Thanksgiving in Shenzhen, China

Here is a link to a video created by my colleague, Chris Tuazon, which offers some snippets of the Thanksgiving day we spent with our fifty Chinese students and friends on the Chinese staff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1AXTzu1D3u8

This video can also be found easily with a a search on YouTube for "Happy Thanksgiving 2012 from Shenzhen!"

If you are wondering how Chris got this video on YouTube it is with the use of a VPN. YouTube, GoogleDocs, Facebook, Twitter, and most blogs and message boards are all beyond "The Great Firewall". At selected times Google search, the New York Times and other non-Chinese publications are blocked, or specific articles are blocked. Searching for one of the "three T's" - Tibet, Taiwan, or Tiananmen will also turn up a whole lot of nothing. Of course, the use of VPNs or hacking is also widespread. An easy trip into Hong Kong where none of these sites are blocked, where you can read books by the Dalai Lama, and where moped drivers actually stop at red lights, also brings access to download VPN software that goes unchecked for at customs.

The class featured on the video is the sophomore class, but there is also a junior class. There are only grades 10-12 at the high school level in China. "Mr. T" will mention he teaches these students. I teach the students featured as well in a weekly course called "College to Careers" that is about understanding their own selves - personality, passions, values, future job or career interests, and life dreams, and then guiding them in setting goals and making a plan from those starting ponts to be admitted into a university in the US that should be a good fit for them.

The video captures a good sense of the family feel and fun we were able to achieve for the day at school. Students were enthusiastically receptive to the idea of being thankful, and even more so - the food! We were able to procure most traditional Thanksgiving dishes, including turkeys cooked by Sam's Club (yes there are also multiple Walmart's and an IKEA in Shenzhen), and side dishes from some local restaurants, but couldn't find plastic forks. We ate the meal with chopsticks, pumpkin pie with spoons. The feast was followed by some open sharing of thank yous in the dining hall (the small auditorium we converted into a dining hall), an attempted game of football on the school soccer field, and a start to the showing of the American film "Stepmom". Classic.

Wherever you are reading this I hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving or can be thankful for friends or family in your life. I appreciate having at least some version of both wherever I have been in the world through holidays. It is evidence to me that people want to connect, share and love each other no matter their cultural differences. Cross-culturally, holidays are an opportunity to share or learn about one's core values or important aspects of one's cultural identity. The sharing process can remind us that all humans value the same essentials such as family, good food, or gratitude.

Universal values are the starting point for social harmony or conflict resolution. If we can remember how much we have to empathize with another person or group of people just because they are also human, and if we can do this more than our bad habit of focusing on differences, we are more likely to share, cooperate, or compromise instead of hoarding, competing, and being stubborn. When the other stops being "the other" and instead can be felt as part of "us" social problem-solving can go from a zero-sum to the better question of "How can we both win?" There is almost always a way. Republican and Democrats could use this lesson, for the sake of the American people, and the world's people for that matter!

Happy Holidays, Chris

Excerpts from My China Notebook

Every day living in Shenzhen it is inevitable I gain a new insight, reflection, or question into Chinese culture or myself. Enjoy these excerpts from my notebook:

o Friday, November 9, 8:52pm – For the first time, I chose to use chopsticks tonight over a fork when eating some leftovers at home. I’m becoming more Chinese by the day.

A MEAL FROM A LOCAL RESTAURANT. ONCE I DROPPED A DUMPLING WITH MY CHOPSTICKS AND A WAITER SUMMARILY BROUGHT ME A FORK. GIVE ME A BREAK, BUDDY!

o Thursday, November 7, 2:30pm – I have learned that what us Americans imagine as large cities are considered mere “towns” here. I asked a colleague today for suggestions about weekend trips to experience a quainter atmosphere. She suggested Suzhou, a “town full of beautiful ancient canals.” Suzhou’s urban population is four million; its metropolitan population ten million.

o Wednesday, November 6, 12:11pm – It’s looking like Obama has won. Nearly every Chinese person I spoke with hoped Barack Obama would be re-elected. Meanwhile, the Chinese “Party Congress” is meeting to choose new national leaders, as they do every ten years. Choices are made behind closed doors, with no reporters allowed, certain books selectively removed from bookstores, balloons banned lest they be released with protest messages, and Google services blocked. Hmm . . . I wonder how the Congress makes its choices.

o Tuesday, October 30, 6:00pm – Halloween is well-marketed here. I’m assuming the manufacturers of most Halloween costumes are in China, and it didn’t take long for them to realize it’s worth creating a market here. If any trick-or-treating goes on, the gift is usually money. Sweets are generally frowned upon in China, considered unhealthily sugary. I've found myself appreciating low sugar ice cream or other desserts here. And hey, money for Halloween? Makes me wish I wasn't too old for trick-or-treating.

COLLEAGUES CHRIS AND KATE DRESSED UP AS NERDS FOR SCHOOL ON HALLOWEEN.

o Wednesday, October 24, 9:05pm – Best values I have found so far:

• $.75 – 16-ounce water at a movie theater: Excuse me? Shouldn’t this be at least four dollars? It’s doubly refreshing when you can enjoy a drink at a theater that isn’t exorbitantly marked up.

• $12 - 1.5 hours massage: I go once a week with my boss where she and I have a casual meeting about work and life. Tips are not accepted.

• $5 – A full bouquet of flowers: Discovering that they are relatively cheap, I now buy flowers once every two weeks or so for my apartment. There are five flower shops in a row on my walk to and from work every day. As I pass I breathe in deeply. The air is cool, fragrant, and the birds are lively.

EACH FLOWER SHOP IS INDEPENDENTLY OWNED AND OPERATED. SOME ALSO SELL BIRDS, FISH, KITTENS, OR PUPPIES.

o Monday, October 22, 11:43am – Every K-12 Chinese student in public schools in the entire city wears the same uniform, by regulation: Navy blue sweatpants with a thick white stripe and matching jacket. Polo shirts for girls are white with a light blue collar. Polo shirts for boys are blue with a white collar. Having the entire student body uniformed is winning me over. It is equalizing and unifying in many ways. Personal style is more subtly expressed through accessories, shoes, or hairstyles.

COLLEAGUE JUSTIN DRESSED AS A STUDENT AMONGST STUDENTS AT OUR SCHOOL HALLOWEEN PARTY.

o Friday, October 19, 6:10pm –I have experienced more flag displaying and waving, and more singing of patriotic hymns and marches in just two months here than I do in two years in the US. And I thought Americans were so overtly nationalistic . . .

Well, maybe we are, in different ways. For now, I’m fine using chopsticks in place of a fork. Sometimes, it just makes more sense.

STUDENTS PERFORM VARIOUS NATIONAL HYMNS FOR A SINGING COMPETITION AT YUCAI HIGH SCHOOL IN EARLY OCTOBER. STUDENTS CHOSE THE SONGS, REHEARSED AND CONDUCTED THEIR OWN PERFORMANCES. THEY WERE JUDGED BY SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS.

Precisely Where I Am

Dear Friends,

When people from home think of where I am the thought is “China”. China is a big thought. Most people I know have never been here. They know it as the most populous country in the world. They think of it as a communist country where the people are controlled by a powerful central authority. From watching the Olympics, they know the gold-star studded red flag. The Chinese language is either an impenetrable set of thousands of written characters or something to mock verbally. They know the Great Wall, Chinese food, and maybe they have heard of Mao or Tiananmen Square.

Really, they don’t have much of an idea of where I am, or of China all together for that matter.

I am in a city named Shenzhen, in southern China, in the province of Guangdong. The climate is subtropical. Heat, humidity, and frequent rain showers or thunderstorms keep plant life lush and one’s skin moist and sticky. But this place is mostly concrete, glass and steel up into the sky or in the form of broad and bustling boulevards. Finance, factories, commercialism and education are the name of the game here. Impressively, this place was nearly all mangrove forest thirty years ago. Now it is considered one the fastest growing megalopolises in the world. Nothing is old here, including hardly any people. 88% of the population is between 15 and 59. In the province most people speak Cantonese, but because Shenzhen is a city of immigrants, the lingua franca is Mandarin, the dominant dialect of mainland China.

I am in a neighborhood called Shekou, in the Nanshan District of Shenzhen, on the western end of town. This district is known for its good schools, including Shenzhen University and where I work, YuCai High School. It’s a bit more suburban feeling that other parts of the metropolis. Streets are tree-lined, the air is good, and it’s near the waterfront, Shenzhen Bay and the port. An hour-long ferry ride once through customs gets you to central Hong Kong.

I am in an apartment on the eighth floor of a 22-story building that occupies one corner of an intersection. I have two balconies that hang above the intersection and Sihai park across the street, which is a welcome respite from the forest of towers that surround most views in this city. In the park I play pick-up soccer with young to middle-aged men on some evenings. There I recently met one of Shenzhen’s immigrant residents, an engineer who came here from the north for a new job. He taught me that San Francisco in Mandarin is called the “Old Golden Hill” (旧金山). It’s the old golden hill because the famous gold rush of the “forty-niners” only lasted so long. We’ll see how long the gold rush lasts here.

I am at 22.496540069580078° N and 113.91957092285156° E if you want to zero in on me with Google Earth. You will see that yes, I am in China, the “Far East”. But there is a lot more for you and I to learn about precisely where I am, and while we are at it, maybe a little bit about where both of us are from.

Yours,
Chris

P.S. Compare this "Precisely Where I Am" entry to my "Precisely Where I Am" entry of 2009, when I was living in Eastern Uganda working on a joint poverty alleviation and rain forest conservation project with Village Enterprise Fund and Jane Goodall Institute. You can find the entry on the lefthand sidebar under Enjoy These Oldies but Goodies > 2009 > April > Precisely Where I Am.

Work and Play in China

Click on this picture to be linked to a Picasa web album of my first few weeks here in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, China. The best way to view is as a slideshow. Give yourself at least five seconds per slide to be able to read the captions.