16/8/2007 - And this is something I really don't like

Volunteers are always a hot topic these days, especially for the upcoming Beijing Olympics. It is not something that I hold against the volunteers but I think it is focused on too much and that they are not the only people who can and will help and then get praised. There are a lot of people on the street speaking English and other languages and willing to help. They are overshadowed by these 'official' volunteers whoes job is actually quite confined to taking place in stadiums and during matches. And not only foreign athelets need some help, but the massive amount of foreign tourists also need some assistance. And this assistance relies on us, the 'unofficial passers-by'. 

Now the posters for promoting the voluntary movement have prevailed in Beijing and there is a Chinlish term on the posters as well: 'name card', ming pian (meaning business cards in English). Probably the designers/organizers think it is of Beijing Characteristic to have a Chinlish word. In this particular poster below, they have got a foreign boy to advertise the smile of the volunteers. And I have to say China, once again, uses foreigners as an entertaining and promoting tool for its own culture.  

What is even worse is that the motto 'the smile of the volunteers is the best name card of Beijing' - the mian pian should be sincerity and decency, which most Chinese people don't have towards foreign people.    

15/8/2007 - Finally, Beijing did something creative...and I like

I feel quite surprised at seeing these pictures of the new subway stations under construction at the moment.

It's certainly creative to carve (or print) scenes of the old Beijing onto the bricks. And it is a harmonious combination between the history and the modern infrastructure. I don't really wanna use 'harmonious' since it's overused by the Chinese government but I like the design a lot:) and this is probably the first thing I have actually liked since the crazed Beijing Olympic construction movement started.

22/5/2007 - Renewal of my blog

The other day I received an email from one of my best friends. She had a scornful but caring tone, asking me why I hadn't put up any new post yet.

I was so happy to learn that I have her as my permanent reader. I was perparing to write some posts with good topics; however, I have been really busy with work and I just want to have a rest and refuse to use my brain on the weekend.

Actually, there is another quite important reason which prevents me from writing any new post - I have found myself an extremist or a Nazi in my personal campaign against WAIDI Ren and I am afraid that any further writing may turn out to be fascist propaganda.

I am trying not to feel disgusted at WAIDI Ren and try to appreciate their contributions to Beijing, which used to be MY city. Nevertheless, I always feel it so difficult for me to think in a positive way. Yesterday, standing in a packed bus heading home, I overheard the conversation between two WAIDI people:

- 'The traffic is so bad in Beijing. And there are so many people.'

- 'It won't be livable in three years!'

Sure, we have too many WAIDI ren here in Beijing who buy cars, apartments, use water and take our job opportunities. I had a look at their working cards hanging around from their necks - insurance salespeople, which is the easiest job WAIDI ren can find here to stay in Beijing. IRONIC! They didn't realize that they are the very criminals who are making Beijing unlivable. SAD!

So now you see why I stopped writing.

I will try to move my attention to less racist or fascist topics and I am trying...

16/3/2007 - Olympic Wenming

A non-profit commercial about Olympics Games always appears on BTV channels these days. A schoolgirl explains in an innocent but proud tone what happens in her family after the IOC¡¯s historic decision. "My dad is a taxi driver and he is learning English to serve the foreign passengers when Olympics come. My mum is smiling to every customer visiting her counter at the shopping mall. And my granny is making pieces of Olympics craftwork at home!"

I thought people should have done these things when China started opening up to the world and when the great man Deng Xiaoping said that China, as a socialist country, should pay equal attention to materialist civilization (wuzhi wenming - to have better commodities and facilities) and spiritual civilization (jingshen wenming - to have high morals).

There have already been heaps and heaps of foreign guests in China and they actually constitute a large percentage of the taxi passengers. My dad, as well as his workmates, who used to be a Beijing taxi driver in the early 1980s spoke English to foreign visitors. However, not many taxi drivers can speak understandable English at present. So have the 20 years between his time and our time been a blank of English? When our great chairman Mao was alive, he presented an award of honour to a shop assistant selling candies at Baihuo Dalou and his name is Zhang Binggui. His service was reputed to be magnificent and he was able to measure the weight of the candies with his hands instead of a balance. Now his statue is still standing in front of the shopping mall on Wangfujing Street. As for the granny, if she is good at making traditional artistic works, why didn¡¯t she make some before and give them to the old, the lonely and the homeless?

Though it is a piece of non-commercial TV ad, yet it shows our life has been absolutely commercialised by the Olympics Games. How many shows on BTV channel talk about Olympics Games? How many concerts have been held in the name of Olympics Games? How many junk and ugly Olympics mascots have been consumed? How many so-called volunteers have appeared for the Olympics?

I have been perplexed by the present over-heated situation. What would people watch after the 2008 Olympic Games finishes? What would people do if they don¡¯t have a grand name to devote their energy to? Where are we going to?

16/11/2006 - Am I a local colorist or a local racist?

My last post has brought me to an old topic, waidiren in Beijing, which I have written about more than once in my blog. I am forced to write about/complain about them again here because they simply can't be justified.

I don't wanna go out these days because the streets in Beijing are packed with waidiren. More and more waidiren have said on TV that they will DEFINITELY come to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games. I almost faint at hearing this. My fiance calms me down, saying that
the central goverment/Beijing government would not allow waidiren to enter Beijing at that time to maintain good road conditions and security here.

The only reason that I love McDonald's and Pizza Hut so much here is that they only employ people with a Beijing Hukou, (although a lot of waidiren bribe officials or marry Beijingers to obtain a Beijing Hukou) and I can still feel the friendliness, frankness and quickness of Beijingers at McDonald's and Pizza Hut.

Liu Guang, the Bei Wai student I mentioned in my last post, has felt inferior to those from cities and taken his origin too seriously. Only when waidiren themselves feel so do Beijingers have to look down upon them. We Beijingers are always nice and frank to others. But they seek for fame and wealth in a ungraceful way.

If you watch Chinese news, you can figure out that over 80% of crimes in Beijing are committed by waidiren. And TV anchormen always warn people of their property and safety before the Chinese New Year Day comes because waidiren need to go home and this needs funds they don't have.

I remember when I was 15 and my family had a car, my relatives always reminded us of being careful when we unlocked our car. At that time, there were people from northeastern China who hit people on the head from behind with wooden sticks.

We have no seat on buses,  get squeesed on subway, share less and less clean drinking water with them, listen to hard-to-understand dialets and smell their bad B.O., most importantly, suffer from their far-more-strange way of thinking.

Waidiren come and go. They never treasure Beijing, our city. They come for opportunities without caring about the city at all. I can fully understand why John Howard has had harsh opinions/words regarding immigrants to Australia, thought the case in Australia is even more complicated - it involves nationalities, races, religions and politics, even terrorism.

I got a phonecall from a survey committee under the National Statistics Bureau one month ago. It was a random call and the woman on the phone asked for my opinions of China's or Beijing's govermental departments. The last question was what department I was most dissatisfied with. I replied "the planning committee". She inquired the reasons of course. I only pointed out one reason before she said "thank you and this is fininshed". The reason is the governemt has been destroying Beijing without knowing it. Beijing has become a test field for high-level officials. They wanna build up their political achievements here. However, what they have done to my Beijing is damage. How can they say that it is for keeping Beijing's tradition and originality by knocking down those traditional and historic buildings? How can you preserve a culture and history by building up look-the-same buildings? You can refer to Richard Spencer's photos of Dongsi Area. I heard this has happened to Xuanwumen Area too. It is gonna happen in the famous Qianmen Area as well. I cannot recognise those shops in Dongsi I had been visiting. I was living in there for almost 15 years and I have never seen it so ugly before. The area matches the Pingan Da Jie near it though. A gray street, looking dead and lifeless, which is Jiangzemin's masterpiece. There is also no limit in how many waidiren can come to Beijing. BTV has broadcast that the drinking water sources can not afford this amount of people here in Beijing (15 million people here!). But people are still coming. Of course, the woman on the phone could not understand my feelings and probably thought that I didn't appreciate the governemt work because she was a waidiren, probably holding a Beijing Hukou now.

My university best friend is from Shenyang, Liaoning Province. I alaways had the idea to ask her to have a look at my blog but I still haven't given her the address cuz I don't want her to see my complaints about waidiren. I have never said so before her. However, I want her to see it now because I can't stand her waidi way of thinking (my uni classmate from Hunan even went to Suzhou for cheaper wedding dresses. She bought one which only cost RMB250. Not to mention its poor quality, didn't she think the RMB hundreds traintickets would've been part of the basic cost as well? And to make a nice wedding dress in Beijing only costs RMB1500, only RMB500 more than hers, if we include the nearly RMB 1000 traintickets!) And my Shenyang friend even looks down upon other waidiren. What a joke! She is not open-minded enough to live with other waidiren.

So my question is: do you expect Beijingers to live with them as well despite the fact that we are friendly and open enough?

I understand that a city which needs develping demands labor, which is called urbanization. A country needs labor as well. I watched a TV program on CCTV 12 today, praising Chinese people for their effort to help build New Zealand. I can also understand that immigrants need to preserve their own cultures/roots. However, I refuse to embrace those waidiren who are destroying Beijing.

I have only one requirement: would they please help preserve our Beijing culture and treat the city well while making money here?

I beg you.  
  

12/10/2006 - The panda's tail is black!

I have made an entry about the tail of Panda Jingjing, one of the five Olympic mascots. But I have never put any evidence in my blog to back up it. Last month, my fiance and I went to watch Women's Softball. Outside the field, there was a display area for the five "Friendlies" and they were of a big size - all reached my waist. So here comes a good chance to have a look at Jingjing's tail! As you can see in the photo, its tail is black without doubt.

Some people excuse for this disgraceful mistake:"it¡'s just an animation instead of a real panda; therefore, the designer can do any change." Yes, the fish has left its water and lost its beauty - the mascot Beibei is in disgusting blue with very bloody lips, the swallow misses its wings and the mascot Nini has got green skin; the Tibetan anteloope is in an ugly form and the mascot Yingying looks like a carrot; the emblem "fire" has been turned into a red-lipped creature Huanhuan. I never intend to buy them due to their ugliness, poor-quality materials and ridiculously high prices. But I may buy some when the Olympic Games finish in Beijing and the prices go down in the name of remembrance.

As for the Beijing Olympic Games, I always have a question in my head - why Beijing and other cities in China have to hold so many useless concerts in the name of the event? Heaps and heaps of concerts, mostly involving Chinese pop music singers and some Olympic athletes, are being held here a lot earlier than the actual event comes out. I don't oppose entertainment but I feel disgusted at commercial entertaining events in the disguise of patriotism and sports spirits, especially the songs at those concerts are hardly beautiful to the ears. Even Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province is even gonna hold a concert for Beijing Olympic Games' sake. Gees! I am glad to see that the Shaanxi people are celebrating the coming event but just don't make it too far since the province is not that rich and very far from Beijing.

With the amount of money of holding such concerts and paying a lot to famous singers and hosts, China could have invented its own ideas of stadiums, built good and economical houses for its people and secured Beijing instead of asking the residents living surrounding the second and third ring roads to replace their iron window fences with some better-looking windows for fear that foreign guests would think that Beijing is an insecure city at seeing those iron things. I don't know how fake the government can be, how ridiculous the city can become, how miserable the Beijingers can turn. The only thing we can do is convert into Christians and pray!

25/9/2006 - Ambitious Beijing

Beijing is to hold the 2008 Olympic Games in the near future. In order to impress all visitors from home and abroad, the government has decided to renovate old and traditional architecture and build modern-looking buildings. As known to all, Beijing once had a famous and fabulous bar street - Sanlitun Bar Street. Small and unique bars came out spontaneously due to its foreign feature - a lot of foreigners and foreign compounds are located in that area. Now the government wants to renew it and make it more international. So houses have been torn down and big ad boards have been erected to hide ugly construction areas. On those eyecatching boards, they say that "you can find Tokyo, Paris, London here" as well as some other cosmopolises. So my question here is "where is Sanlitun?" "Where is my hometown, Beijing?"

The government has also destroyed the Hutongs in the Qianmen area. Construction is being undertaken there too in the name of presenting the "original and traditional" Beijing. But if the original is gone and the new is erect, how can you present the long tradition and rich culture?

Now the government has been seeking a grand title for Beijing since cosmopolises always relate to their features - Paris is said to be the city of romance, London is the city of fog, Milan is the city of fashion. So what is the feature of Beijing?

Dusty, dirty, dangerous, and destroyed. Ah, 4D must be a good name for Beijing, which represents four-dimentional - sounds pretty advanced, doesn't it? (The Beijing government should entitle me  "Good Resident" for positioning the city)

But the sad fact is that Beijing is no longer Beijing. It is packed with waidiren while real Beijingers have to seek homes outside the country. New buildings, strange-looking theaters, seemingly-miserable stadiums, mean-spirited waidiren are taking over Beijing. Even the Beijing government consists of few Beijingers. Who can give Beijing a new direction and correct all the wrong?

We Beijingers should stand up and say "this is our city!" and get it back!

26/7/2006 - I can't stand this any more!

30/6/2006 - we share the same opinions of our Olympics mascots

8/6/2006 - Beijing Friendly Panda

I have known that it may sound weird for a Beijinger to reveal a piece of shocking and shameful news about Beijing's greatest event - the 2008 Olympic Games. However, I really don't like the Five Friendlies mascots. Now I have a question for everybody - what colour do you think a panda's tail is? Black? White? Yellow? I thought it was black since pandas have black eyes, ears, arms and legs. So did the mascots' designer, Han Meilin. Nevertheless, pandas have WHITE tails. One popular Beijing TV program rang up the designer's home but they were told that the designer was so ill that he can't answer the phone! The mascot issue has always been eyecatching and of course important to Beijingers and China. Therefore, Mr. Han should have paid much more attention to details. These days I have been noticing the mascot products. Fortunately, most of them don't show the panda's tail. (but soft toys are a disaster.) Otherwise, it would be more embarrassing. I hope this so-called talented Mr. Han can be bold and manly to say something about this seemingly 'trivial' mistake.