At the Nanjing Massacre memorial… Well, I think I should head back there and read everything in the exhibition hall, so maybe I’ll refrain from too much commenting on that just yet [I never did get back -JJU]. But outside the hall we wandered the grounds where stones are placed for specific massacre sites and the ground is scattered with stones to represent the 300,000 dead. Cheryl says that was a number specifically and politically chosen. Because they can’t tell exactly how many people died. There’s the Grave of 10,000 Corpses but it doesn’t have that many bodies identified (all through that hall they’ve got scattered femurs and humeri broken beside the walkways). The 300,000 was chosen to be a larger number than the atomic blasts killed in Hiroshima (and Nagasaki?). To ensure that Chinese suffering could be quantitatively higher than that of their enemies. So people wouldn’t have to say “Sure fewer died but it was more horrible.” More died and it was more horrible. No wiggle room for the devils. I should be fair. I only saw the Japanese called devils outside the museum by the statues with their quotes and poems.

Cheryl talked a lot about Japan and her time at the Hiroshima memorial. She’s heard people speak on the topic of this whole ugly history. Japanese pastors saying “Our salvation lies in your (Chinese) forgiveness.” Japanese civilians saying “Yes it’s true we didn’t know what was happening but we can’t get away from our guilt that way. It’s our responsibility to know what our government is doing in our name.” (I know that one chilled me with responsibility. We live in a democracy. My government represents me far moreso than the CCP represents an ordinary Chinese person. And what are they doing in my name? Well, at least I’m not an American.) Chinese Christians saying that one of the great obstacles to faith was the idea that god even loved the Japanese. How could that be?

Later in the evening we were at Wang Xuefu’s house and were talking politics. He speaks of the Nanjing Massacre and the Cultural Revolution as psychologically traumatizing events for the nation. As a country “Chinese are very good at forgetting” he said (something I think needs a bit more explanation or at least some speculation) but that means the wounds get buried deeper. The government isn’t interested in healing. All they care for is other things: Economics. Power. And if they can harness the wounds and use them for their own purposes then that’s exactly perfect. Healing would only hurt that agenda.

We got into the story of a prof at Nan Da who is a member of a minority political party. He submitted an open letter to the CCP asking for open elections. On Xuefu’s couch we all sat back with mouths agape, laughing at the audacity. What happened? He was forced to resign from his party and is no longer allowed to teach classes.

In the last couple of weeks there’ve been protests in Lhasa. Monks and civilians in Jokhang Square marching angrily. And this has been shown on CCTV which probably means a forceful clampdown is forthcoming. But not too forceful since the eyes of the world are starting to focus on the country. There was a 19-year-old woman from Xinjiang who supposedly smuggled gasoline onto a plane to try and hijack it in an attack on Beijing. In the media reports the focus is on outside separatist forces using these Chinese people to make revolting statements. “And they’re such monsters they’d even use an innocent teenaged girl to try hurting China.” All these outsiders giving the government excuses for support from the people.

One of Xuefu’s friends is a professor and former journalist and he says that his greatest regret is being part of the propaganda machine for so many years. He’s the one who taught Xuefu about proxies and tunnelling through the Great Firewall. We talked about how there are no rules in China anymore, how classrooms are set up as dictatorships just to satisfy the teacher’s desire to feel important.

Korean respect for age and authority was held up as a kind of model for integrating Confucian values with Western freedoms. Cheryl talked about her Korean friend who won’t talk politics with his family because then his father would demand to be listened to, and “I don’t want to vote for who my father wants people to vote for.” By not discussing it the son isn’t forced to disobey when it comes to the ballot box.

We talked about how in China the people in power have no ideology any more, no ideals beyond staying in power and keeping the good life all that money affords. Supposedly people had thought maybe Hu Jintao would be someone who’d start the process toward democracy but once he got in it was all the same old thing. If a transition to a democratic society were to happen many people say it would be chaos. On these couches in the nicest Chinese living room I’ve ever been in, that chaos was limited if the transition was led from above. Sure a revolution would be chaotic but so much of that is because it would be a fight between the people and the government. If the government were to gradually institute more local-level elections and work its way up, there wouldn’t have to be blood. But how could that happen? It won’t as long as people have the feeling that things could be worse.

The top and middle these days have more and more to protect and the bottom can only steam and maybe have an occasional anti-Japanese riot/three minutes of hate. People are gradually getting better off (“Materially,” I interject. “In every way,” Holly corrects me, “There’s more free speech and better health care available and yeah.” I sit back chastened like the dumb westerner I happen to be.) and a lot of them see that as enough.

All this talking was happening out at Wang Xuefu’s house in the suburbs. Now my idea of suburbs is shaped by the small city I grew up in. Basically anything that’s not downtown is a suburb to me. Places with trees and lawns and such. This suburb is an hour and a half outside the city (by bus. Car or taxi mabe half an hour to 45 minutes) off shitty dirt roads and freeways. It’s more like living in Connecticut when you work in New York, or at least it seemed like that to me. One of the roads we got into a traffic jam on is the state road to Hangzhou. They’re building the subway out there so it’ll be more connected in a year or two.

Inside their subdivision though I thought I’d gone to hell. There are some little hills and a manmade lake his house backs (fronts?) onto. And it’s surrounded by these birthday cake tiered townhousey things just piled on each other. The definition of prefabbed nicety. White Ridge on the Pack ‘em In scale. The other side of their house faces a row of identical buildings across a cement tiled lawnspace. Xuefu stressed very insistently that he wasn’t a rich man, though his house was beautifully upper middle class. Three storeys, heated floors on the main and top levels. Dark stained wood staircase and dining room table. High ceilings with recessed lighting, space for a huge entertainment unit but holding a 24″ old TV. A beautiful office with skylight attached to the master bedroom. Everything very clean and relatively elegant. Lacking in art for the space but whatever. A whiteboard hung in the dining room which was a bit tacky or something but in general it made you forget you were in a townhouse. He bought out there a few years ago when there was nothing, so it was cheap. He’d “had a feeling it would soon be developed” from what he’d seen in the US. So he got in at the base and it’s already quadrupled in value. Good for them and all that.

He also has a silver Buick parked in the driveway. And really, to live out there now you need to have a car. He learned to drive in the States I think, but this winter in a snowstorm (not the big one, a couple of weeks before it) they’d been driving home from some town where they were doing some training and it was icy and shitty and he spun out in a 360. They decided to take safety as a priority over the law and Holly took the wheel. She had greater experience and got them home safely in the end.

Earlier this year the car got keyed when they were out somewhere and Holly was impressed that he didn’t flip out (he really loves this car). He did complain about the ignorance of whoever did it though. “Why does he have to take out his aggression on his fellow man?” Maybe the term he used was “common man.” In any case, Holly thought “You aren’t the guy’s fellow man; you have a car.” And a nice house in suburban hell.

The day after all this discussion Zhang Guo Xian was asking Holly about different countries. “What is your view on…Mexico?” kind of stuff. She said she likes all countries. “Even Japan?” asked Xiao Meng. “Yup.” And then with obvious practice Xiao Meng launched into “Well if you really loved China…” and Holly stormed away. I don’t blame her one bit. I absolutely detest that kind of narrow party-line view of Xiao Meng’s. Holly says she’s a very good and loving friend but she just can’t talk to her about what China is like. I know that since I don’t see (or at least understand) her being a loving good friend I really don’t like Xiao Meng. All I get is the cartoon villain snickering and this narrow narrow view of the world and the TV watching and stuff. If my Chinese were better… but it’s not. So I’m stuck here seeing and hearing what I can and what is explained to me. This is really a very useless document when I think clearly about it. All that humble bullshit up front is really true. Don’t think there’s any insight here.

Holly’s been a bit of a connection point for people here this month. Not just me and Cheryl but that woman in Shanghai who wants to proselytize through counselling, Rod and Bert Lobe and now this Naomi, an American German who’s doing a dissertation on the Chinese church. She was introduced to Wang Xuefu through a woman named Katherine in Munich. She’d talked with Don Snow the day before and was hoping to get more introductions through Xuefu’s connections at the Nanjing seminary. Evidently they don’t like foreigners coming wandering in without an appointment (as we tried to do with Cheryl).

In my limited interactions with Naomi (as usual Holly talked with her more) she seemed dumb as mud. Holly says her Chinese was good, which is always a big plus in her view, but when she spoke in English it made me mad that people might have to call her Doctor whatever her surname is. Maybe it was an act designed to gather information. All “Shucks golly whatever could be going on with seminaries in China?” so people would tell her more, like she was some sort of child. She’d done a literature undergrad then a German Studies Master’s and now she thought she’d like to do a PhD in something she was interested in, like China. She doesn’t have a theology background but wanted to do something theological because her father and grandmother are theologians. She also wanted to do a PhD which would be solely a dissertation so she didn’t have to learn anything else. A friend of her father’s said he could swing that through the University of Wales and now here she is making connections and finding out stuff like “Going to house churches and studying them would put them in danger” and that China’s really big, so maybe some focus might be in order.

I guess some of my dislike for her came from this connection-making which seems to be her means of success in whatever form. As someone who has no connections and no means of making or using connections (see my failed attempts to use that whole Mennonite thing post-CEE) I like to see people display ability. And that she didn’t do. In my eyes. She was so focused on the details of who to submit her questionnaire to she didn’t listen to what Wang Xuefu was saying to her. She was incredulous at an 8:40am meeting he arranged, though she didn’t turn it down. Maybe I was just turned off by her “That was really tough” outside the Massacre Memorial. Maybe it was her accent. I just want people who have more credentials/esteem/status/whatever in society to seem like they should be in that position. Just because I’m slumming along at a nothing kind of job I get resentful of stupid people climbing a career path I got out of.

All right then. A birthday. Twenty-eight years old today. I will spare you any maudlin reflections on the subject. But. Last year was my first birthday in Winnipeg in five years and now this year I’m here. I timed it so this would happen. There’s no point in messing up a perfectly good tradition, you know? Once every five years is about right for a party.

Yesterday we watched the Kun Ju again and it was better than last week. Of course, it was a paid performance, so maybe they put their more finely honed things on then. It was only a third of the way full, though the smaller crowd did include such luminaries as Don Snow (of Turning Bricks to Jade fame and who wrote the Amity Chinese learning book we initially used upon arriving in China), the bored old Chinese man to my right who couldn’t stop yawning, and a little girl who followed the fluttery hand motions on stage with her mother’s guidance. She was utterly confused by Shi Jen [no idea how to spell or pronounce her name], Cheryl’s Korean friend who knows no Chinese, at least not to speak it.

The stories were different than last time too. No martial arts epic. No old man selling his sister to his brother. No emperors. The first story was a monologue by a naughty nun who wanted to escape her abbey. It was frustrating because (though I realize realism counts for not a goddamned thing in opera of any sort) the character was a 15 or 16 year old girl complaining about her shaved head and ugly old nun clothes while the actress’ costume is all blue silk with Fo characters on it and he hair goes down below her ass. Plus the fact of the makeup. Because it is so elaborate (white face, swooping pink eyeshadow and rouge) I can’t stop seeing her as a 50-year-old woman out on the street trying her best to look young/attractive through face-plastering. I guess a little bit of verisimilitude in art is necessary even for me and my flights of fancy. Cheryl and Holly were talking about being enraptured with the story [not so much in this episode, but the third one] while I could only find distractionary nits to pick.

After that was a comedy about the “widely known” Lord Someone of Ying Yang who’d been left behind by the Lady Yaxian and he was traipsing off through the woods to find her when he has to stop at an inn and pawn his worthless old cap to pay for his stay. It was pretty broad comedy with the innkeeper. I liked the innkeeper’s makeup which focused attention on his face inwards like it was all pinched up or like he was a fox. That guyy would have plaed the poop stealing fox dressed up in white gloves perfectly. Then was a scene of a woman reading from the Peony Pavillion, which is a story of a woman who loves a dream man and dies and then when this man actually exists he sees a painting of her and falls in love and exhumes the body and brings the corpse back to life. None of that happened onstage. What did happen was a woman read about it and whined about the rain and how there are no good dream men anymore.

After the Kun Ju we wandered our way back to Xin Jie Kou and then home. On the way we passed a two-kuai shop. Everything inside 2RMB/each. Not quite everything but far more met the proclamation than at your tpical dollar store. Shi Jen bought flash cards for children’s Chinese. Holly picked up a thermos thing with a cork stopper and an extra mug. No, wait, the mug was a gift from Cheryl. I bought a Chinese Chess set and two of those stainless steel balls for rolling around in your hand to keep the chi flowing. The kind of thing old people play with while they circle sportsfields backwards. I’ve wanted a couple of these for a long time but the only ones I’ve ever found to buy have been all ornate with yinyang symbols and fake ceramics and bells on the inside in a cheap little clasping case. These ones are just heavy reflective steel. I quite like them. Common people use these and am I anything besides common?