Category Archives for China & East Asia

» AFRICA IN A CHINESE CENTURY: Radio Open Source interview with Howard French

Photo (c) 2011 by Howard French

In the imagination of many who look primarily to their nightly news, daily papers, or any other corporate US media to inform them, Africa is a disease-ridden hell cursed by a seemingly endless succession of murderous despots. The first two things likely to spring to many Westerner’s minds when they think about the continent, based largely on media coverage, are “aid” and “AIDS.” By contrast, an increasing tide of Chinese immigrants and businesspeople to Africa think: “opportunity.”

Journalist Howard French was recently interviewed on Radio Open Source, and his insights into differences between Western and Chinese attitudes and approaches toward Africa are fascinating and enlightening. Below is some of the introductory text for the interview from Radio Open Source, with a link to the full interview below:

Continue reading →

» ART & FREEDOMS: Half a Day with Chinese People’s Historian Liao Yiwu (廖亦武)

[This is a continuation of my post, "The Corpse Walker: Liao Yiwu's Notes from China's Underclass" To read my long-form profile of Liao, “Drift to Live,” click here. To read recent (July 2011) updates about Liao’s departure from China and his subsequent asylum in Germany, click here.]

Excerpts from “Massacre” (by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wen Huang)

Dedicated to those who were killed on June 4, 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

A massacre is happening
In this nation of Utopia
Where the Prime Minister catches a cold
The masses have to sneeze to follow
Martial law is declared and enforced
The aging toothless state machine is rolling over
Those who dare to resist and refuse to sneeze
Fallen by the thousands are the barehanded and unarmed
Armored assassins are swimming in blood
Setting fire to houses with windows and doors locked
Polish your military boots with the skirt of a slain girl
Boot owners don’t even tremble
Robots without hearts never tremble
Their brain is programmed with one process
A flawed command
Represent the nation to dismember the constitution
Represent the constitution to slaughter justice…

Liao Yiwu, 2010. Photo by Brian Awehali

[Earlier this year] we joined Liao and two writer friends he’d shared imprisonment with for tea. Liao was sturdy and bald, his skin ruddy with black rimmed glasses, wore flowing linen pants and navy flip flops which displayed several blackened toenails, and he walked with a limp. I’ll call the other two PB and RG: PB, who said he had eaten much more bitterness in his life than Liao and suffered much more greatly than him, had a typical black bowl cut, glasses, pasty white skin and a shirt tucked into a belt that said “Playboy” on it over the bunny icon. He said that he wrote about his stories of being in prison every day, and that altogether he had been in for seven years. The other one, RG, who said that it was hard to describe what he writes about, had longer hair down to his ears, was pudgy with rimless glasses and wore a plaid shirt. Of the three, RG smiled the most and spoke the least.

We talked about things like Twitter in China. You can say a lot more in 120 Chinese characters than you can in 120 English characters, and Twitter is used for more overtly political purposes in China, to get around the Great Firewall, and less for inane things about where someone’s eating or what someone’s wearing. We also talked about the difficulties of publishing in China. PB had written many stories about his prison experiences, but was resigned to just sharing them with friends and family because he didn’t think he would ever find a publisher; Liao is only published by overseas presses.

At one point Liao said that Chinese view the government as the police. When I asked about Chinese anarchists, Liao replied that all smart Chinese were anarchists (“no government people”) because the government just took their money and land and enforced rules and laws. They were just the police, and didn’t care if the people were hungry or not. I asked about this because I was just then reading Yale Agrarian Studies professor James C. Scott’s excellent book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland East Asia, which details how between 80 and 100 million people in East Asia fled the Han Chinese state and took to the hills (“shatter zones”) to be self-determining over the past few centuries. This includes Tibetans, the Wa, the Kachin, the Lahu and a staggering range of other East Asian “hill peoples.” I’m not positive, but given our linguistic challenges, Liao was probably characterizing “smart Chinese” as more anti-authoritarian than anarchist, but was nonetheless making a deeper point about power than can be got at by conceiving of things in terms of so-called “capitalism” or “communism.”

Continue reading →

» GOLDEN HOURS THOUGHTS IN TAGONG (LHAGONG), TIBET

These days, urban China is made of people, cars, and ubiquitous green scaffolding and yellow-orange cranes flying the red Communist Party flag over construction sites. Everywhere you look, edifices of glass, concrete and stone predominate. By day, construction; through the night, construction. It stops for nothing, not even torrential downpours so heavy that the cab of the crane can’t be seen from the ground.

In western Sichuan, the rains have fallen particularly hard this year, causing floods and mudslides that have killed several dozen people and blocked key roads.

One of those key roads is the one that takes you from Chengdu, where I’ve spent most of my time in China, to Lhasa, the epicenter of Tibet, which is just now laboring under its 59th year of Chinese occupation. It’s rugged country, and the Tibetans are rugged people, accustomed to harsh conditions and high elevations.

Continue reading →

» THE CORPSE WALKER: Conversations with China’s Lower Strata

This is the first of several posts on LOUDCANARY about Liao Yiwu. To read my long-form profile of Liao, “Drift to Live,” click here. To read recent (July 2011) updates about Liao’s departure from China and his subsequent asylum in Germany, click here. 

When we arrived by cab at the train station, as instructed, Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) met us in a black car driven by a friend and took us to a riverside tea house, where several of his friends were already drinking tea and eating fried Sichuan peppers. We talked for hours, then ate and drank for several more before the musical instruments came out…

Liao Yiwu may be China’s most important literary figure, and not because of anything he says, but because of the people whose stories he collects, and the vivid history he chronicles in a country seemingly so eager to forget its past. Many college students do not know about the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, to take one prime example of this willful (and highly orchestrated) amnesiac tendency. In his work, Liao focuses on the diceng (底层）or “bottom rung of society,” a concept hated by both supporters of Mao’s “communist” revolution and the current PRC, as well as by many Chinese people for whom the concept of “face” (mianzi, or 面子) — looking good and having status and, in this case, not making China look bad to the laowai (老外, or foreigners) — is all-important. In an only theoretically classless society, people are reluctant to speak of beggars, thieves, drug addicts or those in poverty, even if their presence is glaringly obvious.

Continue reading →

» THE U.S.-CHINESE MINING RACKET IN AFGHANISTAN

On a recent trip to Mongolia, I found the place filthy with miners. I rarely come into contact with people in the mining industry, but I often read about their exploits, usually in the Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, and The Economist. So much of global politics is about competition for resources that I’ve always thought it was wise to pay attention to the aims and strategies of those tasked with acquiring and processing them. I definitely want to know what a mining executive thinks about political and economic realities, for the same reason I read the business press.

On the flight into Ulaanbaatar, I sat next to a Canadian miner employed by an Australian company, who was in the Gobi helping to set up a copper mine. He told me lots of interesting things about transnational mining companies doing business in the region. It’s mostly Chinese, Russian, Korean and French companies, and selling what’s under the ground is basically the only real business in Mongolia, though they’ll be happy to sell you a cashmere sweater or a variety of felted wool products as well:

On my flight out, I sat next to an American mining executive on his way from gold mining in Mongolia to an oil drilling gig in Kazakhstan. This second executive talked a lot about the backstory of the mining business, about corruption and bribery, and he claimed that “risk averse” U.S. and European mining companies were losing out in the resource wars. He spoke of some sordid realities of the mining business and shared stories about Nigeria, Mexico and… Afghanistan.

Afghanistan? Did the U.S. have mining operations in Afghanistan? Not exactly. But were we in the mining business in Afghanistan? Absolutely, in a manner of speaking.

“Oh yeah,” the mining executive said, leaning in confidingly: “The Chinese just won the largest copper mining bid in the world after bribing a bunch of Afghan officials, but that’s not even the worst part.” He paused for dramatic effect, then continued: “The worst part is that it’s the U.S. providing military protection for the Chinese to do it!”

Interesting. Once I got back, I started looking into U.S-China-Afghanistan relations, and found that this guy was basically speaking the truth:

“China is in the process of sinking $3.5 billion into Afghanistan to exploit one of the last remaining copper reserves on the planet. And how many deaths in Afghanistan for the People’s Liberation Army? Zero. Will China step in to protect the largest single foreign investment in Afghanistan’s history? You bet — but only after fighting the Taliban to the very last American soldier it could muster.

Feel ripped off? On a gut level, you should. “

- “Is Obama’s Afghanistan Strategy Ripping Off America?,” Thomas P.M. Barnett, Esquire magazine, December 2009

Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s own Vietnam, the alleged base for Al Qaeda, where the U.S. first gave money and training to Osama bin Laden in the name of fighting so-called “communism,” homeland of the Taliban and various warlords, and Obama and the U.S.’s costly, escalating ($940 billion and counting) second war front, where General Stanley A. McChrystal, top U.S. man in Afghanistan, just undertook an epic foot-in-mouth routine in a series of high-profile interviews for Rolling Stone magazine.

Many people who root for U.S. military and business interests can understand the basic problem of a respect and strategy gap between a general and his commander-in-chief. Quite a few people can also understand the dubious logic of a protracted military occupation in a country posing unprecedented logistical challenges at a time when the U.S. is having difficulty meeting its domestic responsibilities.

But how many people know that the 100,000+ U.S. and NATO soldiers in Aghanistan are effectively providing stabilization and armed security forces for Chinese mining interests? And how many people know that while China ratchets up the world’s largest copper mining operation in Afghanistan, they will be committing not a single member of their own military forces to protect their business in the region? A December 2009 New York Times article explained the situation thusly:

Two years ago, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion — $1 billion more than any of its competitors from Canada, Europe, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan — for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China.

While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce…

S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.”

“We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.”

The reality is more complicated than that… [but] the conclusion is inescapable: American troops have helped make Afghanistan safe for Chinese investment. And there is no sense that either government objects to that reality. As diplomats and soldiers alike stress, the war in Afghanistan was never motivated by commercial prospects. Had an American company won Aynak, some Afghans noted wryly, critics inevitably would have accused the United States of waging war to seize the country’s mineral wealth. Moreover, if China succeeds in developing Aynak and generating revenue for the Kabul government, that helps achieve an American goal.

With government money and backing behind them, China’s state-run giants take risks in places that even the largest private behemoths will not tolerate, and they can add sweeteners — from railroads to mosques — that ordinary mining firms are ill equipped to provide.

“The Chinese have sort of raised the bar. They’ve taken it beyond the scope of just an extractive operation,” the Western official said. “The Chinese are willing to step up and take a long-term strategic approach. If it takes 5 or 10 years, at least they have a beachhead.”

China is also gearing up to put this business-friendly set of affairs in Afghanistan to even more profitable use, mining Afghanistan’s recently discovered deposits of lithium. Lithium is used in rechargeable fuel cell technology, and is expected to play a major role in the rapidly growing electric vehicle industry. As one industry publication reports:

Even though we’ve tried to help kill the phrase “the Saudi Arabia of [insert industry here],” we’re going to bring it back one last time. According to an article in the New York Times this weekend, Afghanistan could be the new “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” after analysis from the Pentagon has emerged that suggests that Afghanistan could have lithium deposits as big as those of Bolivia, which currently has the world’s largest.

“China wants to be the leader in the lithium ion battery market, and I’m sure they’re very interested in getting their hands on Afghanistan’s reserves, particularly given how close they are to it,” says Lux Research analyst Jacob Grose. China’s own domestic lithium reserves — which stands at 1,100,000 tons in its reserve base, and delivers about 3,000 usable tons onto the market each year, according to the United States Geological Services’ Mineral Resources Department — are mostly extracted with conventional mining techniques. That means Chinese lithium can be more expensive to mine than lithium found within salt lakes, which can be processed with evaporation, and are found in South America — and now Afghanistan.

As if this was not all cause enough for concern and intense questioning, I also discovered credible reports that U.S. operations in Afghanistan are creating, not reducing, the influence of warlords, and that taxpayer money has been funneled, in some cases directly, to Al Qaeda. A 79-page House of Representatives study entitled “Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan” details how local warlords and Al Qaeda operatives are paid-off, for protection and various other reasons. It details how much of the work for the U.S. supply chain is provided by a company called Host Nation Trucking, whose practices are questioned pointedly in the report. One quote from the report that I’ll share here had me on the verge of tears and laughter at the same time:

Actions speak louder than words, and the locals see these drugged-out thugs [HNT employees] with guns and trucks with “The United States” painted on them shoot without reason… Many of the gunmen have little or no training, and many are also high on heroin or hashish… U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Abrahams said he has tried to tell locals that he understands their plight, but he is consistently undermined by the wild shooting.

Yeah, I could see how the locals might not feel you understand their concerns when the drugged-out goons and warlords you give money to keep shooting them.

Several years ago I wrote an article (“New World Disorder”) about how, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration had responded by jettisoning arms control regulations and selling a flood of weapons to governments and regimes once considered off-limits because of instability or human rights violations. Nothing says “safety” like “massive arms deals to unstable regimes.” Toward the end of the article, I quoted a line from President Coolidge circa 1925, that “The business of America is business,” and then asked if it wasn’t better said, given observable reality, that “The business of America is the business of war.”

The official line is that the U.S. is in Afghanistan to fight terrorism and reduce the threat of Islamist extremism. But how credible is this claim, when the U.S. is funneling money to the very people it calls the enemy, and while it works hand-in-hand with the Chinese to make Afghanistan safe for business? And how many more people need die before the operation is considered a success?

War is a racket. General Smedley Butler (“The Fighting Quaker”), a decorated pre-World War II military hero who recanted and became an outspoken critic of U.S. military policy, defined a war racket as:

“Something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about, and it is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

Smedley continued:

“I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket…

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Addendum: in the latter part of July, 2010, Wikileaks released 90,000 pages of confidential U.S. military documents that served to further underscore that something is indeed rotten in Afghanistan.

» FOOLISHNESS AND GENEROSITY IN GORKHI TERELJ, MONGOLIA

I’ve been in China for almost three months now, and had to leave the country in order to satisfy the requirements of my visa. My partner F. and I chose to go to Mongolia because of its wild, largely undeveloped openness. For nature. After the extreme urban clamor of China, this sounded perfect.

We flew into Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capitol, from Beijing, and spent two days there before heading to the countryside. I was told by some long-timers that UB used to be attractive when the country was still under Soviet “administration,” but it’s hard to believe. Today, it’s a dusty and vegetation-free city made of large Soviet-style concrete block architecture with paint peeling off from the extreme cold of UB’s winters. Tourist-focused shops, of which there are many, hawk camel, yak or wool knick-knacks and sweaters alongside various products, from vodka to war helmets, commemorating Chingiss Khaan. (If you spear your tourist bait on the hook of Khaan and the “Great Mongol Empire,” the largest the world has ever seen, it occurs to me that truthfulness might dictate you also have a slogan for Mongolia that goes something along the lines of, “Declining for 700 years and counting!”) Traffic in UB is horrid, and the roads are in various states of decay. Air quality is exceedingly poor, owing to two main factors: the widespread use of coal as fuel for heating, and the unplanned growth of a city built for 300,000 swelling to over a million in too short a time. Mongolia only has about 2.5 million people, and over a million live in UB.

We were happy to head for the countryside. Our host and guide, Bogi, drove us several hours to the northeast, and found a “nomadic” herding family for us to stay with for two weeks. They had a ger (yurt) and agreed to prepare two meals a day for us. Perfect.

I had imagined epic blue skies, and these were definitely present, as the photos in this post attest, but in June, there’s an equal amount of rain and high winds in northeastern Mongolia. After a beautiful first day, it poured for the next three, and I was going a bit stir crazy from sitting in our ger without electricity or any sitting positions comfortable enough for me to write in.

I decided to head out on a day of walking, hoping to find internet access at one of the many camps or couple of restaurants I’d seen when Bogi had driven us in. I wanted to check and write email, and I desperately wanted to know how Game 1 of the NBA Finals, pitting the Lakers against the Celtics, had turned out. I find my love of professional basketball almost completely indefensible, but since I admitted to myself my powerlessness over its hold on me, I’ve been able to accept my shame and more fully enjoy my love of millionaires bouncing an inflated ball around a hardwood floor. For me, there’s majesty in the game of basketball, because at its highest level, it’s a consummate team game, where communication and intelligence must match extraordinary athleticism. And in 2010, the Los Angeles Lakers are a simply gorgeous embodiment of this balance, playing a team in the Celtics who also exemplify the finer aspects of the game. I love playing more than watching, but after breaking my ankle last year, my playings days may be over…

But I digress.

The massive scale of grass floodplains and thin riverine forests here in northeastern Mongolia make them more suited to horseback riding than to walking, but I was a happy speck moving slowly through dung-maculated valleys full of the bleached skulls, spines and other stray bone bits of departed animals.

I walked for hours, sometimes joined by wary-then-playful dogs, passing alongside grazing horses, cattle, and several vomits of dandelion-munching yak (yes, that’s one of the suggested ways to refer to them, and I personally observed their great love of dandelions). Yak are improbable-looking creatures. I feel somewhere in my childhood media consumption that a muppet or an animal from another planet must have been based on the yak, with its wildly variant coat, cropped close to the body in some places and flowing like disheveled mane in others.

When you look at a picture of the landscape of an area like this, you can’t really see the impressively large volume of dung that occupies every slightly level, even faintly vegetative spot of earth. I feel that I have seen more varieties of dung, in more varied states of decay than I could have imagined here in Mongolia, despite having spent some time around ranches and farms when I was growing up.


This is the Gorkhi Terelj National Park, in the Khan Khentee Protected Area, homeland of Chingiss Khan, in northeastern Mongolia. The nomadic herding families here, so heavily marketed as one of the precious cultural treasures of Mongolia, are, in fact, commercial operators who must hold commercial licenses in order to be in this area and who can no longer exist in their traditional lifestyle without the annual infusion of money they get from tourists between the months of June and August. My host family does herd cows and horses, but they are here, in this particular area, for the tourist money. They’re charging 30,000 Mongolia tugriks (MNT), or around 21 USD, for a ger and two prepared meals a day, which thus far consist mostly of rice, fried dough in various forms, and charred animal.

A copper miner on his way from Mongolia to Kazakhstan talked on the plane about how the meat-heavy diet of the Mongols was one of the keys to their conquest of the Chinese back around the 13th century. The Chinese ate rice and a lot of carbohydrates, and therefore had to eat once or twice a day, whereas the high-protein meat-based diet of the Mongols meant they could eat and then go several days before having to eat again.

It’s hard to grow vegetables in Mongolia, primarily because of the short growing season and also, it should be said, because of the herding and not infrequent overgrazing of ruminant animals, which removes quite a lot of ground cover and leaves what fertile soil (loess) does exist to dry out and blow away. It’s very dusty here. It’s been a dry and hot season so far, but it’s easy to see the plains and hills that have been grazed from green to brown where the animals have been set loose. (Below is one of the greener areas to be found in Terelj).

There are also, according to several locals I encountered on my day’s odyssey, lots of corrupt businessmen, mostly from UB, who bribe park officials to allow them to graze their animals in the national park, and my hunch is that if this is true, these businessmen are grazing animals on a far larger scale than nomad families or everyday herders, and thus they may be more to blame for the overgrazing.

Herding in Mongolia is brutally hard work that puts herders and the animals at the mercy of some of the most extreme conditions possible outside of Siberia or the Arctic. Wolves frequently prey on baby horses and other animals (the mother of a baby horse belonging to our host family was taken by a wolf just two nights ago), and temperatures routinely stay below -30 degrees Fahrenheit for months on end. Once or twice a decade on average a dzud occurs and kills millions of animals. A dzud, it was explained to me, is a certain set of weather conditions that turns the top layer of snow that accumulates in winter into an impenetrable sheet of ice. I was surprised to learn that most of the horses, cattle and yak in Mongolia are left outside to forage as best they can in winter. I did not know they could survive in such extreme cold (in California, I’ve seen horses with blankets draped over them when it’s in the 40s). But in Mongolia they can, unless a dzud occurs, and then they cannot find anything to eat and they starve and freeze to death. In 2008, around 8 million animals died.

I’d walked around 8km, pleased that my surgically-repaired ankle was issuing only minor complaint, and stopped into two camps to ask after internet access when a woman in a white Honda slowed on the road in such a way that made me think she was slowing to offer me a ride. But when I got closer to the road, she appeared only to be checking her cellphone, so I began walking back down into the valley before she honked and waved out the window and I walked back up again. In Mongolia, most of the steering wheels in cars are on the right, but hers was on the left, so I got in on the right side, smiled, and she began speaking to me in Mongolian which I, of course, had no comprehension of at all. I pointed forward, down the road, and said: Internet? She didn’t understand me until I said it with a trilled “Russian” “r,” “Inter-r-r-net?” Ah! She understood. I tried to explain, slowly, using my hands, that down the road, there was a hotel – hotel?, yes she knew hotel – and that I thought there was inter-r-r-net there.

She began driving. With our severe communication gap, I wondered where this might lead. Within fifteen minutes of driving, I calculated that I would be too far from our ger to walk back before nightfall, and I wasn’t sure if she understood what I was seeking.

“Ulaanbaatar-r-r?” she said? No, I did not want to go all the way to UB, where I would likely be stuck for the evening, with no way to let F. know that I was fine and not to worry. We drove and then drove some more. I learned that her “English” name was Giny, and that she had a daughter, 15, a son, 13, and no husband. She handed me a thick presentation book for a Mongolian Horse Expedition Outfitter, and by pointing and smiling, explained that this was her business. One of the pictures showed her smiling astride a lovely chestnut horse with a thick mane. She pointed to other pictures in the book, and said “Kree-un.” After she said it again, I understood she meant “Korean.” Then she pointed to her mouth and said “Mongol, Kree-un. No English.”

Giny was wearing a snug-fitting plush pink top, and unlike most of the women I’d seen out here so far, her skin was smooth and clear – her hands looked well-moisturized and not nearly as rough as I’d expect on a woman who rode or trained horses for a living. I learned that she was 38, and had a moment of small shock when I realized I was older than she was. I’m not accustomed to seeing myself as older than people with 15-year-old children, even though if I do the math, that’s not terribly noteworthy, and this is clearly a case of my not updating my own self-image to match my actual age of 39. If I make it to 60, I bet I’ll still be having moments of mild displeasure or shock when someone refers to me as “sir” or “mister.”

Giny called her daughter on the phone, then handed it over to me. Her daughter spoke some English, and I explained to her what I was looking for. Then she spoke to Giny. Then Giny drove on, ever farther from where I was staying, giving no sign I could recognize that she had hope we’d find any internet.

I was beginning to feel very foolish for having been so keen to find internet access when I was in the middle of a national park in Mongolia. Still, I was enjoying this adventure as well, and I had a feeling that Giny would not strand me in the middle of nowhere. I thought perhaps I’d be spending the night in the home of strangers, and the idea held some appeal.

Giny pulled over. She looked at me. She said something in Mongolian. I asked her in English if we should go back, pointing back the way we’d come. We stared at each other for a moment, and I thought that Giny was really quite lovely.Then we both laughed and she turned around and we headed back. She made a few more calls. After the third one, she let out a celebratory sound and said “internet!”

We drove back, past the spot where she’d picked me up, and I thought that it was remarkable that this lovely stranger had now driven 50 or 60km to help me. We came to a sign that said “Ayanchin,” and she made a turn and we drove up a long dirt road, where I eventually saw a large white 3-story Western ranch-style house, about half a dozen white gers, and a three-story geodesic dome. This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but it was particularly unexpected in a place predominated by blocky Soviet-era concrete structures and the soft circular rising shapes of canvas and wool felt gers.

When she pulled up in the driveway, she looked for her business card for maybe ten minutes, then finally just wrote down all of her information for me. I gave her mine in return. She refused my offer of gas money or compensation of any kind. I hoped I might see Giny again, and made a mental note to look her up for a horseback riding excursion.

The place she’d dropped me off at looked like someone’s home. I walked up to it. The door was open, and there was a mat that said Welcome. I stepped inside and a woman who looked Mongolian walked by. I said hello, feeling awkward at having stepped into someone’s home, and she pointed behind her, to my left. The dining room was, in fact, a restaurant, with six tables and a well-stocked bar at one end.

As I came in, I asked the bartender if they had internet, and he said they did, so I took a seat by a window, plugged in, and surveyed the menu.

Traveling sometimes makes me exaggeratedly appreciative of some simple comforts of home. I am embarrassed by this fact, especially when I’m in a place full of ex-pats, as I often am in China. For example: In Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’ve been based during my travels in East Asia, I sometimes find myself at an Irish-themed ex-pat joint called The Shamrock, with an all-Chinese staff wearing green shamrock-festooned vests and serving poor fascimiles of Irish and American food at inflated prices. I always feel a sense of embarrassment at being in the place, and I like to hunker down in the least visible corner and enjoy my precious internet connection (which all the ex-pat places have, in contrast to most Chinese places). I try to be enormously polite, almost to the point where I’m conveying a kind of apology.

Still, here in Gorkhi Terelj, I was thrilled to read a menu in English, and even more thrilled to see that it listed salad. Two different kinds of salad! With lots of vegetables listed! Oh happy day! I ordered one with beets and carrots and cabbage and cucumbers, along with a beer, and I opened up my netbook and deepened my happiness even further when I read that the Lakers had taken the first game of the series with a display of serious defensive grit and superb offensive execution. I sat there, enjoying my salad and beer, reading about basketball and checking my email and writing down and emailing to myself as backup as many details about Mongolia as I could remember.

On my way out, I saw a very tall, white man smoking a cigar and folding his arms over the top of his big belly while he surveyed three Mongolian workers who were hammering strips of tar paper onto the plywood roof of a new structure that looked like it was shaping up to be a garage. He was eager to talk.

“John,” he said, extending a big hand. He had a predictably firm-to-the-point-pf-painful grip. I have large hands and, as a holdover of my upbring in the Midwest, I know to look men like this directly in the eye, and to shake their hands with a firm grip, as if I might take pleasure in crushing someone’s knucklebones. He told me about this thing they were building – “they don’t know a damn thing about this kind of construction, but I just have my way of doing things and I tell ‘em how it’s gonna be done,” puff puff…

I’ve encountered lots of men like John. So I wasn’t surprised when a great deal of his conversation turned to a reflexive and all-encompassing hatred and distrust of government.

The government in Mongolia, John said, was corrupt, and they “stole everything.”

This made me think of an article I’d read a few days earlier, in the English language Mongolian Messenger. The title of the article was “Officials Defend False Income Declarations,” and here is one choice paragraph from the article, detailing a state servant who made false statements about income and property:

“The Anti-Corruption Agency found that Dornod Aimag’s Governor Ts. Janlav did not declare his private house where he now lives, four apartments which are owned by his family members, building with purpose for small-enterprise, [MNT]50 million income from selling his two-story private house, as well as 23 percent of shares of Dornod Company that is owned by his wife… MIAT Executive Director R.Bat-Erdene did not declare shares of Araknids Company, which is owned by his wife, a Nissan Murano car which was purchased for USD 24,000, a two-story private summer house and USD 6,500 in income from selling his Mercedes Benz C-180.”

John, who’d said that this “lodge” was really just his way to have a second home in the country, claimed corrupt officials were “scamming this ‘nature preserve,’” and getting free grazing for their livestock out of it. In UB (which he pronounced so it would rhyme with Darth Vader or masturbator), he snorted, the government was getting aid money from the U.S. to build the roads. In one breath, he disparaged the Mongolians in this area of Terelj for not paying taxes, but in the next breath, he was praising the Chinese economy for being great because “they don’t pay any taxes!” In similar fashion, after pointing to overgrazed hills in the distance and saying the government ought to just get rid of all these herders, because they didn’t “know shit about the land,” he told me he’d been the first to put up a fence around here, and that people hadn’t liked it. Mongolia proudly advertises in much of its tourist literature that it’s a land without fences, where people can ride and walk freely wherever they like. Then he said since he’d done it, others in the area had started putting up their own fences, and that it just “broke his heart.”

As he said this, I imagined John’s heart as a giant ham, beating away greasily somewhere above his belly.

At one point, John also talked about “squatters” all over the natural park. “Squatters?” I said. “Yeah, they say they’re indigenous and have a right to it,” then snorted. “There aren’t any indigenous people almost anywhere in the world. Just go back far enough and you’ll see what I mean.”

I changed the subject and asked him about mining. Mining’s the biggest business in Mongolia. He said yes, that was the big business, but that it still wasn’t shit. I mentioned that it seemed like a big deal, and he said “Listen, you know how much coal they mined in all of Mongolia last year? 20 million tons [actually more like 5 million metric tons]. They don’t know real mining here. They took 240 million tons out of Colorado last year [actually more like 32 million tons]. You can’t even find a mine here – just try!” Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, and it’s hard to find anything if you don’t know where it is beforehand, but this hardly seemed worth pointing out to John.

I mentioned that a guy from Nova Scotia I’d chatted up on the flight into UB worked for a Canadian mining company setting up a camp in the Gobi, and that he’d said they were spending $40 million this year alone on the operation. John said “Oh, that one’s not going to be up and running for 5, 6 years. Peanuts. Mostly metallurgical grade coal they make steel from.”

I said the guy from Nova Scotia had told me it was a copper mine.

“Yeah, yeah, they’re all over the place,” he said as he threw the butt of his spent cigar on the gravel driveway.

I commented on how surprising it was to me that a country as sparsely populated as Mongolia had such a high literacy rate. I’d read and heard from several people that the rate was around 98%, and I’m pretty sure that exceeds the literacy rate in the U.S.

“Oh yeah, 100%. You can’t find a Mongolian who can’t read,” John said nodding vigorously. “But that’s all changing. The Soviets used to run the school system, and they were–” he brought one hand down in a chopping motion across his other forearm. “Serious.The Mongolians learn their old language and their new one, just for starters” he continued, “then a lot of ‘em also know Russian, Japanese, Korean…”

I said that I was amazed by it, and impressed at how many Mongolians I’d met who spoke four or more languages.

“Yeah, my wife speaks four languages. But I’m lucky. I been here ten years and haven’t learned any Mongolian.” John said this with pride as three of the 450 Mongolians he claimed to employ labored away on his new garage.

John had also told me that he never had foreigners at his place, except for a few Chinese, who “always want to buy the place.” At just that moment, a dark late-model 4-wheel drive Nissan Murano, one of the vehicles of choice for police and Communist Party officials in China and, from what I’d observed in UB, for officials in Mongolia as well, pulled up and stopped. It was too clean for this environment, with an elegant looking Mongolian woman behind the wheel and an all-business looking white guy in the passenger seat, who rolled down his window. He had a gray contemptuous look on his face that reminded me of the fish-hook sneer Dick Cheney has, owing to nerve damage from one of his many heart attacks. The gray man and John stared at each other for a full ten seconds or so. The woman in the driver’s seat looked mildly alarmed. John finally said “What’s the good word?” to which the gray man replied flatly, “This the place? You got the works, the house, the dome, some yurts?”

I took that moment to say good-bye, thanking John for his time and saying I had to hurry back. He waved feebly as I departed, preoccupied, like the wave was merely an afterthought.

The hike home was long but rewarding, despite the blisters forming on my feet. Knowing my route, I went farther from the road this time, through alpine tundra and over great loping hills with statuesque stone outcroppings at their peaks. Marmots occasionally emerged from holes in the ground and darted away, but I saw no wolves or roedeer, which are said to be common in the area. I read that brown bears, also once common to the area, are on the decline in the Khan Khentee, mostly because of a Chinese and Korean-driven thirst for bear gall bladders, which fetch upwards of $300 USD per, and are used in Asian medicine.

Many birds, including Daurian redstarts, Siberian blue robins and black kites flew near to me along my way, and perched on rocks and branches near enough to reach with my hand, looking inquisitive and unafraid. I also saw maybe a half dozen Steppe eagles and hawks, but they kept their distance. After rolling hills, and with the sun sinking perilously low on the horizon, I descended through birch and larch forest and picked my way through moist lowlands, where tufts of earth had to be stepped on like lilypads to avoid sinking into what I amused myself by thinking of as “the grimpen myre,” where some prehistoric Mongolian version of the Hound of the Baskervilles might be waiting to scare me to death. There were certainly piles of dung large enough to plausibly have exited from a prehistoric beast.

I arrived just before night fell, and my host family brought hot milk tea and stoked the wood stove in the ger for the night. I sat drinking tea while I watched the last blue of the sky fade in the circular hole in the center of the ceiling.

» NEAR DISASTER, MINING, AND BEING A MONGOLIAN MILLIONAIRE

We arrived at Peking airport for our flight to Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capital of Mongolia, around 7:30am, several hours before our flight was scheduled to depart. We visited the cosmetics and perfume shop to smell the fragrances and to take advantage of the free samples of high-end lotions. When we flew out of San Francisco International Airport a few months ago, we’d both noticed that our feet stunk rather horribly, and we had the brilliant idea of putting perfume on a variety of tester strips, then depositing those strips into our shoes. It’s true that our feet smelled like a heady combination of Shalimar, Dior and Guerlain mixed with Eau de rotten-foot, but this was undeniably better than the lone foot smell that went before. Maybe our fellow passengers found it confusing instead of merely revolting for the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong.

During this particular visit to the Beijing airport beauty shop, F. was overzealous in her application of scented face lotions and was afflicted with burning red eyes for most of our flight because of it. There is no good reason I can think of for face lotion to be scented. I mean, if your face stinks I think the solution is probably more medical than cosmetic. I’d stuck to unscented lotions.

At 10:00, after I’d been reading a book (The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night-Time) out loud to F. for over an hour while our flight was delayed, we moved into line when our boarding section was called. This was when I realized with great horror that my passport was nowhere on my person, or in my bag. How could this be? Had I left it at the restaurant where we’d eaten? Had someone stolen it? (U.S. passports are worth a small fortune to people in China who know how to alter and use them.) I couldn’t imagine that I’d taken it out of my pocket, and as the last passenger before us boarded, I felt sick. Forgetting that my ankle was still mending from a bad break suffered less than a year ago, and that it had a troublesome three-quarters of surgical pin still embedded in it, I sprinted for the restaurant, where no one had seen my passport.

As my feet and heart pounded the length of the airport, I thought: I’d ruined our entire trip! Our quasi-honeymoon, as we’d called it, our collaborative writing retreat, our time to relax into each other and plan for our future! I’d carelessly let it all slip away by losing track of my passport and Chinese visa, costing us the considerable expense of the flight, not to mention that we’d now be stuck in the Beijing airport for probably a very long time, until an expensive expedited replacement passport and visa could be procured for me. I would not be able to re-enter China without these. What an idiot I was!

I sprinted back to the gate. When I got there, panting, a smartly dressed flight attendant told me that my passport and visa had been found at the security check. The flight had now been held at least fifteen minutes beyond it’s scheduled departure time and as we boarded an impossibly slow-moving courtesy golf cart, she informed me that they would hold the flight for only ten more minutes, and would then remove our luggage from the plane and have us meet with customs and immigration officials. Flights from Beijing to Mongolia only occur twice a week, and they are generally fully booked. It was clear that this cart would not get us there and back in that span, but I was incapable, with burning ankle and lungs to match, of sprinting any faster.

We got back to the gate in about ten minutes, and they were still holding the flight. With reproachful smiles, the attendants ushered us into the umbilicus. I was still an idiot for this mistake, but at least I wasn’t an idiot who’d cost us a lot of money and an interminable miserable stay in the airport. I’m fairly certain I will never make this mistake again and, in fact, as I type this, on the seventh day of my stay in Mongolia, my passport hasn’t been anywhere but against my body except for the two times I’ve showered, and even then I dried off as fast as possible and put my pants with passport on as hastily as possible.

Lesson learned. F. was utterly forgiving and charitable about this whole near-fiasco, never once exhibiting visible anger or frustration. And I think that even if I completely ruined the trip we’d been excitedly looking forward to for months, she would be understanding and not punishing towards me for my mistake. Which is just one reason why, among many others, I am a very lucky man. Even if she also kind of sort of broke my ankle last year.

During our flight, we chatted with our seat mate, a guy named Tim, from Nova Scotia, who was wearing a hat like Crocodile Dundee and that a-hole, Steve “The Animal Guy” Irwin used to wear before they both died. Tim told us he worked for a mining company that was setting up a work camp somewhere in the Gobi Desert. I’d heard that mining was the single biggest sector of the Mongolian economy, and that the Russians, Chinese and international mining interests from many other countries were salivating over Mongolia’s relatively untapped reserves of copper, gold, silver, and coal. So I was curious to chat with Tim, and he was eager to talk about his work.

Tim said his company was headquartered in Australia, that they were setting up a copper mining operation that they’d be expending $40 million on this year alone, and that the camp would likely become the next biggest city in Mongolia once the operation got underway. He said the Mongolian government had a 20% stake in the operation, and that it presently employed about 50% Mongolian nationals, with an eventual goal of training enough Mongolians to have more like 80% Mongolians running the operation. I didn’t ask, but I presume the long-term goals of the company do not include selling the Mongolian government or people a larger ownership stake in the operation.

Tim shared that he had worked for mining operations in many parts of the world, including Nigeria and, most recently, Nevada. He had a wife and two kids, with another on the way, back in Nova Scotia, and was trying to convince his wife to move to UB.

“The tax advantages alone are huge,” he explained. Tim was a nice enough guy, warm and seemingly open, in typical Canadian fashion. He shared his Lonely Planet guidebook with us, as well as various information about UB that proved mostly helpful.

If we hadn’t been committed to a retreat of sorts, I’d have asked Tim if I might make the trek to his mining camp to see for myself what such an operation was like.

After touching down at Chingiss Khaan airport and making our way through customs and getting our backpacks, we were greeted on our way to the parking lot by a tall woman in tight-fitting striped button-up shirt, a short black pair of shorts (a “skort,” really), and high black heels, holding a sign that said “Brian Awehali.” This was Bogi, owner of the Mongol Guesthouse, where we’d be staying. For no good reason, I’d assumed Bogi was a man.

But Bogi was an entrepreneur running two separate guesthouses for foreigners, who often gets up at 6am to go meet passengers getting off the Trans-Siberian Railroad to see if they need lodging or a tour guide. I later learned that “Bogi” means “crystal.” When I asked F. how she would describe Bogi, she said: “like a modern boddhisatva, high cheekbones, full lips, small nose, and oval face… and she makes sweeping know-all comments accompanied by big full-body gesticulations when she talks.” Given Bogi’s heavy make-up, lipstick, skort and high heels, spiritual enlightenment would not have been the first or second characteristic I’d have ascribed to her, but maybe that’s just me.

Bogi was 24, from a Western Mongolian herding family, and she grew up with one sister and several brothers. Later, when she spoke somewhat disgustedly about two gay men who were coming to stay at the Mongol Guesthouse together, and professed no understanding of how that was even possible, I kept her country origins in mind when I opted to make jokes about love and passion having wills of their own, rather than judging her harshly for it. Bogi teaches English at a school in UB, but we had frequent challenges communicating with her. If we asked her something like: “Since you’re from here, what part of Mongolia do you think is best to visit?” she’d respond: “Mongolia, I know all”–sweeping hand gestures–”Yes, but… what part? East, west…?” Answer: “Yes. All.” Mind you, Bogi is an English teacher.

Two endearing things about Bogi: when she told us the words for “thank-you” and “hello” in Mongolian, she immediately pop-quizzed us sternly: “What’s ‘hello’? What’s ‘thank-you’?” She was also blunt about the foreigners who come to UB: “Mongolians like Russians, Koreans, Japanese, Americans, and Germans, but hate the Chinese.” When I asked why, she said: “The Chinese ruin everything.” She’s got a point, but I’m sure a thousand years of war and tension probably didn’t do much for Sino-Mongolian relations either.

The skies our first day in UB were epic, and as Bogi drove us into town, I marveled at how blue they were and how ridiculously distinct the clouds appeared. UB is not a pretty city, though the hills around it are lovely. Mostly, the city is a succession of drab Soviet-style structures made of concrete, with large dirtily-belching smokestacks and the curved flumes of coal power plants punctuating long stretches of crude wooden structures and gers (yurts).

In contrast to my own overall negative experience of UB, F. found it to be a surreal “ethereal concrete city,” somehow “charming,” not least for its odd juxtaposition of Asian-looking people filling a Russian-looking landscape. Sometimes F.’s abstracted relationship to things vexes and mystifies me, but sometimes I am also just a bit jealous of her ability to ignore or overlook even overarching unpleasantries.

The next day, while eating at a vegetarian restaurant, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Colorado—let’s call her Becky—who turned out to be a climatologist and, she was exceedingly quick to point out, a Fulbright scholar. Becky had perfectly braided hair, smooth manicure-grade hands, and an earring and necklace set of matching bright blue felted balls of wool. Becky claimed UB was the most polluted capitol city in the world, especially in the winter, because everyone burned coal to heat their homes and the extreme cold requires that they burn it constantly. She claimed the sky was gray and you couldn’t see it in winter because of all the coal smoke. She also claimed that Mongolia was being more impacted by climatological change than any other country, a preposterous claim if you take into consideration places like the island nation of Kiribati, to cite just one example, which is in the process of disappearing altogether, due to rising sea levels.

When we told her we were heading to the countryside, Becky commented that we’d really appreciate taking a shower once we got back to UB. Then, when we shared that we were presently staying in a flat upstairs from the restaurant we were in, and it turned out she lived in the building as well, she briefly bitched about how loud it was, and how people in UB made noise all night, adding, “I have no idea when these people sleep.”

Giving her some benefit of doubt, I wondered if it was particularly hard to be a woman traveling alone in Mongolia, and if perhaps she was experiencing some culture shock. Still: These people. I’ve heard this phrase repeatedly from foreigners in China and in Mongolia, and it never fails to sound ugly to my ears.

In the main square of UB is the capitol building you might expect, with a giant statue of Sukhbataar in the middle. Sukhbataar was a courier and mail dispatcher who won national fame for his bravery in the 1921 battle against the Manchurian-Chinese army. Mongolians who resist or thwart the Chinese are heroes.

Sukhbataar’s fame in Mongolia is eclipsed only by that of Chingiss Khan. There was a detailed article about Khan in the MIAT Airline in-flight magazine (along with another article about a man trying to bring surrealism to Mongolian art, which sounded intriguing). Khan succeeded, despite obscure beginnings as a boy in the countryside, and despite commanding a fairly small group of men on horseback, in establishing through the almost complete militarization of society an empire the size of which no one on earth has ever exceeded. It lasted from around 1207 until 1368. One of several keys to the success of his army was that they didn’t care at all if it was summer, spring or arctic winter: they were relentless, while their unfortunate neighbors thought fighting wars in the winter was inhumane. Under Khan, the Mongols also invented one of the sounder war-time strategies of the past thousand years when they decided that killing all of the leaders was better than slaughtering peasants. (Khan and his heirs also basically created China when they unified it through conquest, and made previously warring dynastic quarrelers share commerce and knowledge, though the Chinese are aghast to admit the truly long view of their origin, growth and metastasis. See Jack Weatherford’s superb Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World for lots of interesting details about this. It’s what I read on the plane to UB.)

In UB, before heading for the northeastern part of the country, we first headed for a bank to exchange currencies. There’s nothing like wildly disparate exchange rates to impress upon a person the convoluted mysteries of the international currency system. All currency, not just the Chinese yuan, is manipulated, and although economists will tell you the value of a given currency owes to many sober, well-reasoned factors, it also true that it’s just one big consensual hallucination, with a few elites pulling strings to various advantage, and often to the detriment of ordinary people with no clue about such abstruse manipulations. In China, the 100-to-15 yuan-to-dollar exchange rate has seemed luxurious. (Awesome! That whole meal cost just… $3.) Here, 10,000 Mongolian tugriks (MNT) equals seven dollars. When F. stepped away from the window, she was holding a thick 900,000 MNT wad, and after I exchanged my own money, we were Mongolian millionaires.

How absurd. (On a sidenote, what’s with a currency whose basic unit can’t buy a single solitary thing? Even the Chinese yuan can buy you a bread roll or pastry. You can buy something for $1 US. You might not even be able to buy dust for one tugrik).

Armed with our wads of cash, we then walked around, took in the giant five-story shopping mall called the State Department Store, looked over lots of cashmere and felted wool sweaters and handicrafts, and picked up two bottles of quite good Chingiss Khan vodka that Tim, the Canadian miner from the plane, had recommended.

Mongolians, I think it’s fair to say, can really drink, and I was glad to have this vodka to share with Baul, a son of the herding family we wound up staying with, over many heated games of chess. I’m an adequate chess player — fundamentally solid, but possessed of no genius flair for  the subtleties of the game — and I actually dropped the game years ago, once I discovered Go. But it was supremely pleasant to attempt creative, slightly drunken “Monglish” communication with Baul while being generally overmatched on the checkered battlefield. I think we eventually fought to a draw in the win-loss column, while F. wrote or read (she doesn’t drink), but the several-game matches in a cozy candle-lit ger were always followed by the deepest and most dreamless sleep. I could not help but think, as we passed weeks with Baul’s family, that they were better — not in some stupid, condescending idealized way — for having a vital relationship to their natural world and its rhythms. Watching their daily lives, and their devoted work with their horses, then being invited on a ride, on hard, small wooden saddles secured to horses much wilder and freer than those you encounter on fairly gentle, accommodating American horses, made me feel truly humbled and contemplative about what I had lost or given up in mostly unwitting sacrifice to my modern, and relentlessly-advertised, life. Due mostly to globalization and the reach of media, many people in traditional cultures are clamoring to have the advertised fruits of the life I, as an American from a middle class family, know to be mostly hollow or anyway slightly rotten. And this is, to my mind and heart, tragic.

On our second day in UB, it was Children’s Day, a national holiday in celebration of children. Many businesses were closed, and there was a big parade down the city’s main street, with children in costumes on floats, children in dress-up clothes walking, children singing… and military troops marching. That makes perfect sense, right? We watched the parade from The Amsterdam Cafe, which seemed like the place where every ex-pat in town was hanging out. The place was almost full, and besides the staff, only one customer appeared Mongolian.

While we sipped decent coffee and used the wireless internet connection, I read a copy of the not half-bad English language Mongolian Messenger, and noted the mining-centric Bloomberg commodity price listings right on the front page.

Inside, among other mostly informative articles, was this: “Base metals plunged on Monday, with copper prices falling to their lowest levels since February, after signs that China’s economy was slowing spooked investors already worried about fiscal problems in Europe.”

The Messenger also published a report from the National Statistical Office listing various social and economic indicators for Mongolia for the first four months of 2010. For non-mining-related factors, almost all indicators looked healthy save for a dramatic drop in live births for livestock. For mine-related matters, total industrial output had risen 12.7%, “mainly due to an increase of main industrial products such as coal, crude oil, iron ore, molybdenum concentrate…copper, metal steel, and steel casting.” The report also noted that during the same four-month period, the rate of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas increased by 260% over the same period in 2009, and that the mining of coal and lignite extraction of peat increased by 65.2%.

There were no alcoholic beverages being sold this day, and I initially thought this was because of Children’s Day – no drunk adults; good idea! – but it turned out to be because it was the first of the month, and in Mongolia, there is a prohibition on the sale of alcohol on the first day of each month. I could not get an explanation for why this was so, beyond “Because the government says so.”

Later that day, a massive dust storm rolled across the city, making it impossible to walk without getting grit in our eyes and throats, and we both had a persistent dry cough for several days after.

Before we drove from UB to Gorkhi Terelj, a protected area to the northeast that Chingiss Khan came from, Bogi took us to the city’s black market, where most of the same products we saw in the part of town catering to foreigners were being sold for about one-third the price. The vast majority of the products were imported from China. Mongolians may not care for the Chinese, but they are landlocked and trapped between Russia and China, and they are not at all above getting most of their cheap goods, as well as most of their produce, from the Middle Kingdom.

» YUSHU EARTHQUAKE RELIEF EFFORTS: Fact vs. Fiction

On April 14, 2010, a 6.9-magnitude quake struck the predominantly ethnic Tibetan area of Yushu, Qinghai, in southern China. Over 2000 people were killed and over 12,000 were injured, according to “official” reports.

There is rarely agreement between “official” and actual accounts in China, especially when politicized matters involving Tibetans are concerned.

A friend of mine here in China speaks excellent Chinese and keeps a close eye on a number of important things. Today I am sharing some of his work. He writes:

A Chinese blogger combined pictures of pre-quake Yushu with this article by Ai Mo艾墨, “The Stage,” that appeared recently in Hong Kong’s Mingbao newspaper. The full text of that short article, which did not appear on the Mingbao website, is copied below, after my translation. [Some papers in Hong Kong face pressure over the publication of sensitive material and do not keep such material online. I have no direct knowledge of the track record of Mingbao in this regard. - ed]

This story points out the great cultural gulf between Tibetans and Han Chinese and the difficulties of doing culturally and religiously sensitive relief work.  Probably because of some ethnic chauvinism and perhaps because some think it will affect the Chinese-ness of Tibet, many Han Chinese find it hard to appreciate the profound cultural differences between the Han Chinese and the Tibetans. Well, many Chinese Buddhists understand, but the mainstream media doesn’t reflect their views much and the Chinese government strives to prevent the thousands of Chinese Buddhist who want to study in Tibetan monasteries from doing so.

The Stage

By Ai Mo 艾墨 (portions printed in Mingbao, Hong Kong)

A cold evening in Yushu, in the tents, a cadre sent by the province irrigated by high plateau barley wine, rubbed his unwashed dirty hands, and turned towards me, saying sincerely, “Young lady, look now, this natural disaster has been swiftly politicized. Got out of here as soon as you can. Leave this trouble spot.”

When I heard those words, I regretted the decision that I had already made to take a bus early the next day and leave Yushu.

For me, during these four days and three nights in Yushu, this place of cruel death and difficult survival, the word politics has a bit of a foul smell. During the rescue period where saving lives was the top priority, it laid low, it seemed to understand something important, this country plagued by disasters has finally learned that “lives are the most important thing”. However, when the 72 hour golden period for rescuing survivors from the ruins had passed, when the mammoth-scale cremations began, it seemed like something changed, the disaster area had become a stage.

That is something I don’t want to say, but yes, it had become a stage. The difference between the stage and reality is that in reality things happen and appear but on stage there is a director, a leading role, and a supporting role and they are sent on stage as needed. That is what Yushu was like. President Hu and Premier Wen had the top leading roles, given the nature of China, that is not anything to criticize, even the local Tibetans took the sincere tears of Prime Minister Wen and the promise of President Hu that they will have new homes like the words of Living Buddhas.

The official rescue troops had the secondary leading role. “We won’t be able to rescue any more people” the rescue workers knew as the fourth day after the earthquake began. One PAP officer who had done relief work after the Sichuan earthquake said that with the timber and earth construction of Yushu is not as good as the reinforced concrete of Sichuan since when the building collapses, unlike in Sichuan, there are no empty places left in which some people might find a place to breathe. So the miracles of survival are much rarer in Yushu.

On the streets of Yushu there were many officers and soldiers who had nothing to do. One could see many roadside ruins of houses that apparently nobody had sifted through to look for survivors. Although there were many flags and banners proclaiming the outstanding quality of this or that group of rescue troops.

Another journalist doing interviews in Yushu told me that he had the impression that there was a lot of “showing off” going on. That is not to say that the rescue troops were not working hard, they had to struggle hard to do their job given the difficulties of the physiological effects of high altitude, that nobody can criticize them. It was just that the so-called “showing off” was in inverse proportion to the amount of rescue work that they had actually done.

The disaster victims had the third leading role — that is to say the disaster victims who cooperated with interviews had the third leading role.

Many people like to ask, ‘What was the difference between the Sichuan earthquake and the Yushu earthquake?’ Nobody yet knows how to compare the scale of the earthquake. One hundred thousand people died in Sichuan, perhaps not as many as 10,000 died in Yushu. Yet that comparison isn’t meaningful and shouldn’t be made. As a journalist in the Yushu disaster area, I and my colleagues, strongest impression is that in Yushu you don’t see the wailing and pounding on the earth, and even rarely see weeping. If it were not for the sight of many collapsed buildings and the many homeless on the streets, you wouldn’t guess that many people had died here. People who have lost their relatives wear solemn and respectful faces. They read scriptures. They take the corpse to the monastery. They ask the monks and Living Buddhas to help them pass to the next world, and pray that they escape the cycle of suffering and rebirth and enter blissful happiness.

Ninety-seven percent of the population of Yushu is ethnic Tibetan. They believe in Tibetan Buddhism. For them, through the monasteries, life and death connect each of them to the Buddha and their ancestors. Very many journalists from mainland China didn’t find the “story they wanted” — the family of the victims did not display “extreme grief” and those rescued did not “shed grateful tears.” There is no way for you to share their sorrows. Their ideas about life and death are so far beyond your own that you cannot comprehend them. They — really, they don’t understand how to act according to your instructions. In Yushu, there is much thankfulness. A simple old Tibetan mother can shed tears of gratitude and say “Long Live the Communist Party”. But performing to script according to needs is not what they do — they are not “grateful” or “sing praises” in a particular circumstance because that is what the script requires. Take a look at the mainland China TV broadcasts on the disaster, you will see that these Tibetans just don’t act that way.

On the director’s stage, the monks were the only supporting players forced to the margins of the stage. This despite the fact that in real life, these people in red robes have the most important leading role of all, even more important than the role of the rescue troops.

Two days after I left Yushu, I heard from a journalist colleague that monks not from Yushu had already been “admonished to leave” Yushu with the reason given to “ensure the effectiveness of relief operations”. Some had driven several hundred kilometers to Yushu from their monasteries in Ganzi Prefecture in Sichuan Province, others monks hurried from Qinghai, Gansu and many parts of the Tibetan Autonomous Region to help. They don’t understand specialized relief work but they understand the Kampa dialect and they know how to assist the souls of the dead to pass on to the next world. They know how to truly console the people of Yushu who have lost relatives. Even before official help arrived, the monks were making donations in the disaster area. Disaster victims received from the monks noodles, mineral water and even hot porridge. But what does that matter? This is a stage and the supporting role can never become the leading role. At the very least, the audience that watches the stage as it is broadcast will never see this.

On the stage of the Chinese Central TV disaster evening program, there were the names of companies that had given one million, two million, 10 million or 20 million RMB, and individuals who contributed and wanted to do something good. But what truly moved them was the idea of  themselves doing good. For the National Day of Mourning, the state organs forbade all entertainment activities, including on stage and online. The Yushu disaster area was far away but they said in chorus, “This evening we are all Yushu people.”

My dears, I really do have to tell you, that is not wounded Yushu. That is only a stage.

» LOVE IS THE WATER UNDER THE WATER

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

– Wilhelm Reich

Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.

What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?

When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.

In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid; even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?

When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.

Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism, it’s a dictatorial form of coordinatorism) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.

This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metasticized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.

Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.

As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.

And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” (To be fair, the Chinese mostly see it as just a word, not as a word with literal meaning, much like people in the U.S. rarely think of Chicago, Manhattan or Seattle as Indian words with actual, you know, meaning.)

That said, I have been called meiguoren (美国的, literally, “beautiful country person”), probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and it’s own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?


Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and ascending commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.

At the beginning of this, I quoted Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud’s cohort and fellow psychoanalytic theorist, who was the victim of the only U.S. government-ordered book burning in history, and who died in prison, a mad man, after being imprisoned for what he dared to think and write. (Sound familiar?) Freud thought people were violent sadistic animals, who had to be controlled and taught to “civilize” themselves for the good of society and stability. You can fairly say that Freud’s ideas were status quo – he never asked whether conforming to a sick society was natural or not; it was just assumed that being “well-regulated” and conforming was desirable and healthy. This makes me think of the deeply moving and staggeringly far-reaching speech Martin Luther King gave (presented in 1963, at WMU, and well-worth reading if you aren’t already familiar with it), where he attacks the concept of being “maladjusted” in a society to which he did not want to “adjust”:

Reich thought people were loving and good, and that it was the mutilations of society and government, the imposition of unnatural order, that caused neuroses and dysfunction. It was the systematic and unnatural control of people, in other words, that caused them to be violent, and to behave irrationally. Think of a house cat going slowly loopy, eating houseplants that make it sick and playing manically with a toy mouse when all it really wants to do is be outside, eating real mice, rutting at the appointed time, and following its nature. Reich thought eros was the highest expression of human health and actualization, and that it should be given free reign and support if we were to link hands with our higher selves. There are a great many things to take from Reich’s theory and story, but the one I think of most often, and which springs most readily to mind looking at this little Chinese girl caught between repulsion and friendliness is this: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.

» PLAY GO! (玩 围棋!)

“{It is} something unearthly . . . If there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.” — Emanuel Lasker, international Chess Master

First things first: No, outside of there being white and black pieces placed in alternating turns, it’s nothing like Othello. And it was invented by the Chinese, but is most often referred to by its spiffy Japanese name: Go.

Go, or wéiqí, was created by Chinese emperor Yao about 4000 years ago and was allegedly invented to help a stupid son learn to think better. Or it was invented by Chinese tribal warlords as a strategy aid. Or it began as a fortune-telling medium.

The reality of the game is more interesting than the lore:  Go (碁 in Japanese), baduk (바둑 in Korean), and wéiqí (围棋 in the original Chinese), is a game with true majesty for those who devote themselves to it. For its devotees and for mathematicians in almost equal measure, the game inspires reverence and awe. Due to its extremely open-ended play and staggering mathematical possibilities for variation, the game is by far the hardest to teach computers. That fact, along with the clip below, from Darren Aronofsky’s film, π (or Pi) sealed it: Go was the game for me.

“Listen to me. The possibilities of game play are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe. That is the truth of our world…there is no simple pattern. — From π, or Pi

Until recently, Go resisted a high level of mastery by computer intelligence, but advances in artificial intelligence and computing power appear to be making lamentable headway. I’d like to think maybe it was just human beings manipulating things behind the scenes that led to this breakthrough. Call me a human sentimentalist and anti-silicon bigot if you like, but I’m just not into the idea of carbon-based people being bested or replaced by our silicon-based creations. I interviewed a Carnegie Mellon robotics expert, Hans Moravec, several years ago, about a book he’d published arguing that people like me are just squeamish and failing to see that robots and machines are simply “children of our minds.” And I can see his point, in a way. If I were someone who spent all of my time with machines and mostly tinkered away happily in my basement, sans human contact, I might find the ineffable qualities of human experience trivial as well. I might mistake a program for a child.

Speaking of children: Watch out for them and do not take them lightly when playing Go! Many are much better than your calcified adult mind might think. When a friend and I took a dawn train from San Francisco to Palo Alto last year to play at a “qualifying” tournament (to become official card-carrying members of the American Go Association), we faced mostly skilled Korean and Japanese teenagers. And in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’m presently staying and receiving instruction from an 8-dan master, I lost to one of his many students, a 12-year-old kid dressed very oddly like an American Boy Scout.

Earlier today (late-March), I had lunch at a Buddhist temple in Chengdu with my wéiqí teacher and five Russian business students (one from Siberia, the rest from Moscow). Before meeting them, I had fancy visions in my head of meeting some Serious Russian Go Players, but Svetlana, Alexandra, Dmitrii, Anzhela, and another woman who was too cool to offer up a card, turned out to be newbies who were drawn to the game more for its reputation than for anything more substantive. I learned during our meal that they had contacted my teacher to learn more about the game because they thought the principles of Go might be useful if applied to business. They wanted to know: what competitive edge might Go-playing give to aspiring businesspeople?

During the lunch, I wondered if I might have offended any of the Russians when I said that Go had ruined me for chess. “Why?” asked Dmitrii pointedly. “Well,” I explained, wary of giving offense to a game that many Russians revere and are quite skillful at, “chess is mechanistic and deterministic, whereas Go is more open-ended, with many more possible plays and patterns to understand. That’s why it’s easier to teach a computer to play chess than Go. In some ways I think it rewards creativity more than memorization.”

One odd footnote to this meeting was that while writing this post, I thought to hop over and email the Russians about some of the questions they’d had, about travel Go sets, about good Go tutorial books, and about online servers for Go players. (Several of them offered “visiting help” if I made good on my plan to take the Trans-Siberian train back to Moscow before returning to the U.S.) Every single email address bounced and came up as “invalid.” So either they were traveling with bogus business cards for reasons you could speculate endlessly over, Gmail was being blocked by Russia, or the internet or IT department at the school that issued their cards (Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a real institution) was having a particularly bad day.

Whatever the case, they paid for a bunch of delicious food and I do believe I was the most ravenous of the eaters present.

But I digress. Play Go. Immerse yourself: Start watching Hikaru No-Go, a highly addictive Japanese manga series credited with reviving the popularity of Go in Japan. Then check out Sensei’s Library and learn about the theory, practice, and culture of Go. Learn the ABC’s through an interactive tutorial at The Interactive Way To Go. Solve ranked and categorized problems at Goproblems.com. Then log-on to one of the two major online Go servers: KGS or IGS. Both are free and allow records of games for review. KGS tends to be friendlier and new players can often find helpful instruction and tutorial games with other members.

Then, for a game, email me or come find me on KGS, username: loudcanary.