Ni hao!
and a very happy moon festival to you. i have eaten way too many mooncakes as is the custom at this time of year, and am feeling a little sick..
So, I've been in China for..well, over a month now i suppose, it feels like no time at all but also forever, as these things tend to. Apologies for my silence so far..there is indeed a lot to tell but it has taken a while for all of it to begin to settle inside me in any coherent way..
I live in the area of Wudaokou, which is in the NW of Beijing between the 4th and 5th ringroads. Beijing is really very big..and although its not that far out, it's still a very long way to the centre! I haven't strayed much out of this area yet, as I've been more focused on settling in/ being lazy than sightseeing, and of course now the hospital (in which i've just finished week 4), which can wait until it's not so hot and less full of hot and bothered tourists. You england-dwellers may be thinking enviously of sunny days, but until now it's not a been a very nice sort of heat - sticky and muggy, not to mention Beijing's legendary pollution, which got really bad last week, like moving through a grey soup, until a few days of merciful rain culminating in a fantastic thunderstorm cleared the area, and the last two days have been beautifully clear, blue and sunny..a sign of things to come i hope! (Autumn is supposed to be the nicest season here).
This is the student area, a network of picturesque university campuses and a fair number of other laowai - foreigners - so we don't stick out particularly, although i have a suspicion that just about every other one is a language student able to communicate in flawless mandarin, unlike our mumblings and stumblings (haven't got very far on the language front yet, i'm ashamed to say). We (myself and lorena, my flatmate/ co student, an essex-italian with even more enthusiasm for Life than me..needless to say we are having a lot of fun!) live in a nice little flat in...i'm never quite sure how to describe it- complex? compound? community? One thing I can say for sure is that I've never lived anywhere quite like it before - it truly is a 'community: it's a friday night and out of my window i can hear chinese music playing, people chatting and joining in little barbecues along the street, cars beeping, bikes clattering. Just around the corner from our apartment is a little supermarket, a hairdressers, a bakery, several fruit stalls, a mini resturant, a pancake seller, and in the centre of the complex, just around the side of our building is its the focal point 'the playground' as we laowai have christened it, it is a concrete air serving a multitude of purposes: there are little exercise machines, and every night the coloured lights come out, the music is cranked up and it turns into a big social event- middle aged men and women take part in elaborate routines that look like a cross between square dancing, tai chi and aerobics - even sometimes ballroom dancing, and around the the edge people gather to gossip and eat, children play with bubbles, young people sip beer in a decorous manner. It really is a party every night! Sometimes it is turned into an outdoor cinema, with seemingly the whole community gathering to watch a bad kung fu film on a ginat screen. In the morning the old and relax practise tai chi, and the rest of the time it's a general hangout area, and..i haven't even mentioned the best part yet..there are table tennis tables! (you may not know this, but table tennis was a formative part of my childhood experiences, due to many rainy camping holidays..). It's taken me a while to get around to having a go, but when me and my extremely competitive french classmate (there are quite a few of us living in this same bit) wandered down there the other day, we were quickly dragged into a doubles game with an old chinese man and his friend - 'the demon' we've nicknamed him due to his use of spin - which invoked much hilarity in all involved, including onlookers! We've played again with the since and not only is it a lovely way to interact with your neighbours, it's also a brilliant way to wind down after a hard day in the hospital - i love games that encourage ruthless competitiveness in a harmless sort of way! Oh, and did i mention that there is even a massage place? 'Blind massage' is a common phenomena it seems, and any time of the day you can pop round and get a slightly painful but fantastic tuina massage for the princely sum of about £2.30. I can over emphasise how amazing this is. Literally, it can be 9pm, feeling a bit achey after a day of sitting, decide to wander all of 3 minutes walk and go straight in and get the kind of effective massage it's hard to find in england for 20 times the price.
Lorena found the apartment with the help of Emily, a friend of the year above's who has been incredibly kindly running around helping everyone with all their problems, from finding homes to translating for plumbers, so all i had to do was turn up and stumble into my lovely room, all mine, empty the entire contents of my rucksack gleefully onto the floor and enjoy the novelty of being able to control the exact temperature of my environment..i then spent several days enjoying this wonder and reading harry potter (it's brilliant by the way if you're resisting..) before venturing out to discover what my new life was going to be all about! my friend dana (a latvian travelling companion in mongolia) stayed for the first week and we went to explore the hutong district, an fascinating but rapidly disappearing network of alleyways opening onto intriguing courtyards, and to the summer palace, which has, being joyfully only 10 mins by bike from the hospital, become my sanctuary, a place of grass, trees and sky, coloured temples and lily ponds, high arched bridges and willow trees. In the evening it is filled with local people walking, exercising, fishing and singing. People told me before i came that the chinese are remarkably lacking in self consciousness, and from what i've seen, it's true - they don't consider it odd at all to take a nap anywhere anytime, do strange exercises, sing loudly (or of course, spit in the street- yuk) - it's very refreshing!
So, back to the flat - we also have the world's most helpful landlord, Mr. jin, or Jin as we rudely call him, in the first week, did the following things - 1. brought us a microwave as a moving in present 2. took us on a tour of the area in his flash car 3. spent several hours fixing the broadband connection and trying to get skype to work (he is very anxious that we be able to communicate with our families!) 4. took us out for dinner, plus 2 friends, with his wife, 2 sisters and niece to what he says is the best duck restuarant in beijing! Peking duck is of course famous, and we had between us - i'm not exaggerating..at least 20 different dishes, involving every possible part of a duck, including feet, knuckles and even blood (tofu in blood anyone?) followed by an entire roast duck carved in front of us which they showed us how to eat in the proper manner involving pancakes and so on. Actually it was all pretty delicious and a great experience to eat with a chinese family, although i've gone vegetarian since! not too sure about chinese animal treatment standards. Eating here can be great, as food out is so cheap and there is a multitude of dishes to choose from, but it's hard to find some that isn't covered in grease and oil, and of course msg, which makes me feel ill - goodness knows what effect it must have if you eat it at every meal. So i'm getting back into the old brown rice and steamed vegetables which is doing me good..I seem to be hungry all the time, it's all so intensive.
So, nearly four weeks ago, bright eyed and bushy tailed in our spanking new white coats, clutching eagerly purchased new stationary (this of course makes all the difference..) we turned up at Xiyuan Yiyuan, the renowned Chinese medicine hospital situated near the Summer Palace, if you've ever been to beijing, about a half hour's cycle ride from my home. Cycling here is very fun indeed, in fact i'd say it's my favourite thing about china by far. Bicycle riding has of course an old tradition here, and there is a definite difference in attitudes to the uk - you get the feeling that despite the huge rise in the number of car users, bikes still have the upper hand..There are of course whole lanes just for them (these in themselves are kind of chaotic as you can cycle in any direction on any side of the road..and bear in mind that quite a lot of two-wheelers tow trailers with piled-up loads behind them!) but when intermingling with other road users, the one with the strongest resolve wins...'chicken', anyone? There are no actual traffic rules for bikes, so anarchy rules, it reminds me of ones of those quantum models where you see the particles whirling around at random, only in this case, somehow, noone collides. It's fascinating. Alls sorts of people cycle, form students to rubbish collectors to business man, and the bike of choice is the 'sit up and beg' as my friend put it, none of this head down, racing thing, it's all pretty relaxed. Time to chat and so on.
So, back to the hopsital..on first sights it looks a bit run down. Peeling paint, dirty toilets, a general air of shabbiness. However, behind this misleading exterior it is really very efficient. For example: a patient turns up, decided themselves which department they want to go to (no waiting around to be referred to a specialist), waits to see the doctor (no waiting weeks for an appointment). If the doctor then decides they need, say an MRI or a CT scan, they will send themn straight off for one and quite likely get the results that afternoon. Yes, the same day. Not waiting 6 months. In a supposedly more poorly equipped hospital. The doctor will then prescribe both chinese herbs and western medication as necessary, thus cutting out the need for to-ing an fro-ing between different doctors who don't communicate. And a packet of chinese herbs costs about 10 yuan (65p) as opposed to about 10 times that amount in the uk. It makes you wonder what on earth the NHS is doing!!
However, the medical system here is getting more complicated, and Dr. wan (I'll tell you about her in a bit) said that it is not so great now - the cost of treatment had risen so that people in the countryside can no longer afford it, and being a doctor is a hard, badly paid job. Apparently, in the wake of the new capitalist system, they are trying to decide how to shape the medical service, whether to base it on the medical systems of the US, UK or German healthcare systems. Hmm. Guess it'll have to be Germany then. I can't say with any accuracy what effect the revolution had on healthcare. So I'll leave that subject for another time. happily, i've managed to install some security software which means that i can access any website. It seems odd to me that the chinese government should be so adamant about censorship (to the point of demanding that major companies comply with it's demands - such as google- so much for 'do no evil!', and let's not forget the case of Shi Tao. Here is a quote from (normally censored) wikipedia
'On April 20, 2004, the Chinese government released the Number 11 document "A notice concerning the work for maintaining stability" (关于当前稳定工作的通知
. In the document, it warned journalists that overseas pro-democracy Chinese dissidents may come back to mainland China during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 on June 4th, which would affect the politico-social order's stability. It asked all news media to not report anything regarding the so-called "June 4th event", Falun Gong or people calling for politico-social change. Shi used his private Yahoo! email account and sent a brief of the document to an overseas web site called Asia Democracy Foundation.
When the Chinese government found out, it demanded the sender's personal information from Yahoo!'s Hong Kong office. Yahoo! turned the information over without asking what it was for. Shortly thereafter, Shi Tao was detained on November 24, 2004. The Chinese authorities confiscated his computer and documents without showing any proper permit or document, and warned his family members not to talk about it with others. He was formally arrested on December 14.
His lawyer, Guo Guo-Ding (郭国汀, famous for taking human rights cases, stated that the search and seizure and subsequent arrest were illegal. As a result, his license to practice law was suspended for one year by Shanghai's Department of Law. He was later put under house arrest, and one of his co-workers had to take over the case.
On March 11, 2005, Hunan Changsha People's Middle Court held its first hearing secretly. It lasted for two hours. Shi Tao's mother and brothers came all the way from Ningxia to Changsha, but they were not permitted to go inside and observe. After the hearing was over, Shi was permitted ten minutes of private time with his family members. Fifteen days later, he was sentenced to prison for ten years, and will lose his political rights for two years on the charge of leaking state secrets.'
(It's important to remember this sort of thing shouold one be tempted to be sucked into a 'china's so wonderful' sort of bubble).
And yet it is relatively easy to evade....strange. The Olympics is everywhere at the moment. Quite literally. In our 'playground' is a big screen counting down to it, minute by minute. Even in the Botanical Gardens, a peaceful retreat from the rampant develpment happening evrywhere (in which buildings appear, quite literally, overnight, is full of banners with the cartoon 'Olympic antelope'- which, incidentally, they stole from Tibet). Everywhere you look are banners, flags, slogans proclaiming 'One World, One Dream' message...a thinly veiled version of the 'One China' message methinks? Recently, some friends of mine were arrested for abseiling off the Great Wall with a banner proclaiming: 'One World, One Dream, Free Tibet'! Good eh? It's going to fascinating to see what happens at the Olympics. I was just listening to a radio 4 programme (yes, that's right, radio 4 - online radio, it's a miracle!) about a journalist who tried to report on the goings-on in an unrestful village..needless to say he was quietly discouraged..Upon asking whether this would happen during the Olympics, they answered 'but everything will be different then'. China have promised the unprecendented: total journalistic freedom during this time. Let's see what 'Human Rights Watch' have to say:
'Just 11 months before the 2008 Beijing Games begin, journalists in China continue to face physical abuse and harassment from police and plainclothes thugs who appear to work at official behest.
“The continuing harassment and physical abuse of journalists in the countdown to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing raises serious questions about the sincerity of government pledges to greater media freedom,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The Chinese government seems to see a free media as an enemy rather than a watchdog of public safety and social stability.”
As part of its 2001 bid for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government expressly assured the IOC that it would loosen its long-held grip on the media during the Olympic Games. That commitment is consistent with the obligation of Olympic host cities to comply with Article 51 of the Olympic Charter, which stipulates that the IOC should take “all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games.” Moreover, Article 35 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China specifically guarantees “freedom ... of the press.”
One thing's for sure: you cannot underestimate how significant these Games are to China. My friend Emily told me that on the day of the decision, they all started throwing furniture out of the windows!! It is a huge matter of national pride, and they care deperately what the rest of the world thinks about them...keeping 'face' is very important in china. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens next summer...that sounds like the title of a bad horror film! (-: It's hard to say how much surveillance there is. There are guards, quite literally, everywhere- but often they seem like an inoccuous/ reassuring presence (this feels like one of the safest places I've ever lived. To the point at which it is laughabke after Hackney..) But apparently police station are to be set up on university campuses, to monitor student activity. at what point does the benign become the malign??
Anyway, back to the hospital. on the first day, we had to divide ourselves into groups of 5, which regressed us right back back to primary school...Really, i hate to grumble, but soemtimes i wonder how such a dysfuctional group of people were somehow condemned to spend 5 years together. Don't get me wrong, I'm fond of them all, and happily my group is excellent- hardworking, committed, diligent, considerate and fun, thank God. But already the level of complaining, laziness, squabbling and so on within the group is quite extraordinary. Which adds fuel to my theory that a lot of people who want to be therapists are really Quite Weird. I'm sorry if any of you are reading this. But I'm sure you'll agree it's true..
There couldn't be a bigger contrast to the doctors we are working with, who are virtually saint-like in their calm demeanours, endless patience, and extensive knowledge. Unfailingly, they look relaxed, cheerful and attentive, even when seeing over 20 patients in a morning. We spent the first 2 weeks in the 'foreign' department with the lovely Dr. Wan and her assistant, Dr. Su. The name is misleading, as basically it was the 'rich old inpatients' department - i.e. a room each and plenty of time for learning. We took one case each day and practiced questioning, analysing, diagnosis and creating prescriptions, which was a marvellous introduction to the time here - we were very lucky, as the other groups were thrust straight into seeing hundred of patients at a time, whilst we were able to sit on comfy sofas and have in-depth discussions of such thorny matters as - 'so what exactly is the difference between liver yin and liver blood deficiency'?, as well as interesting diversions involving sunbjects such as chinese astrology...She emphasised a lot the necessity for flexible thinking in the practice of TCM and the the ability to be able to look from many different perspectives - ie. there are no absolute answers. She said of me, in as many words, that I have a determination to knwo nthe truth, buit to learn chinese medicine will be good for me because it will teach me to look from different angles, rather than just the one route. Perceptive, eh?
It was a wrench to leave our cozy chats and enter real hopsital life, but..next was neurology, which has just concluded. This involved lots of severe conditions such as cerebral infarctions, strokes, multiple sclerosis and myasthenia gravis, the like of which would send one scurrying in terror, but were treated quite successfully here. Of course, there was lots of western med stuff going on, which had had me poring through my western med books in a nerdish manner, and my extensive spidery handwritten notewriting has already gained me the nickname 'Hermione' (Thuy from my group is more than a little obsessed with Harry potter! of course, i'm not..) I love being a big nerd and i want to rush home at the end of the day and read up on everything. For the first time in the whole course there is nothing else to think about apart from this, no stupid essays to write (for now), no extraneous modules, i dont have any jobs or much of a social life. It's great. Basically, the day follows a pattern that goes something like this:
6am - wake up
somewhere before 6.30 - crawl out of bed
eat porridge, read online news, listen to radio 3/4 etc. On bad or Dr. Li days drink coffee..
7.35-7.45 - leave house, clamber onto bike and embark on the joys of roads as already discussed, with or without lorena and a giggly start to the day
8.10-8.20 - arrive at hospital, in a good mood if if i wasnt already from the cycle ride, woo-hoo!
8.30 - Sit down in outpatients, looking eager and attentive. Watch while Dr. Lee (aka. 'the machine' moves steadily through streams of patients suffering from insomnia and depression and such strange symptoms as 'feeling like a spider crawling up the face'. 'it's all psychological' Dr. Li says..Write everything down on clipboard and grapple with complexities of herb combinations etc
10.30 - slightly less attentive, but still keen. start to doodle and dream occasionally..
11.30 - very hungry, start fantasising about lunch but still trying hard to wonder..'Qing feng teng'...what is that, exactly...?
2 hour lunch break..go with my 'gang' to restaurant, canteen or eat own food. Try to study a little. feel sleepy. Eat freshly baked seed biscuits from stall in courtyard.
1.30 or 2pm- afternoon session with doctor. Try to think of intelligent questions.
3.30 - Hometime!!
4.15 - drink tea, eat yoghurt, do some yoga before getting down to the books again...Or play table tennis!
and so on
Dr. Li is head of the neurology department, and was a western doctor first, so his knowledge is impressive. He's a legend. his MS patients actually get better. He sees patients from 7.30 to 12.30 every morning and never falters. Some of his reports are are a little perplexing..how every patient can have a 'white tongue coating' and a 'thin pulse'i'm not quite sure..but it is a privelege to spend time with someone like him. The doctors here definitely respond to their perception of the level of interest of their students, and when we have cornered Dr. Li for an afternoon (rather than being abandoned to the young doctors who sigh at our stupidity), we've learnt all sorts of interesting stuff..the other day he even took us through a guided relaxation exercise to aid sleep..how many top neurology doctors would you find doing that??
Now, however, it's a week holiday. Moon festival, National day and all that. Lorena's gone off on adventures, but I'm out of travelling mode and into staying. Apparently the whole of china descends on Beijing in this week, so it might not be the best time to go sightseeing!
Otherwise..i've started learning calligraphy with a young art student, which is every bit as difficult as i expected (it's all very symptomatic of one's state of mind..)...been to an italian restaurant with lorena (which she of course discovered immediately, and chatted away in terrible italian and got invited to an italian-chinese moon celebration!)..met numerous young chinese wanting to improve their english. this is always a humbling experience - they
all work so hard..
I'm so happy to have finished this blog at last! i promise the next one will be sooner....
Zaijian!