bezdomny ex patria

Yes, I have been rather silent of late. I’ve been busy and distracted. I have large and growing piles of tests and essays to be marked. The piles of essays will continue to grow, and are even threatening to take over the office and start a whole new civilisation of their own. I will continue to be mostly rather silent as I take on these hordes of marauding essays and beat them back so that my colleagues and I can continue to use our office unmolested.

What inspires this brief break in the silence is the walk home from the supermarket this afternoon. After class I headed down to the nearest branch of Shouhang hoping to take advantage of the specials they have on. No luck. What I wanted was sold out. I guess I’ll have to try again Thursday or Friday morning closer to opening time. On the way home I decided to take a slight detour, walking up through the area just west of our complex and stopping by the newsagents for cellphone card and, perhaps, a copy of So Rock! if the latest edition was out yet. Again, no luck. Managed the cellphone card, but not the magazine. But a luckless shopping trip is not the point.

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It’s nice to be told straight up I’ll never get a mortgage because I’m a foreigner. And for my wife to be told she’ll never get a mortgage because she married a foreigner.

On Friday after work lzh met up with a friend. Her friend said, “Hey, there’s this real estate development out in Yanjiao (燕郊) that’s selling apartments cheap! You should come along and have a look!” And so they agreed to meet at the 930 bus stop at Dabeiyao (Guomao) at 11am.

Yesterday morning dawned with me feeling tired and headachy and generally not wanting to do much more than sleep. But I was kicked out of bed, thrown in the shower, dressed, and dragged out the door. Well, it wasn’t that bad, and it would be nice to see if these apartments were any good and if they were affordable.

The norwester had finally come and cleared out that ridiculous damp, snowy weather we’ve been plagued with for the first half of November. A clear, clean, blue sky, but a bitterly cold breeze. We got to Dabeiyao, met our friends, found the stop for the bus we needed (the 930, like apparently all the 900-series buses, seems to come in a wide variety of mutations, so we had to find one particular 930 that would drop us right outside this development), and eventually managed to get on one. There was quite a crowd of people looking to catch the exact same bus, so we watched three load up and leave before we made it to the front of the queue.

The bus was pretty good, taking off down the Jingtong Expressway then the Jingha Expressway, making a couple of stops along the northern edge of Tongzhou town before getting back on the Jingha, zipping past Songzhuang and across the Chaobai River, over the border into Hebei, then straight down the G102 through Yanjiao. It took us a little under an hour to get out there, and that was largely thanks to the lack of traffic restrictions on the weekends causing backups at the toll gates. Lack of traffic restrictions and the large number of real estate developments being built in Yanjiao. Although we were in Hebei, it seems most of the cars had Beijing licence plates, and the sales office of the development we visited was packed.

The Chaobai River wasn’t much of a river. More like a long, narrow, shallow ditch with a couple of tiny streams winding their way through, but otherwise mostly grass. It would be nice to think it turns into a proper river with the summer rains, but that grass was a bit too long for me to believe it had suddenly sprung up in that brief gap between summer and November when it was still warm enough for things to grow.

It seems that Yanjiao is taking advantage of its proximity to Beijing- especially the CBD- to drive its development. “40 minutes to the CBD” they told us, and considering it took us 50-odd minutes to get there through weekend unrestricted traffic, I can believe that’s true of a weekday morning. The most common kind of advertising along the G102 in Yanjiao was for real estate, and where Yanjiao was expanding at its western and eastern edges, there was no shortage of sales offices. Especially along its northwestern edge, apartment blocks seemed to be the most important cash crop of Yanjiao’s fields. Every bus stop- including Dabeiyao- seemed to have a huddle of real estate touts hawking apartments. I can’t understand why anybody would buy an apartment from somebody standing at a bus stop clutching a well-worn brochure, but I guess they must be able to make a living this way, otherwise they wouldn’t be standing out in that cold, cold wind. And glancing at the map, Yanjiao seems to be no further from Beijing’s CBD than Shijingshan, and closer than Shunyi or Changping.

Our destination was on the eastern edge of the town. The western edge was all fancy, new real estate, then the bus took us through the centre of town, which was considerably older and betrayed Yanjiao’s real status as a township of Sanhe City (三河市), and a small one at that, with a population of 104800 in 2002. The dusty streets were lined with weathered buildings from the white-tile period of modern Chinese architecture, other buildings with very-faux-Classical European facades. It felt very much like a small county town, but not as far along in its development as any of Beijing’s equivalent outlying towns. Nevertheless, it seemed like quite a pleasant place, and certainly had all the amenities one would need in order to persuade people to buy apartments out there, plenty of restaurants, supermarkets, markets, hospitals and schools.

We arrived at our destination on the eastern edge of the town. The first thing I noticed when we got off the bus was the cooling towers of a powerstation just fifty-odd metres northeast of this development. Steam from the towers conveniently obscured the chimney and its smoke, but I’d noticed this powerstation in the distance when we were driving through the town. I was told it would soon be closed down. I have no way to confirm that. Anyway, right in front of us was a fancy new towerblock, obviously yet to be completed. Well, the structure was all there and people had moved in to their apartments, but the lower levels that were supposed to house a shopping mall were still in use as the sales office. So, finsihed, but not quite. Immediately to the west was Phase 2 of the development, where are friends are planning to buy a small apartment. On the eastern side was an old, 1950s-looking estate of long, low-rise brick apartment blocks that would soon have to make way for Phase 3. To the south was an area of low-level industrial buildings, little more than a shanty town.

Inside the soon-to-be-mall/sales office, the walls of the lobby were covered in posters showing the various kinds of apartments on offer and sofas arranged around coffee tables at which multitudes were doing their deals. Under the escalator was a large model showing the finished project, a model that showed the effects of the myriad people with an urgent need to touch it in order to figure out what it will be like when it’s finished. This place was beyond crowded, and the thousands of small groups of apartment hunters and buyers acted with such urgency you’d think they were running late and in danger of missing their train. Our friends found their agent we had a look around. Our friends were there to book an apartment, that is, to put down a 10 thousand yuan non-refundable booking fee which would get them an apartment set aside for a week, a week in which they had to find the deposit and get a mortgage. We were there to have a look and see if it was worth booking an apartment for my brother-in-law, and perhaps, if possible, ourselves, something I was not overly happy about- apartments are not the kind of thing one buys on impulse- but that’s what we were there for.

The apartments seemed fine. Indeed, we did get to look at two in the completed Phase 1, and we certainly could not see anything wrong with them. We would, of course, have trouble getting a mortgage, but we were told there were ways and means around that. My brother-in-law doesn’t have that mortgage problem, though. What was frustrating is that we could put the deposit down, we certainly do have the money, but a large portion of that money can not be touched until lzh has a visa for New Zealand in her hands. If we so much as glance at it before then, NZ Immigration will deny her the visa. A couple of quick calls, and no, we can’t make up that shortfall that isn’t a shortfall but is borrowing money from friends. We’d be able to get some, but not enough. In any case, now is not a good time for us to be buying an apartment, we have other plans. But we did pay the booking fee on a small apartment for my brother-in-law, and I hope he comes up with the deposit by Friday, I don’t want to lose that 10 thousand yuan.

We arrived at midday, and the process of discussions, looking around, urgent phonecalls  to various people, more discussions, more phonecalls, paperwork, and handing over money took quite some time. It was almost 5 when we got back to Beijing, starving. Yoshinoya rescued us, and then I snuck off to O’Farrells to wind down while lzh phoned her father and her brother to discuss the rapid rounding up of money for the deposit on her brothers’ apartment that now needs to be done.

And the norwester continues to blow, keeping the sky clean, clear and blue. lzh is sitting a translation exam. I’m starting to think about lunch.

Following on from my last post, 新京报/The Beijing News has an article today reporting several developments in Beijing’s preparation for the upcoming ‘flu peak season. The headline states that the city’s elderly will be able to get vaccinated against Influenza A H1N1 from next week. The article itself states:

据北京市疾控中心副主任庞星火介绍，60岁以上老人用的甲流疫苗正在向卫生局申请调配，预计下周内可在社区启动接种服务。

According to vice chairman of the Beijing Municipal Disease Control Centre Pang Xinghuo, an application to deploy H1N1 vaccine for over-60s has been submitted to the Ministry of Health, and it is expected that vaccination service in the community can begin next week.

But the article seems to be more a collection of interesting little tidbits of news than a single, coherent piece. Up until yesterday, 630 thousand Beijingers had been vaccinated against H1N1 and, as reported in the article I wrote about in the last post, the rate of adverse reactions is the same as that of the vaccine for seasonal ‘flu over the same period of time. When combined with vaccinations for regular ‘flu- which has been supplied free to over-60s and primary and middle school students, and for which vaccinations end today- a total of 1.9 million people have received ‘flu vaccinations, an increase over last year’s vaccination rate.

Now, I’m all for an increased vaccination rate, but those numbers don’t look quite so impressive compared to Beijing’s total population. Still, H1N1 vaccination has yet to start, so hopefully over the next few weeks the numbers will continue to increase.

What of those masks more and more people are wearing? First up, the municipal drug bureau says there are over 7 million of them stored up, which should be ample to supply the market’s demand. Apparently some company in Tianjin claims to have made a mask that can control the H1N1 virus. The municipal drug bureau says there are no such masks in Beijing at this point. And besides, according to the Ministry of Health’s disease control centre:

甲流主要通过飞沫传播，合格的医用外科口罩即可满足个人防护需求，身体健康的人在日常生活中最好不戴口罩。对于个别口罩生产及销售单位宣传的“抑制或杀灭微生物”功能，其实对防控甲流并无显著功效。

H1N1 is mainly spread through droplets, and standard surgical masks meet individual prevention needs. Healthy people should not wear masks in everyday life. As for the “control or eliminate microbes” function advertised by specific mask production and sales companies, in fact they have no noticeable effect on the prevention or control of H1N1.

I would like to bold that entire quotation for emphasis, but doing so would take away the emphasis. Try this approach instead:

• Standard surgical masks are perfectly adequate.
• Healthy people shouldn’t wear them, anyway.
• There are no masks that can control or prevent H1N1

There is also an attached “related news” article which sets out the rules decided by the education committee and health bureau for how universities must respond to outbreaks of acute respiratory illness and fever in both dormitories and within class groups. To be honest, I doubt I could get my head around the numbers in any language, but I’ll try:

In dormitories:

If half the students in one dormitory have acute respiratory illness and more than 10 students in a neighbouring dormitory have a fever, then all the students in the dormitories must stop going to class and must be quarantined.

Class groups:

In classes of 30 students or less, if 5 or more cases of fever (temperature over 37.5 degrees) occur in one day, or, in classes of over 30 students, if 20% or more develop a fever in one day, then the affected students should be quickly taken off for treatment and quarantine. Campus hospitals are instructed to give the appropriate treatment to students with mild symptoms, and send those with severe symptoms up to the next hospital.

Also, schools have to check students’ temperature daily.

I hope I got all that right.

There’s also an interesting little note at the end about district- and county-level education committees being told to prepare for “internet education” so that education will not have to stop in the event H1N1 forces school closures.

Assuming I’m reading all of that right, it’s comforting to see Beijing making preparations for a possible outbreak of H1N1 (and believe me, school dormitories are prime breeding grounds for respiratory illnesses) without any of those preparations going “over the top”. It’s also good to see the government calling “bullshit” on these masks.

新京报/The Beijing News reports that Beijingers can get free vaccinations against Influenza A H1N1. Anybody over the age of 3 who is willing and gives their informed consent and who is a registered Beijing resident can get their free vaccination from any of 402 vaccination centres any time between November 16 and December 13. I take “registered Beijing resident” to mean that foreigners and Chinese whose residence is registered in a province, municipality or autonomous region other than Beijing still have to pay for vaccines. Unfortunately the 3.63 million doses of vaccine Beijing currently has are for some reason not suited to over 60s, so the city’s elderly will have to wait.

The article also reports some interesting statistics regarding Beijing’s H1N1 vaccination programme to date:

北京自9月21日首先在国庆庆典参与人群中开展甲流疫苗接种以来，至昨日已累计为超过44万甲流易感人群（主要是中小学生，医务人员，司乘人员等重点岗位的社会公共服务人员）提供了甲流疫苗接种。

From the launch of H1N1 vaccination on September 21 among those participating in the National Day festivities up until yesterdaya total of over 440 thousand people susceptible to H1N1 have been vaccinated (mainly social and public service personnel in key positions such as primary and middle school students, medical workers, transport workers).

“不良反应发生率并不比季节性流感疫苗高，且多为局部的轻微不良反应。”市卫生局疾控处处长赵涛说，随着疫情发展，以及甲流疫苗在广泛人群中接种后的安全表现，现在，有意愿接种甲流疫苗的市民越来越多。

“The rate of adverse reactions is no greater than for seasonal flu vaccinations, and are mostly localised minor adverse reactions” said Municipal Health Bureau Disease Control Office directer Zhao Tao. Along with the development of the epidemic and the expressions of safety among the broad masses of those vaccinated, currently more and more citizens wish to be vaccinated against H1N1.

Further down, the article states that from November 16 the vaccination centres will be open between 8am and midday and 1:30pm and 5:30pm. Somehow I doubt that many people reading this blog will be eligible for free vaccinations, but if you want to know where the nearest vaccination centre is you can check the Municipal Health Bureau’s official website (there are links to English, French and Japanese sites at the top of the page- but I hope others have an easier time trying to find the locations of these vaccination centres than I’m having) or dial 12320. Also, large-scale work units such as universities, schools, government institutions, and large enterprises may also get their own vaccination centres.

And so today is 立冬, the start of winter. After a week of obssessively bleeding radiators to try and encourage hot water to come through the pipes, only for cold water to drip out, we seem to have some heat.

Well, not so much “heat” as “not cold”. Still, it’s enough that the temperature inside our apartment climbed to 17 degrees last night, and 18 degrees by the time I got up this morning. It’s amazing how much of a difference those precious few degrees of warmth make. Waking up to 15 degrees was chilly, prompting me to crank up the aircon so we could start the day warm. Going to bed at 16 degrees had us shivering and huddling together to try and get warm. And as our radiators get less and less “not cold” and more and more “actually quite warm”, perhaps the situation will continue to improve.

But based on last winter’s experience, another cold snap will have us back down to 16 degrees pretty quickly.

Waking up, I looked at my cellphone. Twentysomething past six. Surely not, it’s still pitch dark outside! I snuck a peak out the window. Aha:

Lack of wind + the city’s central heating boilers firing up (many of which still burn coal) = ever thickening haze.

Understood. The sky did slowly, weakly lighten as the sun tried to penetrate the haze.

Curious: Yesterday saw a veritable torrent of hits to this blog coming from one particular American IP address. These hits are listed as “feeds” and have lead to an utterly absurd spike in the stats. The IP address in question seems to be connected to this page, which I can’t open (indeed, other links from what seems to be the site’s main page also behave as if they’re GFW’d). The torrent seems to be continuing this morning. I can’t see anything objectionable about that site, I’m just kinda curious as to what is causing this sudden surge in the stats.

Three headlines grabbed my attention this morning:

Beijing: CCTV building soon repaired. Actually, I don’t care too much about this, but that burnt-out shell has been sitting there for so long… If, as the article says the architect claims, the structure is basically sound and it is salvageable, then cool, salvage it.

And in not-so-good news: 5.0 earthquake in Yunnan, 28 injured, Civil Affairs Bureau launches level 4 response. The quake hit Bingchuan, up near Dali, at 5:07am yesterday. No reports of deaths, at least not in that article, which is fortunate- and hopefully it stays fortunate- but there are plenty of damaged houses. Relief supplies are being rushed in.

Better news: 60% of central heating boilers already lit, won’t be stopped if weather warms up. To be honest, I haven’t even read that one yet. As soon as I read the headline I sprinted madly round the apartment bleeding the radiators. There was much hissing of slightly pressurised air coming out, followed by water. Cold water, but hey, that means there’s water in the pipes, and hopefully the cold water will soon be followed by hot. I did notice smoke coming from a heating plant not far north of here yesterday. I can’t see any other chimneys from  my apartment, but I will be looking out for them and hope to see plumes of smoke. And I hope to soon feel heat coming out my radiators.

All Saints’ Day. I wake up a bit after 7, properly awake, no way to get back to sleep, so I get up. My wife was still sleeping, so I left her in peace, wandered in to the lounge room, open the curtains, and

SNOW!

It’s snowing! I knew it had suddenly got cold yesterday, but yesterday was dry, clear blue sky, and I didn’t realised it had suddenly gotten that cold. And snow on November 1, isn’t that a little early?

So I fire up the computer and start brewing tea. I sign into Kaixin001 and see Guoan won the championship, Chen Lin is dead, and a video of a Chinese guy (Sun somebody) who plays football in England making a most impressive save, sprinting back and getting a foot to the ball just in time to prevent the goal.

lzh woke up and asked if it was raining. No, I say. Don’t lie, she says. Go look for yourself. Snow! But Ma and Ba haven’t sold the apples yet! Will snow freeze the apples? I don’t know. So she phones home and her dad says it’s only sleeting up in Yanqing. That I do not understand. Yanqing is colder than Beijing. If it’s snowing here, how could it only be sleeting up there?

And then I learn a new word. lzh is still much perturbed by the snow, and asks maybe if it’s some kind of 冤情. What? 冤情. Yeah, but what’s that? Eventually I get an answer, and she tells me a legend of some guy who died in June, and so it snowed, apparently the snow being Heaven’s tears. Fine, but what does 冤情 (yuānqíng) mean? Nciku says it’s “Facts of an injustice”, while CNKI says simply “grievance”. The dead tree dictionary next to me agrees with Nciku.

And what’s this legend? I try searching Baidu Baike. No luck. Baidu Guoxue. Still none. Well, I’d only just started looking when lzh says she’ll find me the story, and here it is on Baidu Zhidao. And that rankles. My students know from long and repeated experience that if they ever suggest Baidu Zhidao as a possible means of researching their essay topics, I will immediately respond 百度什么都不知道 (Baidu knows nothing)! Oh well, at least I can read the story, now, assuming of course that the answer Baidu flags as best is accurate. Anyway, it’s the story of a young woman who was unjustly executed, and as a result, it snowed in June. Something like that.

And I learn another new word: 昭雪 – to exonerate or rehabilitate. Interesting.

Meanwhile, the snow changes from the usual Beijing-style tiny little flakes to gigantic, fluffy snow, and the paths, which still had too much heat for the snow to settle on them, seem to have cooled enough to allow the snow to start piling up there, too. The usual low rumble of buses passing along Xidawang Lu is only a faint whisper.

I think this is about the awesomest thing I’ve seen online all year.

Maybe I should’ve snuck a recording and submitted it to the good folks at Beijing Sounds…. Anyways, my wife just said:

愤青儿

Yes, with a full, classic, and entirely natural, uncontrived, Beijing 儿化音 (rhoticization? is that the right word?) on the end. And so, naturally, one wonders what the R means here? Is it some kind of diminutive? Indicating what? Familiarity? Or is it perhaps a little belittling?

And what sparked this off was the need to explain ‘misanthrope‘ to her- a word I know only in English and French (a word which would be the same, just pronounced differently in those two languages).

Why? Because I’ve been in a rather misanthropic mood today. Well, alright, “misanthrope” is my default setting, but I haven’t had the energy to keep up any pretence of sociability today.

Anyway, lzh seems to equate ‘misanthrope’ with ‘愤青’ (angry youth) – an equation that does not sit well with me. Misanthropes may be often grumpy and generally prickly round the edges, but in my experience they tend to be highly rational individuals. The angry youth, so far as I can tell, don’t do reason or logic very well, placing the emphasis on irrational outbursts of anger. I still haven’t managed to figure out what that anger is about or where it comes from, as they seem to be generally from affluent, urban backgrounds.

Still, it seems to me that developed countries in general have an overabundance of irrationally angry young people, so perhaps we should take the emergence of the angry youth as a sign of China’s development?

Whatever, I was just surprised and intrigued to hear ‘angry youth’ given the Beijing R-treatment.

新京报/The Beijing News reports on an interesting little development in Beijing’s central heating: Contracts. TBN’s Du Ding reports:

“供热合同”出台 供暖不达标将向市民赔偿

“Heating contract” promulgated. Citizens to be compensated if heating not up to standard.

北京今年出台“供热合同”，明年试行，今冬供暖11月7日点火试运行

Beijing promulgates “heating contract” this year, to be trialled next year, this winter heating to be lit November 7 for trial operation.

今后供暖期，供热单位将和市民签订“供热合同”，昨天，北京市市政市容管理委员会供热办主任郭维圻做客“首都之窗”时表示，为保障供热双方利益，今年北京将出台“供热合同”，明年试行并推广。内容包括供热企业达不到合同规定标准，将给市民赔偿等。

In the upcoming heating period heating companies will sign a “heating contract” with citizens. Beijing Municipal Cityscape Management Committee Heating Office chairman Guo Weiqi said yesterday as a guest on eBeijing (English) that in order to guarantee the interests of both parties, this year Beijing will promulgate a “heating contract” to be tested and promoted next year. The contents will include a requirement for heating companies to compensate citizens if they don’t reach the required standard.

今年出台“供热合同”

“Heating contract” promulgated this year

每年供暖期，都会发生部分市民、单位因嫌供热单位供热不到位而拒交供热费；一些供暖企业因收不到供暖费便降低供热质量。郭维圻表示，针对此问题，北京市 将通过立法的形式加以规范和完善，“立法过程中就要建立合同制度。”据介绍，该“供热合同”将由市民与供暖单位签订，如果供热企业达不到合同规定的标准， 将会给予市民相应的赔偿等。

In every year’s heating period there are some citizens and units that feel the heat supplied by heating companies is not up to standard and so refuse to pay the heating bill; some heating companies, because they don’t receive heating fees, lower the quality of heating. Guo Weiqi said that, with this problem in mind, Beijing would set standards and perfect the system through a legislative form. “We need to establish a contractual system in the legislative process.” It is said that this “heating contract” will be signed by citizens and heating companies, and that if heating companies don’t meet the standards stipulated in the contract, they will have to appropriately compensate citizens.

62357575供暖热线将开通

Heating hotline 62357575 opened

[eliding a paragraph- I don't think we need a rundown on how much gas and coal is ready to be burned to keep us warm]

李楠表示，全市各个供热应急抢修队伍11月7日开始实行24小时值班。另外，从11月7日起将向社会开通市级供热服务热线：62357575。各区县政府大型供热企业和单位，也要同时对社会公布服务电话。

Li Nan [note: a member of the Beijing Municipal Cityscape Management Committee] said that all the city’s heating emergency repair teams would start implementing 24 hour duty from November 7. Also, from November 7 a city-level heating service hotline, 62357575, would be opened to the public. Every district and county government’s large-scale heating company will also need to publicly announce a service phone number at the same time.

Notes:

• 北京市市政市容管理委员会- well, I found their website easily enough, but I couldn’t figure out why, although their address (bjmac!) was clearly based on an English name, no English name was apparent, even if only in tiny type in the logo. So I just made up a name, and I think “cityscape” sounds way cooler than “Municipal Appearance Committee” or whatever it’s supposed to be.
• 北京市 将通过立法的形式加以规范和完善- I wound up just having to mangle that. If anybody has better suggestions, comment.
• I used “heating company” for every word referring to any kind of organisation responsible for supplying heat for simplicity’s sake.
• Yeah, I know, that last sentence I translated uglily.

Anyway, it’s good to know there’s likely to be hot water running through our radiators from November 7 and that they’re working to set and improve heating standards. Last winter our apartment hovered around the 15/16 degree mark on the coldest days and it was occasionally necessary to crank up the aircon.