More Guangzhou Info

All of my visa things were taken care of entirely. I am now in China on a one-year student visa, and after I register at the local police station I will be free to exit and enter the country at my leisure. Everything was taken care of without any issues. The only downside is that now the Chinese government has all of my personal information, especially my medical information, in triplicate several times over.

So the reason I'm actually in Guangzhou is to work, not just to enjoy living in a semi-tropical Chinese city. This year, I will be working at South China Normal University, in the lab of Prof. Wang Suiping in the school of psychology on the neuroscience of language. SCNU is the third-ranked psychology program in China, and the first outside of Beijing (the top two being Peking University and Beijing Normal University).

Note the palm trees in the second photo. Still not sure I approve of such things.

Anyways, Prof. Wang and the rest of the School of Psychology has been great. They've been very welcoming, and Prof. Wang has told me there's a wide variety of possibilities that I can work on this year. There are a good 20 students, Master's and PhD, in her lab, all working on various projects that I can join if I'm interested. Additionally, some of the other professors do more computational modeling-type research, which is a bit of a favorite of mine, so I may get a chance to work with them a bit too.

Right now, I'm starting to work with one PhD student, who does work on bilingualism. His research focuses on native Chinese speakers who learned English later in life, and what the activity in their brain looks like when they're speaking one vs. the other, when they have to switch between the two, and the like. He's also working on, and I think this is the real interesting stuff, what the overall network of active brain areas looks like. There's a very cool phenomenon known as small-world networks, that arises in all sorts of real-world networks and is examinable using a field of math known as graph theory. When I say network, I mean anything that can be represented as something like the following:

This is a graph, and it's basically a bunch of nodes/vertices (dots) connected by edges (lines) to show that there's a relation between them. Though this looks fairly abstract and mathy, graphs can represent many different real world networks. For example, a social network: each node represents a person, and there's an edge between two nodes if the people they represent are friends. Or a transportation network: each node represents a stop, and there's an edge between two nodes if there's a way to get between them. Or brains: each node represents a part of the brain, and there's an edge between two nodes if those two areas are connected.

A small-world network is a special type of network that seems to appear naturally, to evolve in any sufficiently complex network, both artificial and natural. Brains, social networks, power grids, etc. all show properties of this type of network, first described by Strogatz and Watts, 1998, in the paper that coined the term. A small-world network satisfies two major criteria: for a given node, most of its neighbors are in turn neighbors of each other, and you can get from one node to any other node in a relatively small number of steps. In human social relations, the first criterion displays itself in the fact that most of your friends are probably friends with each other, and the second is responsible for the notorious game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In brains, this allows related areas of the brain to easily talk to each other, while also allowing information to easily flow across the entire brain if necessary. Obviously, both criteria would also be met in a graph where every node was connected to every other, but the small-world network is special because it manages to achieve these two criteria with a relatively low number of edges. This is desirable because it's less costly: for social networks, no one is friendly enough to be friends with every person on Earth; for a power grid or transportation network, it would be a waste of resources; for brains, it would be a waste of energy.

So basically human brains (and every other central nervous system examined so far) are small-world networks, which is cool, but why's that important? Besides the fact that it makes sense evolutionary, because it minimizes cost while maximizing efficiency of information processing, it's also important because there's evidence that the properties of the brain network change when people are in different states. People with autism and schizophrenia appear to have differently structured networks, and the functional network of your brain (not the physical connections, but how the activity in different parts of the brain syncs up) appears to change based on whether you're awake but not doing anything, asleep, anesthetized, doing a specific task, or drugged.

Gangyi, the grad student I will be working with, one experiment that he's working on examines how the functional network of the brain differs when speakers are speaking English vs. Chinese. And this is the project that I will be helping him on at first.

Of course, being a native English speaker (the only in the lab and possibly the only one in the school of psychology...), I will also be assisting the lab by helping them revise the papers they write in English for publication. And I may teach some undergrads English, as well as tutoring my boss's young daughter, who lived for a year in the US several years ago but hasn't had significant exposure to English since. In exchange for that, I may learn how to do traditional Chinese painting. So that's super exciting.

And that's a long-winded explanation of what this next year might be like for me. Sorry for the technical bit in the middle, but graph theory is really cool, and it's exciting that it has very useful applications in neuroscience. Math!

Here's a photo of me with a bunch of professors to round out this post.

The woman in the shiny purple shirt to my left in this picture is Yang Kun, my friend who works for The Asia Foundation in Beijing. She helped me move to Guangzhou and get settled and returned to Beijing yesterday; moving down would've been much harder without her, so I'm really thankful she could join me for a couple days. The woman in the not-shiny purple dress to my right is my boss, Wang Suiping, and the man in the blue striped polo is her husband Zhang Wei, the Dean of the School of Psychology. They have both been great, and I'm very thankful to have the opportunity to work with them and the rest of the SCNU School of Psychology this year!

到了广州！

I have made it to Guangzhou! Landed this afternoon, currently staying in a hotel, where I'll stay for three days before shifting to another hotel to stay until I find a more long term apartment with a reasonable kitchen in a reasonable place for a reasonable price.

So far, Guangzhou is a little hot and muggy for my taste, and it doesn't get too much cooler at night. However, the food is delicious, my boss is awesome, and I have started to learn some Cantonese. These include such important phrases as: "hello," "excuse me," "good-bye," "pretty woman," and "fuck off." Cantonese is a very weird sounding language, with many more tones than Mandarin (seven to nine depending on how you count), more final consonants in syllables, and different vowels.

Additionally, while just about everyone speaks Mandarin in Guangzhou, almost everyone also has their own home-town dialect, such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Teochew/Chaoshan. Just from my one day of talking to people, it appears that having a local dialect is not only more common, but these dialects (unlike those of northeast China) are unlikely to be mutually intelligible with Mandarin or each other. So there's that.

More on Guangzhou, as well as the completion of my blogs on Seoul, Harbin, and Beijing, to follow.

Seoul Seoul Seoul

So I am currently in Seoul. It's a wonderful place, beautiful city and everything is great except I can't understand anything. Why can't they just use Chinese? Gosh darn it that would make everything easier. They even have their own alphabet! A phonetic alphabet, not a character based one. There's no logic to it, I tell you.

Bah. Otherwise, however, Seoul is great. Good food, very clean, modern city, and lots of interesting architecture. I'm particularly tired right now and don't feel like presenting any type of narrative, so I present, for your enjoyment, some photos:

 Bibimbap, bulgogi, and chapchae, accompanied by various side dishes, including two types of kimchi: one white (not spicy) and one red (spicy). Bibimbap is the one in the black pot there, which is basically rice with a lot of toppings and then you mix it all up and it's delicious. Bulgogi is a wonderful beef dish. Chapchae is a type of sweet potato noodle that is delicious. Kimchi is basically Korean sauerkraut, similar style of preparation and is, again, delicious.

 The above photos are all from Gyeongbok-gung palace, which is was originally a Joseon era palace, built in the late 1300s, and then burnt down twice by the Japanese, once in 1592 and once in 1910, because the Japanese are like hey screw you guys. So these are mostly reconstructions, done since the end of the Korean War. Another thought, the architecture looks very Chinese, down to the same decorative motifs, roofs, pagodas, and so forth.

 These are all from Cheonggye stream, which used to be a stream and then was an old thoroughfare and is now an old stream that people can walk down. It's really really cool. Literally and figuratively. And is a great way to stroll through the city.

 And this is agujjim, a Korean dish composed mainly of monkfish, bean sprouts, and sauce. It was a decent level of spice, and delicious. Ben and I had no idea what we were ordering, because we don't speak Korean. We wandered into a random restaurant, saw things that looked tasty and decided to try and order it. Thankfully we sat next to a table of Chinese tourists, and they and their friend who spoke Korean were able to assist us. Hurray globalization! Where a couple of American tourists can get around in Seoul by speaking Chinese to some people in the import/export business from Shanghai. So that was fun.

Other thoughts: It is humbling to again be unable to express myself or understand even the littlest thing. I was all thinking I'm hot shit in China: look at this foreigner, he can speak Chinese. That's right I can, because I'm awesome. And then I come to Korea and it's like, well, now I'm just about as communicative as a 1-year-old. Damn. Ah well. Really cool alphabet though, wish I had the time to study it more than just glancing at the cheat sheet I printed out.

I'm thinking of starting two new photo series, using the photos from this trip and some that I believe I have from Beijing: Luce Scholars Walking Through Doors and Asian People Taking Photos of Themselves. Because those would be riveting looks into my life in Asia.

That's all for now.

The Wonderful World of Bureaucracy

As I'm writing this, I am sitting on the floor of a guesthouse in Seoul, Korea. I have left China for the time being and will be spending the next several days in Korea.

This is because of the recent changes in Chinese visa regulations, which make it much more difficult for foreigners to apply for visas. I came to China on a tourist visa, as the paperwork required to apply for a student visa was not yet available from my work. The plan was then to apply for a new visa from Hong Kong a little later in the year, which has been what previous Luce Scholars have been doing for quite some time. However, because of the new regulations that went into place over the summer, the Chinese government has been denying most visa requests made by people that are not in their home country, meaning that I would most likely be required to return to the US.

As a last ditch effort before having to return, Ben and I have been sent to Seoul to try and apply from there, because apparently they have still been processing some student visas by Americans. So, we get a free trip in Seoul for the next couple days and will hopefully be returning to China with our fancy new student visas on Thursday before heading down to our placement cities, Shanghai and Guangzhou, respectively, on Friday. Here's hoping everything works out!

冷笑话/Bad Jokes

Unfortunately, dear reader, I have been busy of late and so have not had time to blog as much or in as much detail as I would like. Today will be similar. I don't have the time to continue the epic of Harbin, and so I present the following diversion.

冷笑话/lěngxiàohuà, literally "cold jokes," are a type of joke that, to quote my dictionary, "are intended to be so corny as to make one groan." So basically they're bad puns.

My favorite that I've heard so far is the following:

有两块牛排，一个是三分熟，另外一个是五分熟。 他们在路上互相碰到了，但是连一次它们都没说。为什么?

因为它们不熟!


Yǒu liǎngkuài niúpài, yīge shì sānfēnshóu, lìngwài yīge shì wǔfēnshóu. Tāmen zàilùshàng hūxiāng pèngdào, dànshì lián yīcì tāmen dōu méishuō. Wèishènme?

Yīnwèi tāmen bùshóu!


So, there two steaks, one cooked rare, the other medium. They ran into each other on the street, but didn't say a word to each other. Why?

The punchline here, 因为它们不熟, works because of the two meanings of 不熟. One meaning is not well-cooked. Therefore, the punchline can be understood as , "because they're not well-cooked," as neither steak is well-done or cooked all the way through. However, the other meaning, the one that makes this joke so groan-inducingly hilarious, is the meaning of 不熟 as unfamiliar. So they didn't say hi to each other because they don't know each other! Comedy gold right there.

Surprise! Or, The Most Vulgar Thing I've Ever Seen in a Church

A warning. This post is slightly Not Safe For Work (NSFW) and contains a picture that may be inappropriate for small children. I figure I should warn people beforehand, since I can't figure out a way to mark the post as such.

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Okay, still with me?

This is my first post about Harbin, though there will be several more. Harbin was an incredible city, and this is really just a teaser post, because it's the middle of the week and I'm tired.

Quick, from the above two pictures, guess which country I was in! And no looking at the ethnicity of the crowd of people or using background information, because that's cheating.


But yeah, from the architecture, Harbin (which is still in China) looks very very different from Beijing. I'll have to post more pictures of the architecture in Beijing to make this clearer, but Beijing feels very Chinese. Low buildings, the sloping tiled roofs that I would expect to find in China, and everything packed close together. This is especially true of the area that I live in. There are giant skyscrapers as well, of course, but they're concentrated in a few areas. Harbin, on the other hand, feels much newer and European. There were tons of giant skyscrapers, placed with distance between them. And the older looking buildings were very European-looking, reminding me of Budapest and Eastern Europe more than anywhere else. This was a very neat contrast to come across.

The city is also along a river and, being so far north, this contributes to an incredibly comfortable climate in the summer time. There was a breeze blowing constantly, especially close to the river, and the temperature was a good several degrees cooler than Beijing. It was nice to have several days where I wasn't constantly drenched in sweat while walking around outside. It was perfect weather too, since we spent most of the two and a half days we were there outside.

Also, as you can see in several of those pictures above. The sky was clear and blue. There was no pollution to speak of, another welcome change from the norm here in Beijing. Well, I should clarify that there was no air pollution to speak of. Several Harbiners whom I talked to pointed out that they had pollution, in the river and the soil, but you weren't breathing it all the time, so that's a plus, right?

So anyways, I'm going to keep this post short and finish with a brief overview of my trip of Harbin before ending with a humorous, slight NSFW anecdote. 

1. We took an eight-hour high speed train, leaving in the afternoon and arriving late at night, both ways. This was not terrible, but I would not recommend it. The overnight train is undoubtedly the way to go.

2. The staff at the hotel was wonderful. They were very friendly and helped us organize all of the excursions we took over the weekend (which was much more difficult than it should have been, for reasons I'll get into later). They were also fun to talk to and taught me some authentic 东北话, Northeastern Chinese dialect, though I've forgotten most of it by now.

3. Walking around Harbin was great. Still a ginormous city, but it was great to fun to walk along the waterfront and to see a bunch of different buildings.

4. We knew we were in for delicious sausage and Russian food, but didn't know we would find awesome seafood. Right next to our hotel too. That was a nice surprise.

5. Our second (and final) full day in Harbin, we took a long-distance bus to a dusty town outside of Harbin to do some outdoors excursions. Our plan was for rafting and hiking, which didn't quite work out. In the end, we got into splash flights with what seemed to be half of the residents of the province and emerged from the ordeal completely and utterly soaked and smelling of river water.

6. In the half day before we took the train back. We saw Siberian tigers at a tiger park. Still not quite sure on my feelings towards the tiger park, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

So, in the church featured in the picture above, St. Sofia Church, or 圣索菲亚教堂/Shèng Suǒfēiyà jiàotáng. It's a beautiful old Orthodox church that survived the Cultural Revolution only to be transformed into a museum about the history of Harbin in recent years.

The museum itself was very interesting, not necessarily because the history of Harbin is a particularly fascinating one, but because of the way it was presented in the museum. Harbin was a city founded by Russian Jews, but you wouldn't find that in this museum. As the story was told here, Harbin was founded by Chinese and was largely Chinese for the entirety of its history, despite an influx of Russians in the period before WWII. This is decidedly not the way things actually happened in Harbin, Other than that minor overlook, it was interesting to see the pictures in the museum, and how Harbin developed from a dusty little down to the metropolis of 12 million that it is today. 

On the way out of the museum, we passed a small section with information about the name. Harbin, or 哈尔滨/Hā'ěrbīn in Chinese, is not a Mandarin name. It comes from the Manchu language, who were the original inhabitants of the region, though they are relatively sparse in the area nowadays.

Right before we left the church-converted-into-a-museum, we passed the gift shop. And, lo and behold, saw the following interesting pieces of home decoration.

Those are two ashtrays, both in the form of naked women, one on her side and one with legs splayed open.

So, yes, that was quite unexpected. This is my opening salvo in the game of "Most Vulgar Things to be Found in a Church," and I'm curious if anyone else can find something to top this. 

More details on Harbin, with fewer naked women, will be forthcoming.

Sorry for the delay

I apologize for the lack of posts in the past week. I came down with a cold over the weekend and have been sleeping more than usual in an attempt to fight off. This does seem to be working, but it has prevented me from blogging as much as I normally do. So, here's a brief update.

This weekend I will be traveling to Harbin/哈尔滨, the capital of Heilongjiang/黑龙江 province in the far north-east of China. This is the province that is the closest to Russia, in what used to be considered Manchuria, and as such has a strong Russian influence. Harbin itself was founded by Russian Jews only a couple hundred years ago, and has several synagogues and Orthodox churches, both of which are relatively rare in China. 

Our original plan was to stay in a place off of AirBnb, a site similar to VRBO where private owners can list their houses and apartments for rent. This didn't end up working out because, as Harbin is not a huge tourist city, especially for English-speakers (which AirBnb mainly serves), there were a small number of places listed and none of them could sleep all three of us in a way that made sense. So we ended up booking a hotel through a Chinese website instead. Our original plan to get to Harbin was to take an early morning fast train there on Friday, leaving at 7am and arriving at 3pm (8 hours for a trip of about 770 miles) and then to take a night train back, leaving Monday night at 10 and arriving in Beijing at 11am. However, due to a terrible case of not-being-on-the-ball-itis, we couldn't buy either of these tickets. So we will take an afternoon train on Friday, arriving that night, and a similar train on Monday for the trip back, as those were literally our only options at that point.

As for what we're doing in Harbin, I've left that up to Ben and Martin, since I took care of (to varying degrees of success) the travel arrangements, so I'll let you know, with pictures, when I return.