06.30.07
Posted in Barbershop, Business 'n Economics, Fujian at 1:41 pm by Benjamin Ross
One summer when I was 10 years old, I heard a rumor at summer camp that there was a grocery store in my neighborhood which would pay cash for recycled aluminum cans. For the next 4 weeks, I collected all of the aluminum cans from fellow campers until I had nearly filled an entire garbage bag. At the end of the summer my dad took me to the grocery store. I proudly showed the clerk my bag full of cans which was nearly half my size. He told me I was a responsible little boy for caring so much about the environment, and then handed me $1.29 cash for my summer worth of can collecting.
5 years later, I started my first real job, working as a sacker in a local grocery store. I was paid $4.25 per hour, which was the minimum wage in Kansas at the time. It didn’t take me long to figure out that labor is worth more than materials in the USA.
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| A professional recycler hauls the days findings through the streets in Fuzhou. |
While I was working at the barber shop, three or four times per day, a middle aged man or woman would rummage through the trash can in front of the store. There was a man who would collect bottles and cans, a woman who would collect the plastic disposable cups we used to serve the customers water, and there was even a lady who would come every few days to collect all of the hair. By the end of the day, there was hardly anything left in the trash.
To a casual observer, these people might seem to be beggers. Fuzhou does have its share of panhandlers, but these are not the same people who are digging through the trash Rather, the people who collect our disgarded items are professional recyclers.
In Fuzhou, recyclers can collect .07 RMB for an aluminum can and .1 RMB for plastic bottles. At this rate, it would take about 109 aluminum cans to equal 1 US dollar. This rate is not too far off the one I was given that summer I collected cans at camp. The return is still not high, but when you consider a low-level service industry job requires 4 hours of work to earn 1 US dollar, the prospects of making a living off of recycling suddenly become more attractive. Add that China’s densely populated cities make the process of bottle collecting more efficient than they would be in the US, and it is not surprising why professional recycling is such a common profession in China.
In addition to recycling cans and bottles, professional recyclers also collect and/or buy used electronic devices, books, magazines, cardboard, CDs, and virtually anything else which at some time had value. Some of it is resold, and some is broken down for scrap. The recyclers ride their bikes through city streets with big signs placed in front of the handle bars which read 高价回收 (high price recyclying) and contain a list of items (usually household electrical appliances) which they will buy.
The future will only tell how much longer recycling will remain a profession in mainland China, and presumably as the price of labor rises, the draw to professional recycling will recede. But as barbershop workers are still making only 24 cents an hour, recycling stands to remain a viable profession for the near foreseeable future at least.
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06.10.07
Posted in Barbershop, Fujian, Society at 9:38 am by Benjamin Ross
There were several interesting comments relating to continued education on my last post. I began responding to them in comment form, but when the comment began taking up an entire page, I decided this topic was worthy of a new post.
Ty from Ireland sums things up by saying:
It is incorrect to say that college entrance exam is the only way to receive higher education in China. There is a system called GaoZiKao, higher education through self learning. You could, if you work hard enough and possess the capability, get a degree after passing a number of exams on different subjects. The system has been there for years. Having said that, it is very hard for someone to finish a degree in that way because you have to work in the meantime to make a living.
I have known several Chinese people who have completed such programs, especially the zi kao. What I have noticed (and again I am making a generalization on 1.3 billion people based on my own observations) is that typically the people who enroll in these kinds of programs are urban residents. Here in Fuzhou, almost all kids get into high school, and generally speaking, they are expected to get into college as well. Not being accepted into college will often define a city resident as an underachiever. This is quite different in rural areas, where being accepted to college is comparatively less common and still quite an accomplishment. When I was teaching in Fuqing, most of my students were from rural areas, and were the first person in their family ever to receive education past high school.
Most of my coworkers in the barbershop come from the same backgrounds as my students in Fuqing, except the did not study hard enough to get into college. In fact, with the exception of only two or three little brothers, most of them did not even get accepted into high school either, thus ending their formal educations at the age of 16.
If a student from Fuzhou does not get into college, it can be a little bit of an embarrassment for the family, not to mention a limit on future opportunities. Because of this, parents will often insist that their child take time off to complete programs such as zi kao or night classes, to further their education.
With rural residents it is not so easy. For starters, there is the economic factor. Most rural families are not nearly as wealthy as those from cities, and need their children to immediately begin working as soon as they have reached the terminal point in their education. If their children test well enough to get into college, they will often borrow money from family members in order to pay for their child’s tuition. In a family which is predominantly uneducated, having a child who can enter college, is like an investment, which if it pays off, will benefit the entire family. However, if the child does not get accepted into college (or an equivalent vocational program i.e. 大专) they usually set off for work, like the little brothers and sisters in the barber shop. Once they begin working, continued education often becomes impractical.
In the case of the barber shop, the little brothers and sisters each put in over 70 hour work weeks. As Ty mentions, it would be virtually impossible for them to enroll in any kind of continuing education program, and expect to have enough time to study enough to do reasonably well. This not even mentioning obtaining the money to pay for the training.
I have pondered how much studying could be accomplished during the excessive down time we have in the barber shop. While you might not be able to attain any certifications, there still is certainly an enormous amount of room for personal improvement. After only a few weeks of informal exchanges, Adamum is now able to correctly pronounce a decent collection of English greetings and swears, and I can now do the same in the Fuzhou dialect. It wouldn’t be too far off to posit that if I were to work in the shop for a full year, Adamum would be speaking fluent English, and I would be doing most of my communication in Fuzhou hua. I brought up this topic of studying to Chen Lin (a little brother) once and he responded with a sarcastic smile “Study? The reason we all work here is because we hate studying and we aren’t good at it. If I was good at studying I would have finished high school.” So there you go.
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05.22.07
Posted in Barbershop, Fujian, Immigration at 3:21 am by Benjamin Ross
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You’ve all heard the stereotypes. 15 Chinese workers crammed into a small room in the back of the local Chinese eatery. They never show their faces. They never leave the kitchen. They don’t speak English. They don’t have green cards, and they certainly aren’t paying any taxes. This has caused quite a stir of late as the Bush administration looks to revise the US immigration policies. Some Americans think it’s about time we punish those who have illegally entered our country. Others feel that it’s just another act of xenophobia from an already over-paranoid administration. In a barbershop in Fuzhou, this is a hot topic as well, but for different reasons.
Fuzhou is famous for its opulent banyan trees, its sugary 荔枝肉 (sweet and sour pork), and its scorching hot summers. But more than anything Fuzhou is best known for its legions of expatriates who emigrate to all corners of the world to wash dishes, cook food, and scrub the floors of Chinese restaurants. If you have ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant outside of China, chances are you have consumed food prepared by a Fuzhou cook.
Estimates suggest that as many as 40% of all Chinese abroad trace their roots back to Fujian province. The vast majority of them immigrate without the proper documentation.
One of the barbers in my shop is especially interested in this topic. My first day on the job he asked me to give him an English name. I chose “Adam” because it sounded similar to his Chinese nickname.
After giving him a name and teaching him some basic English greetings at his request, I asked Adam why he was so interested in learning English.
“I have several relatives who have illegally immigrated to the United States. It is my dream to one day sneak into the United States as well,” he answered.
Adam is uncharacteristically candid for a Chinese, but dreams such as are not uncommon in the City of Banyan Trees.
Like most of Fuzhou’s illegal immigrant population, Adam is not from Fuzhou city proper, but rather from a surrounding town about two hours away. It is in these small, coastal towns where locals have traditionally looked abroad to achieve their fortunes. My first year in China was spent in one of these towns.
Fuqing is a one hour bus ride away from Fuzhou, and is not a desirable city to live in by Chinese standards. It is small, has poor public infrastructure, and few job opportunities for people with college degrees. Yet, on a casual walk through Fuqing, one will see young women wearing designer clothes, old couples living in 5 storey mansions, and men with long fingernails and hairy moles driving BMW’s. Another suspicious characteristic of Fuqing, is the seemingly low number of people in their 20’s and 30’s.
In the words of my friend Xiao He who grew up in Fuqing “There are two options for young people in Fuqing. If you can make it into college, you can get a good job and move to a bigger city. If you don’t get into college, you just sneak into Japan to work for 5 or 10 years” According to Xiao He, of his 41 high school classmates, 11 of them are currently working in Japan, all illegally.
Each little town outside Fuzhou has a corresponding country in which its locals have existing connections and tend to immigrate to. While Fuqing’s expatriates can be found mostly in the kitchens of Tokyo’s Chinatown, New York City’s Chinese restaurants are mostly staffed by immigrants from Lianjiang and Changle, two other small towns just outside of Fuzhou.
The reason people go abroad is simple…money. Most of them spend their entire time working (often up to 13 hours a day), have meals and housing provided by their employer, and rarely go out or spend any money. This lifestyle is strikingly similar to that of barbershop employees in China.
After I initially figured out the hourly salaries of the little brothers and sisters in the barber shop, Adam asked me to calculate what he would be making had he been working in the United States rather than China.
Using the minimum wage of my home state of Missouri ($6.50 per hour) the same schedule as worked by Chinese barber shop employees would net $23,000 per year (before taxes which likely aren’t paid anyway). In China that comes to around 14,500 RMB per month, a salary which easily catapult a worker into the Fuzhou upper class. Looking at these figures, it’s not hard to understand why there is such a draw towards illegal immigration.
This is exactly what Adam and many other Fuzhou people are thinking when they look for opportunities to go abroad. Either way, he will be working 70 hours a week and living in cramped living quarters. It’s just a matter of whether he will be making 50 cents an hour or $6.50.
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04.22.07
Posted in Culture Clash, Fujian at 9:49 am by Benjamin Ross
So the other day I am supposed to meet a Chinese friend at Dong Jie Kou, the mega-intersection which forms Fuzhou’s main shopping district. It’s also the geographic center of the city. I arrive 5 minutes before the scheduled meeting time. A few minutes later my phone rings.
“Ben, I am here. Where are you?”
“I am in front of the KFC on the southwest corner of Dong Jie Kou.” (I have to specify “southwest corner” because there is another KFC on the northeast corner as well).
“What do you mean?”
“The southwest corner of Dong Jie Kou.”
“I do not know which corner is the southwest corner.”
Now we have to begin looking for other geographic markers. This is not always so simple in Chinese mega intersections such as Dong Jie Kou. There are KFCs on two of the corners, McDonalds’s on two of the corners, and major shopping malls on three of the corners. By my thinking, using cardinal directions would be the most logical way to ascertain an exact location. Not in Fuzhou.
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Dong Jie Kou, Fuzhou’s thriving mega-intersection, and logical point from which to determine direction.
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“Where do you live?”
“The northern part of the city.”
“Where’s that?”
“Where is the police station?”
“It faces the west side of the park.”
“Which side is West?”
“I’m trying to find your house. I’m in a cab driving up and down Wu Yi Lu. Should I turn east or west?”
“I don’t know.”
Regardless of the fact that most of the city’s major thoroughfares run either north to south or east to west in a neatly organized grid, virtually nobody, with the exception of cab drivers, knows cardinal directions. Instead, directions are given in relation to a well-known location.
“It’s across from the post office.”
“It’s next to the McDonald’s”
“It’s behind the whore house.”
The problem is that when you are you are in an unfamiliar area, or one where all the architecture is identical, this method does not work. I am not sure if this is just a Fuzhou thing, or a Chinese thing. A Chinese friend once told me “Northerners use north, south, east, and west, but Southerners only know right and left.” The only northern city I have spent a significant amount of time in Beijing, and I noticed that Beijingers, do in fact know cardinal directions.
“Where do you live?”
“I live just south of the north part of the 3rd ring road”
“Where is Hou Hai?”
“It’s northwest of the Forbidden City.”
“How to I get to the Qianmen area?”
“Go to Tiananmen Square, and walk directly south.”
However, I have not spent enough time living in other Chinese cities to confirm whether or not this statement about North vs. South holds any water.
To me, cardinal directions make perfect sense for a city like Fuzhou. Dong Jie Kou is the geographic center of Fuzhou, its main shopping district, and the center of the traffic grid. Using the North Bus Station and South Bus Station as compass points it is not difficult to figure out which way is North and which way is South. If you know the names of major streets (which most locals do), all you have to do is stare at a map for about 15 minutes, and you can figure it all out. Why this method has not caught on with the locals is beyond me.
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