Iron and Silk

Peter Hessler is one of the most popular writers on contemporary China. I've read all three of his books - Rivertown, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving - as well as several of his articles for the New Yorker and other various publications. I'm a huge fan of all of his work.

Last year, a fellow China blogger wrote a piece entitled - How Peter Hessler Ruined My Life. Here is the beginning of that article:

Peter Hessler, the American writer of bestselling Oracle Bones and River Town, has singlehandedly ruined my China life. I’ve never actually seen Peter Hessler in China, but I live everyday in his footsteps.

I’ve always had an adversarial jealously of Hessler, seeing as how he’s achieved the fame and success as a China writer with Princeton connections that I’d take in a moment. I’ve scoured his writings to find faults and thereby a basis for my rivalry, but I still have yet to come up with anything.

Living in China in the shadow of Peter Hessler is a bit like what a real-life Harry Potter would feel toward J.K. Rowling if Potter were an aspiring novelist and he one day discovered someone had beaten him to the punch—and made a tidy sum in the process. I suspect that nearly every Princeton in Asia fellow has a tinge of jealousy-based grudge-tinged-with-respect for Hessler.

To understand how Hessler has stolen my thunder, it’s necessary to understand one of the most essential benefits of choosing to live in China. That is you get to wrap yourself in the plush, velvety illusion that you’re the first one to experience all of the crazy aspects of China life.

Read On

I can relate a lot with what this blogger is talking about in his post. After I finish reading one of Hessler's books, I often think to myself the following kinds of things:

Why don't I keep up with all of the Chinese people who've passed through my life like Hessler did?
Why didn't I completely dedicate myself to learning Chinese at a more fluent level?
Why did I waste time watching pirated American TV show DVDs while in Xi'an when I could've been doing something productive?

I believe that this sort of reaction to Hessler's writing is natural. One of the most amazing aspects of living in China (or any foreign country for that matter) as a foreigner is the novelty of expanding one's boundaries to limits that before seemed impossible. There were countless times when I was in China where I thought to myself, "I can't believe what I'm doing right now." Reading beautifully written accounts from a first-class writer about his own unfathomable adventures can dampen one's buzz a bit.

Peter Hessler found this blog post about him a few days after it was written. He wrote to the author about his thoughts on the article.

Here is a snippet from Hessler's letter that the blogger published:

It’s a funny phenomenon, and one that I remember when I first came to China. There were certain books that everybody read, and the longer you lived there the more you might be inclined to resent them. It’s a natural reaction in a place like China, where you’re constantly learning and discovering. It’s a very personal process, very intense, and a sense of ownership develops. In “River Town” I wrote about how I wasn’t so charitable when I saw a couple of Europeans in Fuling, the first (and only) “uninvited” foreigners that I ever saw in town. I really did not want them there. I realized it was an unfair reaction, very childish; but I also saw that it was quite natural. After a long period of isolation I felt like it was my city.

During the years that I was in Fuling, “Iron and Silk” was the book that all foreign teachers read, and sometimes complained about. When I sent out the unsolicited manuscript of “River Town,” a lot of reactions were clearly shaped by Mark Salzman’s book. Most agents and publishers rejected it, probably because there was already a successful book about teaching in China. Or they wanted to build on it in narrow ways: one agent wanted me to cut my manuscript down into very short vignettes, like Salzman’s book. I’m glad I resisted; over the years it’s become clear that these are very different books and each has its own place. A couple of years ago, I met Mark Salzman at a literary event, and I told him that the foreign teachers now complain about me as well as him. He laughed; he knew what I was talking about. When I was in Fuling, I really benefited from reading his book, as well as Bill Holm’s “Coming Home Crazy.” The fact that they were so different struck me as a good thing. It reminded me that it’s not simply the experience that matters: it’s the writer. And I noticed that these books shared something in common: a sense of humor.

...

Of course, it’s not strictly the experience that distinguishes a piece of writing. China has been around for a long time, and experiences have overlapped for years and decades and even centuries. Recently I was reading Archibald Little’s “Through the Yangtse Gorges,” in which he describes a Sichuanese banquet, and then he apologizes because it’s hardly a new story: “Chinese dinners have been described over and over again, but I have narrated this one, as I think few have given an idea of their tediousness and the absence of all that we deem comfort.” Little wrote this in 1887! So I wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with the baijiu banquets in “River Town.”

I had to get beyond this, especially since my goal in that book was to write about everyday observations and experiences. Lots of foreigners shared those things, and there was nothing special about my China background. Fuling wasn’t an important place. Many foreigners spoke the language better than I did, and many people had a deeper knowledge of the culture. But I thought of myself as a writer, not a China expert. My training was more along those lines; before going to China I had worked as an ethnographer in southeastern Missouri, and I had thought a lot about the social sciences and theories of observation. In college I took a lot of courses in fiction and nonfiction writing. I had very few ideas about China, but I had strong ideas about voice, structure, set pieces, story structures. People often don’t realize how technical writing is. It’s a lot harder than learning Chinese or learning about China, that’s for sure. By the time I left Fuling, I had spent only two years engaged seriously with China, but thirteen years engaged seriously with writing. If the ratio had been the opposite thirteen years in China, and two years thinking about how to write that book would not have happened. I might have known a lot, but I wouldn’t have known how to express it, and how to structure it. In any case, that book is more about a learning process; it’s about how language, people, and culture came into focus for me. It’s not about “China” in the strictest sense.

Read the entire letter (recommended)

I really like this response. It's not the experiences that set Hessler apart from others, it's the writing. It'd do all travel writers good to reflect on what he has to say here.

After reading Hessler's response, I was interested in reading the "Peter Hessler before Peter Hessler" book that foreigners living in China in the 1990s complained about - Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman. I picked it up a few weeks ago.



Iron and Silk is 210 pages of short vignettes on Mark Salzman's two years in China. Salzman was a young Yale grad who taught at a medical college in Changsha, Hunan Province in the mid-80s. The book mostly focuses on his teaching experiences, daily life, and his study of Chinese "kung fu."

Salzman took a strong interest in China when he was a twelve year-old boy. He began studying how to speak and read Chinese, painting Chinese calligraphy, and practicing martial arts at that time. Thinking back on the jealousy discussed above, I'm very envious of the fact that Salzman already had such a solid foundation of Chinese culture before he ever went over to China.

A great deal of the book is about Salzman's martial arts lessons. Here is a section of the book going over some of the basics of Chinese "kung fu" from page 30:

Salzman has several different teachers of different styles of wu shu. He's pushed really hard by all of them. It's not exactly like Uma Thurman going to learn with her master in Kill Bill vol. 2, but it's not too dissimilar. Studying wu shu with Chinese masters as a suburban American kid is a great story and Salzman nails many of the passages working with his teachers in his book.

The theme of "gong fu" - 功夫 - or a skill that transcends mere surface beauty - mentioned in the passage is weaved throughout Iron and Silk as well. I appreciated this mode of self-examination. By the end of the book, one has gone on a long journey both in terms of getting into Chinese culture and in the development of Salzman's character.

On the whole, though, I didn't particularly like Salzman's choice of writing a series of twenty-five or so short stories instead of stringing together one longer narrative. For this reason, Iron and Silk doesn't stand up to anything that Hessler's done. The full depth of the experiences just don't quite make it onto the pages of Salzman's book.

Saying that, I enjoyed Iron and Silk a great deal. Reading about Salzman's unique stories taking place a generation ago, just as China was embracing reform and opening, is very worthwhile.

I'm an NPR Nerd

I feel like I'm starting every post on here these days with, "I heard a really interesting story about China on NPR today on my drive home..." Oh well. America's National Public Radio is the best source of intelligent news around.

Today, Peter HesslerCountry Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory." In the feature story/interview, Hessler talked about some of the main themes and characters of his soon-to-be released book:

Today, China is the world's largest producer and consumer of automobiles — about a thousand new drivers register each day in Beijing alone.

Back in 2001, just as China's auto boom was beginning, New Yorker writer Peter Hessler decided to join the masses and apply for a driver's license himself. He spent the next seven years driving around China to see how the car was transforming the country.

His new book, Country Driving, details his observations from the road. It begins with his 7,000-mile road trip, following the Great Wall across northern China.

"Along the way, I would stop in villages, and ... it was really sort of sad because so many of these places are losing population to the south," Hessler tells NPR's Melissa Block. "This is basically the story of today's China ... that you have an estimated 140 million people who have left the countryside to work in factory towns, work on construction crews. Often the only people you see are very old people who no longer work, or the children, the youngest people who are still too young to go out and find jobs."

Read On

I'm really looking forward to reading Country Driving. Hessler's first book, River Town, should be required reading for anyone remotely interested in China.

In addition to this good story on Hessler, NPR also had a nice (if not a bit scathing) story on Shanghai and the coming 2010 World Expo. It too is worth a listen.

Sometimes the More Information You Have, the Less You Know

This blog isn't so cutting edge.

Noted China writer, Peter Hessler, just came out with his latest book - Country Driving. Instead of reading that, I'm reading his book that came out in 2006 - Oracle Bones.

I'm loving it. Hessler's perspective on China is great.

This following passage, about journalism in China, on pages 302 - 303 of Oracle Bones, particularly struck me:

In the United States, journalists worked within a community, and often their stories inspired change. This was one of the noblest aspects of the field, as well as the most widely celebrated. Any American journalist knew the history of Watergate: how dedicated reporters helped bring down a corrupt administration. That was the model for a good journalist - if your community had a rascal problem, you exposed it, even if the rascal was the president of the United States.

At big papers, successful journalists became foreign correspondents, and then they brought their work patterns overseas. Usually, they searched for dramatic, unresolved problems; if they didn't speak the language, they hired interpreters or fixers. Sometimes, their stories made a difference. In African countries, journalists who covered famines or genocide could be instrumental in motivating international organizations to step in. Reporters functioned within an international community because the local community had broken down.

But China was completely different. The country received some international aid, mostly in the form of loans, but the economy had been built primarily through Chinese effort and determination. In the past, the American government had responded to Chinese human rights violations by periodic threats to impose economic sanctions, but those days were gone: trade had become too important. Essentially, China had outgrown the traditional limits of a developing country. Despite its problems, the nation was stable, functioning, independent, and increasingly powerful. When Americans looked across the Pacific, the critical question wasn't how they could change China. It was far more important to understand the country and the people who lived there.

But most journalists were stuck in the old mindset, the old file cabinets:

DEMOCRACY
DEMOCRATIC PARTY
DEMONSTRATIONS
DISABLED
DISASTERS
DISSIDENTS

In a typical foreign bureau, Chinese assistants searched local newspapers for potential stories, and they received tips from disgruntled citizens. When something dramatic caught the foreigner's eye, he pursued it: child-selling in Gansu, female sterilization in Guangxi, jailed labor activists in Shandong. The articles appeared in American newspapers, where the readers couldn't solve the problems and didn't have the background necessary to keep everything in context. It was like the Fuling textbook: sometimes the more information you have, the less you know. And there is a point at which even the best intentions become voyeurism.

I didn't want to write features, which meant that the main appeal of working for a newspaper was news. And news in China seemed pointless: the country changed every year, but the pace was steady and it moved subtly. There weren't any great leaders, and supposedly important events like the plane dispute fizzled out; they were like splashes of foam on the surface of a massive sea change. We had escaped history; news no longer mattered. Brave new world.

Anyway, that's how it looked before September of 2001.

Hessler is implying that this was the case before September 11th. While it may not have been true in the months and years directly following 9/11, I feel that this idea applies again now.

A year ago at this time, I was blogging every single day about China news. There were a lot of reasons why. The biggest was that I had free time at my job to blog. I was sitting at a desk for hours every day with not enough work to fill the time. Another big reason was that I wasn't living with Qian. I had a lot of time to blog, study, or do whatever I wanted to at night when she was living at her parents' house. And another reason was that the world was still figuring out what it was doing after the meltdown of Lehman Brothers and the other troubled US financial institutions. That was a very turbulent and unsure time (as if now isn't).

I miss blogging as much as I did at that time. I miss being as into the Chinese news scene as I was at that time. But in the grand scheme of things, I think it is good that I have taken a step back from obsessing over every single news story relating to China. Blogspot being blocked in China was the first step in backing away from pouring over every story about China. Moving to America, getting married, readjusting to American culture, and starting work has been a much larger step (or steps).

Hessler's idea that China is largely impervious to the daily/weekly news cycle is very interesting. I agree. No matter what happens, China is going to continue being China and heading down the path it currently is. China is quickly developing and modernizing. The country is constantly changing. But that change is China's constant.

Sure, the country has a massive list of problems - both domestically and internationally. At times, I have a hard time seeing how it functions or will continue to thrive. But it is and is going to continue to.

Subconsciously, I'd come to agree with Hessler's passage above. I'm not trawling Google News for China News stories these days. Sure, I'm too busy to. But I also don't think it's necessary to be a news-junky to have a good understanding of China. Understanding its people and its culture, rather than the obsessing over daily headlines, can be far more insightful in a country that operates in the way China does.

That's not to say I think that China news is unimportant. Keeping abreast of what's going on there, and the rest of the world is important, but I now realize that one can be too caught up in current events.

I'm about to finish Oracle Bones, have a 30% off coupon from Border's bookstore, and am planning on buying Country Driving today. Can't wait to get going on Hessler's newest book, which will cover the time period in China that I was there: 2006 - 2009.

Don't Give Up Eating for Fear of Choking

The largest dam in the world - the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River - is wreaking all kinds of havoc these days.

From Xinhua News:

CHONGQING, April 17 (Xinhua) -- The rise and fall of the water level in the Three Gorges reservoir has triggered 166 geological hazards and forced 28,600 people to relocate in Chongqing Municipality since last September, local officials said.

Since the water levels behind the dam rose from 145 m to 172.3 m on September 28 last year, these geological disasters including landsides and mud-flows have caused economic loss of 539 million yuan (79 million U.S. dollars). No casualties were reported, said Wen Tianping, spokesman of Chongqing government, at a press conference Thursday.

The people whose houses were liable to suffer damage had moved to safe places where new homes have been built. Some are living with their relatives, he said.

Read On

The problems with this dam are too long to rattle off in one blog post. In fact, we don't even know the extent of the problems that the dam may ultimately cause. New waves of difficulties with the dam are constantly coming to light.

From Earth Times:

Beijing - China's Three Gorges Dam, due to be completed in November, is getting bigger every day on all fronts. While officially the government said it has spent 180 billion yuan (26.35 billion dollars) on building the 185-metre dam and a reservoir stretching more than 600 kilometres, local critics and foreign observers said the real figure could be more than twice that amount, and that's just in the construction phase.

A new figure emerged in local media, indicating that nearly 100 billion yuan would have to be spent over the next 10 years to manage the myriad social and environmental problems that have risen alongside the dam's concrete wall.

The financial magazine Caijing and local newspapers reported that 98.9 billion yuan would be needed over the next decade. Of this, 38.2 billion yuan would be spent on environmental protection.

Read On

Nobody should be surprised by the new problems that are arising on an almost daily basis. The project, from the beginning, has been over-the-top. Everyone involved with the decision to do it took the potential costs into consideration.

I'm about to finish the book River Town, by Peter Hessler. Hessler is a really good writer from Columbia, Missouri who's written for publications like The New Yorker and National Geographic. He, along with Edgar Snow, keeps the tradition of prominant China writers from the Kansas City area going.

River Town is about Hessler's two year Peace Corps experience in Fuling, a city in between Chongqing and the three gorges, in 1996 and 1997. The book is a must-read for any westerner living in China. It's also good for anyone wanting an enlightening read into modern China. I highly recommend it.

I found his writings about the Three Gorges Dam, which at the time was just in its earliest stages of planning and development, to be a particularly good part of the book. Fuling is a city that's been affected greatly by the dam.

To hear the way Hessler describes people talking about the contruction of the dam in the late 90's and the effects it'd have in the future is very interesting.

From page ninety-nine of the book:

I taught my writing class from a Chinese-published text called 'A Handbook of Writing.' Like all of the books we used, its political intent was never understated, and the chapter on "Argumentation" featured a model essay entitled "The Three Gorges Project Is Beneficial."

It was a standard five-paragraph essay and the opening section explained some of the risks that had led people to oppose the project: flooded scenery and cultural relics, endangered species that might be pushed to extinction, the threat of earthquake, landslide, or war destroying a dam that would hold back a lake four hundred miles long. "In short," the second paragraph concluded, "the risks of the project may be too great for it to be beneficial.

The next two sentences provided the transition. "Their worries and warnings are well-justified," the essay continued. "But we should not give up eating for fear of choking." And the writer went on to describe the benefits - more electricity, improved transportation, better flood control - and concluded by asserting that the Three Gorges Project had more advantages than disadvantages.

So there you go. All of these recent developments - land slides, out-of-control costs, increasing amounts of displaced persons - were taken into consideration.

But despite these costs, "one shouldn't give up eating for fear of choking."

Moving Mountains - 愚公移山

A few weeks ago, I made fun of myself for being an NPR Nerd (or an NPaRsehole as my friend, Andy, put it) and constantly using NPR stories in my blog posts. Well, I'm going back to another well I've been frequenting recently and am going to discuss a Peter Hessler quote on here again.

I really enjoyed Country Driving. Different from Hessler's other books. Still is excellent. Impeccably written. I may try to formally review it at some point.

There's a section of the book I liked that reminded me of an ancient fable I learned while studying Chinese when I was back in Xi'an.

I'm first going to present Hessler's piece and then the fable it reminded me of.

From Country Driving, on pages 304 and 305:

At Lishui, the exit led straight to the city's Economic Development Zone. After the peacefulness of the new expressway, it was a shock to enter the half-built industrial park, where most roads had yet to be paved. Earth movers and bulldozers worked around the clock, and rugged farmland surrounded the zone on all sides, a reminder of how this place had looked until recently. The scale of the construction project was impressive - nearly six square miles. The director of the economic zone, a man name Wang Lijiong, told me that in order to prepare for the factories they had leveled exactly one hundred and eight mountains and hills.

...

Every time I met an official, I scrambled to write down the numbers, and then in the evening I'd look at my notebook and wonder if they could possibly be true. But Director Wang Lijong's remark about moving one hundred and eight mountains made me stop scribbling. I asked the man to explain what he meant.

"Pretend that this is a mountain," he said, pointing at a spot on the table between us. He moved his finger a few inches over. "This is another mountain. Between them there's a valley. So we take the tops off the two mountains, and we fill in the valley. We lower the high parts and raise the low parts, and we make it as flat as possible."

"He ran his hand along the table - perfectly flat. He continued: "There's a saying here in Lishui. 'For every nine acres of mountains, there's half an acre of water and half an acre of farmland.' With such a small percentage of good land, we had no choice but to move the mountains."

And here is the fable this passage reminded me of. First, in Chinese and then my (attempt at a) translation:

愚公移山

很久很久以前，有一个叫愚公的老人，他家的门前有两座大山，一座叫太行山，一座叫王屋山。这两座大山挡住了他家的路，无论去哪儿，都必须翻过这两座大山，出门很不方便。

于是愚公决定带领全家人搬走这两座大山，那一年他已经九十多岁了。一天，他把全家人召集到一起，说：“我想和你们一起搬走门前的两座大山，你们同意吗？” 全家人无论是儿子还是孩子都表示同意。可是愚公的妻子却说：“你已经这么老了，连石头都搬不动，怎么可能搬走那么大的两座山呢？再说，那么多的土和石头放到哪儿呢？” 是啊，这真是个问题， 大家商量了半天，决定把土和石头运到渤海去。

第二天，愚公就带着全家人开始挖山，不管是男人还是女人，都去挖土搬石， 连七八岁的小孩子也去帮忙。他们把土和石油运到大海，往返一次，要一年的时间。但是他们还是不停地挖呀运呀。不管是春，夏，秋，冬，全家人一天也没休息过。

有一个叫智叟的老人看到他们这么干，觉得太可笑了，就对愚公说：“你可太笨了，您这么大年纪了，连山上的树都砍不动，这么可能搬走大山呢？” 愚公说：“不是我太笨了，是您太没理想了，还是如女人和孩子呢。我死了，我的儿子会继续挖；我儿子死了，孙子会继续挖；子子孙孙会永远延续下去。山虽然很高，可是却不可能再长高了，只要我们坚持下去，就一定能把山搬走。”

愚公一家不停地挖山。两座大山的山神害怕极了，他们到天上把这件事告诉了玉帝。玉帝被愚公一家人的精神感动了，就派了两个神仙把两座大山背走了。

这个古老的故事，教育着一代又一代的中国人：不管多么难的事，只要坚持，坚持，再坚持，就能成功。不过现在却有人认为愚公太笨：他为什么不搬家？搬家不是比搬山容易多了吗？还有人认为愚公是最早的破坏环境的人。你认为呢？你对这个古老的故事有什么看法？


The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains

A long, long time ago, there was an old man named Yu Gong. There were two tall mountains just in front of his family's home. One mountain was called, Taihang Mountain, and the other, Wangwu Mountain. The mountains blocked the road near the family's house. Whenever the family wanted to go anywhere, they had to traverse the mountains. Going anywhere was so inconvenient.

Because of the trouble that the mountains had caused his family, Yu Gong, a ninety year-old, decided to move the mountains. One day, he asked every family member to come together. He said: "With all of you, I want to move these two mountains, do you all agree to this?" All of Yu Gong's children and grandchildren agreed to this idea. But Yu Gong's wife said: "You are already so old. You can't even pick up a rock. How are you going to move two huge mountains? What's more, where would we put the dirt and rocks if we did move these mountains?" Yes, this was a serious question. Everyone discussed the problem for a long period of time. They decided that they should put the earth from the mountains in the Bo Sea.

On the second day, Yu Gong led everybody to start digging. Both men and women dug. Even seven and eight year-olds helped out. Everyone carried the earth with them to the Bo Sea. One round-trip to the sea took one year. Despite the difficulties, the family didn't stop. They went in spring, summer, fall, and winter never taking a rest.

A wise old man named Zhi Sou saw the family working one day. He thought they were so silly. He said to Yu Gong: "You are so stupid and old. You can't even chop down a tree. How can you move a mountain?" Yu Gong responded: "It's not that I'm dumb. It's that you don't have any ambition. You're no more capable than a woman or a small child. When I die, my children will keep digging. When my children die, my grandchildren will continue digging. Generation after generation can forever continue. Although the mountain is tall, it won't grow any taller. We just have to continue to work and one day the mountain will be gone."

Yu Gong's family continued to dig up the mountain. The two mountains' spirits both began to worry. In heaven, the spirits told Yu Di (the supreme deity of Daoism) about what was happening. Yu Di was moved by the persistence of Yu Gong's family. Yu Di then asked two spirits to come down to earth and move the two mountains.

This ancient story has taught generation after generation of Chinese people the following: no matter what difficulties you face, persist, persist, and persist and you will succeed. However, some young people today think that Yu Gong was an idiot: Why wouldn't Yu Gong just move his family? Isn't it easier to move one's house? Some people even believe that Yu Gong was a pioneer in destroying the environment. What do you think? What's your opinion of this story?

This story is in the second volume of my Chinese text book - 发展汉语.

Looking back on this fable (I haven't thought about it in some time), it doesn't exactly apply to Hessler's experience in Zhejiang Province. There might be a little bit of a connection. I don't know.

Just talking with about this story with Qian, she says that the 愚公移山 fable is a very traditional one that every Chinese person knows. She also says that it, in some ways, captures a spirit of Chinese society that goes back generations.

As the fable asks, what's your opinion of this story? Does it at all apply to the economic development that Hessler saw in present-day China?

Americans in China

I don't think This American Life is going to have to have to issue a retraction for their most recent expedition in to China.

The radio program, produced by WBEZ in Chicago and distributed by Public Radio International, caused a huge stir this spring when it had to retract its program - Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory - by performer, Mike Daisey. It turned out that Daisey had made up many of the key points of his hugely popular monologue about witnessing abuses at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Watching the truth come to the surface was a wild thing to witness. I get a sick sense of enjoyment watching people get called out on lying and experienced a great deal of schadenfreude hearing Daisey taken to task as hard as he was by Rob Schmitz and Ira Glass.

Following up their piece from a pathological liar who admitted he knew "fuck-all about Chinese culture," This American Life redeemed itself this week by featuring a line-up of some of the most influential and knowledgeable foreigners living in China. This week's episode, Americans in China, is one of the better This American Life episodes I've heard (although I have to say that my favorite episode is still Somewhere Out There... do yourself a favor and listen to this one that's also China-related).

Kaiser Kuo is the main character in the most recent "Americans in China" episode. He's the host of the Sinica Podcast, a program I've touted numerous times on my blog. His story of being a Chinese American who completely fell for the land his parents came from, moving to China and literally becoming a rock star, having his Chinese band mates turn their backs on him after the Chinese embassy was bombed in Belgrade in 1999 because he's American, and ultimately raising his family in Beijing and working for Baidu is fascinating. I was quite moved by his passion for both China and the US.

The second act of the "Americans in China" episode is from Michael Meyer. His piece is about living in his wife's village in rural northeast China.

I read Meyer's book The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed last year, actually, but never got around to writing anything about it on my blog. I didn't really have anything to say about it. There was nothing overtly wrong or bad about Meyer's book, but I was just, for lack of a better word, bored by it.

My reaction to Meyer's book reminds me of my brother's reaction to Peter Hessler. After a huge amount of hype from me, I convinced my brother to read Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones a couple years ago. Oracle Bones is one of my all-time favorite books. I was so surprised when, a few weeks after he had started it, he told me that he couldn't finish the book. He said that Hessler's seriousness and humorlessness just got to him and that he couldn't continue reading.

I feel that way about Meyer's book and his piece on This American Life. I can't put my finger on it, but I haven't enjoyed his work as much as I have a lot of other prolific China hands'.

Despite not being enthralled with Meyer's piece, it was good to hear such quality programming on Americans in China. Kuo's story, framed by the excellent Evan Osnos, alone is worth listening to. This American Life has gone a long way in making up for whatever it egg it still had on its face from when it featured Mike Daisey.

Studying Mandarin

China's Confucius Centers across the globe are making it much easier to study Mandarin.

From The Associated Press:

Image from Chinese-tools.com

TAMPA, Fla. — In a small room at the University of South Florida, Maya Ueda and two classmates prepare for a Mandarin exam. A pot of green tea idles nearby and Chinese folk instruments, games and movies fill the cabinets and bookcases.

Although the students are doing their work at a state school on Florida's Gulf Coast, the center they are studying in is part of a global outreach by the government of China called the Confucius Institute. The cultural and language centers have sprung up around the world, hosted at universities eager to boost their Mandarin offerings as China's economic influence grows.

...

China observers see the Confucius Institutes as part of the nation's efforts to reshape its image from that of a threatening superpower. Such displays of "soft power" are hardly new, though analysts say the Confucius Institutes are unique in the close relationships they establish with universities.

Read On

One of the first Confucius Centers in the United States was at the University of Kansas, near where I grew up. Qian has asked about teaching at the school, but there are only subbing opportunities available since their full time teachers are all on exchange programs from China (ie. they don't hire locals). This is unfortunate since Qian would be a great asset to the Confucius Center.

Qian put an ad on the internet a few weeks ago for tutoring Chinese. The ad has worked pretty well. She has three students - two adults and a young girl - already. None of them have any experience with studying Chinese. Qian has been really impressed with the talent of the students though. They're all doing pretty well with the language.

A fellow China blogger just wrote a really long and in-depth analysis of studying Chinese. The title of Ben's post - Journey Across the Great Hump: Debunking the Myth that Chinese is the World's Toughest Language.

Ben grew up about five minutes from me here in the suburbs of Kansas City. Although I've never met him in person, I think it's interesting how we both ended up going from Kansas to China and falling in love with the place.

I'm really impressed with Ben's studying of Chinese. He's currently acting as a translator in Chicago. He seems to have taken a similar path as Peter Hessler did in Rivertown - a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in China. Both Hessler and Ben attacked Mandarin and learned it very quickly.

Unfortunately, I did not learn the language as quickly as Ben did. I was too intimidated when I first started and was more interested in learning "survival Chinese" than really perfecting what I was doing. This lack of time and effort in the beginning made my Chinese path much more arduous than Ben's. Whereas he got to a very high level in about two years, I'm still at a more intermediate level after studying for about two years. I regret that I didn't tackle the language more head on when I first got to China (I really wasted my first year linguistically in China thinking I was only going to stay for a year and then come back to the States... I ended up staying for three and a half years).

There's nothing I can do about how I learned Chinese now though. So I'm just trying to do the best I can after my rocky beginning. Although I've left China (for the time being), I'm continuing to use my Supermemo study method and am trying to use Chinese as much as possible on a daily basis with Qian.

I'm not sure I can say that I've cleanly crossed Ben's "Great Hump," but I'm relatively happy with my level. I've crossed many personal "humps." The way I'd put where my level is is that I can have fun with Chinese now. I can chat fairly easily in one-on-one conversations. I still get tripped up from time to time, but I can tackle a wide array of issues and topics. I can't understand a lot of what goes on on TV and am not ready to be a translator, but I'm having, and have had over the past year, a lot of fun. And since starting studying Chinese more seriously about two years ago or so, that's been my goal.

Mobile Shanzhai

The Chinese are world-class copy-cats. And they have a strong tradition of counterfeiting too.

From The New York Times:

SHENZHEN, China — The phone’s sleek lines and touch-screen keyboard are unmistakably familiar. So is the logo on the back. But a sales clerk at a sprawling electronic goods market in this Chinese coastal city admits what is clear upon closer inspection: this is not the Apple iPhone; this is the Hi-Phone.

“But it’s just as good,” the clerk says.

Nearby, dozens of other vendors are selling counterfeit Nokia, Motorola and Samsung phones — as well as cheap look-alikes that make no bones about being knockoffs.

“Five years ago, there were no counterfeit phones,” says Xiong Ting, a sales manager at Triquint Semiconductor, a maker of mobile phone parts, while visiting Shenzhen. “You needed a design house. You needed software guys. You needed hardware design. But now, a company with five guys can do it. Within 100 miles of here, you can find all your suppliers.”

Technological advances have allowed hundreds of small Chinese companies, some with as few as 10 employees, to churn out what are known here as shanzhai, or black market, cellphones, often for as little as $20 apiece.

Read On

This part of the NY Times article is great:

So far, however, China has done little to stop the proliferation of fake mobile phones, which are even advertised on late-night television infomercials with pitches like “one-fifth the price, but the same function and look,” or patriotic appeals like “Buy shanzhai to show your love of our country.”

Here is the video that the Times article linked up to:



Love the English in this video.

A couple weeks ago I referenced Peter Hessler's "Rivertown." A truly great book on contemporary China (even if it was written in the late 90s).

There is a fascinating passage from the book where Hessler writes about shanzhai culture in today's society as well as the long-standing tradition it has in China. From page 258 of the book:

The demand for Nalgene-knockoff bottles was much more understandable, especially in a tea-drinking city like Chengdu, where the bottles spread quickly throughout the city's social strata. They were first acquired by cab drivers, who tended to be at the forefront of such trends - cabbies had a certain maverick quality, as well as plenty of money. After that, the businessmen followed suit, and then xiaojies, and finally by summer even the old people in the teahouses were sipping their tea out of fake Nalgene bottles. Soon you could buy them for twenty yuan in any Sichuan city or town.

The bottles came with a label that described them as American-developed Taikong Pingzi - Outer Space Bottles. But they were clearly the product of Chinese factories, because they weren't quite standard and often the label was misspelled. In that regard things hadn't changed greatly from the seventeenth century, when a Spanish priest named Domingo Navarrete described the business methods in China. "The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation," he wrote. "They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the Province of Canton (Guangdong) they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe."

Some things never change. Modern "Hi-Phones" are just the 21st century manifestation of something that the Chinese have honed for centuries.

I was really surprised to read that the Chinese tradition of copying goods goes back hundreds of years. There really is something long-standing about the Chinese ability to produce high-quality fakes.

This culture of counterfeiting goods passed on through generations is sociologically and anthropologically fascinating to me.

Kansas City and China

I came across a hilarious quote while reading The China Fantasy the other day:

"With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City."
- Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska during the era of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China (in the 1940s).

It's funny how misguided people often sound after history plays out.


Photo of Kansas City from photocamel.com


Photo of Shanghai from cuewb.com

While talking about Kansas City, my hometown, I'm going to feature an article I found while searching for information on that quote from Senator Wherry. From Globaljournalist.org:

Missouri and China do not ordinarily go together in people's minds. One tends to think of China as most closely tied to parts of the U.S. that either sit by the Pacific (like California) or were early magnets of Chinese migration (like New York)-and neither is true of the Show Me State. Still, dig around a bit and a host of connections between Missouri and the Middle Kingdom emerge. Some are merely interesting historical tidbits. For example, the fact that a nephew of the Chinese emperor attended the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, or the fact that the plane that launched the missiles that hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 set off for Serbia from a Missouri airfield. Other China-Missouri links are more significant, such as that a native of the Show Me State, Harry S. Truman, was President when Chinese and American forces fought each other in Korea. Still others are just bizarre. In this category, I would put the presence of the “New Shanghai Theater,” which hosts year-round performances by the Acrobats of China performing group, in Branson, Missouri (aka the “Las Vegas of the Ozarks”). And the infamous 1940 statement by a U.S. Senator that has often been quoted in the past to epitomize a certain kind of recurrent American hubris concerning nation-building projects: “with God's help we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”

Probably the single most intriguing connection between the two places, though, is a literary one, which was brought to my mind by the recent announcement that a National Book Award nomination had gone to Oracle Bones: A Journey between China's Past and Present. Peter Hessler, the author of this elegantly written book, which mixes elements of travelogue and memoir with reportage and political analysis, grew up in Columbia, Missouri-and he is just the latest in a long line of writers with ties to that state to emerge as an influential shaper of American images of China. The originator of the lineage can even be said to be none other than Mark Twain, the first Show Me State citizen to gain global renown as an author. Though he never made it to China on his travels, Twain was fascinated by the country, and he wrote everything from an epistolary tale about a Chinese immigrant (“Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again”), to a newspaper editorial denouncing the “unequal treaties” that the West had forced upon the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in the mid-1800s, to essays sympathetic to the anti-Christian Boxer insurgents (since, in his mind, any foes of missionaries couldn't be all bad).

The highpoint of China-writing by people with ties to Missouri came a bit later than Twain's day, in the early-to-mid 1900s. This was when Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, both Missouri-born journalists, published famous books on the Chinese Revolution. The influence of Snow's Red Star Over China (1936), the book through which many Americans got their first close look at the previously mysterious figure of Mao (presented there as a very sympathetic, indeed heroic figure), is hard to overstate. Smedley never wrote a book that had as big an impact, but her writings introduced American readers to new topics, such as the role that women played in the Chinese Revolution, and her Battle Hymn of China (1941) was one of the most widely read accounts of the country published in the United States during World War II.

Read On

I'm not sure if I've talked about it much on this blog, but the reason that I ended up going to China is the Kansas City/Xi'an's sister-city organization. A group of people in Kansas City and a group of people in Xi'an have a relationship and work together to promote friendship between the US and China. Hardly anyone in either city has even heard of their sister city, but there are groups of people passionate about the relationship on each side. When I was looking for an opportunity to go abroad back in 2005 after graduating from college - I was looking at Japan, Taiwan, and Chile - I was introduced to someone in the friendship organization.

The foundation of the KC/Xi'an connection is largely based upon Edgar Snow who is mentioned in the article above (the geography of KC and Xi'an is quite similar too... gateways to the west). Snow was born in Kansas City and ended up spending a significant amount of his later life in China. He's most famous for his book - Red Star Over China - where he embedded himself with the Communist rebels in northern Shaanxi Province (Xi'an's province) in the mid-1930s.

I read Red Star Over China years ago. I wrote a review of the book on my old blog here. The book is a bit tedious at times, but it's something someone interested in China should read.

Overall, Snow's legacy is not a positive one. He's credited for deepening our understanding of Mao in Red Star Over China. But he was used badly by Mao throughout much of his life. I blasted Snow in a recent post for the things he wrote about the Great Leap Forward. He really was a pawn being played by Mao at that time.

Conceding that I, and many others, have major problems with Snow and his work, I do appreciate Snow's life. Growing up in Missouri in the early-1900s and then going to China during a tumultuous time in its history, Snow's life was a unique one.

I know it's not the same at all, but I like to think that the journey I took to China has at least some elements of his adventure. I also appreciate Peter Hessler's story (a writer who I have the utmost respect for), which took him from Columbia, Missouri to China. I take pride in the fact that middle-America, my home, has such a strong legacy in the Middle Kingdom.

Get Your Kicks on Route 312

I'm reading another great China book. This one is China Road by former NPR correspondent, Rob Gifford.



The book is about Gifford's final days in China before accepting a new assignment with NPR in Europe. Gifford celebrates his leaving China with a six week road trip west on Highway 312 out of Shanghai. He sees his journey on Highway 312 in the 2000s as comparable to rolling down America's famed Route 66 in the 1940s. Gifford's goal is to go from the east coast of Shanghai all the way to the border of Kazakhstan in Xinjiang. Along the way, he wants to figure out what modern China is (or something along those lines).

I'd heard glowing reports about this book. To be honest, I was a little nervous picking it up since I just recently read a book about a road-trip in China - Peter Hessler's Country Driving. My worries were unfounded. The two books are very different and both worthwhile. I'm really enjoying Gifford's insights into a country he understands deeply. His take is very fresh (even though it's three years old, which is forever in China time).

China Road has hit close to home several times. Gifford spends a lot of time in Xi'an and Shaanxi Province on his journey. He has a whole chapter on my favorite holy mountain - The Hermit of Hua Shan - where he finds a daoist hermit living in a cave and chats with him about the meaning of life. He also spends time in Xiahe, the closest to Tibet I ever got.

There have been a lot of passages that I've considered posting about. One stands above the rest for me though. Here is an excerpt from pages 101 and 102 about the terracotta warriors that discussed China in a light that really struck me:

In 230 B.C., he (Qin Shihuang, who built the terracotta army) was the ruler of just one of seven states that existed in northern China, states that had themselves been formed from dozens of smaller ones. China as we know it today had never been unified, and in fact the period from 403B.C. until Qin’s unification, in 221 B.C., was known as the Warring States period. His unification is still hailed by the Communist Party.

I’m not convinced it was such a wonderful event, though. Qin’s unification is the first reason, the political reason, why China’s system never developed the checks and balances that eventually emerged in Europe. Qin unified the states not through skillful negotiations or cunning diplomacy, but by banging a lot of heads together rather hard and with a less than selective use of those thirteen-element-alloy weapons. The doctrine he espoused in both conquest and ruling was known as Legalism. Not a doctrine of laws in the modern sense, it was more a doctrine of rules, rewards, and punishments that brought about obedience. Qin's violent, heavy-handed means of conquest, however, did not prove the best method for ruling the new united territory, and when he died suddenly, aged forty-nine, in 210 B.C., the Qin dynasty ended after just eleven years.

But Qin Shihuang had set a very important precedent, which has survived to this day: that China should be united. It has fallen apart many times between then and now, but each time, someone has said, "China must be reunified," and set about doing so. Chairman Mao was just the most recent in a long line of reunifiers, and if Emperor Qin were to return to China today, he would recognize the mode of government used by the Communist Party.

I have to say that I find this idea rather scary, that two thousand years of history might have done nothing to change the political system of a country. Imagine a Europe today where the Roman Empire had never fallen, that still covered an area from England to North Africa and the Middle East and was run by one man based in Rome, backed by a large army. There you have, roughly, ancient and modern China. The fact that this setup has not changed, or been able to change, in two thousand years must also have huge implications for the question - Can China ever change its political system?

The Roman analogy is an apt one. The tendency is to think of contemporary China in terms of the United States, because of their similarity in geographical size. Actually, to understand China today, the best comparison by far is Roman Europe two thousand years ago: lots of people with different languages and dialects, different customs, different artistic styles, even different cuisines, all with a shared heritage but ultimately held together by force. It makes no more sense to say you're going out for a Chinese meal that to say you are going out for a European one.

The laments you hear constantly in China that the country is too big and there are too many people can both be blamed on Qin Shihuang. At one fell sloop he not only created both of these problems but made sure they would be perpetuated throughout Chinese history. He created a "country" that needed a strong man at the top to hold it together, and that requirement precluded any constraints on his power.

That's some pretty hard-hitting stuff. Any nationalistic Chinese person will most certainly be disgusted by it. In fact, I bet that nearly all Chinese people who read this assessment of their country hate it and think it's false.

I think a lot of what he says in this passage rings true though. When I think of many of the parts of China that I've seen - from the Taklamakan Desert out west to the Himalayas in Yunnan to the karst in Guangxi to the villages in Shaanxi to the capital of Beijing - China can seem more like a collection of cultures on the same continent than a country. Gifford really nails China with this passage. In fact, I think China's leadership has largely come to the same conclusion he has.

Mandarin language has been a requirement in schools since, as Gifford puts it, "the last reunification" under Mao in the 1940s/50s. Before that time, people spoke regional dialects. People older than the age of fifty-five or sixty years-old nowadays very well may speak very broken or no mandarin at all. They simply didn't learn mandarin when they were children. Unifying language has been a key component of China's development.

In addition to language, China has "sinified" areas on the country's periphery with Han immigrants that could, feasibly, be more volatile. Russia did a similar sort of thing during the time of the USSR.

There is a case to be made that Beijing sees things in exactly the same way Gifford lays things out. China seems to, now and since 1949, rule China in a lot of ways with Gifford's assessment in mind.

One is probably right in saying that China's "tying up of the loose ends" and making sure that people who may not feel as connected to "China" is largely working. There are plenty of counterexamples - a couple controversial areas out west come to mind. But for the most part, the "moderate prosperity" (a term that Gifford loves) much of China's enjoyed over the last thirty-plus years has given people on China's fringes the chance at a better life. And that, more than politics opposed to Beijing, has won over a lot of people.

Gifford, again and again, talks about how most Chinese are getting something now that they have never had before - choice. He's not necessarily taking about politics. Instead he's talking about things in daily life. The choices Gifford highlights are the choices between eating noodles or rice for lunch, taking a bus or a cab or biking or driving a car, or having a cell phone with 3G or without. Freedom of choice, Gifford argues, is one of the things that is changing Chinese people more than anything else.

One scene I liked a lot was when Gifford is making his way further and further west and runs into a group of Tibetan construction workers. Gifford asks them about whether being a construction worker is better than what they did before. "Of course it's better," one of the men responds. He then says that he no longer has a 靠天生活. 靠 means rely, 天 means heaven, and 生活 means life. This man no longer relies on the heavens for his subsistence. He has the option of getting on a highway so that he can go to another part of China where he can do something different than what he and his family members have done for generations. Being able to become independent and break free from the shackles of a 靠天生活 is an unbelievable freedom that millions upon millions of Chinese people are finally enjoying.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this post. I started with my praising of the wonderful book, China Road, then went on to promote the premise of China being a flawed model of a country, and then further went on to say that the sinification of China is raising up millions upon millions of people.

I guess one can take from this post that China is a confusing place.

China really could be a number of different countries. China's Henan Province has a population of 97 million people. Shandong Province has a population of 92 million people. Sichuan Province has a population of 82 million people. All of those provinces are more populous than the most populous country in Europe - Germany. On top of that, the food, climate, language, cultures, etc. have extreme diversity.

At the same time, the country is working (both literally and figuratively). Its economy is churning while the rest of the world is in stagnation and most Chinese people have more hope now than they or the past several generations of their families have ever had. There are scores and scores of problems in China and plenty of people getting left behind, but China is working out for a lot of its population.

Gifford doesn't have all the answers to China or a special way of looking at things that makes everything crystal clear in China Road. One day during his road trip he can't fathom why he's leaving China and then a couple pages later on in the book he can't wait to get outside of the country's borders. Such is China. Gifford's book is a fantastic way to attempt to understand China more and there aren't any dull moments accompanying him on his road trip.

AmCham-China Podcasts

I found a treasure trove of China podcasts for all of the China news/culture/politics/economics nerds out there. The podcasts are all produced by the American Chamber of Commerce from the People's Republic of China - AmCham-China - and can be found here.

So far, I've listened to the following:

Bill Bishop (@niubi on Twitter) talking about Chinese real estate.

Jeremy Goldkorn (from danwei.org) talking about censorship.

Zachary Karabell talking about the US/China economies and his book Superfusion.

There are dozens more discussions on the site with prominent China thinkers that I look forward to listening to (Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Peter Hessler, Evan Osnos, etc.). The ones I've heard so far have been quality. Go listen.

River at the Center of the World

River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester is one of the two books I brought with me on my trip to China last month. I absolutely flew threw it. In fact, I read it too fast and ended up book-less for my long flight home. I knew I was reading the book too fast as I was reading it during the middle of my trip, but couldn't help myself. The book was just too much fun to read.



River at the Center of the World is based around the 1995 several month-long journey Winchester took from the sea east of Shanghai, up the Yangtze River, to its source in the Tibetan plateau. As Winchester narrates his trip, he delves deep into the history of the river he's tracking. The book is as much recounting the histories of previous adventurers and different areas' rises and falls as it is about Winchester's experiences.

Winchester hires Lily, a married woman from northeast China, to be his guide/translator up the 长江 (in Chinese, the "Yangtze" is literally "long river"). She is with Winchester throughout the book. Winchester speaks a bit of Chinese but isn't so fluent.

Going from the east to the west, the book begins in the East China Sea several miles outside of Shanghai. Winchester then slowly works his way up the river - through Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Yichang and the (at the time) freshly begun three gorges dam, Chongqing, northern Sichuan, northern Yunnan, and into Tibet.



I've traveled through a lot of China. Despite having seen a ton of the Middle Kingdom, I found myself envious, teetering on jealous, of Winchester's epic journey. He stayed in big cities, saw tiny villages, visited historic sites, took in the unparalleled natural beauty surrounding China's main artery, and had countless humorous run-ins with Chinese people along the way. The trek was executed so well.

In addition to the experiences Winchester took in himself, I really liked to hear the tales about the people in the past who attempted to conquer the river. The stories of the likes of Cornell Plant and Joseph Rock - foreigners who got to know the river and China intimately - are histories that I had never heard before.

Winchester is a really good writer. He seemlessly weaves his experiences with previous explorers' experiences with a more general history of the Yangtze.

I want to highlight a particular long passage of this book. I didn't know how to cut this wonderful chunk of writing down. The following is from p. 295-7, while in Sichuan Province searching for the famous bridge at Luding Qiao, the famous bridge where Mao escaped the nationalist army and crossed the Dadu River:

The River at the Center of the World is a great read. I have a few criticisms, though.

First, there were times where I really grew to dislike Winchester. There were several sections of the book that simply rubbed me the wrong way. In one instance he goes on and on for pages about how terrible contemporary Chinese architecture is and, specifically, how much he hates the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.


Image from gilygily.com

These sections where he rails against things in China he finds distasteful (don't get him started on Chinese green vs. English black tea) both haven't aged well and come across as arrogant and, frankly, annoying.

Second, eastern China is far more prominently featured than the western half of the country. Winchester doesn't get to Chongqing, which is about halfway up the river (give or take), until page 270. The book is 395 pages long. I didn't feel like the first half of the Yangtze (and the latter part of the book) was given enough space.

I found Winchester's experiences in the small villages of western China dotting the river to be just as interesting (if not more) than his time in the mega-cities of the east. I wish he'd written about the rugged more and the (relatively) refined less. I understand that the end of his trip was desolate and maybe didn't have quite as much "content" as the lower reaches of the river. But western China is where I've had my most exciting travel adventures and would've liked to hear more about it.

And third, the book was too foreigner-centric. Winchester, an Englishman (although he has a home in America), seemed particularly fond of other Englishmens' experiences in China.

On top of the stories of Plant and Rock, the foreign boatmen mentioned above (whose stories I did find enjoyable), Winchester also goes to visit another foreigner explorer's grave. The history of old-time Shanghai was nearly exclusively about foreigners. And Winchester seeks out other foreigners working on the three gorges dam and again in more remote sections of western China.

Winchester travels through areas occupied by millions upon millions of Chinese people throughout his trip but his book ended up being mostly about foreigners. That's not the case with a lot of newer travel books written in the past few years that I've reviewed on my blog (see Peter Hessler or Rob Gifford for examples of foreign travel writers who completely immerse themselves in the Chinese experience).

Despite my criticisms, overall The River at the Center of the World is a very fun book that's well-written. It's a great travel read. Bring it on a plane or train with you. You'll fly through it.