The Chinese class that I’ve been attending has an interesting diversity of people. Nearly everyone is here for six months or a year. People are mostly Thai and South Korean, with a few Westerners, one Vietnamese and one (I think) Japanese. Many of those from Thailand and Korea are young university students, often majoring in Chinese in their own university, and taking a sandwhich year here. Of the Westerners, two are already working or have been working in China (setting up an Irish pub, opening fitness centres), one is going to teach English for an NGO in the north-west of Yunnan province, and one is likely to work in China after the course.

There are also lots of other foreigners studying here, who you pass in the street or meet in bars. I think many of them are studying other aspects of Chinese culture; the language section seems to be part of a university Centre for Chinese studies. There are a few older people who have been hanging out here on and off for several years, mastering Chinese in their retirement.

It’s quite easy to make friends. Partly this is because everyone wants to practice English, so everyone from some of the Koreans in my class, to some girls studying law who were sitting near me at lunch have given me contact details. Also white people are much easier to talk to than in England, because there are few of them. It’s possible to strike up a conversation with a stranger in the street, and easy to meet more in bars, or be introduced. I’ve been too busy studying, and feeling that my presence here is ephemeral to take full advantage of these opportunities.

I finally found some more useful SARS information from the UK government other than the FCO’s China travel advice. Two places to go are Department of Health emerging travel advice and Public Health Laboratory Service (they handily protects the population from infection). These sources are all reassuringly calm, basically saying travel anywhere, but watch for symptoms even when you get back.

Of course, the World Health Organisation is the place for the latest news. With today’s press briefing you even get to practice a foreign language – one of the questions asks in French about regions of China other than Guangdong province. The reply is that the healthcare system is decentralised, that regions have been asked to report on SARS centrally, but that there are no results from that yet. They’re working on getting results. I’d feel safer in Vietnam…

Finally, Bene Diction Blogs On seems to be the main mover and shaker in the Canada SARS world. Although she is perhaps a bit too on top of the news if you are looking to avoid hysteria, she does link to lots of general interest SARS stuff.

I love Chinese characters. They’re great fun, so much more interesting than rather dull alphabets. I know at first they seem like a really stupid idea – surely it is better to have a phonetic representation in writing, rather than arbitary and innumerable pictures? One way to look at it is that they are at a granularity inbetween the letter and the word. By this I mean that one character has slightly more meaning than one letter of the alphabet, but slightly less meaning than an English word. Similarly, there are very few letters (only 26), slightly more characters (about 3000 are needed to read a newspaper), and many more words. So you spend the effort to learn characters in the first place, but that makes learning words easier than in an alphabetic language.

What’s a “word” in Chinese? They are composed usually of two or more characters. For example, 汉字 (Hanzi) is a word composed of two characters which means “Chinese character”. Another good example is 中国 (Zhongguo, Centre Country or Middle Kingdom) which means “China”. I’m typing this blog and you’re reading it on a 电脑 (Diannao, Electric Brain), which is ever so slightly creepy. But that first character, it really looks like electricity, doesn’t it? In English we have words made up of smaller words in a similar way – just look at “telephone”, “television”, and so on. It is much rarer that long words make sense like this in English than in Chinese.

I’ve probably learnt about 100 Chinese characters, but that’s enough that I recognise the major elements in nearly all of them. Walking down the street I don’t have any more understanding of what the signs mean, but now they all look like good friends. There are parts of the characters that indicate they have a certain meaning, for example to do with water, people, language or food. There are also phonetic parts, which show another character that that one sounds roughly like. Most importantly, you soon get familiar with the basic sets of two or three strokes, so every character looks like it is made up of parts from other characters that you already know.

The disadvantage of all this for a language student is that it is much harder to learn. For every word you have to learn three bits of information – the meaning, the pronunciation and the characters. This is partly why Chinese has a reputation for being difficult. One of the first things the new Communist government did in the 1950s is introduce simplified versions of many of the characters, so the rural poor could more easily learn to read and write. Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong still use the old, complicated, traditional characters.

The picture is of some Chinese calligraphy in a gallery at a temple outside of Kunming. There’s a whole art form of painting characters with a brush. An eerily primitive beauty, reminding you of the underlying concepts which our words represent, much nearer to the language that we’re all really made of. I wonder, do Chinese people think in characters, instead of pronunciation?

To go completely against my non-linking byline, and to fuel the misinformation fire, here’s some stuff about SARS. Here’s an article in a Japanese newspaper, describing how irresponsible the Chinese government has been in their handling of the case. This certainly fits with my suspicions the other day based on how WHO is having to tiptoe round them.

And then an interesting blog which has comments saying that local doctors say the disease has spread to other cities, which the Chinese government hasn’t admitted to yet. This could either be true, or it could be fear and hype based on some ordinary pneumonia cases.

Of course there’s no way of knowing, so I’m going to get back to meditating on impermanence…

Today the Chinese government allowed a small expat anti-war protest in Beijing. Even the English language China Daily has reported on it, albeit it in an alternate reality way with regard to the stopped Chinese student protestors. Some delicate balancing going on here between the government criticising the US, stroking the US to make sure it doesn’t get upset, and not setting a precedent for local protests.

The World Health Organisation website worryingly vanished behind the Great Firewall yesterday. I’m hoping this is because of politicing about the status of Taiwan, rather than government covering something up. I think that the day before yesterday the SARS infection table listed Taiwan as a separate country, whereas now it is magically a province of China, but I’m not sure. Anyway, at least it’s back up today.

I’ve been in Kunming for three weeks now, and it’s a pleasant place to live. I’m studying at the Center of Chinese for Foreign Students Yunnan University. The university is very eminent for a place so remote from Beijing. This is because during the Cultural Revolution lots of academics either fled or were exiled here. I’m also staying in university accommodation, although I upgraded my room to one more like a hotel than a student room. The first two pictures are views from my window.

You can see the street sellers who hang out from daybreak until eleven in the evening, with time off in the late morning and afternoon. I buy my breakfast there just before dashing to class at 8am. There is a choice of:

• deep fat fried hand-sized disks of dough with herbs
• deep fat fried banana pancakes
• rice balls wrapped round strange bread stuff
• freshly chopped-up meat and veg hot-pot in a scone-like bread roll (the comforting sound of the knife chopping both wakes me up in the morning and eases me to sleep at night)
• a kind of bean stew which I haven’t tried yet
• warm soybean milk to wash it down

The cost of a decent breakfast is about 15p, although I am getting a bit tired of it now and have bananas more often.

Sometimes the peaceful hum of students in Kunming is distrubed by arguments. Quite what these are about I don’t know, but they have a certain brutality to them, and seem contrary to the Chinese culture of not losing face. Once I was woken up by a street seller shouting, haranging an old white-haired man. Another seller was holding him back as he tried to attack her. The old man grabbed and shook one of the trees by the stalls, until he eventually calmed down and lurked just down the road. Another street seller argument a few days later was I guess turf war one, I’m not sure how slots for selling are allocated.

Another time, outside the window I spotted a man running out of the university entrance across the road. This is most unusual, as you don’t see many joggers, and he was sprinting. Two uniformed guards (there are guardmen everywhere) sprinted out after him, followed by a whole miscellaneous crowd of people. The victim dashed under the pedestrian bridge and out of my view along the road, and over the next minute about 20 or 30 people came out to follow. Some were students, some old, some young, some well dressed, some not. Shortly the two guards came back with the captive, and took him into their office at the entrance to the university. The crowd lurked outside for sometime, but the guards wouldn’t let them in. The people seemed more angry than curious, but hung about for so long they must have had some stake in things.

Round the corner down the road there was a fourth incident. A women was screaming and shouting, really angry, kicking at a man who I can only presume was a thief. He was being held by two other men. The scene was rough, the thief struggling and lurching round the pavement, clutching something, perhaps her bag. A few people were stopping to watch, and I quickly hurried on.

Kunming is in its way quite beautiful. This is partly because it is outside the tropics, so you sometimes find real fluffy white clouds, and the sun actually takes a while to set. The weather reminds me of home, it’s even quite unpredictable. There are huge skyscrapers, drummed into the landscape to show that China’s economy is flourishing. Most of them house banks, there seem to be an infinite number of banks. These have a strange appeal to me after so long in the relative poverty of SE Asia. Energy, life, action, human strength. Kunming also has some actual beautiful places, such as parks and zoos, and places out of town in the mountains. Well, these are often beautiful only by Chinese standards of tourism, which are quite clinical like a painting drawn by an engineer.

There’s a school just down the alleyway where I live, and the day before yesterday on my way out to upload these digital photos a whole horde of children were coming out. With hardly an exception they all shouted “Hello!” to me, until I couldn’t help but grin. It’s not like there’s a shortage of foreigners here, they must be doing this all the time!

After being on the move for three months, it’s interesting to observe how my behaviour changes when I’m in one place. Days are thrown away much more readily, with the feeling that there’s an endless supply of them left. I’ve reacquired the strange concept of the “weekend”, when I head off on day trips to tourist attractions nearby.

I finally got round to finding a computer I can plug my digital camera into, so I’ve added a few photos. Go to the March archive page and scroll down. You can find a photo of the terraces at Bac Ha in Vietnam, and one of the pig on the back of a moto. By popular demand, there’s even a picture of me at Tam Coc.

With that provocative title, you might expect that the Chinese government have clamped down in a purge on me, or perhaps the Vietnamese secret police have chased me across electronic borders. Not quite, this is self-censorship. And, no, I don’t mean the unconscious “censor” from psychology, or the very conscious way that I select which things to talk about so publicly.

In Vietnam, I talked to a few other people who I haven’t mentioned in my accounts. I would like to write up what they said, although none of it is particularly surprising if you have read the literature about the Vietnamese government. Which you probably haven’t. Basically, the communist government are scared. They are as a group afraid of other sources of power, and as individual bureaucrats are trying to preserve their own position. They also try to gain advantage for themselves, whether manipulating perks and resources their way, or through outright corruption. This all leads to excessive, complex, and ever changing paperwork, which requires bribes to slice through it. Control-freakery due to fear.

People in the south are perhaps more resentful of this than people in the north, the post-WWII division of the country still haunts a little. What’s sad is that a lot of the fear isn’t really needed any more. Until quite recently, US citizens weren’t allowed into some ethnic minority areas, in case they were hard-right wingers or CIA agents trying to recruit locals. But Vietnam doesn’t need to be scared of this, it’s opened itself up to trade and become a very capitalist communist state, one which I am sure the American Empire approves of immensely.

I don’t want to either over or under emphasise all this. When bribes become sufficiently codified and understood locally they take the role of taxes, and cause much less of a problem than grinding poverty and hard work. On the other hand, as a tourist I’m sheltered from this view of the government, so naturally am inclined to end up with a rosy view. The only time I spotted the negative side of the government was when doing quite non-touristy things.

It’s slightly unnerving being in a foreign land when your country is going to war. There isn’t much fuss about the war here, it doesn’t affect China that much, only some potential economic damage relating to oil prices. A couple of people today talked to me about it. The main concern, presumably one that comes from the Chinese media, is not that the US/UK/Spain are acting in an immoral way, or that the US doesn’t have the right to exert its power to protect its interests. The fear here is that the war will spill out into a larger and more dangerous conflict across the Middle East.

Some good news today. To my surprise and pleasure I spotted that Anne Campbell, Member of Parliament for Cambridge and for me, was one of the rebels who voted against the government the day before yesterday. She supported the amendment which said the war in Iraq was not yet justified, and had to resign her junior government position in order to do so. I had emailed her about ten days ago and got the usual vaguely supportive response that was mainly loyal to the government; this clearly wasn’t how she was acting in private. It’s encouraging that there are people in the world with the courage and conviction to stand behind their beliefs, and to show the potential for both parliament and international law to have strength.

This week I was tidying up my notebook, and found the notes from a conversation I had with a monk in a monastry in Burma. I promised at the start of January that I’d write about it, and now I’ve got round to it. So we go both back in time to the end of December and change note to the subject of religion. I’d been in Myanmar for about two weeks, and was recovering from minor illness in the disappointing city of Mandalay.

Phil had gone on a four day trip north while I rested, and I was soon well enough to make trips out into the city. The name Mandalay is very romantic, and I thought it would be quite beautiful and characterful. Instead it is laid in a grid, with a huge great military area plonked in the middle, which when walking past felt as large as Cambridge. There is a pleasant moat round the military area, with rich reflected colours of the sky in the early morning mist.

On the first day I climbed Mandalay hill, which is much higher than a skyscraper. It was a few km walk from my hotel, and like the hills in Cambodia it protudes alone from a vast plain. Coming from a small island where hills roll together in groups this is very unnatural to me, mystical enough that I can almost believe the legends about them being frozen giants or dragons. Half way up the hill is a most moving Buddha statue with one arm pointing out over the city.

At the time I was very into Buddha expressions. I spent a while kneeling down and looking into his face, reminding myself that life is change and everything is impermanent. This then made me think of the correct attitude to have about life, which balances both acceptance of the world as it is and compassion for it. Are these the Buddhist thought processes that led to this Buddha’s gentle-faced contentment called enlightenment?

The next day I went to the market to try and buy some warmer clothes, and was so overwhelmed by it that I completely failed. There was an intimidatingly large indoor centre, selling unsewn fabric and women’s clothes, but apparently none for men. I wondered round looking at vast mounds of Colgate toothpaste and popular books in Burmese script, until the colourful food market outside attracted my eye. Like most of these places in SE Asia, it bustled with people weaving through narrow paths between all manner of fresh fruit, vegetables and spices. A family in a shop attracted my attention and offered me to try a spicy snack, a mixture of nuts and strong herbs which was to much for my unaccustomed tastes.

By this point I was exhausted, depressed and still not really well; I didn’t know what to do for the rest of the day. I looked vaguely for a quality Burmese tea shop to sit down in, and instead spotted a temple. In Burma these are usually very tranquil places, where you can sit undisturbed in the open courtyard and look at the towering stupa, think and read your book. Within ten minutes about three different people tried to talk to me. This was a bit frustrating until I realised what was going on – the guidebook had mentioned that some temples in Mandalay were good places to meet monks trying to practice their English.

My third disturber was a young monk, perhaps 18 years old. Like all monks in Burma, he was dressed in orange robes with a shaved head, only in this case his head was particularly large and round. He was friendly, although not at all fluent. As he talked to me a small audience of non-monks stopped by to watch us, which made me a bit wary about what was going on. When I asked who they were, the monk said that people are curious, and he got them to move on.

He invited me to his monastry, so to get myself out of my depressed rut I agreed. We walked a few hundred yards across the road, and through an open gateway much like the entrance to an urban university accommodation block. There were narrow streets inside the enclosure, and scatterings of two or three story buildings. He led me through a smaller entrance to one of them, and we climbed an outside wooden staircase. I removed my shoes, and we enter a substantial, although divided up, room. Being nearly two metres tall I could see over the rough partitions.

Maybe 25 monks live there (with 600 in the whole outer compound). All the young ones sleep in a row on mats on the wooden floor, and the older ones have their own beds. An old monk was asleep on his soft platform in the far corner, and it was peaceful and light and sunny. The place is quite academic, but also a home. Blackboards with English practice chalked on them, books, calendars, flowers and chairs. I could imagine happily living there, not so differently from how I lived at university. Not quite what I expected of a monastry, my mind had thought of a stereotyped Catholic austerity.

The monks are from Shan state, in the north-east of Myanmar, a place not fully under the Burmese government’s control. Indeed, these monks are Wa people, famously stereotyped in colonial times for head-hunting, and now controllers of one of the warlord armies near the Chinese border. (My journey has taken me almost in a completed loop. I’m now, in China, only a few hundred km from the home of the Wa).

They are Mahayana Buddhist, which is more inclusive of lay people than the dominant Theravadan Buddhism in Burma, but philsophically more dubious with worship of god-like beings. The monk who found me won suitable brownie points for doing so, and stayed nearby all day, but I spent most of the time talking to a much more fluent monk who was 21 years old. He was friendly, calm, wise and thoughtful. He came to Mandalay when he was 10 years old knowing nothing; he initially had to learn the Burmese language. First I asked him about being a monk.

On Being a Monk

The monks’ parents pay for their study. They learn both the Pali language and Sanskrit in order to study scriptures in the original languages, but they also study other subjects such as English. The monks have an obligation to return to their village each year to teach Buddhism.

All the monks under 20 are really Novices, you must be at least that age to become a Monk. Even a young kid can be a Novice. The transition to Monk is made if you are invited to be one and you agree. You also need:

1. Parental permission
2. To commit to desire to become enlightened
3. To commit to obey the rules/disciplines of the monk (precepts).

The precepts are prohibitions from killing, stealing, lieing and sex/marriage. You cannot decide to be a monk for your whole life, as you can’t know the future! You can stop being a monk whenever you like.

On Perception of Christianity

This was one of the most interesting areas that the fluent monk talked about. In Wa state, Christianity has been prohibited by the Wa chief. This is partly because Christians burnt down a monastry. The fluent monk believed that Christianity was an immoral religion, and was quite interested and surprised when I described that true Christianity has a strong moral code. He genuinely didn’t know about or understand Chrisianity, because of lack of information – in particular the Bible was suppressed by the government.

What was interesting was his surety of belief about it before, combined with his honest adapitability on finding out more information. We all believe things strongly, and in this case his belief was clearly wrong, although I could completely understand and sympathise with how he came to believe it. What do I believe now that is transparently false to someone with more knowledge than me?

A similar thing happend in northern Vietnam. A guide described the northern Mahayana Buddhism as being much better than the Therevadan sort praticed in the south. His reasoning was logical, that Mahayana Buddhism involves and can enlighten the lay people, whereas in Therevadan Buddhism you have to be a monk. However it was also flawed, as it ignored the huge philosophical holes in the justification for Mahayanan beliefs, and also the ease and commonality of becoming a monk in a Therevadan country. To me it was clear that he didn’t know the full picture, and the reason for that was because his experience was narrow.

On Lay Believers

There is no upper “coming of age”, people live with their parents until quite old. You can ask permission to leave you parents.

People in Myanmar rarely live in sin. To marry you get permission from parents, and sometimes they have a ceremony in a monastry. A monk tells them how to live and not to quarrel. There is also a state registry hall. Amusingly to me, marriage there is a promise for life, even though he had said that being a monk wasn’t because you can’t know the future.

90% of the population are Buddhist in Myanmar. Anybody can come in a monastry at any time. However, once a week people come to the monastry to hear teaching. The teachings are of the Buddha, translated from the Pali.

The fluent monk described that you worship Buddha to gain peace of mind. “May I be free from trouble, greed/ignorance and anger”.

On Government

The fluent monk specifically said that he cannot talk about the government. The one thing he did say I mentioned in a previous post – that the Wa people call the Burmese area “Myanmar”, as a way of indicating that they don’t like attempted Myanmar government rule.

To Conclude

I spent most of the day and afternoon there chatting. The monks fed me with some snacks, including more spiced nut stuff, which would be delicious if I had a taste for it, bananas and green tea. Their supplies all come from donations collected from the community. It was sunny and peaceful, and by the time it came to leave I felt light and happy again.

I took some photographs of the monks, and we all laughed about how tall I was that I could see over the partitions. The fluent monk took me across the street to another building also in the outer enclosure. Here about 20 monks were having an English lesson. The old teacher was quite excited; from his poor speech I could tell he hadn’t talked to westerners much. I sat at the front of the class, and was instructed to chant pairs of words with frustratingly similar pronunciation. “People”, “Pupil” and so on. Then I read a bit from an old teaching book which must have dated from colonial times. It was about a Burmese gentlement visiting London, and involved lots of exotic places. The teacher was particularly interested in the pronunciation of “Hackney”.

The fluent monk told me that you can visit any monastry at any time, and monks are always welcoming. So next time you’re on holiday in a Buddhist country, don’t be intimidated and check one out!

(Updated 28 March 2003, as I found some more notes with a few details on.)