Go China! Zhongguo, jia you!
Quick recap: after six weeks of assessing in China following the May 12 earthquake, we called it - no go. Here's my verbose recap of my time here. I first posted this on the HODR Blog. John and Marc also posted their recaps as well. I think that together, the three posts make a pretty fair, fun account of what happened.
*****
When the earthquake happened on May 12, 2008, I was at home in California. For my three previous HODR assessments, I’ve been outside of my home country, without a sense of what kind of media coverage an event garners. Days, even a week after the event, the quake was still very much in the American consciousness. I heard it on NPR while driving, saw it on TV, and tracked it online while checking my email. While I feel like American media coverage of China is often skewed towards the negative, people seemed galvanized by the sheer magnitude of human tragedy that was unfolding. It was a more personal, empathetic side of China than what most people probably think of when it comes to China.
When the earthquake happened on May 12, 2008, I was at home in California. For my three previous HODR assessments, I’ve been outside of my home country, without a sense of what kind of media coverage an event garners. Days, even a week after the event, the quake was still very much in the American consciousness. I heard it on NPR while driving, saw it on TV, and tracked it online while checking my email. While I feel like American media coverage of China is often skewed towards the negative, people seemed galvanized by the sheer magnitude of human tragedy that was unfolding. It was a more personal, empathetic side of China than what most people probably think of when it comes to China.
As a Chinese American family we also get CCTV and other Chinese-language news channels in our house, in addition to my dad’s perpetual perusal of Chinese news online. Chest-thumpy coverage of Chinese civilian and government heroes was interspersed with TV benefits featuring fiercely-coiffed Chinese pop stars crooning to orderly lines of flag-waving, uniformed officials and excited school kids.
On May 19th, David made the decision to launch an assessment, and I was immediately on board. Even though I didn’t leave the US for another 10 days, the assessment begins immediately. We track the status of the response, learn about who else is on the ground, and identify target areas through ReliefWeb. We also reach out to NGO contacts with whom we’ve worked in the past to establish links and email personal contacts in-country to see what kind of networks we can tap into there. Meanwhile, I prepared my “to-go kit” (first aid, phones and electronics, HODR wear, documents, travel gear, etc.) and chatted online with John, my partner for this assessment, en route from Nepal.
My parents were skeptical. Oh, the government will take care of it all, my mom said, watch and see, they’ll build it back better than it was before. No one can compare to China! Yeah fine, you mainlander, I thought. My dad was concerned as well, but chose a different tact – shouldn’t you be applying to grad school? Umm, I already bought a ticket. Sorry. Ciao!
I landed in Beijing on May 30th. My brief time there included a meeting with iboughtashelter.com, a hotpot dinner with Kirsty, a HODR alum from Bangladesh (sausages were translated on the menu as “intestine kiss,” ew!), and my Beijing staple: savory pancakes and dumplings with my aunt and uncle. Apparently, they told me, Sharon Stone had said something about the earthquake being karmic payback for China’s actions in Tibet. They were confused – shouldn’t people try to offer support, or just not say anything, they wondered? Uh, yeah, I said, no one in America even watches her movies. I was surprised how hurt I was on their behalf, that a few careless words of some random lady on the other side of the globe could cause them to be upset. I’ve never had an opinion about Sharon Stone!
I started experiencing problems with my email and internet access early on. John remarked that my emails coming out of China all seemed to be delayed, and Marc wondered why I was keeping him out of the loop. China has the “Great Firewall,” which blocks various websites and most blogs to web users. Finding myself unable to load Gmail one day, HODR email the next, I developed paranoia that China was watching me and shutting me down. This coincided with Marc’s visa rejection. I stopped posting to my personal blog, thinking that an impatient comment might get my IP address further restricted. Inexplicably, I could still pull up some seemingly touchy sites (Tibet info?) while not being able to load innocuous ones (popular Chinese snack foods?), no matter what proxy I used. I’ve developed a new theory, that the government wasn’t watching me; they simply apply their firewall at random thus creating paranoia which frankly, is a good strategy. Well played, Chinese government, well played.
I moved on to Chengdu on June 1st. A couple NGOs were already at Sim’s Cozy Garden Hostel, where we’ve stayed the entire duration of this assessment, and more still were at the Chengdu Bookworm, the expat bookshop that’s been our office in the city. If you’re ever in Chengdu, I highly recommend both.
China has been engulfed in a wave of supportive, China-pride sentiment since the earthquake; one example is the rapid proliferation of “I love China” t-shirts everywhere. Men, women, children - I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a dog happily trotting around in an “I love China” sweater. The shirts are often white, laid out similarly to the ubiquitous “I (heart) NY” shirts. The solid red outline of the country might be printed in the center, or a red heart with the Chinese stars (laid out as on the Chinese flag), or the date “512” emblazoned in bold, maybe with the Beijing Olympics logo or rings added somewhere as an afterthought, with a panda thrown in for good measure as well. Design restraint doesn’t seem to be much of a concept here.
Initially I was incredibly energized by the NGOs getting started, the outpouring of support from regular Chinese citizens, and the perceived atmosphere of change and openness in the government. I felt there was a tremendous opportunity in the pool of Chinese students, Chinese professionals and companies looking to get involved, and robust expat community, in addition to loyal HODR alumni chomping at the bit to get dirty again. Yet, I still felt wary of operating as a foreigner in China. Everything I’d read and heard was that NGO work is a fledgling concept here, and that there is incredible ambiguity and inconsistency in working here.
Our usual approach to assessment is to visit sites in the field, make courtesy calls to local officials, and have interviews with government, NGOs, and citizens. Somehow I got it into my head that I needed to roll low-profile, avoid authorities, and network heavily with international groups. Wow, completely wrong! After two days of field assessments, I’d been stopped by police twice, instructed not to take photos, escorted out of an area by a police car, and been asked for my passport and visa (I lied and said I didn’t have it with me). I also hadn’t seen a single INGO working on the ground – only a Muslim Hands truck which passed by, shaded windows rolled all the way up. I realized that if I wasn’t meeting authorities head-on and concurrently feeling out permission to operate while assessing sites, then what I was doing amounted to sight-seeing. And so I went back to the original HODR M.O. – courtesy calls and meetings with officials. Duh.
John arrived on June 5th, and after a few more days of field assessments, our focus shifted to securing “permission” (whatever that meant) to work in our target areas. It was a futile goose chase to do this ourselves; village chiefs referred us to city officials, city officials hemmed and hawed and waved us to provincial authorities, provincial authorities avoided eye contact while stammering something vague about the Chinese Red Cross or the city-level officials, and then city officials shrugged and pointed to Beijing. Our tenacious translator Monica shook her head angrily after a day of rejection, “it’s such bullshits!”
One of the ways that we try and establish our “street cred” is by name-dropping some of the large INGOs we’ve worked with in the past. One problem though – UNICEF, Salvation Army, Save the Children – the average Chinese person has never heard of any of these. (Interestingly, a ton of people know WWF. Well played, WWF, for using the panda as your worldwide logo! Well played.) And so we shifted our strategy to looking for Chinese NGOs to partner with. The initial round of Chinese NGOs we found were energetic and eager, but rather inexperienced. Few had active earthquake response projects, and while interested in partnering with us, they simply didn’t realize the challenges involved with foreign NGOs. Invitations to meet and visit their sites slowly yielded to the realization that their tentative relationship with governments could be adversely affected by our presence, and they all backed away from working with us.
We got a taste of what it would be like to work in China when we went on a test build of an iboughtashelter.com shelter in the village of Baiguocun. I described this briefly in our second assessment update on hodr.org. The shelter is a dome-like tunnel framed with a mesh of split bamboo, wrapped in a sheath of durable, laminated tarpaulin that could last at least one year. Initially bewildered, the villagers started to rally; a crowd quickly gathered and villagers scattered and returned with random antiquated, rusty old tools which of course worked better that our shiny new picks and shovels. Amazing fun and energy! Four hours later, we’d finished the prototype. When were we coming to move in, asked the villagers? Oops. While they thought that the shelter was durable strong and better than what they currently were living it, they said it simply required too much time and too many people to set up. This would have been a great HODR project – our volunteers could work with individual families to set these up as shelters, community spaces, harvest storage, etc. In the end, the villagers of Baiguocun rigged up the shelter with a satellite dish and electricity; it’s where the people congregate to watch TV, play mahjong, and socialize, assured of its strength and ability to keep out the rain.
We conducted our assessments largely with the help of local guides/translators. Sichuan has its own dialect, and once people get going, I can’t make head or tail of it with my Mandarin. All of our translators can speak both Mandarin and Sichuan. Kipling, pictured with kids at the top of our fourth assessment update on hodr.org, was our main translator. He organized, strategized, and has a father who is a human GPS system. Monica balanced her exam and study schedule with persistent follow-up phone calls to everyone we ever talked to. Lily helped us source materials in Chengdu and translate documents and emails. I had fun with Una, who chatted with me in French and then translated to Chinese. Jackie would listen patiently to our ramblings and then ask, “ok, what’s your point?” thus helping us to streamline our message. Alex and I would get caught up in Mandarin clarifications to each other, leaving John in our linguistic dust. All of these people were critical to the progress of our assessment.
Rolling around in taxis in Chengdu was a good way to see how the earthquake was still very much in the public consciousness. There are large red banners everywhere, boldly lettered with encouraging and patriotic slogans. Every cabbie had their radio turned to talk radio, discussing some aspect of the quake or the response. One female host recalled how minutes after the quake, she started receiving text messages from a listener in a severely affected area. Dramatically, the host set up her program, at which point she called the mobile number and had a voice conversation with her mystery lifeline…which was actually pretty anti-climactic. I often heard one radio spot, a gallant male and empathetic female voice taking turns orating lofty mottos, culminating in a chorus chanting “Jia you!” It’s the Chinese way of saying “go!” in English, or “allez!” in French. Wenchuan, jia you! Sichuan, jia you! Zhong guo, jia you! Wenchuan, go! (Wenchuan was the epicenter of the quake.) Sichuan, go! CHINA, GO! John really liked this, and would randomly exclaim “jia you!” when walking around or thinking to himself.
Another challenge was in trying to communicate our model, programs, and the evolution of our work to officials and other NGOs. Clearing rubble? Oh, the army is doing that. Are they doing it now? No. Do you know when they will? No. Don’t people need to clear a space to build their temporary house? Yes, but the government is building temporary houses. Will the government build temporary houses in this village? No. So what’s your plan? The government hasn’t told us yet. Oof! So they’d change the line of questioning. Where are your experts? What kind of training program do you offer your volunteers? What’s your budget? What can you build? We’ve encountered this everywhere we’ve worked before, but usually we’re able to explain how HODR fills a different niche. Here, we couldn’t get around the narrow mentality, which frustrated me immensely. Effective response is about simultaneously pursuing different kinds of relief activity. Of course the government takes care of large-scale needs; NGOs are meant to be complementary. The value of HODR’s work can’t be fully expressed through this bottom line type of thinking.
In China, charitable donations are public, and therefore quite scrutinized. Some companies sent office-wide memos recommending how much employees should give, depending on their position in the company. Celebrities were chastised (and thrashed by China’s voracious online community) for not giving “enough.” In the west, charitable giving is often a private, or at least a quiet affair. Here, TV news kept a vigilant update like a PBS pledge-a-thon. At the local Starbucks, the “community board” maintained its cheerful scrapbook aesthetic, but was carefully arranged with photos of their staff dropping cash donations into a collection box. Each staff member was posed with their ¥100 bills fanned out, so that you could see how many they were giving.
There is some legitimacy to the singular “the government will take care of it” mentality that people have. This government does do a lot for its people. It has tremendous resources and it knows how to mobilize them. On my first day out in the field, the highway was packed with trucks transporting prefab housing materials to far flung locations. In addition to the massive 10,000 module community that stretched out like a sea, soldiers also dropped off a neat stack of 21 units in a rural hamlet I visited. Impressive coverage. I won’t go off on the considerable issues and needs that remain – credit should simply be given where it’s due.
In other places HODR has worked, we’ve been able to find someone who puts their faith in us, or at least is open to having us start work, see what we’re doing, and then evaluate. And if we just get that opportunity, I’m supremely confident of our ability to perform and impress. I’m wary of starting off our relationship with an official by offering to build a temporary medical center. What comes next? Part of the beauty of HODR is that we start off by simply offering our hands, our volunteers. From this, we build a relationship with the community, start work on more complex and involved projects, and then we’re recognized for both the hard and soft benefits that our volunteers contribute. Here, it’s quite difficult to get that chance.
Things never seemed to line up quite right. The government might allow us to work in one area, but there was simply not enough infrastructure to be able to support a volunteer base without being a burden on the local community. In another place, the community vibe was great but the road leading to the town was buried in daily mudslides that would persist through the rainy season. In yet another, the potential work was a good fit but local officials were about as interested in us as Tim is interested in wearing shoes.
As our time in Chengdu dragged on, we fell into the habit of having ice cream every day after lunch. There’s a shop down the street from Sim’s which has 10 ice cream coolers, nothing else, and a constantly evolving selection of bars and cones to choose from. John has an uncanny knack for consistently choosing terrible flavors every day. It’s been so long now that I think he aspires to it. If I may say so myself, I choose pretty good ones.
A significant disappointment was that foreign volunteers were viewed as a liability to the government officials and Chinese NGOs that we met. John and I felt strong pressure to restrict the numbers of foreigners (and therefore HODR alumni) who could participate. This was troubling, since the global mix of our volunteer community is one of the things that produces memorable exchanges with the community served, part of what’s unique and fun about HODR. I have absolutely no problem with a majority Chinese-volunteer event, was certainly excited at the prospect, but was disappointed that we would need to explicitly gate foreign participation to get our start. Marc and I have always been adamant in our open, no minimum time commitment, no required skills policy. This would be a major change.
Last week, I met Marc in Beijing and we spent a few days in meetings. It seemed like the perfect time to make these connections. Enough time had lapsed since the quake for some groups to get their programs started and for things to stabilize. Overall, these Beijing contacts operated at a higher level with better government relations, reacted positively to our model, and offered creative ideas on how to get started. But we still faced the same fundamental problems to launching a project: access to the area, government permission, and sensitivity to foreigners.
I know of one NGO doing work similar to us that’s up and running. CODE is a Japanese group staying at Sim’s, which sends teams of Japanese volunteers to a rural village (where that 21-unit temporary housing I mentioned is) to do rubble work. Every evening they burst out of their van in a cloud of dust, looking tired and happy. I feel kind of jealous, but also very happy to know that our kind of work is quite valued and appreciated at the local level. They say that the reception to their work in the village is tremendous. Now they’re starting to look at housing projects. Being based in Chengdu allows them to operate on this interim basis; because we try to set up our operation in the field, we have to be more conservative.
In the end, we did have an opportunity to partner with a Chinese NGO (NGODPC) already at work in a community that would have been a good starting place for HODR. They even have ten volunteers operating out of a tent base camp, much the same as HODR’s style. But as I wrote in our conclusion on hodr.org, we have a responsibility to provide a stable base and transparent operations to our volunteers, domestic and international. The relations we had in place didn’t give us the confidence to do this over a sustained period.
I often grapple with my Chinese identity, especially when I’m in China. People are puzzled by the juxtaposition of my self-conscious, lumpy Mandarin with my Chinese face, and their eyes are inevitably drawn to my scuffed sneakers (atypical footwear here). In each of my previous trips here, I’ve found parts of Chinese culture that overwhelm me, that make me lose my patience at this seemingly soulless, spitting, elbowing, loud, overwhelming crush of people and crazy lateral traffic motion and smog and development and narrow-mindedness and those terrible ankle-length nylon socks that women wear and blarghh!
And yet this time, I feel quite enamored with the place. I experienced incredible kindness and generosity from the people I aspired to help. I enjoyed candid, intelligent conversation with our tireless team of guides and translators. I respect the experience, insight, and energy of the NGO people (mostly Chinese) with whom I met. And I’m impressed with the ambition and dedication of the Chinese people. It was never difficult to motivate myself to keep going, to keep finding contacts and meetings and places to get excited about. It was difficult to know when to call it, to let it go. My experience over the past six weeks has been so positive. I might go get one of those t-shirts.
And so, we make our preparations to leave China. I’m incredibly disappointed to not be able to launch a HODR project here, but I feel overwhelmingly touched, heartened, and exhausted by the interactions we’ve experienced here. Now I wish the Chinese people, ChineseNGO/operating INGO community, and Chinese government the best of luck for the continued earthquake recovery, and place my faith in the incremental, perpetual changes for the better which I do indeed see taking place in China. Zhong guo, jia you!
posted by Stefanie at 9:42 PM
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