Vladimir Komarov and Censoring

The second text in my Chinese reading class is about Vladimir Komarov. Besides learning such useful phrases as 'return to base' and 'the universe,' I've also scratched the surface of censorship and (re-)writing history. Vladimir Komarov was a Soviet cosmonaut who in 1967 was the first man to die in space. The space shuttle's parachute malfunctioned, and so he was unable to slow down and crashed upon landing. My Chinese text recounts the hours before his death, when he learned of the unsolvable technical problem, was communicating with ground control, and saying goodbye to his family. In the text, he insists on first giving a lengthy mission report before spending his last moments with his loved ones. He is worked up but in control of himself and gives a coherent account to ground control. He announces that in spite of everything he is happy to have devoted his life to space exploration. Then, he speaks in turn to his mother, wife, and daughter. His daughter tells him she wants to be an astronaut just like him. Finally, his lover's husband comes on the transmission, and says that he forgives Komarov because now he understands why his wife loved him. It is all very emotional, and the text basically concludes that everyone looks to him as a hero, and that he unquestionbly is one.

After some searching on the internet, I have found that the facts are true, but the dialogue and situation are distorted. The 1967 story published by the BBC reports the following:

"Mystery crash
The announcement from Moscow gave few details surrounding events leading up to the disaster, and there remain a number of mysteries surrounding the last moments of the doomed flight.
The Soyuz 1 is known to be a new and heavier type of spacecraft, built as part of the Soviet attempt to land a man on the Moon, and Colonel Komarov was thought to be testing it when the disaster happened.

Correspondents in Moscow had indications that all was not well with the flight from as early as yesterday, when earlier reports on Moscow Radio suddenly stopped and there was no mention of the space flight for nearly 13 hours. Experts have questioned why Colonel Komarov did not use an ejection system to get out of the spacecraft. The cosmonaut was also known to have suffered from heart problems."

The online BBC article then follows up with current, retrospective information:
"It is now thought that the Soyuz 1 space flight had been dogged by problems from the beginning, and that the craft was not ready for manned flight. But objections from the engineers were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin's birthday. The Soviet Union continued to dominate the space race for another two years, until the United States put the first man on the Moon with the Apollo 11 mission in 1969."

Finally, wikipedia goes so far as to say:
"On his second flight, Soyuz 1, Komarov was killed during a return, when the spacecraft crashed owing to failure of the parachute. Just before impact, Soviet premier Alexey Kosygin told Komarov his country was proud of him. An American NSA listening post in Istanbul noted Komarov's reply was inaudible, though persistent rumours stated that Komarov died cursing the spacecraft designers and flight controllers. Whatever the truth of the matter, a tape from a West German tracking station bearing some of Komarov's brief phrases was forwarded to the Command-Measurement Complex of the Soviet Union after the disaster and was reported to contain the word "killed", mixed in with Komarov's distraught unclear transmissions, among other flight data recorded on radio by the West Germans. The recording was made, apparently, on one of the last orbits, if not the final one."

Also, the fact that I've managed to read wikipedia at all is an issue of censorship. Indeed, it is blocked in China. I've managed to get an add-on that lets me around the national internet censoring when I want (perhaps I shouldn't be writing this...). I can also see my blog using this, which means that blogs on blogger.com are blocked by China.

Who do you believe? I obviously have more trust in the BBC, and even in wikipedia, than my Chinese text book, but even the justification for this trust, I suppose, should be questioned. Perhaps this is just a simple example of Chinese propaganda - the text encourages values such as devoting ones life to a common goal, to duty before anything else, and also to loving relationships between relatives. The China-Russia relationship also seems to be rather complex and interesting, and here in this part of China, particularly important to people.

Of course my Chinese book doesn't claim to be a news report, and I figured the dialogue wasn't exact, but the very different accounts are still surprising to me. If any of you know any more on these events, I'd be interested in hearing what you think actually happened. For now, I'm first reminded more concretely than ever to really keep my eyes open and question what I hear. Second, living in China now, I wonder, should I even be posting this?

Tennis

In Chinese, tennis is 网球 (wǎng qiú), and it's a bit of a different game than I've seen elsewhere. Well, that's not quite true - it's the same game, but playing it on the Lanzhou University Courts is different from anywhere else I've played.

I was very pleased to see four hard courts in a prime spot on campus, and soon after arriving I bought a racket. When my classmate and I got there, there were no open courts. We inquired about whether it cost money to play, and whether there might be an open court in about an hour. The peopel sitting by the entrance at a sort-of-official looking table only seemed interested in knowing whether we had student IDs (which we did not yet). Finally they seemed to agree that we could play, and said something about a half an hour. After some more confused conversation, it became clear that the courts were going to close in a half an hour for lunch, but that we could go play now. At these courts, you don't have to wait for a free court, you just have to wait for a free half a court. Four people can play on any court, even with strangers. You can join anywhere there's a spot. Particularly, elderly men seem to show up by themselves and join in. In fact if all the courts are full, I would later learn, you can still play between courts, if you really want to.

This means that no one is ever playing matches, since anyone at any time might come and take half of your court. It also means, since the courts are often full, that you don't get much cross-court practice. It means you can meet people easily. The courts have many regulars who hit every day, regulars who are interested in a foreign girl who hits decently. Many dont look like they've had much or any instruction, and I can easily keep up with most, despite not having seriously played tennis since high school.

Another difference are the tennis balls. When I first started, I was shocked at how everyone was using really old balls. I later realized I was partly wrong -- the courts were covered in a layer of dirt such that even after playing a short while the balls looked old. I still think people don't often buy new balls (the wal-mart-esque store where I bought my racket didn't even sell them - you got two free with your racket, though they were not in a pressurized container and already going a little flat). The balls I got with my racket came with a long length of rubber band which I could thread through a tight loop accessible through a small gap in the ball's surface, attach the other end to my racket, and hit with myself.

All sort of strange, but not in a bad way. I also like Chinese tennis for its characters -- the first is 网，which means net and absolutely looks like a net. It's used in words having to do with the internet and any type of network as well. The second, 球, literally means ball and is found in the name of any sport that is played with a ball.

兰州大学/Lanzhou University

My year studying Chinese in Lanzhou, China has begun. I've been here nearly three weeks now, and had time to set up my room, begin to familiarize myself with the city, start classes, and get to know a few people. Months of gradually gaining a deeper understanding of the city, country, people, and language now lay before me. I've already come quite a ways since my arrival, when I had no idea who or what awaited. Below you'll find an overview of my first couple weeks and first impressions, and future posts will have more details about these topics and others. You might want to start from the bottom to read in a more chronological order.

I've added some of you to a list to receive an e-mail when I update. If you find you're not receiving these and would like to, let me know. As for contacting me this year, here's how:

Address
Lanzhou University Zhuan Jia Lou, Room 104
222 South Tian Shui Road
Lanzhou, Gansu 730000

e-mail
ellenleffler@gmail.com

I have a slight problem in that I can post to this blog but can't view it, so I can only hope that the formatting is ok. Also, I want to include some Chinese characters which your computer may or may not be able to read. If you want to, you should be able to easily install an add-on which allows you to read them (though I forget how). Also, e-mail me any questions you have about China or Chinese or anything I've written! I'd love to here from you about any and everything.

Week 2: First Week of Classes

Before classes began, there was a placement test to help sort students into levels, but I didn't end up taking it. I put it off for a while because I wanted to study first. I knew it would be hard for both them and me to figure out which class I should take. I took two years of Chinese at Amherst, but that ended three years ago. Besides listening to the occasional song and trying to spit out one sentence to a foreign classmate or Chinese waiter, I really haven’t touched it since. I felt like I remembered quite a bit, but would it come out right away? I didn’t want to repeat what I’d already done. In the end, I explained my situation and only did a small portion of the test. We'd be allowed to switch classes during the first week, anyway, once we got a better idea of the level of the classes.

Upon starting class, I soon discovered a few things about my Chinese: first, I could say much more than I could read, and I could read much more than I could write. Second, there a whole lot of incredibly simple words I couldn't remember and some strangely difficult words which stuck (why could I not remember how to say ‘soft’ or ‘reply’ but could remember how to say ‘self-contradictory’?) Third, my pronunciation is decent, such that if I only say a few things, my listener thinks my Chinese is a whole lot better than it is. This probably helped me get the recommendation I wanted for an intermediate class. Especially because my results this year don’t mean a thing, I figure I might as well err on the hard side. In the end, I chose to take Intermediate 2, mostly since that was what my roommate and neighbours decided to take. Being able to work together on homework and use new vocabulary words in conversation sounded really good to me.

I've got five classes basically:
1)汉语：Chinese (reading texts and learning difficult vocabulary) - 4.5 hours/week
2)口语： Spoken Chinese - reading dialogues and focusing on common expressions - 4.5 hours/week
3)听力：Listening - distinguishing between similar sounding words, between tones, and listening comprehension - 3 hrs/ week
4)写作：Chinese writing and grammar - 3hrs/week
5)HSK: preparing for the Chinese equivalent of the TOEFL - 2.5 hrs/week

The first is incredibly difficult - the teacher speaks very quickly and doesn't stop to ask us questions or make sure we understand, and the vocabulary is tough. I got really excited though when the first text was about apes and humans. Also, the book for this class translates the vocabulary words into both English and French, so besides learning the Chinese, I also find it interesting to see how they have decided to translate it into both English and French. The other classes vary in difficulty...the listening teacher speaks painfully slowly and I am impatient. The writing teacher is very demanding and holds us all responsible for having prepared for class and knowing something.

My class has about 10 people in it, though it's hard to say because a number of them come irregularly. There's me, my roommate and neighbors from Korea, and then the rest are from Uzbekistan, Krygystan, and yes, Kazakstan. There are a lot of students from Central Asia here. I've met a couple others from the US (though not in my class), but by far the more common language spoken among foreign students is Russian, followed by Korean. I know I have trouble thinking beyond Borat when hearing someone is from Kazakstan. I am looking forward to getting beyond that and maybe helping you to as well...

For now, these classes are overall very challenging. There are a million characters to learn, it seems, and sometimes I just want to close myself into my room and learn them all before coming out again. I know it doesn't work like that, though.

Week 1: Before Classes Start

It turned out that classes were to start on September 10, so I basically had Wednesday through Sunday to settle in before thinking much about school. The first day, my roommate took me around to get something to eat, and shop for things I would need in the room. Her school has an exchange set up with Lanzhou University – each year five Yeungnam University students go to Lanzhou and five Lanzhou University students go to Yeungnam. So, she came with four other Korean students from her school, and they’d all been here a week or so already. I really can’t overestimate how helpful that was – actually, how helpful in general it has been to ask people who have already gone through the first days here how to do it. I like to figure things out by myself – read the manual, look at the company or school’s webpage, etc. But here, that’s not so easy, sometimes because things aren’t written down or accessible, often because my Chinese reading skills are currently rather slow and limited. It takes a long time to look things up in the dictionary.

Another thing that made things easy is that there’s a large wal-mart-esque store across the street from the university. This actually makes some things easier than in England, where there were no such stores within walking distance. I indeed breathed a sigh of relief when I walked in and knew that every essential item was in a few minutes walk. Plus, I really enjoy shopping in such stores in different countries, seeing the similar but different products catered to a culture’s taste and taste buds. For example, in Vanguard, this Chinese Wal-mart, there was a large section dedicated to moon cakes gearing up for Mid-Autumn festival, huge bins of rice, and a large the selection of rice cookers and cups for drinking tea. The store also has an amazing cool feature that I hope appears in other stores – there are free lockers to put your things in while you shop. You push a button, and a little white slip pops out. When you take the slip, a locker pops open and you can put your things inside while you shop. When you want your things back, you just scan your slip on the same machine and your locker pops open. A really good idea, and I was surprised to see it first in Lanzhou.

I guess before I left, I didn’t really think of Lanzhou as a whole, complex city. It was just this foreign, far, unheard of place I got randomly bumped into to spend a period of time. But it’s a city as any other – there are parks, there are shops, there are restaurants. People go to museums and they go to concerts and they go shopping. They go out to eat. But they also do strange dances in public squares in early morning hours and sell lots of food and small items on the street. Some places are dirty and not taken care of; people don’t follow the traffic laws and they spit and stare.

This is the main gate to Lanzhou University. The guys are my neighbors, and the girl is Yuri, my roommate.

This is along the path from the main gate to the place I'm living.

Similarly, Lanzhou University is like other universities I’ve known. It’s clearly a campus - there’s a library and a gym, dormitories and classrooms (though I often can’t tell what is what). There are students walking around all the time, there are places to eat and little stores selling student necessities. There’s a bank branch, and a China Telecom branch. There are even construction sites. But then again, it’s extremely different. There are a ton of outdoor ping pong tables and badminton courts, and no grassy fields. Instead of a ‘green,’ there’s a big very Asian-feeling park, with a curvy pond and stone benches. The buildings are mostly old and not very attractive. At certain times of the day, everyone walks around with big hanging canteen-jug things, filling them with hot water to drink (even the Chinese don’t drink straight tap water). There is a place where the newspaper gets posted ever day and anyone can walk up and read it.This is where newspaper gets poted, and several people have stopped to read it.

I’m living in the “International Guest House,” or 专家楼, which is at the back of the main part of the university campus. (see photo below). My room is pretty basic, with two beds, two desks, two armoires, and a TV. We’ve also got a little entryway with a bathroom off of it. There’s a normal shower and toilet (which is not the case in Chinese student dorms I hear). We only have hot water between 6-9am and 6pm-midnight, meaning that I have to get up before 9 to have a hot shower (something I did not know on my first morning here...). Also, this is actually the first time I have ever had a TV in my room. We get 50-60 channels, but naturally they are all in Chinese. For now, I watch the occasional sports match and sometimes turn it on for ambiance and osmosis. We tried watching kids’ shows but even they were tough to follow. One good thing is that most of the channels have Chinese subtitles running across the bottom. Once my Chinese gets a little better, I think it will be a really good learning device.

So in case you’re wondering – I’m basically speaking Chinese all the time. Sometimes I get frustrated because I can only express simple ideas, or I try to say something a little complicated and completely fail. I miss being able to joke, too, and have to settle for a very situational-based type of humour. But I have been pleased so far by how easily my conversational Chinese comes to mind. I don’t know how correct it is, but that’s a nice thing about talking with other foreigners – they don’t know either and if they do, don’t mind. My roommate and neighbours are often conversing in Korean, but they have agreed to stop doing so in my presence after one month, and I plan to hold them to it (Oct. 6!).

Another very important topic – food! The food is really good and really cheap. We’re still figuring out where are the best places to eat, but have one favourite restaurant just outside the campus, where a full meal comes out to $1 or so (50p!), and you can easily get full elsewhere on half that. I’ve made progress in deciphering a Chinese menu, which is no small feat. I am developing my repertoire of foods that I can identify on the menu, and a vocabulary of key food terms (e.g., 炒 is fried, 丝 means cut into thin strips, 血means blood so stay away, etc.). In the morning, sometimes I just eat a piece of fruit in my room, sometimes go out to eat beef noodles in soup (牛肉面), which are hand-pulled and renowned in Lanzhou (I hope to post a video of this sometime – its pretty cool to see them made) or steamed dumplings (包子). I still don’t really like eating what seems to me like lunch food for breakfast, but maybe I’ll get used to it yet.

Yuri at what's for now our favorite restaurant.

Also, it’s most fun to eat with a number of other people here. Mealtime is very different – there are almost always many dishes served and everyone eats from each. You have a small bowl of rice, but you don’t serve yourself helpings, you just take bite by bite (with your chopsticks!) from the general serving dishes. If your group is larger than four, the table generally has a lazy-susan which gets turned periodically throughout the meal. Also, out at a restaurant, the servers put down one menu and then one person orders all the dishes. At a lot of the inexpensive restaurants, you write down your own order on a piece of paper they give you. If someone invites you out to go eat, they will do the ordering. They might ask what you like to eat, but they are in charge of choosing a good, varied selection of food. I am already yearning a bit for certain foods (someone mentioned alfredo the other day and I just about melted. It’s funny how I hardly ever eat this in the US, but when it’s not around I still miss it). As for western food, I hear there is a place serving pizza in town, and there are several KFCs. I’ll put it off for a while, and then go. No McDonald’s, though.

This is a street not far from the University. I'm on a pedestrian bridge crossing the street.

Lanzhou is a strangely built city – long and skinny, stretching for about 30km along the Yellow River, mostly on the south bank. I bought a map, and it’s funny how it keeps folding out and out and out. I guess that’s pretty convenient, actually, for the printing press. There are mountains on both sides of the river which have prevented the city from growing much in a second dimension. This is also part of what has given Lanzhou a name for being quite polluted, even for China. The mountains prevent air circulation and the pollution produced stays in the area. The other part is the quick industrial and population growth of the city (it now has a population of over 3 million). However, I haven’t found the pollution (or the population for that matter) to be unbearable. Often the mountains sort of look like they’re behind an opaque screen, and you know they’d look a lot prettier if you could see them clearly. And maybe the airs a bit dirty and smells funny, but I’ve gotten used to it. I hear winter is the worst. For now though, it’s better than I had feared, and I’ll leave that worry on the shelf for a while.

Another street view from near the University, with the mountains in the background.

The University is on the East end of Lanzhou, and the shape of the city makes distances kind of long. Still, I can get to the Yellow River in about 30-40 minutes, and to most parts of the town centre in an hour or less. There are several parts to the campus, and I’m still figuring them out.

During the time before classes started, I also had to take care of some official business in order to be registered at the university and stay in the country legally. By far, the most exciting step was the medical exam, followed at some distance by getting a bank account. Everyone had to do the medical exam, regardless of what doctors’ in their home country had said about their state of health. Early my second morning, Yuri took me onto bus number 33, which we rode out east to the last stop. Tucked away behind and through several buildings was a door marked with something about “international entry and exit inspection and quarantine”. After filling out some forms, they ordered me to the 2^nd floor to get my blood drawn. After that, I got shuffled around from floor to floor, room to room, and doctor to nurse, each pointing me where to go next in a well-oiled but very strange sequence of events. The drawing blood might have been the scariest – I waited in a line where each person in turn, once at the front, put his/her arm through a window where a nurse tied a rubber tube around the upper arm and drew blood into a few small tubes, everyone watching. During this same step they also asked for a urine sample (at least you got to do that privately). I went for a chest X-ray, an ultrasound, did an eye test (though of course there’s no alphabet, so I was just pointing which direction an “E” was facing. I was following around two British guys starting a gap year teaching English in a more remote part of the province and one of them comment that because of this his vision was much better in China than in England). They poked and prodded, took an ECG. Finally, it was over, and I was told to come back next week to get the results. It all cost about $35, and I found out I’m blood type O. My Korean friends were all surprised that I hadn’t known my blood type before – to them it’s kind of important, and they even have theories about what the personalities of people with certain blood types tend to be. Anyway, I eventually went back to get my results and have since delivered them to the security bureau of Lanzhou, along with paperwork from the school and my passport, as an application for a residence permit.

I now have two bank accounts in China, both with about $2 in them (I first opened at the wrong bank for the school to deposit my stipend money). At the second, China Industrial and Commercial Bank, I had to fill out the application form three times. After the first time, I thought maybe I just had to fill out the form in duplicate so I wrote exactly the same thing again. After the second time, the bank worker frustratedly showed me that when I marked which type of account I wanted, I had put an ‘x’ in the box. In China, this means you don’t want the item – you have to put a check in the box to indicate your selection. Third time I got it right.

The first weekend I went with a group of people (including some Chinese students) to a mountainside park just outside of town. We ended up waiting around a long time for everyone to arrive so didn't make it very far up the mountain. Still, it was very interesting to see the city from a bit of a distance, and to see the activities of Chinese people out in the park on a Sunday morning. There were lots of people doing Tai Chi or group dance-like exercises (Chinese line dancing! - see video at bottom). There were people playing badminton, and lots of old men doing whatever you call it in this picture:

September 3-4: Arrival

I’m at the end of day 1. That is to say, the sun tells it’s been a full day, but I can’t tell when it’s time to eat from when it’s time to sleep and can’t tell whether I’m hungry or tired or not. I guess that’s what you get when you travel for 30 hours to get halfway around the world. The time difference here is 12 hours – which on one hand probably gives the worst possible jet lag, but on the other hand, you don’t even have to change your watch!!

I first flew to Newark, where I had a three hour layover and spent some of it with my uncle and has family. I got a goodie bag of fresh tomatoes, some good questions about what I was about to do and other varied, energetic conversation. I recalled that for many of my ventures I have flown through Newark or New York and met with family over a layover, which has always been a nice way to start a journey. This time it didn’t even make much sense to go to Newark (what? Go east and then go west??) but it turns out the route sent me north, sort of through Canada and over part of Russia. I don’t think we actually crossed over the pole, though. I sat next to two ladies from Montreal who were going on a three week tour that they had organized among friends and friends of friends. So on the way to China I practiced my French. During the 13 hour flight, I don’t think I slept more than 2 hours. My continental plane had a new video system installed (as had my Virgin Atlantic flight back from London a month ago) allowing you to choose movies, TV shows, and games at leisure. You could start and stop then at will and choose among 200 films and a lot of other programs. There are still some bugs they need to work out, such as that fast forwarding is too slow and the games load frustratingly slowly. Also, continental didn’t offer any new releaseses. On Virgin Atlantic they had a cool system where you could send messages to the screen of any other passenger (thought it didn’t do me much good travelling alone) and you could challenge others to a game of tetris or bowling or play a trivia challenge with others logged in on the plane. So I kept myself busy watching a French film about a lighthouse off an island in Brittany, a Chinese comedy/drama about a woman with breast cancer, Sweet Home Alabama, and a number of Simpsons and America’s Next Top Model shows. Seriously, not a bad way to fly.

Once I arrived in Beijing, I was not looking forward to another flight, that’s for sure. Customs in China didn’t take long at all, and my visa was accepted no questions asked (even in England they had requested to see my admissions letter to Cambridge). I was too early to check in to my next flight on China Eastern, so I went to find some iced tea (the airport was not air conditioned. Actually one of the first things I noticed when I got back from England was the excessive air conditioning in the US. We sure like it cold inside). Finally, I checked in and all that good stuff and sat waiting for the flight. I looked around and didn’t feel so out of place - there were lots of foreign looking people there. A few minutes later, though, most of them got on a plane to Xi’An.

Finally aboard my Bejing-Lanzhou flight and despite the scarcity of foreign passengers, I ended up next to a Scottish ecologist who was going to Lanzhou for a few days to meet with a potential collaborator for research out in the highlands and mountains west of Lanzhou. What a nice fortuitous encounter – I had thought about contacting biologists with research in the area but I never did. And, for the first time, after a conversation throughout the flight between bouts of trying to sleep (but between nerves and excitement unable to despite my exhaustion) and trying to read and trying to eat the meal served, I exchanged e-mail addresses with someone met on a plane. Maybe I’ll end up on a field expedition next year, or at least in touch with biology students or professors at the university.

My flights were particularly interesting, which seemed to me a good omen. They finally ended in... Touch down in Lanzhou!! Indeed, just outside baggage claim there was somebody with a “Lanzhou University” sign. The ecologist was already there chatting with him but we figured out that he was there to get me, and shortly after someone else showed up to pick him up. There were two people there to greet me actually – a driver and a CSL (?) teacher. We waited around for another flight to get and in the end there were two other foreign students coming as well, one from Hungary and one from the Philippines. They were both there on an exchange arranged by the Gansu provincial government, though I think they will be in the same Chinese classes. Anyway, I tried to sleep on the ride but was still too nervous/excited to get any quality Zs. After an hour and a half or so, at about 10pm, we arrived in Lanzhou. From (really) tired eyes, I saw the Yellow River with just a couple bridges across it, and lots of people out on the street.

Luggage cart at the Lanzhou Airport

We arrived at the university campus, where only cars with business there are allowed to enter. My first impression was just that it wasn’t well lit, but that nonetheless there were people walking around, and there were a few restaurants or shops within the campus limits. We parked at the place I was to have a room. The front desk looked kind of like a hotel reception area, with a counter and clocks showing the time in different cities around the world – Beijing, New York, Tokyo, Moscow...). It was sort of a nice touch, except that all the clocks were wrong except for Beijing (n.b. about a week later they fixed most, but New York is still wrong. I’m not bothering to tell them though because after the change for daylight saving time it will be correct). I paid a deposit for my key and located my room, on the first floor. My roommate, Yuri, was getting ready for bed, but greeted me warmly and started telling me a bit about the city. Yuri’s Korean and doing a year-long study abroad here for a Chinese and International Studies major.