The China Match

I wasn’t really using that caution anyway.
Enjoy,
-Kevin

Just for fun, I’ve (with the help of Geoff’s Google Analytics) put together some statistics for this blog.

Before that, though, I really want to thank everybody who has kept up with the site, or even who has just checked in when I got myself in especially deep shit. I’m particularly appreciative of all the feedback that I got; it was overwhelmingly positive, and absolutely the reason that I put in the effort to keep the posts both as frequent and as (hopefully) high-quality as I was capable.

More than that, though, one of the most important goals of the blog for me was to stay connected to my friends and family while I was half the world apart; I’ve known tons of people who went on study abroad and fell off the map entirely. This effect isn’t so bad during the summer because that’s when everyone scatters; during a time when everyone else is together, though, total radio silence can be hell on friendships, and the longer it goes the worse it gets.
Accordingly, the China Match in large part existed as a way not only for people to read about eighty Chinese shenanigans but rather to bridge the 7k-mile disconnect and give people something worth starting a conversation with me about. In this it succeeded with flying colors — for every blog comment posted there were two more facebook ‘likes,’ emails, IMs, skypes, all sorts of stuff. Over the months you guys were able to start literally hundreds of conversations with questions and comments about the random happenings here without having to fall back on the ever-so-nebulous/awkward-and-tricky-to-respond-to-succinctly-in-a chat “so how’s China?” and through all of this I felt so much less alone than I would have been otherwise. It’s tough to describe how grateful I was for that, through it all.

But then, for every one person who said something there were nine who didn’t; Google tells me that since February first, this blog has somehow gotten just short of 500 unique visitors, which is dumbfounding. That number is probably six or seven times higher than I was expecting, and I’m flattered. But yeah, to those 450 unknown faces out there, thanks for reading! Oh, and if one of you mystery-readers ever catches me on Sheridan, know that “Dude, I read your blog, you’re an idiot, how’ve you been” is a completely acceptable way to say hello (=

Ok on to the actual stats, which are kinda neat —

The Cage Match has received 1,907 spam comments since January and 211 real ones, 43 of which are me responding to people. Thank god for Akismet which is a super-helpful spam filter.

It’s 80 entries counting this one and all told is a touch over 55,000 words long… which means that at least at the 250 words/page standard, the five or six of you who have read the text of the entire match, start to finish, have functionally read a 220 page book. And if a picture’s worth a thousand words…
No but seriously. That’s like seven hundred words an entry on average, and that’s including super short posts like “Mrh” and the first “heading home“; I’m sure the median word count would be even scarier but that’s a bit too much work. Come to think of it this paragraph has just been a very longwinded way to say that I’m, well, longwinded. Whatever.

492 unique viewers, 2675 pageviews, 1,151 visits. On average people stayed for about four minutes, which I’d imagine is about the time it takes to read an average post. Most people went to 2.32 pages per visit though, which seems weirdly high considering everything’s on the main one. About a third of my traffic came from people directly typing in my blog’s name into their url bar which is awesome (more than half of the 5% of people directed here through search engines were referred because they typed kevin.thecagematch.com instead of .org), because that means they were checking it on their own. The other 2/3 are from facebook. Some rough math would tell me that that’d account for 392 independent people from facebook looking at the blog at one point another — that’s like 2/3rds of my friends list. Holy hell. I’m either awful at math or you guys are completely awesome.

Huge spikes in traffic around the Jasmine Revolution and Earthquake posts, of course, and that also explains a lot of the non-facebook views because my parents threw those two around to their friends and the rest of my relatives. Overall though traffic was pretty damn stable, even discounting the spikes I still got about twenty pageviews a day, for that average of four minutes per. Crazy times.

Location wise was pretty predicable, huge shoutout to my three or four Chinese coworkers who found the blog at the end of my sojourn in Beijing and opted not to turn me in to the police; 感谢你们啊! Also, to my seventeen Canadian viewers… huh?

All said and done the feedback and viewership of this site has gone way way past my expectations; it’s really humbling, and it means a lot. The blog isn’t completely dead, but it’ll be winding down pretty dramatically for the foreseeable future. As ever there are a few posts that are perpetually in the pipes, but I’ll post statuses or something when they get published.

~

Really though, writing this blog and having it read definitely were critical in keeping me in very high spirits for 60+ days in a place where I had basically no friends. Check back every once in a while, if you like, I have a few plans in my head for new directions in which to take the site, but unlike last time I’m not going to make a bunch of pledges that I can’t follow through. There will be at least one more post though soon with pictures of the absurd decorations in my old house (feat. schwarzenegger/chan, monroe/guevara… pretty epic).

Thanks again for reading; hope you enjoyed.
-Kevin

Update: I’m home, and safe, and about to go to Ken’s Donuts which at this point almost goes without saying. All told it was almost exactly 48 hours from when I left my house in Beijing to when I touched down in Austin, and right now I couldn’t be happier. I’ve got a lot of thank-yous and wrapping ups to do, but again — donuts call, so for the time being I’ll leave you with this little rant on culture shock and nationalism that I wrote up during my four-hour layover in Houston this afternoon. At the time of writing and even now I’m more than a little exhausted so take it with a grain of salt. Oh and to my Chinese friends/coworkers reading, if you think the categorization of China is unfair in any way I wholeheartedly welcome criticism, comments, debate, etc.

~~~

Coming back through Houston elicited some weird feelings. There’s always going to be reverse culture shock with this sort of thing, sure, but before when I came through Chicago it seemed a lot milder.
Houston’s just more, eh, red-blooded-‘murican than the windy city. And by this of course I refer to the presence of fat people, who are everywhere here and nowhere in Asia. That whole “sure we will put you in a wheelchair simply because you are fat and do not feel like walking around the airport” bullshit was something that I would have been happy to forget actually happened, for instance.
On the other side of it though, Houston isn’t different ENOUGH. I’ve just come from a one-party controlled security state into the Land of the Free and the first — I kid you not, the very first — announcement that I hear over the PA is about how if you joke about security procedures you will be arrested.
C’mon now, guys. Also the fact that Houston is one of the most populated cities in the States (and each person takes up relatively more volume) means that the whole ‘I am awash in a sea of people” effect hasn’t gone anywhere. Except that now I can overhear and understand all the random chatter around me; honestly it’s a little overwhelming. I’ve become pretty accustomed to really needing to focus one on speaker at a time to get comprehension but now I’m picking up snippets of three or four inane conversations at once and I almost wish that I couldn’t.

Despite this, though, there’s a reason why this country is my favorite one on the planet and I’m not sure it’s necessarily a function of being born here. My last few days in particular have highlighted that.
China and Japan are pretty much opposites — China is developing, chaotic, and boisterous. It pretty much lacks rule of law (for those with money, at least) in a lot of ways; overall it just comes off as raw and exciting, which is why it appeals to me. But as a developing country it comes with all the faults that that entails, especially with regard to just getting basic shit done; every experience is an uphill battle. From roads packed with more and more new drivers who have NO idea what they’re doing — and from what I gather from Hessler, neither the system nor the drivers themselves is improving in the slightest — to local political systems so riddled with corruption that they’re functionally unable to improve the quality of life for a huge number of people there is something about the country that is clearly very, very broken. Several coworkers and Chinese people I met who I independently asked about the state of development and the sustainability of the country’s current way of operating compared it to a sick patient who nobody knows how to cure. The problems are simply too myriad, pervasive, and interconnected to be systematically addressed. Look at the “guanxi” system of business, look at the opaque and frankly oppressive government, look at local debt and corruption; these are the very worst that China has to offer, and these are the most powerful forces in the country.

Now admittedly, I know substantially less about Japan than I do about China, but I’ve visited the country for a combined three or so weeks and I hear plenty about it from Connor, who loves comparing it to China because on paper it’s “better” by pretty much any metric you’d care to pick. That’s mainly because it’s developed and organized and well-run in every way that the middle kingdom is not. Look at yesterday’s earthquake, for instance – the last tally I heard counted deaths in the thousands. You put an 8.9 earthquake in China and you will not have 4-figure deaths. You will have six, maybe seven figure deaths especially if you put it near a coast so that you have tsunamis hitting dozens of cities. Japan is one of the most educated and efficient countries as you could ever ask for. But culturally — to me — there’s something missing. The trade-off in Japan for having everything neat and orderly, for things working when they’re supposed to work and people doing what they’re supposed to do is that you sacrifice everything that makes China fun. You can’t be loud and drunk on the street without shaming yourself (unless you’re old), you can’t find insane hole-in-the-wall stores that violate a million healthcodes but sell delicious kung-pao chicken in Tokyo. You couldn’t lie your way past world exhibition doors or try to bribe someone and be laughed away. That’d be against the rules in a county where rules matter. The important thing here is that these flaws are subjective; they aren’t actual problems but rather just the reasons why I’d rather study Mandarin than Japanese.

America, though, has the best of both worlds. We’re rich and developed and enjoy all the benefits that that confers, just as the Japanese do (aside from healthcare, where they’re kicking our asses but hey). But we also are loud and rowdy and shameless and spontaneous; America is a lot of things but culturally boring or stagnating is not one of them. There’s a reason the whole world has its eye on the states; there’s a reason our music and food and pop-culture, intolerable as the latter may be, are ubiquitous. We’re the greatest country in the world, dammit.
U.S.A.
U.S.A.
U.S.A.
God it’s good to be home.

Images in a gallery format because the internet here is awful and uploading them one at a time is not working right now. Will edit later

Bad news: Seems like I picked a pretty bad time to change planes in Japan.

Good news: Instead of reading about playing basketball with all my coworkers on my last day followed by a wind-down of the blog, you guys get to read about earthquakes.

So today I was supposed to be going to see my family (and finally meet my brother’s girlfriend) in Hawaii for spring break. The plan was to leave from Beijing pretty early — at the time of starting to write this, about twelve hours ago (7.30 Beijing time) — have a five-hour layover in Tokyo, then a seven or so hour flight to honolulu, another layover and then wind up in Kuai. All told it was supposed to be fifteen or so hours of flying; certainly not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination but not awful (and it’s hard to complain at all when your end destination is Hawaii). I didn’t quite make it that far, though.

I’d been in Japan maybe five minutes — having not even finished taxing — when the first one hit. For anyone out there in readerland who for whatever reason hasn’t yet experienced a high-magnitude earthquake from an airplane, allow me to describe:
It’s exactly like midair turbulence. Like, I was trying to deplane, and walking around I felt precisely the same sensation of unsteadiness that you get when you’re trying to get down the isle to a bathroom while the plane is going through a storm. So even though we were clearly grounded and stopped, my brain’s immediate reaction to the feeling was “oh. this turbulence is pretty nasty” followed by “ok wait turbulence is impossible, we’re grounded, so man I guess there must be some hell of a wind out there” to “ok there’s no way wind can be this strong and it definitely feels like we’re moving, but looking out the window we clearly — oh holy shit the entire airport is shaking and the windows look like they’re made of rubber what the christ is happening.”

Then the captain came on, said it was due to ‘seismic activity’ and then five seconds later I learned the Chinese word for earthquake. Didn’t quite expect to ever just pick that one up from daily life.
Getting off the plane, the first thing I saw was that first image below. Not so bad. Then I saw the second one. First time in my life I’ve been glad to have been seated near the back of the plane. People near the front of the plane were already off the plane in the area where shit was falling from the ceiling when the quake hit; if someone had been standing under that huge grate it would be… problematic.

For the next half hour or so, we just waited in the lobby with that second picture as the building got rocked by aftershock after aftershock. Incidentally, people are saying these were in fact entirely new earthquakes, but I don’t get the distinction. In any event, it was kinda a scary time; I realized partway through the second big quake that I was standing under a terminal directions sign that was wobbling rather severely. Rather, I didn’t realize this, but the Chinese guys next to me did and I overheard them tell each other to move. Never let anyone tell you that Mandarin isn’t a handy language to know. After that I hung out by a wall after that for a while, until they eventually unloaded everyone onto the tarmac.

So: earthquakes on a plane feel like turbulence, and earthquakes on a building feel like you’re riding a subway without holding onto anything, but earthquakes when you’re just standing on solid, flat ground are above all the most disconcerting. It almost feels like you’re dizzy, because when you start feeling movement while standing still on a huge flat expanse of asphalt your brain automatically assumes that the fault lies with it as opposed to the Earth. So you have to consciously convince yourself that your sense of balance is fine, and it’s actually the Earth moving beneath you; it’s a strange mental conversation to have.

Another bit of advice that isn’t — if you’re going to be in an airport getting hit by earthquakes, do it in Japan. Their reaction was perfect, and pretty timely. Pictures three to six are about the lengths that they went to to get everyone seated and comfortable — they had people sitting on the tarmac vehicles, on the luggage carriers, on these random couches that 300 workers in identical blue suits and white hardhats dragged out from godknowswhere. They put out buses, vans, huge plastic tarps, countless chairs. Best of all they passed out tons and tons of airport blankets and then, when they ran out of those they started handing out bath towels. I again have no clue where an airport produced hundreds of towels from, but I know that Douglas Adams would be proud.

Now, due to the “indeterminate” — read: canceled — nature of all the flights, I’m sitting in the lobby that you see in the last picture. They’re passing around candy and water and ritz crackers. I was able to get a power outlet by acting very, very fast and it’s made me incredibly popular. I’ve set up a really elaborate power-rotation so that in the past three or so hours we’ve had a dozen or so people keep a whole lot of devices sustained off of three outlets. And my laptop is the only one around with 3 usb ports so I’m charging 3 different phones at all times… the amount of camaraderie built by situations like this is pretty awesome.

As of the 9:30pm posting time of this blog, my dad has somehow managed to get me onto a flight bound for houston leaving sometime tomorrow. Also, in the last ten minutes, a flight to D.C. was allowed to take off; the runways are uncracked and operable. I am hopeful that I’ll be in the states within 24 hours. Unavoidably camping out at the airport tonight, but it’s actually kinda fun. Still more pleasant than camping in my powerless/heatless house was, anyway…

“Most powerful earthquake to hit Japan in 100 years” is what the guy next to me is reading…wow

*Addendum: WORST THING ABOUT THIS
Alright, listen. I have spent the last two+ months in a country where if an Asian person is attempting to communicate with me in English, but is obviously feeling awkward about it because their English is not very good, the absolute best way to improve the situation is to begin responding to them in Chinese and carry the conversation from there. Worst case scenario it just transfers that awkwardness and language burden onto yourself, which I’m more than happy to do because it forces me to learn.
But here, here I’m in Japan.
Japan, if you’re not aware, is not the same as China.
— God this has happened like five times now, I swear —
So these well-intentioned Japanese stewardesses will come by and try to check on me / offer me things with like, a few words of broken English
And I’ll auto-respond with a dozen words of Mandarin before I realize ‘shit not only do you have a lesser chance of knowing Chinese than you do English i bet you find this SUPER SUPER RACIST’

And then I feel deeply ashamed of myself for the next hour, until another stewardess comes by
at which point I do it again because seriously, forcing a conversation away from English into Mandarin as a defensive maneuver and selfish way to improve my own language proficiency is actually, legitimately an instinctive reaction that I no longer consciously control unless I’m thinking very very hard about it, and my mental state is not fit to think very very hard about anything right now.

I’m breaking my don’t-blog-this-weekend rule because I’m pissed off and that is as good a reason as any. You know how a month or so ago when I was leaving for Xi’an my power went out? Because the way billpay works here is that like, you buy a certain amount of electricity and when that number gets back to zero you automatically stop getting power. There’s no reminder or anything that gets sent to you, the concept of paying a bill late doesn’t exist — it operates like gas in your car.

Almost needless to say at this point, the power’s out. Oh and Rayco announced two days ago that he’d be leaving yesterday, so when I woke up this morning he was gone and the power was dead again. And the little card by which one buys more gas is missing, and he has no idea where it is. So thusfar I’ve spent all of my last Sunday in the country searching fruitlessly for this fucking card that he misplaced, and the bank is about to close so I couldn’t get buy more power even if I found it.
Gah.

On the upside, in the event that I am indeed going to go the next four days without hot water, lights, 等等 then Hawaii is going to be that much more awesome.