Peking Opera

Last Friday night, I went to see Beijing Opera in Beijing. I want to share some pictures with you. Pictures are always worth a thousand words, but this is certainly one of the more visually stimulating things to see in the world.

Before the performance begins, there is a young woman who plays the gu zhong on stage while one of the performers "puts on his mask." When he is done painting on his mask, another man comes out to help him don his unwieldy costume.

There are four important roles in Peking Opera: Sheng, Dan, Jing, Chou. These Chinese words mean main male role, any female role, painted face male role, and male clown role, respectively. There are also important ways to breathe when singing the parts and many other intricacies of this old art form.

The music is orchestral with a jinghu leading the pack. This grainy photograph is the best I can offer.

I took dozens of photographs of the actual performances. Among the short operas we saw was "Farewell My Concubine."

China Arrives in Durban Greener than Ever

United States Should Take Heed

Workers prepare to lift a giant blade to be used as part of wind turbines at the Vestas Wind Technology Co. Ltd. factory in Tianjin, China, on September 14, 2010. The Chinese central government committed to increase renewable energy consumption to 11.4 percent of the energy mix by 2015 and 15 percent by 2020.

By Melanie Hart | November 30, 2011

 

This week representatives from 194 parties are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for another two-week round of climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. As always, all eyes are on the United States and China—the world’s biggest carbon emitters and, according to some, the biggest hurdles to a global climate agreement.

China balks at a legally binding international climate commitment due to its still-developing economic status, and the United States refuses to sign a global agreement that does not include comparable—though not necessarily identical—action from China. (See more.)

A River's Gifts

IHT Magazine | Global Agenda 2012

By SHENG KEYI

Published: December 2, 2011

When I was younger I was ashamed to admit I came from a remote village, yet I lacked the courage to claim I was from a city, so I usually said simply that I came from an outlying township. Now I must tell the truth, that I was born in an isolated village.

Let me start from the banks of a humble river where my life began and which is the true source of my writing. My fellow villagers live and while away their time in a monotonous environment completely cut off from the outside world. I know their lives only too well. If I had not harbored a distant dream from a very young age I would have shared their fate. (more)

Calligraphy: Another of My New Obsessions

Over the last few weeks, I have doubled the number of hours that my Chinese teacher and I spend together. The laborious task of learning a language is still reserved to one hour lessons on Wednesday and Friday, but now, on Mondays, Shannon and I, together with Fan Xin--our lao shi, or teacher, take out our brushes and write for two hours. We don't use ink, but dip our fox hair in water and write on a special cloth from which our masterpieces mercifully evaporate quite quickly.

The traditional tools are shown below. Like everything else in China, you can purchase really cheap or really high end tools. Shannon has a nice set of mao bi, or calligraphy brushes. I have two brushes and a stone for the black ink, as well as a stamp and some red ink. The stamp is inscribed with my Chinese name in Traditional Chinese characters. We don't have a brush stand and I don't yet know what the spoon is for, but I do know that the black ink is made from ground stone.


Here are the basic strokes which are, coincidentally, all contained in this Chinese character meaning "eternity." The gou can be affixed to any of the longer strokes so that the character below does not have a shu and a gou, but rather a shugou.

Here is a picture of me hard at work. The inset shows a close-up of my attempt at writing my name, but there was too much water on the brush so that strokes appear bloated and puffy instead of elegant. That is a jar of honey by my left hand and the tea things that I mentioned in my last post.

On a related note, I have added the ability to write in Chinese characters on my Blackberry and I am very excited. (The nerds and Sinophiles among you will be interested to know that I can either use the pinyin or use the number keys (1-5) to enter strokes, like heng, and the Blackberry will offer a list of all the characters that have the same strokes in the same order.)

I am also learning to write using the nifty HSK preparation tool offered by nciku.com. HSK is short for Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (汉语水平考试) and is the pre-eminent Chinese test for international learners, administered by the Confucius Institute and widely used by Chinese companies and universities to assess foreign candidates’ Chinese skills.

Tea: One of My New Obsessions

"I will bet you all the tea in China..." 

I know almost nothing about red wine, but I know more about red wine than I do tea. Nevertheless, I am really interested in the tea culture here. My friend David and I shared a cup of tea this morning. The tea is called Mao Feng ("furry peak"). That was the inspiration for this post.

An ancient Chinese legend concerning the origin of Huangshan Mao Feng tea has it that a young scholar and a beautiful young maiden who worked on a tea plantation on Yellow Mountain were madly in love. One day a wealthy landowner saw the girl and desirous of her, he made her his concubine, which was within his power. However, the unhappy girl escaped only to discover that the landowner had in the meantime killed her lover, the young scholar. The young girl located the grave of her lover and remained there, weeping incessantly and uncontrollably, until finally she became the rain itself and her murdered lover became a tea tree, nourished by her tears. This is why, says the legend, the slopes of Yellow Mountain are humid and mist-enshrouded all year long.(http://www.chinatravel.com/anhui/huangshan/product/huangshan-maofeng-tea/)

Going to a tea house is an elite activity and costly, but worth the experience. At an establishment near here, some months ago my friend and I bought a canister of the cheapest tea which entitled us to go there five or six times and keep using up the tea.  On the last time, I got to bring the canister and remnant tea home. Pretty girls in traditional garb rinse the cups with boiling water, pour your first cup, and leave you and your friends (or business associates, as the case may more often be) in a private little room to discuss, bargain, or marvel at the tea. Some rooms have regular solid tables with solid chairs and some have little tea tables where you sit on the floor. In the summer, you can pull a chain and start a fan. All the year long, you can ring a bell and the pretty girl comes back to help. You can order snacks of green tea-flavored pumpkin seeds or walnuts, prunes and other dried fruits. It is, in a word, delightful.




There is a tea market in Changchun with fifty or sixty stalls by my estimation. My friend E (short, er, very short for Elizabeth) and Sun Lu went there two or three weekends ago. A lawyer ran the particular shop we visited and another tea expert (pictured below) came in and had her picture taken with the foreigners--a not infrequent occurrence!

The little tea bricks that you see above are what Santa is bringing to the Lee Family this year. (Shhhh!) Pu'er, Pu-erh, Puer, also Po Lei or Bolay is a variety of post-fermented tea produced in Yunnan Province, China. You have to sort of peel it off with a knife or sharp tool and you don't need much to make a potent cup of tea.

At the tea market, I purchased this nifty picnic box which turns into a tea table. It has six cups and you put the tea in the pot with the lid, then pour it through a strainer into the one sans lid. I had already had a tea set for several months, but this portable addition will allow me to bring tea anywhere I go and share it with friends.

This tea set was a gift from Fan Xin about seven months ago. He is my Chinese tutor. I picked up the little boy with the penis at Alice's Tea House in Beijing. If he soaks in water and you pour water on him, he will pee across the room. "Tea toys" come in a wide variety, but this one is common...almost vulgar!

I should have some tea tools.  The information about tea tools below is from http://proudofyouangela.wordpress.com/.

A.) Vase – provides storage for all tools
B.) Tea Shuffle – shuffles/scope tea leaves
C.) Tea Needle – prevents spout blockage
D.) Tea Digger – digs and remove expended tea leaves from teapots
E.) Tea Tongs – handles hot tea wares for cleaning
F.) Tea Funnel – funnels tea leaves into small teapot openings

 

Those of you who know me well, know I am a fan of jasmine. I also was enamored of a tea made from dried fruit that I have run out of. A collection of green teas that have come as gifts from friends have also accumulated in my cupboard.

Keystone XL Pipeline Editorial Full of Bad Ideas

Washington Post's Illogical Arguments Set Bad Precendent

I was dismayed by four rationales offered by the Washington Post editorial entitled Washington’s unwelcome delay in the Keystone XL pipeline project, which advocated proceeding post haste. There are lots of good reasons to delay. Watch my friend Bill McKibben on The Colbert Report, but don't let that prevent you from sending the Washington Post a letter yourself! Watching Comedy Central is not doing something about the problem.

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Keystone XL Oil Pipeline - Bill McKibben
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My first objection to the editorial board's ill-considered words was that delay in a quasi-judicial proceeding (three years of review, as they noted) does not equal a reason to proceed with a project. If you use that logic, then the people in New England who are concerned about the power lines that NU/NSTAR intend to build from Canada's hydroelectric dams through New Hampshire on to markets in Massachusetts and Connecticut also should lose their case eventually, because those delays have already begun.

Secondly, while Hydro-Quebec's dam energy is not as easily exported to the Chinese as their oil is, the Post's  rationale that if America does not buy Canadian oil somebody else will could be applied to any transportable natural resource, from Trufula trees to lithium.

I live in China for the time being, as an English teacher although I am a lawyer who once worked at the NH Public Utilities Commission and advised Jon Edwards on a carbon tax. I assure you that as thirsty as the Chinese are for energy, papering their nation and ours with their "Made in China" solar panels is much more in line with their foreign and domestic policy objective of reducing carbon than soaking up Alberta's shale tar. The WaPo should not shill for the greedy, but take a stance that democracies make moral decisions about the future of the planet based on science and reality, not fears and dreads.

Third, the Keystone XL pipeline is a corporate project, not a national project. The insidious suggestion that we would "offend a reliable ally" (Canada) if we did not drink from the Alberta tar well or hook our high-voltage wires to Quebec's reservoirs suggests that these editorial writers believe WalMart's or American Electric Power's corporate ambitions abroad are synonymous with our national interests. Governments are supposed to harness corporations, through their charters, to protect the public good not act as extensions of their sales and marketing departments. Recant and applaud the Administration for their forbearance!

Finally, this will not "cost infrastructure jobs" as the Post suggested. The real, long-lasting infrastructure jobs are, as McKinsey & Company pointed out long ago, in energy efficiency and conservation projects which can obviate the need for this oil in less time than it takes to build almost any kind of power plant or its wires and pipelines.

Weddings and pipework

Early morning wedding festivities brought me to the window.

A wedding reception was held in the building next to mine. I took this photo from my window.

...then I went outside and shot this at ground-level later that day.

The last week and a half they have been replacing pipes and the streets and sidewalks outside my house have been ripped up.

First, they set up a tent.

Then they brought in equipment:

That is my window in the upper left-hand corner of the bright yellow building.

Then they ripped up the sidewalk:

Digging the trench with pick and shovel:

The aftermath this morning after our first light dusting of snow.  On the left, you can see they are still welding or soldering pipes.