“Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years he was in power, as Saporito points out in his piece on the Chinese middle class, a spending class that precariously faces what could wind up saving the global economy–or busting it even further.

What China is planning is a shift away from export-based industry to a consumer-spending based system, but it will not be easy and there are plenty of potential hiccups involved in fundamentally shifting an economy of 1.7 billion people. But the middle class of that country, which they are projecting to be 70 percent of the population by 2020, could be the saviors of the global economic structure; they have immense capacity for spending, a huge group like that.

Western- and Chinese-based companies combine to create the giant metropoles that dot China. This is downtown Zhengzhou, whose population was 8 million in 2007.

Companies have known for years that the developing world was an important place for them to seek new markets for their goods. Couple that with a recession across the West and other developed nations, and you see a kind of exodus now, towards those booming, growing, expansive markets–the new consumers who have their eyes on fancy goods. Gap, the American jeans company, is closing twenty percent of its U.S. stores and tripling the number it has in China.

Saporito’s most memorable bit:

If successful, the shift to consumer spending will take a good chunk of the weight of the global economy off the shoulders of American consumers and make China a gotta-be-there market for everything from video games to surgical tools to potato chips. “This generation, these strivers, they will be the saviors of the global economy,” says Tim Minges, chairman of the greater China region for PepsiCo, which is pouring billions into China in anticipation of that growth. “I really do think the Chinese middle class will be like the U.S. baby boomers.”

I, for one, am putting my faith in this Chinese middle class, as the new version of the U.S.’s baby boomers, to save us all.

Shopping with other study abroad girls at an 8-story mall in Shanghai. (We were excited because they actually took credit/debit cards in Shanghai.)

I decided that if I were to produce a pair of jeans, start to finish, I would charge the prospective buyer $2,000, at least. Obviously, I should not go into the jean-making-or-selling business. But it was a stark reminder that there are plenty of women–and also men and children–whose days are defined by pumping out pair after pair to sell to hungry consumers around the world for amazingly low prices, considering the labor. I cannot tell you how many times, during my years in mall retail sales associateship, I heard parents complain about the cost of jeans. They were especially mad when the jeans  were bleach-washed and “destroyed” (lots of holes and patches, in other words), as they could not believe they were paying more money for something that has been ripped up. As someone who has sat at home and pulled denim threads out of jeans until my fingers bled to get the same look in DIY form, I often held back from pointing out the obvious to them: someone has put many hours of their life into creating this pair of runway-ready jeans for you or your teenager. If you want, buy the regular pair for a whole $20 less, and take them home and try to do it yourself.

There are no new revelations to be had in what I am saying. Sweatshops and the low wages of garment industry workers have been well-publicized over the last twenty years or so, and I do not pretend to have some answer. As long as people need clothes to wear, there will be this problem in the world. But the important thing to remember is that it was not so long ago when the women of the United States were the ones subjected to the long hours, low pay, and back-breaking conditions. It is part of the phenomena of developing nations, that a generation will work very hard in factories to provide better lives for their children, the whole theory being that they can eventually move up a notch in the world. One of the most important lessons about places like Lowell, Massachusetts, which was defined by its industrial factories and garment producers in the nineteenth century, is that those conditions, the ones we thank our grandparents for improving for us–have not disappeared. They have simply relocated. Another group of people carries the burden today, producing clothing for the masses.

Earlier this semester, we read The Lowell Experiment in one of my classes, in which ethnographer Cathy Stanton examines the relationship between historians, a post-industrial city, and the National Park that the city is today. Lowell is still a real, inhabited city, but it is also a historical subject, and a place in the American industrial past that serves as a ground for social scientists to really examine many aspects of the course of American history over the last couple hundred years. What Stanton does the best is remind us that historians do not exist in a vacuum, but are, just by going to a place and trying to learn about it, affecting the results they will find. The relationship a historian has to her subject cannot be entirely removed from the results she will present to her peers and community.

And the other key thing Stanton brings home is that Lowell’s history cannot exist one its own, either. People who visit the city-slash-national-park have to be confronted with the notion that these factories, just because they are no longer booming here, does not mean they are gone, that we have cured the world of the plight of the factory worker. She points out one poignant moment on a tour she was on, when the tour guide strayed from his script for a moment and did what Stanton had concluded had not been happening in this place: he connected past and present. His statement:

I want to say, this machine isn’t just history. When we built this historical park we had to travel around the world to buy looms. Looms like this are operating as we speak somewhere around the world. It’s kind of neat to think about that. And there’s no right or wrong answer, there’s no easy answer to it, but we can go to Wal-Mart or A.J. Wright or any store, really, and buy really cheap clothing. And what’s the alternative? Paying a lot for your clothes? We all work, we all try and and pay the best we can for our cloth. But the reason we can get cheap cloth is because someone around the world is working on these looms, and looms not unlike what we have today. A few years ago, Kathy Lee Gifford was in trouble for using child labor on machines just like this. So it’s just something to think about.

One other thing I like to sort of think about is the word “labor.” It means “to suffer” in Latin. And when you think about the suffering that goes into making cloth, back in history and even to the present day, it’s just something to think about. We wear the clothes, sometimes we don’t think especially how hard the person who built or made the clothes worked to produce that. And all that labor, all the suffering that went into building this city, and the results, both good and bad. Just think about that a little bit. And I’ll be talking about more of the positive consequences on the way back. But on a hot, sticky day, with this loud machine and the lint flying in the air, it’s pretty easy to picture how miserable it would be to work there. (p. 61)

Stanton says it was a stunning moment, where suddenly each person on the tour was confronted with “the phantom figure of the Malaysian or Pakistani mill girl who was laboring–suffering–so that we could buy a t-shirt for a small fraction of what it would have cost to produce in a developed country.”

The tour guide was obviously taking a risk, and chose his words wisely, speaking softly around the issue but offering no illusions about what he was referencing. And, the author reported, the other people on the tour, while a bit shaken, seemed to be able to handle it. “This is precisely the goal of progressive public history,” she says, “to seize such small opportunities and compound them into larger visions of the process we are all a part of.”

My own sewing quarters, where I am allowed the gift of being able to create what I want, as a hobby rather than a laborious job. I am truly grateful.

I was reminded of all of this not because I hemmed a pair of jeans–although that brought the message of labor and frustration home personally–I was reminded, really, by the remembrance, recently, of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, which 100 years ago went up in flames on a Saturday morning in March, killing more than 100 workers, mostly women and children, due to a shoddy fire escape and other unsafe conditions for its workers. Supervisors would lock their workers into the factory’s floors, on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the ten-story building, and so when the fire erupted, many people were left to jump out the windows–usually to their death. In 1911, in an industry of extremes that was subject to the whims of the fashion trends, work of this nature was often relegated to new immigrants seeking to improve their lives. Their average work weeks were 84 hours. These were the victims of the fire, one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. The tragedy of that day, which you can explore in a podcast and recreation of the morning here, reminds us again that such circumstances have not gone away–they have only gone beyond our national borders. It is a kind of labor many of us can only imagine.

It has not entirely left the United States, nor Lowell. Immigrants still hold those jobs, today.

The World’s Jason Margolis did a news story on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and its galvanization of the garment industry. (I heard it on Jeb Sharp’s How We Got Here history podcast.) He reports exactly the thing that the Lowell tour guide was imparting on his listening visitors, but in more specific way, and with direct connection to the conditions that existed in the Shirtwaist Factory in 1911.

“Effectively what we have done is exported our sweatshops and exported our factory fires,” said Robert Ross at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. And it’s as if the 1911 conditions had been lifted up by an evil hand and dropped into Bangladesh.”

According to the Bangladeshi government’s Fire Service and Civil Defense Department, 414 garment workers were killed in at least 213 factory fires between the years 2006 and 2009. Last year, 191 people were killed in Bangladesh in a reported 20 incidents, according to Ross’ research. Last December, a fire killed at least 25 people in a garment factory there.

“And the pattern is disturbingly uniform,” said Ross. “The shops are often in high rise buildings, just like the Triangle. The pattern is that an electrical fire starts, and then without adequate, or any fire escapes, without sprinkler systems, the workers surge to get out. And in factory after factory, the newspapers report locked gates and locked doors. It’s a horrific duplication of what we earlier experienced.”

Even while we may not have answers about these issues, it is important that we be aware, as we put on our clothes each morning, that simply because the factory is farther away does not mean the work has improved any in the last one hundred years. After my frustrating night last night, my hat goes off to all of them, in every factory corner of the world. I hope we can begin to change out outlooks and our consumer mindsets, or at least improve our awareness as a whole, so that we can move towards improvements in the lives of all garment industry workers, not just the ones in the United States.

If you’re like me, i.e. NOT a nuclear physicist, all the coverage of the quickly-deteriorating nuclear situation in Fukushima has gone a bit over your head. Not that you’re not a compassionate, intelligent person, but man, can those experts on the radio and television talk fast and loose with terms like “partial-meltdown”–which it turns out has no actual definition and is a terrible way to describe anything, especially because it’s probably way milder than an actual meltdown would and could be. Not to mention the other terms that scientists use that I can’t even recall. Words I don’t use a lot.

So what is the deal, and what are the dangers, and what do all the diagnoses really add up to? Those are all really hard for anyone to say right now. But more importantly for my understanding, how does it all work in the first place? How does it function under regular circumstances? I have looked at a few helpful diagrams of nuclear electricity plants, and how they function, which basically looks very confusing even in simple-colored-coded-drawing form. Every one I’ve seen has been a bit overwhelming.

There have also been at least three (by my count according to news via NPR and  Twitter news reports from a couple sources) explosions, which no one has really explained–at least that I had come across. Hydrogen was involved, but it’s been awhile since I studied anything along the lines of nuclear chemistry, or regular chemistry, and all I could remember was that you could potentially have an enormous explosion from hydrogen too. But since no one was saying this, there had to be more to it than I knew or could comprehend.

POPSCI’s article “How Nuclear Reactors Work, and How They Fail” (by Dan Nosowitz) gets all my kudos, for basically explaining in an approachable and even conversational way how the reactors work, whether they have an “off switch” (they do! it’s just not your momma’s off-switch), why and how they do all these double- and triple-back ups for power and cooling, and what a “dreaded meltdown” means–in real terms, like damage and that irksome “partial meltdown” that has been used by Japanese officials to describe the situation thus far.

Definitely read it; it’s the most helpful ten minutes I’ve spent thus far learning about a situation that has lots of people all over the world curious, cautious, and downright worried about the whole issue of nuclear energy. I am a more informed citizen of the world now. But, no, no plans to work further on my nuclear physics.

In case you did not click on the link yet, here’s a taste. Full disclosure: a nuclear meltdown sounds horrifying, even in raw chemical talk. This is the scariest bit of the article. The rest is far milder.

What people mean when they say “meltdown” can refer to several different things, all likely coming after a hydrogen explosion. A “full meltdown” has a more generally accepted definition than, say, a “partial meltdown.” A full meltdown is a worst-case scenario: The zirconium alloy fuel rods and the fuel itself, along with whatever machinery is left in the nuclear core, will melt into a lava-like material known as corium. Corium is deeply nasty stuff, capable of burning right through the concrete containment vessel thanks to its prodigious heat and chemical force, and when all that supercharged nuclear matter gets together, it can actually restart the fission process, except at a totally uncontrollable rate. A breach of the containment vessel could lead to the release of all the awful radioactive junk the containment vessel was built to contain in the first place, which could lead to your basic Chernobyl-style destruction.

One of my favorite snapshots at the Shaolin Temple: monk on a cell phone. Don't know if he was tired or trying to be subtle...

That day was ridiculously hot; in retrospect, looking at my pictures of the Temple and the mountains and scenery, I wistfully forget this detail, preferring to wax nostalgic about the beauty of everything around me. This day traveling among the Song Mountains, between them on winding roads in a gigantic bus, remains one of the best days in my life. That is no overstatement. I was breathless the whole day over the beauty of the mountains, and I could not figure out why. As dusk approached, I realized internally that I had never actually been around mountains of any true enormity. These geographic giants gracing the backdrop of everything we did was an entirely foreign context for me.

A very poor photo of the landscape and scenery of the Zen Music Show. This does not at all do the mood or the evening justice.

Add to this the dinner we’d feasted on before the show: a traditional fare of what a monk would eat in a Buddhist monastery, eaten in a monastery that glimmered with fresh flowers, vines, and twinkle lights in its charming courtyard. I honestly do not care if the whole thing was a tourist establishment, because it did not feel this way, and the food was some of the very best I had in China. With meat out of the picture (traditional monks are vegetarian), all the sudden spices and vegetables were the delicious focus, and it was as if the two composed a symphony of flavors together, shining, instead of serving as sideline components to dinner. The vegetables were incredible, cooked perfectly. Nuts, rice, and other key dishes in the monk’s mix were also extraordinary. I realize this might have been compounded by my already-blissful feelings on the day, but even while eating the meal and when considered against every other night I ordered food in two months in China, it remains on a very short list of stand-out meals.

The traditional monk's dinner that we ate that night. On the quintessential Chinese lazy susan.

I have lessoned my outrage over time regarding this part of the Temple, as sometimes history happens and we just have to do the best we can with the tumultuous times we witness. Buildings get destroyed, and if they matter enough to the people around it at the time, they are rebuilt. But I had real issues with the way it was portrayed, as the “real thing.” The grounds and cemetery are the real thing, where generations of the kung fu masters have their final resting place. That is significant. I remember feeling a bit betrayed when they informed us that this temple was circa 1980s, about as old as me, right at the end of the whole spiel.

One small speck on my day though. All these memories were coming back to me this morning, and I took some time to reflect again on the way I felt that day, and reminded myself again that experiences like that have been vastly influential in my life as a whole. Bites of life like that are what give it so much meaning. And, I was so utterly thankful to be there, drinking in this country, this language, this landscape, so unlike my own.

Men and boys performing some amazing kung fu moves for an audience

And other boys during some downtime in their dorm courtyard

This horrible shot is the best I have conveying the HUGE lines of boys who began to flock the Shaolin Temple as we were leaving. The lines were miles long.

The courtyard of the monastery where we ate dinner that day

Ethereal feeling as dusk approached (helped along in the China way by a bit of cloudy sky)

Someone was nice enough to take this picture with their own camera, I think. As close to a pure bliss feeling as I've had. (And the coldest beer ever. It was a HOT day.)

“And what would your good name be, sir?” asked the greeter, with the Dickensian formality that only India has preserved.

So begins writer Benjamin MacIntyre’s visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival (read it all here), an event that’s been held the last six years to relish in and appreciate the colorful wordplay, rhyming, and dose of formality that characterizes Indian English, and makes it its own distinct entity from the its British source. A few examples:

Unconstrained by received pronunciation, Indian-English delights in wordplay and internal rhyming, eliding words, inventing new ones, but also retaining the elaborate, grammatically correct constructions of an earlier age. A hair-washing is a “headbath”; when a politician scrambles from one place to another, he is “airdashing”; sexual harassment is “eve-teasing.”

Couples without children are “issueless”, and when a meeting is brought forward, it is “preponed”, the opposite of postponed.

The Indian love of English words is on daily display in the crime reporting of Indian newspapers, where “sleuths nab evildoers” or “miscreants abscond” after committing “dastardly deeds.”

Spring a year ago, I got to spend a whole semester thinking a lot about India, Pakistan, and larger South Asia, and grew to appreciate the charming quirks and vast diversity of the area even more than I had before. (There’s at least one blog about that, here.) The whole concept of a taxi wallah or a chai wallah is stunningly sensible: “wallah” means “someone who does this” or “a person from here,” so you might call me an Atlanta wallah. Saves a lot of syllables, and characteristically delightful Indian English. Last spring, it made my job as a mall sales associate a little easier, being instead a retail wallah.

And perhaps the most important lesson for the United States to learn, the one it struggles with most, is coming to honest terms with the fact that China is not a democracy. It functions as a fast-paced consumer economy, and does allow more economic freedoms today (like job choice and sometimes location of residency, for example), without really having changed its governmental system at all; much has been written on this unique breed of national existence, this “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and so the basic system remains today–with obvious cracks and some severe humanitarian issues on its plate. America has trouble with this sometimes, this issue of engaging as an ally a country with fundamental differences from its own governmental policies.

Neither condoning nor condemning China’s policies, though, it must at least be admitted that China cannot be ignored. Without condoning their humanitarian infractions, myself and many Americans have been able to learn about the Chinese people’s language, culture, history, food, and customary idiosyncrasies; each American who speaks Mandarin Chinese is contributing positively to the larger relationship between these two economic powers, to the extent that it is hard for me to understand the neglect this language currently sees in U.S. schools. In urban areas, more is inherently available to students; but in smaller towns, like the one where I went to high school, French and Spanish are the only options, and only through the required level “two.” (Let’s not get into that larger discussion on our monolinguist nation.) Meanwhile there are 264 million children in China under the age of fourteen, going through school right now, and I’ll give you one guess what language they’re also learning. It just seems so very clear that we’re putting our own children at a disadvantage for their lifetime and their job choices, if they are unable to compete with the bilingual Chinese children who can communicate in both directions in the business and politics of the twenty-first century.

Photo by Mustafah Abdulaziz for Education Week; link to story: http://bit.ly/dz96t1

But naturally, given the menacing vision of China as an economic bully (granted, the fixed Chinese currency is a festering thorn in the side of economic negotiations and discussion), and given its less than stellar past of censorship, political freedom, and dissemination of information, there are bound to be cries of cultural infiltration: these Chinese will infect the minds of our kids! It’s Yellow Peril for a new age.

In a recent article from Education Week, this issue was explored. Some see it as accepting resources from a country who will provide language, with a heavy dose of propaganda on the side.

That dust-up caught the notice of Chester E. Finn Jr., a former education official in the Reagan administration and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank. He argues that public schools should not accept aid from the Chinese government.

“This is not an ally. This is the country on the planet from which the United States faces the largest and most worrisome long-term threats,” he said. “And for its government to be funding our schools to teach its language, I think, is an alarming and menacing development. And that our schools are welcoming this development strikes me as outrageous.”

Countering this, some educators see its value for the future or global relations, as well as for the schoolkids.

“It’s a great opportunity,” William C. Harrison, who chairs the North Carolina state board of education, said of his state’s program, to which China is expected to supply more than $5 million in direct aid and “in kind” services. “The best way to become globally competitive is to develop an understanding of those with whom you compete, being able to communicate with them, and being able to collaborate with them.”

He added: “We’re looking at the number-two economy in the world with prospects to be number one. … I think it’s in our best interest to develop positive relationships.”

The key lies somewhere in the balance of being economic allies while respecting differences; we don’t have the best reputation with that. Shortsightedness now will have a crippling effect on our country’s standing in the future, and the people leading it then will be the ones in school now, learning minimal Spanish and French. Our world will look mighty different then; can we find those areas of change now, and adapt?

UPDATE 12/9/2010: Here is another article on America’s trials and tribulations in building a Chinese language program in K-12 schools. From Newsweek: “America’s Chinese Problem”

The communal courtyard shared by several families

This third one sprung up in my mind as I arrived in Beijing with a study abroad group in May 2007, and I even got to see one of these tight-knit and close-quartered communities myself, with part of what I’m sure was a choreographed tour for tourists. This didn’t matter so much to me, as the hutong was the most charming thing I saw in the capital city, and I even made their rapid disappearance the subject of a paper for one of my classes while I was there. (Here’s a post from my first encounter with the hutong.)

Unfortunately, the story has only gotten worse since Johnson’s reporting, and since my visit three years ago. Government and business developers see the single-level, “dangerous” housing as an obstacle in the way of economic growth in the city, as things can be built upwards and sold as commercial space for much higher prices than any residential buildings could garner. What acres do becomes private homes will land in the price range of millionaires, out of reach to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who grew up on that same ground.

A bright and shiny paint job on one of the areas inside the Forbidden City, the old home of the emperor that is now a tourist site

“Historic” in the eyes of the commercial and governmental developers means razing the dilapidated building that has been neglected for half a century and replacing it with an “authentic” facsimile, with upturned eaves painted classic Chinese colors: reds, golds, greens. Qianmen, a fabled shopping district in the center of the city that has been replaced with a swanky doppelganger, is mourned by urban planning professor Yao Yuan in a July 20 article in the New York Times. “The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” he said.

Shopping center in Shanghai

I’m not here to pass judgment or even complain, really, because some of those modern amenities made my visit more comfortable, and surely improves the living conditions and salaries of many of China’s urban dwellers. But as many others have asked before me, at what cost are these things forming? Is a newly-built shopping center doing the people of Beijing much more good than its previous shopping center? Is it really a part of the city’s history that could not have been preserved more carefully from the start? Many of these areas, deemed “dangerous” by the government, were named as such in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which means they were slated for demolition or at least known to be in need of renovation and preservation for nearly two decades by now.

Many of these areas did not survive to see the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I hope there are people in charge who will listen more carefully to the preservationists and historians both domestically and internationally who have been offering their advice on the ever-vanishing character of the city, and I hope what little is left of the city’s pre-modern composition can survive. I hope this for the sake of outsiders who visit, but more so for the sake of its own people.

Newly constructed buildings, complete with Starbucks and westerners

View from the moutaintop temple outside Yangzhou

To end my series on Yangzhou, it is only right to leave you with my favorite image: a hut, full of character, perched on the side of a mountain, overlooking the valley and farms below. Above this humble and beautiful home was a temple that we visited, which was also stunning on the breezy, calm day we were there. If you look closely, you’ll see the man tending to his crop (in the lower right-hand area of the photograph); I didn’t even notice him until someone else pointed him out.

This is my favorite image that I collected that summer, and when I took the picture, I didn’t even really notice the absolutely stunning hut. It is the star of this scene, which became clear to me once I looked back through all my pictures. But when I was standing there in the breeze, the mist that billowed down around the mountain and engulfed the fields and forests was what made me take the picture; it was ephemeral.

When I got back, and stumbled across this hut among the thousands of other images I had, I was taken aback at the yellow roof. I was also reminded of a joke my Dad had long told his wife and children, when the world got overwhelming: he’d say he was going to give it all up, and move to a hut on the side of a mountain, in China. I printed this image big–2′ by 3′–and framed it, and gave it to my Dad as his “hut on the side of a mountain, in China,” for a Christmas or birthday soon after. Now it resides on the wall opposite my parents’ bed, reminding them of the goal for a simpler life.

(Sorry for the delay in this post– I’ve been on vacation and attended a very important wedding, etc.–much needed rest.)

On the outskirts of the city, the huge mall loomed as a vision of the future towards which China is aiming.

On the outskirts of the bustling city lies some of the newest additions to the area, a modern development area that includes the enormous mall here, as well as the giant new museum that I was standing in when I took the picture. Surrounded by high rises, the mall contains at least six floors begging to be shopped, with ribbons and streamers and lots of busy displays and professional salesmen roaming the atrium at the bottom floor. There is a Dairy Queen, the only one I ever saw in China, and a Starbucks (fairly rare outside of Beijing and Shanghai), and lots of stores selling home goods, like dishes and bedding and child’s play room equipment. The only problem was, the sales people far outnumbered the shoppers; it was a largely deserted mall on the two occasions I visited it. It was obviously a huge investment for the city, or the government, or whoever built it. And they built it for a time in the future, most likely, hoping that within a  few years the population of Yangzhou would find their pocketbooks able to handle consumer spending À la the western model.

I don’t imagine the global economic situation has helped this mall in the years since I last saw it. Notice the many cranes gracing the skyline on both sides of the shopping mall, the ubiquitous sign of expansion and change throughout my time in the country. Every city has this crane skyline. I can only imagine what this mall and this same city will look like ten years from the time of this snapshot, for better or worse. I’ll try to go back in 2017.

A multi-level shopping extravaganza, teeming with decoration and just waiting for its shoppers

Our desks, made our own

We stayed in the international student dorms during our time in Yangzhou, and for a small monthly fee (around 5 dollars), a man would come by and hook up the internet for your computer. This was a huge relief after the horrors of the Zhengzhou computer labs with their limited hours, terribly slow and/or mostly broken computers, and other international students who wanted to play computer games endlessly. We didn’t mind at all paying for two connections, which I’m pretty sure the building staff thought was an extreme luxury.

My desk is on the right, closer to the door. Collections of pantry food, schoolbooks, and schoolwork graced my shelves. The TV was as good as worthless unless you had an ear for Chinese or wanted to try to keep up with the lightning-fast dialogue for a bit of practice; I never even scratched the surface of comprehension when faced with a TV. Needless to say, it remained off.

Our beds were slightly improved from the slabs of wood with medium-thick cushioning that we’d had in Zhengzhou: we had mattresses, at least, but they felt as stiff as box springs. (I would be very surprised if they were not actually box springs.) We had two big wardrobes where we hung and stored all of our clothing and other possessions (not many). We’d keep our room cold, and after a long day of classes and trekking to site visits, it did become a haven of sorts, the way any room does if you live in it long enough.

From another angle, showing my bed, the closets, bathroom door, and room entrance.