Did you hear the one about the Fulbright Scholar in China studying stand-up comedy? The student, Jesse Appell, put together a spoof of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” called “Laowai Style.” Lao wai is a Mandarin term for foreigner—literally meaning “old” and “outside.” Here’s the video, with subtitles:
And then there’s the former amateur soccer player from Norway, Havard Rugland, who watched the Super Bowl in 2011 and started working on his American-football-kicking skills. The result was a video of amazing trick kicks, called “Kickalicious.” It went viral and caught the attention of some NFL franchises, with a couple giving him tryouts. Last week, the Detroit Lions announced that they had signed him to their team. No joke.
I heard about the two stories above on “PRI’s The World” while I was listening to NPR in my car last Friday afternoon. This last video isn’t related, but it shows some cross-cultural miscommunication, between an English-speaking tourist and a couple French locals—and I think it’s pretty funny. It’s “Do You Speak English?” by BBC’s Big Train comedy team:
With President Vladimir Putin’s signing of a new law at the end of last year, as of January 1, US citizens are no longer able to adopt Russian children. For Americans seeking international adoptions, this means one more closed door, in an environment that has seen the number of foreign children adopted by US parents steadily decline since 2004.
Nine years ago, adoptions of foreign children peaked at 22,991. In 2012, that number had dropped to 8,668, representing a decline of 62%. Last year, before Russia’s new law went into effect, that country was the third-largest provider of children for foreign adoptions to Americans, at 748.
There are several reasons for the lower numbers. One is the enforcement by the US, beginning in 2008, of stricter guidelines under the Hague Adoption Convention. The Convention was formed to cut back on child trafficking and other abuses, which is a good thing. But this has also complicated the process for reputable adoptions and has caused some countries to restrict, or eliminate, adoptions to foreign countries, as they try to meet Convention standards. (The State Department maintains a list of global updates and notices concerning adoption, here.)
For some countries, politics is at play, which seems to be the case in Russia, which is widely thought to have passed their ban in response to a US law that targets human-rights violators in Russia.
And in other countries, feelings of nationalism have caused governments to make it harder to adopt out their children in an effort to have more of their own citizens fulfill the adoptions—and take care of the problem without outside help.
In the case of China, numbers have dropped, in part, because more Chinese have become economically able to adopt (China’s one-child policy allows for additional children through adoption) and because the nation has lengthened its list of restrictions limiting which foreigners can adopt. A 2009 article in Time also cites changing attitudes by the Chinese that are increasing in-country adoption of girls, who, at the time, made up 95% of the children in their orphanages.
With international adoption statistics changing so dramatically over the years, it’s hard to keep up with the numbers. Here’s a look at the latest figures from the US Department of State—for fiscal year 2012, ending September 30:
Most Adoptions, by Country of Origin
1. China 2,697
2. Ethiopia 1,568
3. Russia 748
4. Republic of Korea 627
5. Ukraine 395
Most International Adoptions, by State
1. Texas 617
2. California 555
3. New York 492
4. Florida 398
5. Illinois 390
Median Fees for Hague Convention Adoptions (Most Expensive)
1. South Africa $160,217
2. Albania $25,960
3. Hungary $21,685
4. Canada $20,000
5. Armenia $19,825
(For perspective, the median fee for adoptions from China was $15,600)
Median Fees for Hague Convention Adoptions (Least Expensive)
1. Sri Lanka $6,200
2. Ecuador $6,250 ++Kenya $6,250
4. Philippines $8,500
5. Brazil $10,413
Average Number of Days to Complete Hague Convention Adoptions (Longest Wait)
1. Mexico 770
2. Dominican Republic 741
3. France 709 (1 adoption)
4. Costa Rica 690
5. Armenia 667
(For perspective, the average wait to complete adoptions from China was 267 days.)
The Both Ends Burning Campaign is concerned with facilitating adoptions and decreasing the time that children spend in orphanages. Their work includes the Both Ends Burning book, an online petition, and the Step Forward for Orphans March, scheduled for May 17 in Washington, D.C. Here’s a trailer for their documentary, Stuck. The full video is available here.
A Note on the Numbers: Stuck gives the average length of time for an international adoption as 896 days, while the State Department figures above list Mexico as the country with the longest average time at 770 days. I’m curious as to why the numbers are so far apart. I’m not doubting the validity of the documentary’s statistics, but I wonder where the difference comes from. Maybe it’s because the State Department left out non-Hague countries or because the two differ on what constitutes the complete adoption “process.”
No matter how you slice it, some people in some countries are just so gullible.
Kim Jong-un, supreme leader of North Korea, has had a busy few weeks. Not only did he watch a basketball game in the company of Dennis Rodman, but he also threatened to launch a nuclear missile at the US. He sure knows how to grab the headlines.
Phony News Is Still News But the dictator whom Rodman calls “awesome” isn’t new to being in the news. Take for instance when The Onion last year named him the “Sexiest Man Alive.” Of course, you and I know that The Onion is a satirical news outlet, so everything it reports is fake news. But it appears that others outside our borders are not so savvy.
Following the bogus proclamation, the People’sDaily in China jumped on board, running its own story on Kim—including 55-photos of the dictator—and borrowing quotations from The Onion, such as
With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-born heart-throb is every woman’s dream come true.
Will Tracy, editor of The Onion, told BBC that he’s not surprised. ”I mean, this kind of thing has happened in different forms before,” he said, “so it never totally takes us by surprise, although it’s a total delight whenever it does happen.”
Last year, the Iranian news agency Fars apologized as well, after publishing a story based on The Onion‘s “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama.” In the agency’s defense, Fars’ editor-in-chief wrote,
Although it does not justify our mistake, we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen.
Good Thing the US Is Safe What is it that makes the rest of the world so easily taken in by satire? You’d never read about an American publication believing foreign-born fake news.
For instance, a magazine like Harper’s would never be duped by a report on something like “visual allergies” from, say, the satirical program This Is That of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Harper’s, in its “Findings” section last month, wouldn’t have written, “A Canadian student sued her university for failing to accommodate her allergies to cactuses, escalators, tall people, and mauve,” as if it were true and then wouldn’t have had to follow up in its March issue with “We regret the error.” Of course, that kind of thing would never, ever happen here. Right?
If imitation truly is the greatest form of flattery, then many in China believe that flattery will get them everywhere.
Over the past decade, China has experienced a boom in the building of look-alike cities and structures, fashioned after architecture from non-Chinese locales. Leading the trend is Shanghai’s “One City, Nine Towns” project, building foreign-inspired housing developments to draw residents out of the city’s crowded center—though it seems that the people have been a little reluctant to make the move.
There’s been a bunch written about the carbon-copy construction—lots of photos, too. Here are links to some of the articles around the Web:
Anting New Town: Car Museum, Cafes and Homes, but No People (CNN Travel, September 24, 2010) “The Anting New Town development was designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favorite architect, to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants in apartment buildings and stand-alone houses.”
Going Dutch: Shanghai’s “Holland Town” Brings Europe to the City (Mathias Guillin, CNN Travel, July 8, 2010) “Life in Shanghai can be a bit monotonous: work, party, brunch and then do it all over again the next weekend. If you need to break things up and don’t want to hop on plane, head over the river and check out Pudong’s Nederland, aka ‘Holland Town.’”
Luodian—a Slice of Sweden in China
(Ulrika K Engström, Sweden.se, February 10, 2006) “Luodian is a fully fledged copy of a Scandinavian town. Even the weather seems to have been specially imported to this newly built development in Baoshan, one of 16 districts in Shanghai.”
China: Shanghai: Citta di Pujiang
(Bret Wallach, The Great Mirror) “An Italian city in Shanghai? But of course: this is another of Shanghai’s new towns, like Thames Town, but in this case Venice. Well, that’s what you’ll read in the press, but this new town doesn’t ape Europe: it has lots of water, in other words, but an intensely modern architectural style.”
China Builds Its Own Eiffel Tower (Metro News, September 21, 2007) “Chinese architects copied the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the famous fountain in the gardens of the Palace of Versaille to make their own version of the French capital. Famous buildings and Parisienne style gardens are surrounded by rows of European-style villas where up to 100,000 Chinese people will live in a special gated community called Tianducheng just outside Shanghai.”
Made in China: An Austrian Village
(Reuters, June 5, 2012) “A $940 million Chinese clone of one of Austria’s most picturesque villages, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hallstatt, recently opened its doors to visitors in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong amidst some controversy.”
Photos: Jiangsu City Has Four Fake US Capitols (Michael Evans, Shanghaiist, December 3, 2012) “The Jiangsu city of Wuxi is home to not one, not two, but four buildings with a less-than-coincidental resemblance to the US Capitol.”
Village Uses Famous Site Replicas to Draw Tourists
(Wang Hongyi, China Daily, October 12, 2011) “[T]ourists can also see replicas of the US Capitol building, the Arch of Triumph in France and the Sydney Opera House by going to Huaxi village, which is deemed the richest village in China.”
Dorset Town is Re-built in China
(BBC News, July 26, 2007) “A town in China has been modelled on Dorchester after planners saw the town’s picture on a Christmas card. The development in Chengdun, Sichuan province, named British Town, is complete with mock Victorian and Georgian architecture.”
Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town
(James Fallows, The Atlantic, March 2007) “After lunch, Zhang thanked the guests for coming and invited them to spend time seeing some of the other highlights of Broad Town: the 130-foot-high gold-colored replica of an Egyptian pyramid, for instance.”
China’s Elite Learn to Flaunt It while the New Landless Weep (Joseph Kahn, The New York Times, December 24, 2004) “Chateau Zhang Laffitte is no ordinary imitation. It is the oriental twin of Château Maisons-Laffitte, the French architect François Mansart’s 1650 landmark on the Seine. Its symmetrical facade and soaring slate roof were crafted using the historic blueprints, 10,000 photographs and the same white Chantilly stone. . . . ‘It cost me $50 million,’ Mr. Zhang said. ‘But that’s because we made so many improvements compared with the original.’”
Château China: $30 Million “Hobby”
(Sheila Melvin, The New York Times, January 10, 2006)
“The town of Changli, in Hebei Province, resembles any other nondescript county seat in northern China. . . . But just outside the town center is a 200-hectare, or 500-acre, vineyard replete with a state-of-the-art wine production facility; a villa with tasting rooms and restaurants; a three-story wine school; a luxury hotel, and an immense private château. The Tuscan-style complex is so opulent and incongruous in the Hebei countryside that it at first seems like a mirage.”
As a boy growing up in rural Missouri, I was very interested in insects and ended up with a rather sizable collection of mounted specimens that I took to the local 4-H fair. Later, when I became a 4-H leader to a younger friend nearby, I passed on what I’d learned. I remember once, after running out of ideas, spicing things up with a snack of deep-fried insects. As I recall, we ate grasshoppers, bees, and possibly cicadas. Little did I know that I could have been on the brink of a future career.
If you travel much outside the US and Europe, you run a good chance of running across insects served up as snacks or side dishes. But if people like China’s Li Jinsui have their way, edible insects will become a global main course.
As reported in Le Monde, Li runs an “insect factory,” which has as its focus the housefly—in particular, the immature housefly, or maggot. You can read the entire article here, but if you need some coaxing, let me whet your appetite with some quotations. Where else can you read such phrases as this?
China’s Maggot Factories Hoping to Feed the World (the headline)
Li says he can deliver about 150kg of maggots a day . . .
As he walks into a room filled with two million flies . . . , and With the price of wasp larvae on the rise . . .
For Li, raising insects for human consumption isn’t just a novelty. He’s hoping to educate his countrymen, develop his business, and become “the industry’s world leader.” One obstacle that he has to overcome on the maggot front, though, is to figure out how to raise his flies on a diet of rice. That’s because housefly maggots typically feed on animal feces, which makes them unsuitable for human consumption.
Sounds like Li has a lot of educating and persuading to do.
But he’s not alone. There’s a whole movement devoted to “entomophagy,” or the eating of insects. It touts the health and environmental benefits of insect eating and presents it as an effective solution to the problem of feeding a rapidly growing world. For more information, check out these interesting sites:
Also, at NOVA’s “Bugs You Can Eat,” you can follow a couple American journalists, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, as they trek around the world trying a variety of insect and spider dishes. With a twist on the “tastes like chicken” meme, Menzel describes deep-fried tarantulas in Cambodia, saying,
If day-old deep-fried chickens had no bones, had hair instead of feathers, and were the size of a newborn sparrow, they might taste like tarantulas.
And finally, if you’re in the States and want to get your taste buds ready for the insect-eating future, go to HOTLIX to order some “larvets,” hand-dipped chocolate crickets, or other varieties of insect candy. Or go to Hollywood location scout Scott Trimble’s Entomophagy, inspired by “the seeming lack of a concise smartphone-friendly list of American restaurants that serve insect options on their menus.”
Who knows, maybe someday you’ll ask, “Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?” and his answer will be “Why, adding flavor, protein, and pizazz, of course!”
In my last post, on friendships between international and American students, I pulled some statistics from Voice of America’s “Student Union” blog. Actually, rather than a lot of numbers, much of what you’ll find at “Student Union” are first-hand accounts of what it’s like to study in American colleges and universities, while facing the challenges of a new culture.
There’s a lot of insight and candor there, on a great variety of topics. Take, for example, these posts:
But back to the topic of friendships. In my post I cited a recent study that says over half of students from China and other East Asian countries have no close American friends. Under the title “Whose Fault Is It when American and International Students Don’t Mix?” Jessica Stahl discusses a video from the Office for International Students and Scholars at Michigan State University, in which students from China and the US talk about the ins and outs of cross-cultural friendships. Part of what makes the video especially interesting is that the group of four female Chinese students and the group of three male Americans are not interviewed at the same time. While this means they don’t respond directly to what their counterparts are saying, it does give them a greater opportunity for honesty and frankness.
After the introduction, the video opens with a segment called “Forming Friendships: Finding Common Ground.” One of the Chinese students begins by saying, “Finding something in common is really hard, because you don’t make friends with someone without having something in common with them.” I think she makes a good point.
When we meet people, we usually start with questions that will reveal what we have in common. And when we find that we share something—place of origin, interests, likes, beliefs, friends, experiences—we pursue it in conversation to see how good a fit we are. It takes time and patience to get past the superficials to track down deeper commonalities, and people from different cultures often don’t get past the opening conversation . . . or they don’t even begin the conversation in the first place.
On the other hand, just looking like you’re from “someplace else” is enough to draw attention from others with significant cross-cultural experience. So Third Culture Kids often seek out international students, and international students find community among each other, regardless of how far apart their home countries are. But while this can lead to some wonderful opportunities for friendship, it is often a small pool to draw from, and it can further limit one’s feeling of fitting in to the general population.
To pique your curiosity, I’ve transcribed below more of the students’ comments on this topic of making friends. But really, if you’re interested in any aspect of cross-cultural interactions, watch the whole video. It’s 17 minutes long but well worth your time.
FYI: The video description at YouTube states that the panelists are all undergraduate students at Michigan State, and the American students “have all spent time in China and have meaningful Chinese friendships.”
Here are some of the comments made by the Chinese students.
Students’ get-togethers start off by talking about high school life. When they came from the same area, well they have some kind of similar backgrounds and experiences that we don’t really have.
Some Chinese students, when they talk with an American, when they cannot find anything in common, they’ll just keep quiet. So they just ignore you. . . .
They care about their baseball game, football game, everything else, instead of this bunch of Chinese people just arrived.
If you make friends . . . you want to get involved in the American community, they will treat you as either a joke or just ignore you.
I’d rather just be with my Chinese friends.
I’ve met a lot of great American friends who are willing to sit down and listen to you and also share their story.
And by the American students:
For someone who hasn’t been to China before or who doesn’t know the culture, I think it’s going to be difficult for them to kickstart a conversation.
The closest relationships that I’ve had with Chinese students are the ones where the Chinese students make it an effort to also start a relationship as well.
My feeling, from my experience of why Chinese students don’t necessarily form close relationships with Americans and why Americans don’t form necessarily close relationships with Chinese is more so the flaw of the Chinese students.
Man, all the Asians are always together. You’ll never see one by themselves. They’re always in a group.
Besides those certain things that do make an impact, we’re all very similar, and you don’t need to stress the differences too much, because those are easily overlooked. . . . Differences aren’t a problem. Differences are what make life.
In the process of sharing in the story of her daughter, adopted from China, Linda Goldstein Knowlton decided to tell the story of four other girls, Chinese adoptees living in the United States. The vehicle for her storytelling is the documentary Somewhere Between. On the film’s website, Goldstein Knowlton says,
I am making this film for everyone. For the girls, so they can see their experiences in connection with each other, and for everyone who grapples with issues of race, culture, identity, and being “different.” By necessity, we must all try to comprehend the experience of being “other” in America, to see how each individual finds his or her own way in society. This film explores the emotional and psychological fallout on our daughters and our selves, and our cultural experience when stereotypes and assumptions collide.
The film follows the experiences of four young teenagers:
Jenna Cook, a 13 year old in New Hampshire (now a student at Yale). “As strong as she is, she breaks down discussing the word ‘abandonment’ and its effect on her life. . . . The film documents her courage and commitment to facing her past as she volunteers for summer work at the very Chinese orphanage that housed her as an infant.”
Haley Butler, 13 years old in Nashville, TN (currently studying at Nashville School of the Arts). While she is on a trip to China to find her birth parents, “miraculously, a man comes forward and claims her as his biological daughter, which sends Haley on a rollercoaster ride of excitement, trepidation, and self doubt until, at the end of the film, Haley discovers some surprising and shocking truths about herself and her history.”
Ann Boccuti, 14 years old, living in a Philadelphia, PA, suburb (now a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania). “She loves her life and has little desire to know anything about where she came from. . . . Her attitude, however, shifts when she meets other adopted girls in the CAL/Global Girls organization, and signs up for a trip to Europe with them. Once she is exposed to the innermost thoughts of other girls like her, girls who admit they have a nagging desire to find their roots, her world cracks open.”
Fang “Jenni” Lee, a 14-year-old in Berkely, CA (currently a student at Mt. Holyoke). “Her adopted parents divorce, and Fang must relive the ‘abandonment’ she faced as a small child. Amid this emotional turmoil, Fang travels to China and sees a little girl in a Chinese foster home, unmoving because of her cerebral palsy. Touched, Fang becomes determined to find the little girl a home.”
“This film is about these four girls,” says Goldstein Knowlton, ”and the 79,562 girls growing up in America. Right now.”
The award-winning Somewhere Between has screenings scheduled in several cities, but if there isn’t one near you, join me in waiting for the DVD. Having adopted a boy from Taiwan, I think we could learn some things from these girls. As our son grows up, he’ll be asking more and more questions, and we want to do our best to help him find the right answers.
Long before there was “Lin-sanity,” there was “The Year of the Yao.” That would be Yao Ming’s rookie season with the NBA’s Houston Rockets, and the subject of the 2005 documentary of the same name. One of the players who made an appearance in the film was Stephon Marbury. Playing for the Phoenix Suns, Marbury embarrassed Yao with a crossover dribble that made Yao tangle his feet and hit the floor (at 1:09 of the trailer, here). That was a while ago, and now, both players are no longer in the NBA. Yao has retired due to injuries, and Marbury, in an ironic twist, is now playing for the Chinese Basketball Association’s Beijing Ducks. Not only is he playing, but he just led his team to win the 2012 championship.
While playing in the US, Marbury was known for his philanthropy, but he also had a reputation for being selfish and hard to get along with. In fact, Sports Illustrated once named him the “most undesirable teammate” in the NBA. But according to China’s Economic Observer, things are different in China, where Marbury’s image has only an upside. During the 2005-06 season, reporters at the Daily News called Marbury, then a member of the New York Knicks, “the most reviled athlete in New York.” But now, in 2012, the people of China call him by the respectful title zheng wei, meaning political commissar.
For his fans, not only is he a great player leading them to victory, he is also someone who never disappoints them. No matter how long the queue is, he signs every notebook handed to him. . . . He also talks with the old Chinese ladies in his neighborhood, makes Chinese tea for journalists, has learned to use chopsticks and speak Chinese, and he even takes the crowded subway.
Marbury appreciates the fan support and acknowledges the difference that his time in China has made. “China changed the direction of my life,” he said. “I gained a lot of things that I did not have before. Coming to China has been a blessing for me.”
Marbury’s comments in a New York Times article last year echo these thoughts:
It’s just something about the serenity and peace of the country. I can’t really explain it; you’ve got to experience it.
He even gave advice to a fellow former NBA player in China, J.R. Smith, who was facing disagreements with his team:
I spoke with J. R. and I told him to make himself completely vulnerable to love: embrace the culture. You’ve got to acclimate yourself to something different, you’ve got to grow into it—and then you get this stillness and calmness about yourself.
And what are the future plans for the political commissar?
It ain’t temporary, it’s for good. I’m going to stay here, I’m going to live here. I love it here.
If you’d like to see a great film about adjusting to a new culture, I recommend The Year of the Yao. Not only did the 7-foot-6-inch Houston Rockets’ center enter the US, he also stepped into the unique world of the NBA, carrying the hopes and dreams of an entire nation with him. The documentary is also a look into the life of his young translator, himself a “rookie” thrown into the mix.
As a followup to making Beijing more foreigner-friendly for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government has published a book to provide restaurants with standardized English translations for over 2,000 dishes. While the publication, titled Enjoy Culinary Delights: A Chinese Menu in English, should clear up some confusion, it will diminish the entertainment value of menus in China. Gone will be “red burned lion head,” which becomes “braised pork ball in brown sauce,” and “chicken without sex life” gives way to “spring chicken.” Other substitutions include “shrimp cooked in rice wine” for “drunken shrimp,” “ground pork with green soya noodles” for “ants climbing the tree,” and “stir fried prawns and chicken” for “gambolling dragon and praying phoenix.” These last two aren’t mistranslations, just examples of poetic Chinese names whose meanings aren’t immediately obvious to foreign readers. (Maybe restaurants should just keep these literal translations and follow up with an explanation.) But others, maybe the best ones, come from a less-than-stellar grasp of English, such as the menu item from the photo in this article, which translates what could be called “sesame seaweed” as “dish of sesame oil connected through one’s female relatives.” Of course, if “seaweed” doesn’t sound good to you, the second name might be more appealing.
I don’t remember any specific examples of funny menu items from our time in Taiwan, but this topic reminds me of a couple of canned drinks that were commonly available in convenience and grocery stores. Both were labeled with unfortunate English names. The first is a sports drink from Japan, called “Pocari Sweat,” and the other is a yellow citrus soda, simply named “P.”
For anyone who’d like to learn more about the unique names of traditional Chinese dishes—and the history and makeup of Chinese characters—I highly recommend Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee. Using the names of foods, the stories behind them, and the stories behind the individual characters, Zee shows how the paths of culture, language, and cuisine intertwine. It will make your mouth water, and it will make menus come to life.
Welcome to Clearing Customs. This space is part blog, part annotated bibliography. It’s a collection of thoughts, information, links, and articles about how the people and parts of our world fit together across cultures. It's for those of us who, on our journey, sometimes have to check the box "something to declare." —Craig Thompson
