Everyone Needs a Tera

Introducing my new friend Tera. Tera recently graduated from college in the US with a degree in international business and a minor in Chinese. She decided to evade the working world for a year to come teach English in Harbin. I did not know her last semester; she was too busy teaching 10 hour days. This semester Tera decided she did not want to spend all her time in China in a classroom. So she cut back her teaching hours, signed up for Chinese classes, and found herself with a lot more spare time.


After I met Tera, I explained my rice research project. I told her I was trying to visit some of Harbin's street food markets in the morning. The problem is that the markets are all open at 6am and need to be closed by 8am (Harbin law). Its early and cold outside at that time. I could easily wake up that early if I needed to be somewhere, but with no one expecting me to be there, I had not been motivated to get to visit them. Tera knew of some in her neighborhood and immediately offered to get up and show me around one morning. Then I told her I was planning to visit another market and she offered to come with me. At 6 am. She offered her services as a personal research assistant.

When I plan to meet her, I have to be there and I have no excuse not to go outside. Having someone there to meet me makes me go. And I have had some productive mornings at the markets. I'm not collecting much information at the markets, just seeing how many rice stalls there are and the varieties of rice they sell (hoping that one day when it actually gets warm here I will spend more time at the markets). I don't need Tera there to do anything aside from walk with me. She keeps me company. It works well for her because she wants to go to grad school for a PhD one day so she is getting exposed to (the fun part of) graduate work. Sometimes she stops to pet the fish for sale.
We also stop to pet dogs, examine the rice, taste test fresh peanut butter, avoid looking at the dead animals being sold for meat, and marvel at the tropical fruit being sold outside in the snow.

Markets are pretty fun places.Here's some rice!

And when we are finished, we stop at a nearby KFC to warm up and wake up with hot coffee.

On Writing

I write a lot these days. Luckily, most of the time I am my only audience. This is good because I am writing behind closed doors and no one is reading and judging what I write. But its bad because its me alone with my thoughts. Which sometimes turn into a wild jungle of scary jibberish.

Soon I am going to have to write this all into a story about rice where I have to balance the stories of the people I meet with the story I want to tell. Somehow I am going to have to make that work. But for now I write to process and evaluate (and constantly re-evaluate) what I am doing here. Sometimes I think about things and write them out and that writing process leaves me with 5 new threads of ideas to carry out. Those are the days when writing is good. Other times I write and I am trying to confront or figure out a problem and I keep wrapping myself back to the original question or problem. I guess that is the nature of something as complicated as social science.

For example, I feel like I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why people think the rice I am studying is good rice. So I have asked people what aspects or qualities they look for when buying rice. I am trying to get to the bottom of this question by making it complicated when sometimes it appears as simple as this: it’s the only rice they really can buy here because it’s the local rice. They are used to this rice and its readily available and fairly cheap so its what they eat. But I tell myself it has to be more complicated than that so I keep asking people to explain it to me and I continue to get the exact same answers. It has taken me a lot of time to be able to synthesize all of my ideas into this simple paragraph. But I am constantly confronting the original question and wondering at what point do I leave it alone and move on or try to dig further and pull deeper meaning from it all. And maybe now is not necessarily the time for me to even be thinking about this and I should just be doing it. But I can’t do it without thinking about it. And I am drawn back into a cycle…

Its times like these when I need to laugh at the entire process of writing. Because writing is thinking and good writing is the outcome of the combination of bad writing and good thinking. To make light of this situation, here is a link to one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite TV characters, Lorelai Gilmore of the Gilmore Girls. I love this character because her mind works like my mind. But unlike me (who keeps my incoherent thoughts to myself to maintain the image of sanity), Lorelai just lets it go. In this scene she is trying to write a letter, but nothing is coming out. It makes me laugh (and as a bonus she references Casablanca and the Bush White House in one breath-[Casa Blanca=White House in spanish]).

One final note: I think that a lot of my thoughts about writing come (surprisingly) from Steven King. The only book by Steven King I have read the entire way through was a memoir/guide to writing called On Writing. I bought this book a few years ago on the street in Beijing the day before a 13-hour plane ride to the US. By the time I got home, I had finished the book. I realize my writing is much different from Steven King’s, but I appreciated the ways he synthesized the process of writing. Whether its weird science fiction or rice preferences in China, writing is a process shared by many.

Random

I have so many things to write about I have had trouble choosing what to write about so I have not written much lately. I guess I would rather not choose what to write about than to try to write a jumbled mish-mash of thoughts. Here are some topics I could write about in greater depth, but will provide just short paragraphs:

• Flavored potato chips. After purusing the potato chip selection in a Chinese supermarket, I realized the main selection between chips was: blueberry, strawberry, cucumber, tomatoe, beef, or 'American.' A friend has informed me that in the UK one can get hedgehog flavored chips. A few years ago in Thailand I had curry-flavored chips that I have not seen anywhere else I have travelled since. I would love to figure out how potato chip companies cater to consumers in dofferent countries. I am especially interested in this because 'blueberry' is a rare flavor in China. Even in Maine where anything and everything is labelled as blueberry to attract tourists, I never saw blueberry potato chips.
  
• Spring in Harbin. Harbin is melting. The ice sculptures have been blown up and the ice returned to the river. The other night we had rain that slowly turned to snow. With poor drainage on the streets, the result is that during the day I am constantly dodging ankle deep puddles. At night, I am carefully walking on frozen sidewalks. All around me, the sidewalks are filled with hordes of Chinese who walk leisurely. As much as I've tried the lazy Chinese leisure walk, I can't help being a fast-paced American who needs to march through the crowds. I am convinced one day that my fast walk, combined with icy, muddy sidewalks, will have negative consequences. But its cold outside and I need to get around.
• The Financial Crisis. I've had people ask me how people are talking about the financial crisis in China. Given that each time I open the US news on my computer, I see something else related to the financial crisis, I am still trying to figure out how it is perceived in China. Most people ask me about America's economic problems. They understand its a world problem and affecting some industries in China, but do not necessarily see it as affecting their lives. I wonder if this is because of the overly-confident attitude through which the Chinese media is reporting how China will make it through this crisis. I also wonder if the overly-negative stories in the US media are causing too much panic. I know that is an overly-simplistic position to take, but I am not thinking about it too much.
• Markets. This topic could quite possibly turn into quite a long post someday since I spend so much time thinking about where and how food is sold in urban China. But I have too many ideas to make a coherent post, so here is the simple version. I've been exploring Harbin's markets lately, trying to understand where rice is sold outside the major chain supermarkets. The most interesting places I've found have been the Grain and Oil Stores. These stores are leftovers of the Communist era where staples such as wheat, rice, soy sauce, and oil were rationed. They were all placed together in a single store where families could use their ration cards. Today, money is all that one needs. Many of these stores are difficult to find (unless you are familiar with the neighborhood and know where to look, as I've learned the hard way) and are often run-down. But many people prefer to shop at these stores for their convinience. Yeah, there is so much to say, I am cutting myself off here.
• Happy International Women's Day. Today (March 8) is Women's Day in China. Its a big deal here. Its on a Sunday this year, so I am not sure how it is celebrated but when I taught in Sichuan, I think we all got the day off. I did not learn until after I had left China that it is a Communist holiday, started primarily by the USSR, which explains why its a big deal here and I had never heard about it in the US.