Science Fiction--Just in English?

When I saw the Star Trek movie reboot in 2009, I was one of the first people in the world to be able to see it in the theater.  I was living in China, and, excited to be able to get to a premiere of a film before my friends commented on it on Facebook, I decided to go to a midnight showing at the cinema in our small town. 

In the early 2000s, I’d been a reporter covering the midnight showings of the new Star Wars movies in the US, and I had great memories of people dressing up in costumes, getting their lightsabers confiscated by ushers, and making the movie an event rather than just another film to see. 

The cast of Star Trek.

However, I had a feeling that Star Trek wouldn’t have the same cult status in China. 

And I was right. 

We had booked our tickets in advance--but there was no need. Dan and I were two of only a handful of people in the large theater. At first we guessed that this was because it was a premiere, and premieres in China are often shown in English, with Chinese subtitles. But no, as it turned out, we’d be watching the film in Mandarin. Good practice for our language skills, but not much for helping us grasp the nuances of character and plot. 

Since then, I’ve been wondering how different cultures view science fiction. I know there are Chinese authors of science fiction, though I have never found a translated book I could read in English. And I have heard that Avatar is one of the top-selling movies in China of all time, right after Titanic, which was the first Hollywood blockbuster to be released in the Middle Kingdom. But, the percentage of science-fiction films coming from China seems to be much below the percentage of science fiction being produced in English language film studios. 

Much of Looper takes place in China.

It could be because science fiction is ill-regarded in China. In 2011, it was announced that Chinese censors were going to ban movies featuring time travel. This may be why, some industry insiders suggest, the films Looper and Iron Man had such large chunks of plot set in China. This inclusion perhaps greased the wheels and made censors more friendly to the idea of letting the movies release to their huge population of cinema-goers. 

What are your experiences with science fiction in other cultures? I’d love to hear about some books or movies you’ve enjoyed. Leave a comment below, or Tweet me @bethverde. 

A Taste of Traditional Chinese Medicine

A TCM pharmacy.
Photo by Sam Steiner.

By Beth Green

Many times when you visit the doctor or pharmacy in China, you’re given a choice: traditional treatments made from herbs and mysterious ingredients, or Western-patented pharmaceuticals.

The first city I lived in in China, in Southern China, had a specific hospital for Traditional Chinese Medicine (often just called TCM). At the bus stop outside it, passengers boarded wearing white bandages stained with brown poultices. Pharmacies usually featured both the comforting little rectangular boxes of pills that spelled out the ingredients in both Chinese and English and large dispensaries full of odd natural items that often looked like hedge-clippings or leftovers from a taxidermist’s shop. The air near the hospital and in the pharmacies had a distinctive smell—bitter and earthy.

I was always curious about experiencing TCM, but luckily I didn’t really need a doctor’s opinion in China until the second year I lived there. We’d just moved to a rural city in Southwestern China, with different weather and different food. My skin was not reacting well to the changes—and, distressingly, I’d picked up impetigo from some of the children I was teaching. After an Internet self-diagnosis of skin cancer (my self-diagnoses always include the worst possible interpretation of symptoms), I asked a co-worker to take me to the hospital across the road and see what a real doctor said.

At this hospital, and others I’ve been to since, when you come in to register you pick whether you want to see a nurse for a few yuan, a nurse with more experience for one yuan more, or a specialist doctor for a whopping seven yuan (about a dollar at that time). Not one to skimp, I chose to visit the specialist dermatologist.

The dermatologist had no waiting room; all of her patients grouped together in her small office on stools and listened avidly to her diagnosis and recommendation for the other patients while waiting for their names to be called.

When it was my turn ( I was extremely conscious of the ten pairs of ears and eyes in the room) the doctor didn’t ask me any questions other than if my skin itched. I had my co-worker explain my difficulties but she simply nodded, had me stick out my tongue, and made a note.

“Will you take TCM?” she asked me in Chinese.

“It’s not cancer?” I replied.

She laughed, and so did the other patients behind me.

A TCM store in Hong Kong.
Photo by Brian Jeffery Beggerly.

Relieved of that, at least, I said, “sure, why not?” and so began a six-week course of TCM. The doctor explained that I would see results less quickly than I would if we used Western medicine, but that hopefully I’d experience better skin and more energy after using the TCM.

The treatment was in part restrictive: I had to limit my intake of spicy and oily food, milk products, sugar, and caffeine. I had to eat more green vegetables. So far so good.

It included a topical treatment, which involved combining a paste with the clear contents of a glass vial, stirring it, and then applying it daily to affected areas with a delicate wooden stick. The glass vial was the most frustrating, because it didn’t have a lid: you had to break the tiny top off of it without shattering the rest of the vial and dropping glass shards in the paste; without dropping it on the floor, smashing it and getting glass splinters all over the bathroom; without cracking it and cutting your fingers. It took a few times—and return visits to ask for more medicine—to get this right.

I was also told to up my vitamin intake, which I could thankfully do with nice, comforting, Western-looking tablets.

And I had to drink four servings of a special brewed medicine every day.

The prescription for all this medicine was several pages long, because the doctor listed twenty-some ingredients.

I knew that the prescription was lengthy, but I didn’t realize what exactly was in store for me until my co-worker and I went to the pharmacy counter to pick up the medicines: three plastic shopping bags full of powders, leaves, and twigs.

“Um, what do I do with this?” I asked my friend.

“You cook it,” she said.

Um, yeah.

Medicines before they are cooked.
Photo by Bernhard Scheid.

Luckily, the town had one pharmacy that catered to people who were as incompetent as me in the medicine-preparation department and with a little negotiating, the proprietors agreed to cook up and bag my medicine, even though I hadn’t purchased the initial ingredients from them. It took them a day to prepare, but soon I had about four gallons of a root beer colored drink, hermetically sealed in several dozen small plastic baggies.

I was told to keep this refrigerated and drink it hot every day under certain conditions that I forget now. To warm it up, it worked best if I put a baggie in a bath of hot water for a few minutes, then snipped a corner off the plastic and slurped it out in one foul-tasting go.

Or, sometimes I put it in a coffee cup and pretended I was drinking really bad filtered coffee.

It was a fussy, bewildering way to find a cure, but the impetigo cleared right up, and soon my skin was behaving itself too. I went back to the doctor several more times, for more medicine, until finally she gave me the all-clear.

I have always wondered what was in the medicine she prescribed, but at the end of the day, I’m just happy it worked.

What experiences have you had at foreign hospitals?

Silk Road Ruminations

By Beth Green

While the sun made its way down behind the far hills, I crouched by a rock wall in a long-destroyed temple in the middle of the JiaoheRuins and imagined.

What had happened in this place?

I examined the crumbling wall. Were these striations and grooves in the rock from the wind alone? Could an army have destroyed this, or was the destroyer the oldest kind of enemy--time?

Half-left houses, their dark doors and windows eyes in melting giants' faces, leer at us but the city doesn't seem sad. It's a playground, a carnival of history. Here, Silk Road caravans rested on their way east or west. A dozen empires ruled and fell. Religions waxed and waned. How many people lived here, died here, sat just here and had the same thoughts that I did?

A map and historical description near the park's gate describe Jiaohe's high-sided rocky island as 'a willow leaf' pointing north. The residents, who were ousted by the Mongols in the 13th century, lived far above the flowing waters, protected by high cliffs on both sides of the river. The main gates led visitors up through the residential districts to the government buildings and then out to the temple district on the very tip of the willow leaf . The monasteries probably housed tens of thousands of Buddhist monks, centuries before Islam made its way along the Silk Road to XinJiang. Each morning they’d look out over the river that branched on either side of their city and catch sight of caravans of traders leaving the oasis for the Taklamakan Desert to the south.

A version of this post was first published as part of a travel blog about Beth's life in China.

To read more, follow this link to Travelpod.com. 

History: Reread and Rewritten

By Beth Green

One of the biggest thrills for me when researching a place to visit—whether for tourism or for living abroad—is reading about its history. I have written here before about reading a book just because I like the setting. But I also seek out works of both fiction and nonfiction to flesh out my concept of what a place was like at particular moments in time.

Following is a short list of a few historical books about China I often recommend to friends and other travelers.

* Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang, is one of those sweeping, epic tales that makes you want to flip right back to the start after finishing the last page. Part memoir, part novelized biography of the author’s mother and grandmother, Wild Swans tells the story of a family as well as a nation. From her grandmother’s bound feet to her mother’s work with the Communist Party, and finally to Chang’s emigration, Wild Swans illustrates the great changes China has undergone better than any other book I’ve read on the subject. At the time I read it, the book was banned in China. I got it from an expat friend, who got it from a friend, who brought it in from Hong Kong. And yes, I passed it on.

*Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’En. Often called just Monkey when in translation in the West, this is one of the four great classical novels of China. It describes the pilgrimage of a monk from China to India, on a quest to bring Buddhist scrolls back to his homeland. There is evidence the monk, Xuan Zang, was a real historical figure, but I’m guessing that the tale’s other characters are not: Sun Wu Kong, a monkey king; Zhu Bai Jie, an awakened pig; and Sha Wu Jing, an immortal general fallen from service in the heavenly court. If you travel in Xi’an or the western parts of China you’ll often find references to this party’s legendary journey.

*River Town and Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler.  These two books about journalist Hessler’s experiences, travels, and friendships in China since the 1990s are titles I often recommend to people who ask me for something to read about China’s contemporary history. (I mentioned River Town in my post about the Yangtze River, here.) Hessler moved to a small town in Sichuan province in the 1990s as a Peace Corps volunteer. His books reflect the amazing cultural and social changes that have taken place since that time, and also the changes in his own perceptions of China. He’s got a third book now, Country Driving, which I keep meaning to read.

*1491: The Year China Discovered the World, by Gavin Menzies. Probably known to my friends and family as the book I love to hate, I often recommend people read this book even though I doubt it’s historically accurate. (I’m not the only one. There was considerable controversy about this book’s claims.) Basically, the author asserts that China discovered the Americas and Antarctica before Columbus. I’m willing to accept that as a possibility, but then Menzies goes on to say that the Chinese influence from landings and shipwrecks on their voyages forms the basis for much of indigenous tradition in the Americas.

That’s where I get skeptical. However, what is fascinating to me about this book is the reception it got within China—my students loved it. The government loved it. It was featured on the news. It was widely available for sale (unlike Wild Swans, as I mentioned above, which features actual history.) So I recommend this book, because it has resonated with a huge population—it shows what they would like their history to reveal. Menzies followed up this book with two books I’ve yet to read:  1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance and The Lost Empire of Atlantis.

Do you have some favorite titles about the history of a place? Add them in the comments!

What Do You Mean There's Mangoes In This?

Moving to a new country is exhilarating.
Photo by D.C. Pelka

By Beth Green

First stage, Honeymoon: You’re thrilled to be here in [insert country name]. It’s wonderful!

Who wouldn’t like the people? The culture is so quaint! There are so many new things to see and do. What do you call that anyway, in [insert language]? Quick, let me write it down. I’m just learning so much!

Moving to a new culture is more than just a trip abroad. It’s a head trip, too. When we transition from a known quantity to an unknown, we’re setting ourselves up to react to a whole new series of experiences. I grew up traveling with my parents on a sailboat, and I’d visited 27 countries by the time I entered high school. I spent a further year abroad as a university student, in Spain. So, when I moved abroad in my 20s to teach English as a foreign language, I felt that in one respect I was rather above the rest of the travelers I met. Culture shock couldn’t touch me, oh no.

And, it was true that, living in Prague and coming from the U.S., there wasn’t all that much to feel shocked about. Aside from language, local customs and foodstuffs were not terribly different, and while there were definitely things to adjust to, I didn’t experience the swings in temperament I witnessed in some of my friends and colleagues. There were patterns, I saw—mostly within in a six-month time frame—of people vacillating between exhilaration and despair. One friend I knew for six months in Prague: he showed up, he loved it, then he hated it, then he found a job in another country.  But, by the time of his going-away party, he told me he wished he had given the city another few months before leaving. Thank goodness, I thought, that I don’t get culture shock.

Then, I moved to China.

Second stage, Negotiation: People are staring at me. Why are they always staring at me? Do I have something on my face? Did I forget to button my fly? Oh, God. Look, look at that! See what that guy just did? I can’t believe it. No one else noticed! How can they live like this? Back in [insert home country] we’d never stand for that. Nope. No way. What is that guy saying? Hey, [tries to speak in local language]. Do you understand? Do YOU underSTAND? [Insert expletive], this is useless. Why do I even bother?

 Culture shock can make you feel like the
host culture restricts you too much.

The first month in China was glorious. There was so much to do, so much to explore. I had bursts of energy, and then took long naps, blaming it on the heat. My new job took tons of preparation, but I still found time to go out with my new colleagues, see the city, and go on trips on my days off. And the food! The best I’d ever tried. How could it be that so few people I knew came to China to travel?

The second month, I started to feel less optimistic about learning Mandarin. I noticed that the other teachers, the ones who had been in the country longer, didn’t have much good to say about living in China. I wondered why they stayed if they didn’t like it. The food was still enticing, however, and I was getting to be a chopstick whiz.

The third month, I was laughing along with my colleagues’ jokes a little. I mean, yeah, I liked China a lot, but sure, the public toilets left a lot to be desired! And, sure, people were mostly friendly, but why were they staring so much? Local restaurants were just my thing. Now, I was actually able to order without the waiters laughing at me—well, actually, they still laughed at me, but I got the food I wanted.

The fourth month, I noticed I was grouchy a lot. The students were wearing on my nerves. My apartment had problems that were never fixed quite right. The weather seemed to be cruelly singling me out: raining the days I had a white top and no umbrella, freezing the days I wore sandals and shorts, sweltering the time I toted a sweater. The food lost its luster.  It was too salty. Too overdone. Too slippery. Why couldn’t we find bread that wasn’t sweet? How could a culture with such culinary masterpieces consent to sell only Kraft singles as cheese? And why was I gaining weight while all these Chinese people stayed so slim?

The fifth month, I ordered a mango shake by accident. Let me be clear—I hate mangoes. While this may be blasphemy to most fruit-lovers, I think I’m mildly allergic to them. Also, when I was young my family was once given a 5-gallon bucket of mangoes, which we proceeded to eat for months and months, until the last jar of mango preserves my mother had made was exhausted. Since then, they turn my stomach.

Now, usually, when I order something by mistake, I just eat it. To the irritation of my partner, I almost never complain in restaurants, even when it’s warranted. But on this day—not a particularly stressful day—instead of sorting out the problem, I pitched a little fit in the juice bar. People gathered to watch the display.

We left, shakeless, and I instantly felt terrible. I burst into tears on the street in front of the shop. Where were my manners? Where was my internal commitment to blend in, to be the good American abroad?

Aha, I thought, between sobs. This is culture shock.

Third stage, Adjustment: My [insert language] is coming along. I feel progress, finally! I’ve booked tickets to go home—but just for a visit. And, my new friends tell me that I should really go with them to this other town on our next holiday. I think it will be great. I’m really looking forward to it.

Don't feed me mangoes.
Photo by D.C. Pelka.

Recognizing the stress of moving to another land is probably the best way to handle culture shock. I tried to analyze my anxiety and work out the situations that bothered me and how to deal with those when they came up. I learned the characters for “mango” and “papaya” (also a hated ingredient) and never ordered any fruit drinks colored orange, even if I didn’t see those characters. I watched the effects of culture shock on newly arriving friends and co-workers and tried not to badmouth our host country where new arrivals could hear me, so that I didn’t pollinate anyone else with bad ideas.

Fourth stage, Mastery: Been there, done that. I’m here, and I can handle it. Want me to show you around?

By the time a year had passed, and it was time for my partner and me to think about whether we’d move on or renew our contracts so we could explore more of China, we’d really got the hang of things. We were still largely illiterate, but our spoken Chinese was improving. Friends came to visit, and it felt great to play guide. I was sure I wanted to stay in China longer the day that we visited the Guangzhou jade market, when I helped a frustrated British woman communicate with a seller.

After the deal was over, she looked at me with big eyes.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was amazing. How do you do it?”

“It just takes time.” I said. “You’ll get there.”