little trouble in big china

I play basketball a couple times a week with a local women's rec club. I might have more to say about that in another post, but for now it's just to explain that I've had ample opportunity to scope out the public basketball-court scene. We've been rained out a lot lately, but before the Olympics began (I'll be curious to see if things have changed post-Games), I took note of the sampling of jerseys on display: on any given day, there are usually a good number of NBA jerseys, perhaps a sprinkling of Team USA or Chinese-pro-team shirts, and once a clubmate pointed out a Chinese-university uniform (she also noted that it wasn't a very good university, though I'm not sure whether she meant for education or basketball).

No one wears a Yao Ming jersey.

No, really. I've seen Stackhouse (Wizards edition), Pierce, Iverson (Philly), several Jordans and Kobes, LeBron, some generic team uniforms featuring neither name nor number, and even a Bird. Bird!! I would wager that the guy wearing it could not have been school age when Bird was still playing, but there was big ol' number 33 on display on a Shanghai court. But no Yao Mings. Which I thought was funny, since they do seem to love him here. When I asked another clubmate about it, she laughed a little and confessed that she prefers Kobe, then conjectured that people might just not like Yao's playing style.

Poor Yao. You have a season-ending injury, and then your hometown fans (he's actually from Shanghai) don't want to buy your jersey. And somehow I doubt it'll be more prevalent after the Chinese team's Olympic flameout.

These are the other (xiao long bao) Shanghai dumplings I mentioned. They have a thinner, less bread-like skin, and you dunk (or douse) them in vinegar before consuming. They're only steamed, no frying involved, but I would hesitate to call them a health food. Still, they're delightful. I actually like these better than the sheng jian bao, but it's just a personal preference. I'd definitely take either over most of the other food here!

I believe I've confessed that Shanghainese cuisine is not all that much to my liking. As with all good rules, however, there are exceptions. In this case, little meat-and-soup-stuffed exceptions.

Along with various seafood dishes (hairy crabs in the autumn), the fatty pork, and the overuse of sugar, salt, and oil, this part of China is also known for a couple kinds of dumplings: xiao long bao and sheng jian bao. They're both soup dumplings, but not the kind where the dumpling is served in soup -- in these cases, the broth is actually inside the dumpling. Both are traditionally made with pork, but you can sometimes get different meat or seafood fillings.

The little white bumps in the giant wok at the foreground of this picture are sheng jian bao. The outer skin is a thick dough; inside is a ground-pork meatball, and the resulting broth from its cooking inside the dough. The dumplings are both steamed and pan-fried, which means the dough is soft on top, crispy on bottom (and good for holding in the soup). The amount of soup in the dumpling is significant, or "enough to squirt all over your shirt if you're not paying attention."

The way most people eat both of these kinds of dumplings is to bite a small opening in the skin, let the steam escape and the soup cool a bit, and then consume. Biting straight into the dumpling usually results in either a seriously burned tongue, or soup flying in one or more directions (if you're lucky, merely leaking down onto your plate).

I took this photo on a food street where this little stall does so much business that it cloned itself, such that there are two of the same shop within about 20 metres of each other, both with long (but fast-moving!) lines. It takes the army of 5 or 6 dumpling makers behind the server to just about keep up with the pace of the line, but given the limited space in there (there's also the actual cook just to the right of the photo), it's a very smooth operation. And the dumplings are... mmmm, dumplings. 

I met this guy Oliver in here. He couldn't get enough of the stuff.

See, I go and say that there aren't any more Vietnam posts coming, and then I realize that I never mentioned the new "Vietnam" tab at the top of the page, which has more random images and commentary from that trip. Duh.

I'm still working on getting some more driving-in-Vietnam photos up, but am otherwise back to posting about Shanghai, seeing as that was originally the point of the blog and all.

You may have heard that there is a major sporty festival going on in China right now. I like watching sports, and I am glad to be free of inane American commentary (the Chinese commentary may be equally inane, but it's generally too fast for me to catch, so it doesn't bother me), and it is also quite hot here, so I have probably logged more hours in front of the television in the past week than in the rest of my time here combined.

As is the case in the US, the vast majority of coverage is given to events where domestic athletes are expected to do well. Luckily, China has many athletes competing in many events, so this is not too much of a constraint. I have, however, watched more weightlifting, riflery, archery, fencing, handball, badminton, and table tennis than ever before. The Chinese really like table tennis. And weightlifting. And basketball, which makes me feel bad that their team is having a tough time.

They also like Michael Phelps.

I'm back! Apologies for the disappearing act -- I took off for a few days, not to Beijing, as one might expect, but to the middle of the country. I met up with a friend who's over for the Olympics, and we took a 4-day cruise down the Yangzi to see the famous Three Gorges and the infamous Three Gorges Dam.

The gorges are pretty cool, but I don't know whether I'd say they're China's best scenery. It's a big country; there's a lot of scenery. Also, this isn't the best season to see it -- lots of summer rain also means lots of fog, and very muddy water (more so than usual, if the tour guides are to be believed). However, there are still some very good sights.

I was most interested in the "hanging coffins" found in the rock cliffs along the river. They're believed to have belonged to the Ba people who lived in the area around 500BCE, and to this day no one knows for sure how they got the freaking coffins up there (context: from the bottom of the picture to the bottom of the treeline is roughly 20m, and the water level until a few years ago was 60m below the bottom border). Many of the coffins have been removed and put in museums or are being studied, but a few have been left behind, I suppose either for posterity, tourism, or because they're too hard to get to and not in any danger of being reached by flooding (the guides point out the ones that you can see from the river). Some of the coffins are in what look deep enough to be called caves, while others are squeezed into a sort of three-sided tunnel indentation on the cliff face. In some places a bar (wood or bamboo; it was too far away to tell) is placed across the cave opening, presumably to keep the coffin from falling out.

These coffins don't actually hang; I think they're just called that because the practice wasn't exclusive to the Ba -- they just get lumped in with other ancient peoples' high-coffin practices, some of which date back to 3000BCE, and include such sights as coffins lodged on stakes driven into cliff walls. Anyway, they were neat.

[Right: View from the "Observation" Deck]

On our last day, we went to see the monstrous Three Gorges Dam. It's 600 feet high and 1.4 miles long (NB: Wikipedia disagrees with me on the height by half, but that's what we were told and what the Chinese embassy has to say on the matter). I'd elaborate more on what that kind of scale looks like in person, but it was raining so heavily -- I was very soggy after walking up to the hindered-observation tower --  that we couldn't even see all the way across it. There were many generators, and it was very large. Take my word for it.

A couple instances of crossing the street in Saigon -- I hope they work, since I can't check them from here! Your player isn't broken in the second one; the video really is only about a second long, because both my camera and I were too slow to start recording. I thought it went well with the post title, though, so I put it up anyway.

There's a huge, intricate tunnel network outside of Saigon, known as the Cu Chi tunnels, that was used extensively by Viet Minh/Viet Cong forces during the French and American wars. Imagine an ant farm, with all of its routes and levels, for humans -- it's a pretty incredible display of labor and determination: the tunnels totaled over 200km in length, over multiple stories, and included features such as medical rooms, sleeping rooms, and underwater entrances with trapdoors.

Trapdoors were also the way in and out of the tunnels -- small and concealed by brush, they made it easy for the Vietnamese to disappear in mid-pursuit. Not all of the trapdoors were entrances, though; the guerillas also developed a large assortment of booby traps, samples of which are on display at the tunnels.

Pretty much all of the traps involve some form of lever or pivot, and spikes that come hurtling or snapping at you (or you into them, as at right); you can probably figure out the differences from their names. There are the clipping armpit trap, the door trap, the leg trap, and the window trap, among others. I forget the name of this one, but it's basically a see-sawing floor trap. Guess what's on the other side of the leaves -- yep, lots of pain.

Most of the network was pretty well bombed out by the end of the American war, but portions have been reconstructed and opened to tourists. Our group of about 15 was given the opportunity to traverse what I think was 100m of tunnel. A few of the more claustrophobic (or injured) chose the surface route, while most at least descended to see what it was like, but exited at one of the first two (of four) opportunities. The tunnel we entered started out as you see in the picture -- probably a bit under four feet tall, and reasonably wide. With a line of people between you and the exits, it was uncomfortably hot and humid, and that's coming from someone who likes heat and humidity. By the time we reached the last 20m, there were only four of us still remaining in the darkness (the guide had gotten too far ahead and taken the light with him), crawling in a much more compressed -- both narrower and shorter -- space. There were Vietnamese soldiers who spent months in those tunnels, but it took no more than five to ten minutes for some members of our group to start freaking out.

While we were in Saigon, Valerie and I went to check out the Cao Dai temple at Tay Ninh. Cao Daism is a 20th-century religion founded in Vietnam, and claims a few million followers worldwide. I'm not sure how it's regarded among the Vietnamese, but I can imagine how it'd be thought of in the US. (Side note: as one who was raised atheist, I find all religions pretty strange; some seem to have merely had greater legitimacy conferred on them by dint of having been around for so long. So anything here should be taken as curiously amused, but not disparaging.) It is, if nothing else, a very colorful religion, even more so within the cathedral than without.

From what I understand, which isn't much, Cao Daism is a mishmash of various belief systems, primarily Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, but with dashes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, among others. One of the premises is that the large number of religions has caused God's message to be lost, so they're trying to 'bring it back', as it were. God, by the way, is represented by the All-Seeing Eye, which looks remarkably similar to the symbol found on the back of the US$1 bill. Anyway, the Cao Daists are about uniting humanity, overlooking differences between people, and peace and understanding, which all sounds pretty good to me.

If I'm getting this right, God often tries to relay his message through cultural means or intermediaries (their saints, who have appeared in visions, and are sort of like prophets, I guess). The three major saints are thus Sun Yat-Sen (of Chinese nationalism), a Vietnamese poet laureate named Nguyen Binh Khiem, and Victor Hugo.