The Muddy Waters

Back Again

    So I'm back in China once again.  I'm finishing the fifth year program of our Chinese program.  For one semester I'll be taking classes at Nanjing University (two classes focused on language, plus two to three regular graduate classes with Chinese students).  I spent the first week here looking for an apartment.  Luckily I found one really close to the school, in this neighborhood:

 

    It's a two-bedroom apartment in good condition.  It's only a five minute walk to most of my classes.  The building is full, as are most of the apartments in this neighborhood.  Most of my neighbors are retired professors or their family members.  Not much to say about classes yet, because I'm currently shopping around.

    My landlord is great.  She's helped me set up electricity, water, and internet.  She also has a contact at the Jiangsu Provincial TV station who has passed tickets on for two different events already!  I didn't even spring for cable here--I only get three channels, and only one national channel--but I've had fun being in the audience at these shows.

    The first show I went to turned out to be a hot ticket.  It was the finals of Jiangsu TV's "Sprite New Voice Competition" （雪碧飞场新声）!  It was an American Idol-type singing competition, except the voting was controlled (a small number of in-audience "representatives" cast a vote, rather than using cell phones).  There were four guys in the finals, and their fans packed the audience. Each guy had a fan club.  The fans were decked out in t-shirts, and they carried special signs that lit up.  There were three Chinese guys and one Korean guy in the finals.

 

The fans wait during taping.

There were five celebrity judges who critiqued the contestants.  Of course they were famous, but I didn't know who any of them were.  The whole competition was to find someone "who could be the next Jay Chou", and Jay Chou actually showed up.  One judge was constantly referred to as "Jay Chou's best friend", and they kept going to him and asking things like "since you're Jay's friend, and you've known him a long time, what do you think HE would think about this song?"

The singers participated in several challenges.  In the first round, they sang their "ideal song", in another, they each took on one of Jay Chou's songs that had a traditional Chinese sound.  One by one, they were eliminated.

 

My favorite song of the night came from the first runner up, named Ding Shao Hua.  He sang and played guitar for an upbeat version of Teresa Teng's song "Tian Mi Mi". 

At the end of the night, Ding Shao Hua faced off against the Korean, Jin/Kim Han Yi (金韩一).  And in the final vote, which was decided by 17 people, Jin Han Yi won.  Jay Chou came on and claimed although he had been busy off-stage in meetings, he had been glued to the TV the whole time.  MMhmmm.

Taping took about four hours.  I didn't realize it was the finals until I was in the audience! 

More to come later.  It's already 12:30 here.

Updates

I was so busy this summer that I haven't updated the blog any.  However, I'm gearing up again for the fall.  Daniel and I are returning to China after our wedding.  I'm redesigning the blog a bit, too. New stuff coming soon.

The Thesis, it takes over my life

    I haven't felt like writing much because all my writing energy is devoted to finishing my thesis!  I am close to finishing...hopefully I'll be able to tie everything together in the end.  Besides writing my thesis, I have been cooking and poking around for interesting videos.  I thought about discussing the Grass Mud Horse (NOT work safe English description of a really juvenile Chinese pun...) that my Chinese friends had told me about, but the Western media has picked it up in a major way.  You know it's already over when the NYT finally picks it up.
    But in the spirit of censorship, why don't you  "Help, Help, Help the Police!"  And I'll finish my thesis.

Flashbacks...

    Watching this clip of the HBO show Flight of the Conchords makes me think back to my karaoke times in Korea and China! 

Malaise de L'Orange

    I was reading the Serious Eats blog earlier, and I came across this multimedia video called "Malaise de L'Orange".  It's a fruit love story.  An artist named Alana Yuen made it.  I've heard Cake's version of "Perhaps, perhaps" before.  I like Cake, but I like Nat King Cole's Spanish version better.  It was featured in one of my favorite movies, Wang Kar Wai's "In the Mood For Love". 

Food Fight: The Movie

I realize all my posts lately seem to touch on food.  I am busy writing my thesis, and that topic would bore most people (but not me!).  I work, go to class, stay at school more, and sleep.  Eating and cooking are about the only hobbies I'm really engaged in right now, so it's the only thing I feel like writing about.

    The Oxford Film Festival is happening this weekend.  As soon as I saw the schedule, I knew I wanted to see the movie Food Fight.  It's a documentary about "how American agricultural policy and food culture developed in the 20th century, and how the California food movement has created a counter-revolution against big agribusiness".  The documentary was well paced, the story didn't drag, and it was visually appealing.  I don't know if I really buy the concept, which is that the Slow Food movement was totally created from this Californian, 60s, counter-cultural, anti-war/anti-establishment mindset.  Yet I thought it was a good introduction to the movement, something for people who don't know much about it.  After the movie was screened, the producer/director of the film spoke briefly.  He mentioned that we should talk more about what we want out of food and spread the word about sustainable food.  Here's my little spiel.

  Sustainable eating is a topic that I have been interested in for a while.  I wish I could say that my high level of environmental awareness led me to this, but really it was just my taste buds.  I like to eat.  I enjoy fresh and flavorful foods, and the freshest foods are obviously local, seasonally grown foods. 

    Even though many people think about pesticide-laden vegetables, tainted foods, and similar scandals when they think of China, learning to cook in China was actually something that brought me closer to fresher food.  I lived close to a food market in Hangzhou.  The sellers there had fresh produce that was grown around Hangzhou.  What they had is what came out of the ground the weeks before.  Produce still had all the dirt in it.  Sometimes it was a little banged up, too.  But everything tasted fresh and flavorful.  No plastic tomatoes or wimpy carrots.  No bamboo shoots until winter.  Going to the market made it easier to pick out seasonal produce.  If it didn't grow in the area, nobody was selling it at the market.  Even the illegal food stalls outside the market followed a seasonal pattern.  One weekend in November, suddenly truckloads of tangerines were parked on roadsides all over Hangzhou.  As it turns out, that was the start of tangerine season.  The same thing happened with sweet potatoes.  It was easy to see what was in season--if it wasn't, then the stalls didn't have it!   
    I eat much less packaged food in China.  For one, they don't have some of the junk I still enjoy eating.  But more so than that, it's just easier to get a hold of fresher produce and meat.  Just like in the US, the number of young people who cook on a daily basis is decreasing.  Yet home cooking is still common.  Chinese refrigerators are a little smaller than American refrigerators, so more people shop at the market on a daily basis.  Fewer people have private cars, so there aren't weekly buy-a-cart-full-of-stuff Walmart runs. Big box retailers like Carrefour and Wal-Mart are moving in, but the neighborhood markets are still bustling.  Lots of people run by the market every day.
    It was tough cooking without a real kitchen (the dorm "kitchen" was a hotplate and a little sink).  Yet I found a lot of pleasure walking across the street and picking out things to make for dinner.  There were stands for each category of food:  produce stands, butcher stands, seafood stalls, live poultry stalls, tofu products stall, fresh pasta/noodle stall, and pickled stuff/spice stalls.  Here's a trip to the market in pictures.

Produce.  The ladies behind us look really surprised that we're hanging out at the local market, looking at veggies and speaking Chinese.


In this picture, you can see how Chinese people eat more types of vegetables than most Americans do.  There's so many types of mushrooms just at that one stall.  Yum!


Meat.  My teacher taught me different cuts of meat, as well as how to tell what's fresh.


Seafood.  Live sea creatures swim inside the tanks.  You can pick out what you want and either take it home live or have the boss clean it up for you.

This food is almost certainly not organic.  I don't know what levels of chemicals are used on the vegetables.  Awareness about organic farming is slowly spreading in China, but it's definitely not a mainstream trend yet.  I think about the market as a farmer's market.  It's local food grown in China.  Most of it is farmed by smaller farms, not shipped from overseas or from faraway mega-farms.  I hope that there aren't too many chemicals in the food.  The most important lessons I learned from the markets were about freshness and seasonally appropriate food.  When I move back to Shanghai, I want to live in a neighborhood with a good market!