be honest, I think it is just another way for us to remain grounded. That we remember we can do great things, and also make simple things impossible.

Why watching TV shows is tiring

So I was staying at a friend’s place for a week while visiting Beijing. She has her TV linked up with the Youku (local YouTube) app, which means she can stream anything that is on there on her TV.

My own TV mainly functions as a washing/clothing rack and card stand, so it was nice to actually watch something on it. I always aim or have the intention to watch more TV or TV shows, yes the stuff that all kids dream about, because listening more to Chinese people talking never hurts.

There is only 1 problem that I established early on: TV shows wear me out.

I remember watching TV shows when I was younger and getting increasingly frustrated and irritated by them as I watched them more regularly. The way that everything is drawn out, the staging of certain emotions and the second-hand embarrassment of some things that are being said. These points all play out the same when I watch a Chinese TV show.

Sure, I pick up some new words or neat way to say things. But the texts are equally overwrought, the acting as overdone and the cliches largely the same. Moreover, Chinese TV shows, especially those involving competition, always emphasize the humility of their participants. They have superhuman discipline, need to hammer down that they had a lot of help getting where they are now and how proud they are of being Chinese.

This is to say that for me, watching a TV show is almost equally unattractive as just regular studying. I remember being on exchange in China and once having the chance to be audience member to a, to be honest, quite boring TV program.

I almost fell asleep. Literally.

I never watched that show, obviously.

Hidden unemployment in plain sight

So, there are a lot of things you learn in high school that you never use afterwards. For geography, which was one of my weak subjects, this might actually count a bit less. It is quite useful to know about Pangea and why Dutch soil is weak and why exactly Amsterdam is built on stilts.

But in daily life, I do not think or wonder too much about these things. Something that is very relevant though, is the concept of hidden unemployment. I have already mentioned and experienced enough that efficiency is not held up to the highest standards in my country (watch my washing machine saga unfold and be surprised). This is because with all these people around, we need to give them something to do. Even though it makes no sense or could be done better, faster, stronger by a machine.

I am putting aside the tedious factory work that is still making a living for many people around here. But let us take a look at the slightly less depressing examples of hidden unemployment you encounter on a daily basis here.

1. Parking meters: I do not think I have ever actually seen a parking meter in China. For parking garages, the West of course also still uses human labor as well. You could argue that having people do this work on the streets, provides some slight benefits. They can yell at you to possibly make parking your car easier (or not), perhaps you can bargain for a slightly lower price (probably against the rules) and they can keep an eye out for your car (if they are not sleeping or talking or otherwise not paying attention). Another thing that makes it almost nostalgic to encounter these parking fee people is that you often can only pay cash. Perhaps that is their most important function, preserving a link to the past.

2. Security guards: Sure, the soldiers outside the embassy gates look slightly menacing, those probably would serve some kind of purpose in any event. But with all the security cameras in this country (apparently some 20 million throughout the country) you might think hiring some extra people to make security extra inefficient is unnecessary. Of course you would be wrong. The most fun parts of my day are sometimes walking into building where I am clearly not supposed to be (I explain this technique in more detail here) past a sleeping, talking or otherwise clearly not paying attention security guy and walking right out past him within 10 minutes. But perhaps, they are meant to serve as a secretly rebellious example. That as a security guard, you can be on duty, and probably being filmed as well, without actually doing it. Or even more so, with doing the opposite.

3. Cleaners: It is amazing how much there is being cleaned in this country. Not necessarily with the goal of it actually becoming clean, but merely the act. On the streets there are sweepers on every corner with just a broom and dustpan, then you have the slgihtly cooler sweepers who have their own little garbage trucks and you also have the people in those automated street sweepers. And the streets are also being sprayed once in a while. You have people sweeping streets with dry mops, with water machines to clean the pavement, dusting of handle bars and fences. The end result is a cleaner street than you would expect, but not an environment as clean as you would hope. This might be because sweeping up leaves is not actually cleaning up anything. Or because people keep throwing trash in places that are not trashbins. Or because almost half of the cleaners seem to be 50/60/70+ years old.

In the end, we can argue how much use any of our jobs have. In this sense, China delivers a healthy reminder daily that most of us do not really matter that much. A message, that incidentally fits the Chinese dream quite well.

Well, it is only the rule so…

I sometimes think that the expression “Rules are meant to be broken” comes from China. Even though there are many ways in which people listen or accept things at face value, there is certainly a lot of room for opposition as well.

Of course, this manifests in somewhat negative ways as well. Going off the beaten path in the mountains (although mother nature put this sign here urging you not to), shaking the trees for flowers or red leaves (ignoring another sign that says trees have feelings too) or simply squatting on the toilet seat (how do you do that anyway)?

But it also means that there is in a certain way more room for exploration. For example, if you are looking for a place and you are not sure if it is in this building, you can almost always enter it. It does not matter if the guard is awake (although oftentimes they are sleeping) they almost never ask questions. Once you are inside and realize within 5 minutes that you are not at the right place, nobody will even blink twice at you coming out again almost immediately.

Once you have mastered that stage, you can move on to the next: making your own rules. Everyone constantly is in a certain way just doing their own thing. Wearing whatever they want, setting up their street stall wherever they can, getting on the bus in the middle of an intersection or singing along very loudly on their bikes. It is almost mindful.

After that stage, there is only a final one left: blatantly ignoring the rules. It helps if you do not understand or can act as if you do not understand people talking to you. I once stopped sort of half-way on an intersection with a friend and pretended to not understand the traffic guy yelling at me to stand back. He gave up, muttering something about me being Thai. Or an alternative is directly talking to them in your own language and catching them off-guard that way. I have only done it once, but it is definitely one of my greatest achievements this year.

Oh, and it also works great to avoid agressive advertisers or people asking you the way. In general, it is a great way to not make any friends.

Hush, hush, hush

Peace and quiet. Two things people definitely do not come to China for. The whole environment here is just plain noisy. From people to pets, from cars to cicadas there is always something happening and you can hear it.

I live in a ‘traditional’ 6-story building in Shanghai and there is always some pipes making a noise, or the airco outside, or my neighbors getting up at 7 to dance to very loud music.

In Shanghai, it is prohibited to honk for the greater part of the city center, but in Beijing that is definitely not the case. The symphony of all the noises sadly do not come together and it can make for quite an overwhelming experience when a bus, a truck, a car and a scooted are all honking at each other at the same time.

Furthermore, the Chinese are sort of famous for letting others ‘enjoy’ the sounds they make. Whether it is playing mobile games (without earphones), watching a drama (without earphones) or plainly calling (without earphones on the toilet), everyone can very clearly hear what they are doing.

It is the same with human comunication. People rather loudly call each other from the other side of the street, than cross it to talk normally. Kids running off are being accompanied by the increasingly louder screams of their parents that they need to come back. It does not work.

So in this environment, I always find it quite funny when people find me being too loud. I think I have been told a bit more above average to be quiet, or that I am loud. To which I can only say: I am a product of my environment. Apparently I sound more Chinese sometimes than the locals around me.