12.22.09
Posted in Announcements, Travel Log at 10:22 pm by Benjamin Ross
This past Thursday I sent in my last grad school application. On Friday I turned thirty. And tomorrow I am embarking on my first significant journey of my thirties. It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled extensively in the United States, with my last major trip being my road trip from Kansas to California in 2003. And with all the China excursions in the middle, it’s due time to explore more of my home country.
One of the most crucial skills I learned during my 3 plus years in China was the benefits of efficient circuitous traveling. In other words, choosing a starting and ending point, then traveling from start to finish with short overland trips, stopping frequently along the way, and always leaving room for improvisation. By my measures, the only region in the US which this can be accomplished with any degree of efficiency is the East Coast. So here’s my itinerary.
I fly into Boston the morning of 12/23. I head back to Chicago from Baltimore on 1/5. In between, I’m also planning multiple day stays in New York City and Philadelphia.
The reasons and goals for this trip are multi-fold. First and foremost, over the past year I have been reading extensively from the literature of urban sociology. As this is my hopeful future field of study, I want to take the chance to experience some of the earliest examples of urbanization in the Americas. Thus, I’m going to be shying away from the typical tourist draws and instead focusing on ethnic enclaves, transportation systems, sites of gentrification, areas which have experienced significant urban decay, and several of the districts and neighborhoods specifically studied in Sociology texts I have read. And yes, I will be visiting multiple Chinatowns along the way.
I’m also going to be catching up with various family and friends whom I haven’t visited in a very long time. My uncle my six cousins will all be in Boston for the holidays; Yueting, my best friend from Fuqing, is currently studying in Philadelphia; and I have various friends from college, Kansas City, and Jewish summer camp smattered throughout the East Coast. I’m also going to be scoping out several of the schools where I applied.
From a logistical standpoint, I am curious how my travel methods and techniques I utilized in China will translate into American public transit systems. I have lived without a car since I moved to Chicago in 2007 and am eager to further test what I hope will be the future of transportation in the United States. The circuitous travel method would never work in the Midwest, South, or West without a car, but I am confident I should be able to make all my destinations out East via subways, commuter trains, and of course the now-famous Fung Wa Chinatown bus service.
I’m going to be writing updates along the way, but probably will hold off on thorough write ups until I am back home since I’m going to be squeezing a lot into 2 weeks. I’ll also be tweeting a lot, so follow @BenRoss if you want to keep tabs. Oh, and as for finishing 《奋斗》, that’s going on the backburner until I get back. More updates from the road. Leaving for Boston in less than 12 hours.
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10.17.09
Posted in Announcements at 4:10 pm by Benjamin Ross
Hello readers. It’s been a while since I’ve done a “state of the blog” post, and although I generally try not to convolute this blog with my own personal affairs, it’s been over two months since the last post, so I figured an update was necessary.
Being as I spent three months in Beijing last summer, this summer was my first to actually spend in Chicago. Halfway through the summer, I also realized that it had been six years (since the summer after I graduated college) that I had actually spent a summer on American soil. With that in mind, my goal for the past four months was to stay in one place and travel as little as possible, something I haven’t done much of since the last millennium. Whenever possible I’ve been spending my free time exploring Chicago much in the same sense that I explore a new Chinese city whenever I first arrive: taking public transportation to a random part of town, disembarking, exploring on foot, and sampling any strange foods which may appear along the way. Chicago is one of the most diverse places on the planet, and my previous experience of living abroad for 3 years has served to engender in me a new found appreciation for vast depository of the world cultures which exist in the United States.
On the work front, I am still interpreting, primarily in the healthcare field, but I’m also starting to get some court gigs as well. Interpreting has forced me to push my Chinese studies into directions I had not previously tendered with while living in China…for example thoroughly describing the process of a colonoscopy or a vaginal tissue biopsy. Another pleasant effect is that my Chinese level has actually improved since I’ve repatriated rather than the typical attrition which comes along with not using language skills on a daily basis.
Recently, I’ve also begun a side gig as a consultant and translator for Lenovo’s soon to be rolled out design blog. I’m going to be working with the Beijing team on brainstorming, idea management, and translating the blog into English for the international audience. If budgets work out, I’ll hopefully also be spending a little bit of time in Beijing at some point over the next few months.
The biggest news however is that I am currently in the process of applying to Ph. D programs in sociology. I am hoping to focus my graduate studies on the rapid urbanization of China and the incipient urban centers which are flaring up all across the country. More specifically, some of the issues I’d like to address include urban growth patterns, suburbanization, ghettoization, social class, and migration as they relate to China’s rapid movement from an agrarian to an urban society. I have always intended on continuing my ethnography work with Chinese migrant workers (and Chinese barbershops), and have decided a Ph. D program in sociology is the best venue in which to carry out these pursuits.
With all this going on, my blog has been noticeably lagging. Suffice it to say, it is not easy to procure content for a blog titled “A Midwesterner in the Middle Kingdom” when in fact the author is not in the Middle Kingdom. Therefore I have opted to change the title to the more appropriate “A Midwesterner ON the Middle Kingdom.” However, one aspect of China with which I am becoming increasingly familiar in Chicago is the Chinese American experience. I have been spending a fair amount of time in Chinatown and have been becoming reasonably well acquainted with various aspects of the large Chinese community here, and hope to interject some of these findings and observations into blog posts in the near future.
With all that in mind, I am looking forward to a busy fall, and hopefully a nice little shot in the arm for “A Midwesterner On the Middle Kingdom.” Thanks to everybody who has continued reading and look forward to more content to come.
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03.29.09
Posted in Announcements, Travel Log at 10:09 am by Benjamin Ross
Recently I returned from a month-long stint in China during which I was consulting for PacEth for two and a half weeks, and then traveling independently for another two. At exactly 30 days, it was the shortest duration I have even stayed in the Middle Kingdom, but probably the most efficient in terms of both work, and play.
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| Downtown Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, one of the more affluent major and modernized cities in the Middle Kingdom |
My first two and a half weeks were spent working in Shanghai. Located at the mouth of the Yangtze River Delta, Shanghai is the center of one of Mainland China’s two most prominent economic regions. (The other being the Pearl River Delta). Shanghai, Northern Zhejiang and Southern Jiangsu provinces collectively form a hyper-economic zone which has emerged as one of the wealthiest regions of modern China, representing the benefactors of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy.
However, right in the backyard of the Yangtze River Delta lies a province which bares little in common with the glamour and glitz of the Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. With soil and farmland far inferior to the fertile Yangtze River Delta and no port access, Anhui is one of the poorest provinces in China. Unlike Shanghai with its youngsters touting PSPs and its businessmen chatting on iPhones, its café culture and western markets with organic produce, Anhui remains stuck somewhere between the economic woes of the 60s and 70s, and the economic miracle of the past 30 years. Public infrastructure is poorly maintained, expendable income is low, and its inhabitants live in constant knowledge that their brothers and sisters, just an overnight train ride away, are sipping lattes and updating their Facebook statuses on mobile wifi.
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| A city road in Taihe, located in Northwestern Anhui, one of China’s most economically lagging provinces |
What Anhui does have though is people. With a population slightly larger than that of the UK, Anhui is the source of millions of laborers who make the short journey east to Shanghai to work as housekeepers, construction workers, vegetable vendors, and a multitude of other occupations undesirable to Shanghai locals. Within Shanghai, Anhui people comprise the rapidly expanding urban lower class, needed to support Shanghai’s growing urban elite. As the dominant element in Shanghai’s working class, Anhui people have developed a reputation as the shysters, sneaks, and beggars which populate the city and draw the ire of its locals. In the eyes of most Chinese, Anhui is a destitute land from which people come out, but nobody ever (willingly) goes in.
This is exactly why I wanted to spend a week of my vacation exploring Anhui. Embarking from Shanghai, my two week excursion took me in a clockwise direction through the prosperous Yangtze River Delta, to the backwoods of Anhui, back through the Yangtze River Delta and returning to Shanghai from where I flew back to Chicago on March 19.
The following series explores my recent trip from one of China’s wealthiest regions, through one of its economic backwaters, and back. In all, my journey took me to eight different cities, and there is a corresponding blog post, with images, for each of them.
Part 1 Suzhou: Ancient Capital of the Wu
Part 2 Linan: Stomping Grounds of the Chinese Small Town Upper-Middle Class
Part 3 Huang Shan: The Famous Yellow Mountain
Part 4: Anhui: Industrial Capital on the Plain
Part 5: Fuyang: Into the Backwoods
Part 6: Taihe: Rural Anhui in all its Glory and Grit
Part 7: Nanjing: Cultural Oasis of the South
Part 8: Yangzhou: Home of the World’s Most Famous Fried Rice…and Jiang Zemin
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02.21.09
Posted in Announcements at 9:50 am by Benjamin Ross
Well, I’ve been in China now for a good 72 hours, and due to a busy work schedule and jet lag, have been a little slow on the blogging. I am, however, updating my Twitter pretty regularly, so if you’re interested in more rapid and brief updates, add me on Twitter. (Ben Ross). My sleep schedule has just gotten back on schedule, and I should have some new blog material up in the next 24 hours. In the meantime, enjoy some self-serve shao kao.
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10.10.08
Posted in Announcements at 1:55 am by Benjamin Ross
I hate spam!…as I am sure most of you do too. However, over the years it has become an annoyance which I have come to accept and realize that I am just going to have to deal with it. For those of you who are also blogers as well, you know how intrusive spam can feel when it is your own blog (not just your inbox) which is affected.
For the first few months of it’s existence, Midwesterner in the Middle Kingdom chugged on with just one or two spam comments per day. About four months into the endeavor, the penile enlargement vendors and mortgage brokers of the world came to the realization that my humble blog was an ideal vehicle to transmit their own messages. The spam picked up to the point where I was regularly receiving and deleting 20-30 spam comments per day. The pace gradually increased until this summer when I was having to remove a solid 100 spam comments per day, still annoying, but manageable. About a week ago, this number abruptly exploded to the point where I was pushing 500 per day, and moderating comments was becoming a serious drain on my spare time.
Now the real problem with all the spam is not just that it wastes my time. More importantly, during the process of moderating all of the comments (99.5% of which are typically spam) there is always the possibility that I may accidentally delete a legitimate comment. I am sure this has happened on several occasions. So to alleviate this problem I have implemented a plug-in which will now require you to enter a word from a graphic every time you leave a comment. This is to ensure that you are in fact you, and not a robot from Bahrain trying to solicit ‘male enhancement’ supplements.
Personally, I have always found these extra spam protection mechanisms to be quite annoying, and in cases when they have malfunctioned, they have precluded me from leaving comments on others’ blogs. So I want to go ahead and apologize (ironic I’m doing this on Yom Kippur, eh?) for any inconvenience or annoyance this causes to potential commenters. If anybody has any problems with the new system, please e-mail me at bensinchina at yahoo dot com to let me know. Likewise, if it seems to be working properly, leave a comment below to test it out. The last thing I want is for this extra splash of homeland security to prevent you from leaving your comments. To all those who are fasting (but apparently still using their computers), may you have a meaningful fast. To everybody else, enjoy your full three meals. By the way, I am curious if anybody knows of any endemic traditions of fasting (outside of the monastic order) in the Middle Kingdom? Whenever I have explained Yom Kippur to Chinese friends, they are baffled by the precept of not eating for an entire 24 hours.
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09.14.08
Posted in Announcements at 12:42 pm by Benjamin Ross
I just wanted to chime in with a quick update of my wherabouts for those of you who have been following the blog. This has been one of the most incredible summers of my life, and after three months, it is finally winding down. I was supposed to leave Beijing on the 9th and head off to Tokyo, for what is now becoming my annual 3-day stop over in Japan. During my last 2 days in Beijing, I had 2 different visitors stay in my house, and combined with the normal tasks one completes before leaving China (mainly buying stuff, i.e. eye glasses, pu er tea, funky Beijing t-shirts, etc.) I wasn’t exactly ready to leave by the time my last evening rolled around. I decided to do something I’ve always wanted to do; stay in China after I’ve already told everybody I’d left. This gave me three extra days without all the text messages, excess gifts, last minute phone calls, “I gotta see you before you leave” demands, and other hoopala which go along with leaving China. I highly recommend it to anybody making an exit from the Middle Kingdom.
So anyway, I am in Tokyo now, so look for this blog to shift to more Japanese related content for the next week or two. I will be back in Chicago on the 17th, and soon after we will be back to regularly scheduled programming. Thanks to everybody who’s followed this blog during Summer ‘08. More updates on the way from the Sun Kingdom.
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08.07.08
Posted in Announcements, Food and Drink at 3:51 pm by Benjamin Ross
As Beijing puts the finishes up its remaining last minute touches for the Olympics, I have been doing the same for How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com. In the past 24 hours, I have added several new dishes, brushed up some of the descriptions, and most importantly, the guides are now available in PDF format. This means you can now either print them out or save them to your iPhone or PDA, and take them along when you dine. The PDFs can all be accessed on this page, as well as on the original page of the respective ordering guide.
For those who are not already familiar with it, How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com is a site that I started last summer just before I left China. The idea behind the site was twofold. Firstly, it’s a guide for ordering food in China for people who can not speak Chinese. Secondly, it’s an educational tool for those who can already speak some Chinese but want to improve their culinary vocabulary. In addition to providing information on ordering Chinese food, there is also an extensive Chinese culinary glossary with everything from a leafy vegetable disambiguation page to a page on the Chinese terminology of American fast food.
I got the idea for How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com from my own first experiences in China. At that time I could neither speak nor read Chinese. I found that the most efficient way to order food was to have Chinese friends write the names of all the dishes I liked in a notebook with the English translations next to them. I couldn’t read or pronounce a single character of what they wrote, but that didn’t matter. Whenever I dined out, I would go armed with my notebook. When the waitress came to my table, I would point to the different characters in the notebook and the waitress would know exactly what I wanted to order.
How To Order Chinese Food Dot Com is designed to do all of this for you. The site is broken down into multiple guides. Each guide is based on a theme. The different themes are based around particular foods (i.e. pork dishes, veggie dishes, rice based dishes), as well as by region (i.e. Hunan, Sichuan, Dongbei). Each guide contains a list of entrees, with the name in Chinese characters and pinyin (Romanization), as well as an English description and a photo. With the guides in hand, you will no longer be confined to eating only in restaurants with English menus, or bringing along a translator. Try them out, and be sure to send me any feedback you might have.
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07.12.08
Posted in Announcements, Travel Log at 11:22 pm by Benjamin Ross
Well, it’s been a rather hectic last two days due to work-related reasons I have no need to bore you with on this blog. But the good news is early tomorrow morning (very early tomorrow morning) I am finally going to get out of Beijing for my first extended trip this summer. At 7:15 am I will be taking the direct super-fast 8 hour train to Haerbin.
Haerbin is the capital of Heilongjiang province, and in the heart of what is called “dongbei,” which means “Eastnorth.” (the Chinese denote the east-west direction before the north-south one, hence “southwest” would be “westsouth,” etc.) I plan to use Haerbin as my starting point, and then slowly meander back to Beijing. On the way back, I am aiming to stop in at Yanji, the Korean autonomous prefecture in Jilin, and possibly Dalian, and of course several random rural podunk towns which always seem to be the most interesting places in China. From past experience, I have always found it is always easiest to travel in China with no reservations, no concrete plans, and carrying nothing more than what can fit in a small backpack. This always makes for the most spontaneous and flexible Middle Kingdom excursions. I’ll try to post regularly from smoky net bars along the way.
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07.10.08
Posted in Announcements at 1:02 am by Benjamin Ross
For the past 24 hours I’ve been working on some site maintenance which should alleviate the problems people have been having with accessing this site. So in case anybody has been noticing anything strange with the site over the past 24 hours, that is probably why. As of now, everything should be functioning properly, but if anybody encounters any problems from this point on (i.e. pages not opening, pages opening increcibly slowly, comments not appearing, links going to the wrong places, etc.) please send me an EMAIL to bensinchina at yahoo dot com. Be sure to let me know what problem occurred, approximately what time it happened, and what country you are accessing this site from. Thanks for all your patience and help, especially to those who answered the questionnaire last week. Expect regular daily China-based content to start flowing again tomorrow.
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06.28.08
Posted in Announcements at 9:24 pm by Benjamin Ross
As many of you have probably noticed, my blog has been having some problems of late. Sometimes it loads great, other times not at all, and lately here in Beijing it has been opening, just incredibly slowly. I have narrowed the problem down to three possible reasons, but I need a little feedback in order to get this solved. So if you are reading this and have the time please send me an e-mail to bensinchina at yahoo.com answering these 3 simple questions.
What country are you accessing this site from? (If you’re in mainland China, please list province and city too.)
Have you experienced any times where this site would not open at all?
Have you experienced any times where the site loaded, but very slowly?
If you haven’t experienced any of these problems, please by all means let me know as well. I need to know where the problems exist, and where they don’t. Thanks for everybody’s help, and hopefully this situation will be rectified ASAP. Hope everyone’s enjoying their summer.
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