The Rope Maker

 I took a walk on the main road away from the beach.  The asphalt surface served as a communal drying place for the nets from morning fishing.  A lot of rope was laid out to dry too.  Ropes which, I guess, are used to pull the nets and to tie off the fish traps and so on.  Fishermen use a lot of rope.

 A little farther up the road was the rope-maker's hut.  It should have come as no surprise.  All the rope in the village had to come from somewhere.  But it was a surprise to me, since my subconscious assumes that such basics come from a nearby Wal-Mart.       

Once before, I'd seen some women making rope by twisting and braiding it with their hands.  The rope making here was done by machine...made of wood and powered by hand...but a machine nonetheless.  This machine was set up to make four lengths of rope at the same time,  twisting together three strands for each rope.  It took three people to operate - two at the ends of the machine to operate the cranks and one to walk in between with the spreader jig.  The top photo shows one of the crankers and the walker.  The photo above shows the cranker at the other end.  The photo below is a section from the top photo, enlarged to show the three strands entering to the left of the spreader and emerging to the right as a single piece of rope.

The photo below shows a fourth worker, the lady in the background working with the pitchfork.  She is preparing the plant fibers to be used to spin the next set of strands.  I don't know what kind of fiber they were using....whatever is in the big brown pile behind her.

I'd guess that this is a family operation, run by two married couples.  Maybe brothers and sisters.  I don't know.  They were nice folks and were kind enough to let me take pictures of them.  They giggled as I did, with the kind of giggle that people give when they are dealing with idiots or crazy people. 

The Village Near the Beach Near XiaPu

 The last post discussed the beach near XiaPu, in Fujian province.  It was a beautiful beach.  Our tour schedule allowed us about three hours to kill there.  Most of my Chinese colleagues were excited to strip down and do some swimming.  Me, not so much.  The sun was to harsh for pale skin.  Besides, the areas surrounding the beach were much more interesting.

I would guess that the beach area (I don't even know its name) is beautiful and unspoiled because it located in an extremely poor area.... so poor that no one has had  the wherewithal to spoil it yet.  To my jaded eyes, it looks like some investors are now trying to turn it into a tourist attraction and make a buck off of it.  Similar investments are legendary in China.  (An example being the beaches of TianYa HaiJiao in Sanya.)  Such schemes achieve success when the surroundings appear to be quaint and traditional and romantic, rather than just plain poor.  By that standard, the beach near XiaPu still has a ways to go.

 To get to the beach, our bus got off of the highway and drove for several miles through small cities and rural villages.  The roads were two-lanes only and bumpy and for most of the way the roads were lined with houses.  The closest descriptor that I know for these houses would be "row houses".  Typically, these buildings are two or three stories high, 20 to 30 feet deep, and a few hundred yards long.  Along this length, the buildings are subdivided into houses/apartments....each maybe 15 to 20 feet wide.   From the road, then, you see each building has four of five doorways, each doorway marking a separate family home.  Each doorway opening out onto the street.

It was hot on this morning, and most of the doorways were open.  As the bus moved along you could look into many of the homes as we passed.  They are "shotgun" homes, on the first floor at least....one large room in which a shotgun blast through the front door would go undisturbed through the back window.  Most of the floors looked to be bare concrete.  Inside, you could see tables and chairs and gas cylinders and e-bikes the other accouterments of life.

More homes than not had people sitting in the front doorways, trying to get a cooling breeze.  Or if there was shade, they were sitting on the sidewalks outside the front doors.  Mothers and daughters and grandmothers shelling beans.  Shirtless men playing cards and MahJong.  In one home we passed, I saw a mother sitting on a chair in the doorway breastfeeding her baby.   It was as if we were driving through discarded footage from The Grapes of Wrath.

As we got further from the highway it became more an more rural.  The houses continued to line the roadway, but the intervals between them became larger and larger.  The road became a ribbon of asphalt flanked by a single row of  houses which were then surrounded by rice paddies and gardens that, sooner or later, rose up to steep, tree-covered hillsides.

 At the end of the road was the beach.  And also a village.  In past times, it looked as if the village spilled out onto the beach.  Now, there was a wall and a gate which separated them.  The beach has been "developed".  At the point where the road ended, there was a parking lot for buses on one side and a row of food joints and beach shops on the the other and a gate at the end which led to the beach.  Most of my colleagues headed through the gate to the beach.  I went looking to see what was behind the food joints and the beach shops.

 The beach side village was small.  Behind the main road there were only three more streets, or blocks, of houses that made up the village.  Then the village gave way to gardens and rice paddies.  Behind the rice paddies rose the terraced hillsides.  The citizens appeared to sustain themselves on both the land and the sea.  In the streets you could see signs of the fishermen - the fish and shrimp drying on racks in the sun (two photos above) or the repairing of nets (one photo above.).  Throughout the village you could also see the signs of the dirt farmer - the squash and cucumber vines growing in open spaces between the buildings and the fields of rice and corn and beans in the surrounding valley.

 The village was...how shall we say..."rustic".    At the North and South ends of the village were public rest rooms.   Above is a photo of the one at the South-end.   You can see the brightly tiled stalls - six in all - that make up the men's side.  What you can't see, because of the partitions, is a trench that runs the length of the building through the center of each stall.  At the doorway, there is spigot with a hose that can be used to flush the trench or to wash your hands.  Plumbing at its most simple.

I do not know how many of the houses in the village have their own bathrooms and how many use this as a common outhouse.

 Though the streets are not crowded with chickens, there are chickens in the streets.  The photo above shows one feasting on discarded dumplings.  This shows the economic beauty of chickens....they convert waste (by eating bugs and garbage) into valuable food (by us eating them).  We tourists that come to the beach provide ample waste for the local chickens to feed upon.

 In past posts, I've gushed over the art that decorates the public spaces in Suzhou.  The beach-side village only had one instance of public art that I could find. as shown in the photo above.  It was a nice piece of ceramic tiled artwork that , I believe, dates back 10 years or more.  It has a beautiful folksiness, depicting mother and daughter in the foreground.  The background depicts the optimism of the new millennium.  You see the outline of China overlaid by "2000" in big block letters which are overlaid with industrial and space age images.

It took me a while to paint the strokes of the Chinese text into a character dictionary and to come up with a translation.  But best as I can tell, here is what this artwork says:" Population growth must be compatible with economic and social development.  Control the total population of the city at:  2000 - 558,000, 2005 - 580,000, 2010 - 600,000."

The Beach Near XiaPu

 Continuing the story of the trip to TaiMu Shan:  After nine or so hours on the bus, we arrived to the small town of XiaPu.  There was not much time that evening to do anything other than check into the hotel and then venture out to find some food.  A lovely woman named  Chen XiaoHua was my guardian angel for the evening.  She was my guardian angel for pretty much the entire week-end.  Betty, which is her Western name, and her husband invited me to tag along with them in search of local seafood.

 We found a local place where the seafood was on display in a cooler outside and the game required you to bargain for what you wanted first.  After Betty and her husband struck a deal, we went inside to a little room with a round, plastic patio table.  On top, though, was a restaurant-quality, glass Lazy Susan.  (Whomever sells these Lazy Susans must be the richest person in China. ) The chosen items were cooked up very nicely, and we all left with happy bellies.

The schedule for the next morning was to leave the hotel at 8:30 to go a local beach.  Betty and husband invited me to go with them, at 4:30 in the morning, to watch the sun rise over the China Sea.  Part of me wanted to go, but another part of me did not want to intrude on their romantic sunrise experience.  And all parts of me did not want to get up at 4:00 am in the morning.  So I took a pass on the sunrise.

So the next morning, we went to the beach near Xiapu.  The scenery was beautiful. That's about all there is to say about that.  I'll just let the photos tell the rest of the story.

But credit where credit is due - Betty's husband had a killer digital SLR camera.  He is also a very good photographer.  Only the top photo is mine.  The rest are all the photos that he took...before sunrise, after sunrise, and on the beach near XiaPu.

Trip, Tombs, Temples, and Churches

Two or three times a year, the "Employee Welfare" committee puts together some vacation travel opportunities for the workers.  The company even kicks in a little bit of money keep the out-of-pocket costs within reach for everyone.  It's part of the benefits program.  There are usually short, medium, and long travel options to choose from.  Last year, Theresa and I did a long travel option and went to Hainan.  Last week-end, I went on a short trip to TaiMu Shan.

Theresa decided that she did not want to go.  First off, any place in China with "Shan" as part of the name implies that there will be a hill or a mountain to climb.  Her knees ache at the thought of such climbing due to the old surgery scars from the treatment of a MRSA infection a few years back.  Another reason she chose not to go was because it was forecasted to be very, very hot.  Her idea of the perfect vacation week-end get-away was to hang out at the apartment pool.

At total of around 60 people went on the trip.  Most were families;  husbands, wives, kids, and even a few parents.  At 7:30 on a Saturday morning, we filled two buses and began the 8 or 9 hour drive southward.  The map at top (courtesy of Google) shows our route.   Most of the driving was through ZheJiang provice.  It takes an hour or less from Suzhou to crossover the province's northern border.   Our destination, TaiMu Shan, is in FuJian province, but just a few miles after you crossover ZheJiang's southern border.  So for most of the trip, we were looking out the bus windows at ZheJiang province.

Driving through ZheJiang is like driving through West Virginia.  It is mile after mile of tree-covered mountains with small towns in most of the valleys and big, industrial cities in the those valleys that have access to a navigable river.   The scenery was beautiful and made even more so by the clear blue skies. And for nine hours there was not much to do other than to watch that scenery go by through the bus windows.   In the course of those nine hours down and another nine hours back, I saw several things that struck me as interesting.  (Apologies for the poor photos which follow.  They were made from the window of a moving bus.)

 The first thing I noticed were the tombs.  We started to see them as soon as we got into the rural hill country south of Hangzhou.  If you look at the photo above, you can see the hints of about seven or eight small stone structures.  When I first saw them, I thought they were drainage culverts.  But then I realized what they were.  I would guess that many of these, out away from the big cities and haphazardly placed, are old family plots. 

I've never seen a tomb in Suzhou, though the cemeteries are clearly marked on the maps.  Most are over in the hill country surrounding Tai Lake.  Local friends tell me that Suzhou is a very expensive place to be buried.  They say many rich Shanghainese spend top dollar RMB to assure they have a scenic view of the lake for all of eternity.  My understanding is that most tombs in Suzhou are commercial operations and are rented on a yearly basis.  But I am not sure.  Nor do I have answers to the obvious questions related to funeral rites and burial customs and what happens when the rent stops being paid.

 We saw a few large, commercial cemeteries near the large cities.  But we saw hundreds of tombs like the ones shown above and below.  I now begin to understand the importance of the QingMing holiday - also known as tomb sweeping day.  It would only take a year or two of neglect for these hillside tombs to be completely swallowed by overgrowth.

Last March, I asked a colleague whether she would go to the cemetery on Qing Ming.  She planned to go, but not on the exact holiday...she explained it would be crazy crowded.  She planned to go a week or two early to perform her obligations.  I asked her what those obligations were.  She said: "You know, you clean up around the tomb first, and then you open the doors and invite your ancestors to come out an visit for a while.  You share your respects and your thoughts with them and maybe bring them some offerings of things they like.  Then at the end of the day, you tell them it's time to go back inside until next year and then you close the doors."

I first noticed the tombs on the trip down, but there were many more to be seen on the trip back, when we were driving towards the North.  There were many more tombs facing towards the South.  It's good Feng Shui.   Also, both of the tombs shown above have the circular Yin-Yang symbol over the center of the entrance.  You can see it better in the second photo, but it is also there in the first. 

The second thing I noticed was that, from the bus window, it seemed that there was hardly a time when you couldn't see a temple if you looked hard enough.  You can easily spot them by their golden-yellow colored walls.  In the towns and cities, these colors jump out at you; the surrounding buildings are all whitewashed or the grey color of naked concrete.  Between the towns you can see golden-yellow walls peeking out from amongst the trees on the hills.

I've included a couple of photos showing the more spectacularly located temples.  The one below is actually nestled between the rocky cliffs on TaiMu Shan.  Don't expect to see any photos from inside these temples, as we did not visit either of them.

The third sight and the one that surprised me most, though, was the number of churches we passed.  In Suzhou, I've only seen three - the large new church on DuShu Lake, the old small church  hidden behind the walls near pet street, and the fake church at BaiTang Park that was built as a back drop for wedding photos.  This is in a city that has millions of residents a relatively large population of Western expats.  So I was kind of surprised to see that almost every city and town we passed through in ZheJiang had at least one building marked with a Cross. 

 The churches shown, above and below, are both respectably large.  They were located in cities that appeared to be of modest size - I'd guess 250,000 people or less.  In the larger cities,  I would see two or three churches, some of them very, very large.  In the small towns, I saw small, simple whitewashed buildings with crosses painted  on the gables.

Anyway, the fact that Christianity was visible at all in the Chinese countryside was a surprise to me.  Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism have been integral parts of Chinese culture for over 2000 years.  The traders on the Silk Road brought in Islam about 1200 years ago, but the Muslims are still a small minority that is as much an ethnic distinction as it is religious.   

My understanding was that Christianity came much later and had little chance to put down roots.  When the Western powers began to carve up China into de-facto colonies in the 1800s, the Christian missionaries soon followed.  Officially, the government of China does not look back fondly on that period of their history.  When we were preparing to come to China, we were advised not to bring too much Christian reading material, as it might raise the suspicion that we were planning to proselytize.   They do not want any more uninvited missionaries.

Since returning to Suzhou, the Internet has told me that  ZheJiang province has one of the largest concentrations of Christians in China.  Also, I learned that the Jesuits began missionary work in China as far back as 1550 or so.  I had forgotten (or never learned in the first place) that Saint Francis Xavier, the founder of the Jesuits, died on an island just off the cost of China while trying to further this mission.  The Portuguese brought Catholicism to their colony on Macau from about the same time.  In the 1800s, the British and other European colonial powers brought an fresh wave of Protestant missions.  (In ZheJiang province, the port of NingBo was one of the first and largest of the port cities conceded by China to the British after the Opium Wars.)

These days, it seems that no one knows the true number of Catholics and Protestants in China.  The official numbers total around 15 million for both, or a smidgen over 1% of the population.  Others say that Christianity is booming and the number is three to ten times higher.

I'll leave those questions to others to answer.  Me, all I know is what is saw from the window of the bus.

The Green Bikes

Last year, in my first months in Suzhou, I heard stories about "public bikes".  It was usually in the course of discussing my options for getting to/from work.  Folks would say that there are places downtown where you could borrow a bike from the city for free as long as you returned it to an official city location.  Then they would normally say to me that it was too bad that such bikes are not available in the Suzhou Industrial Park.

The public bikes have come to SIP now.  There are stations all over the place - normally beside each major apartment complex, shopping center, and subway stop.  The stations consist of a long rack with a bunch of green bicycles.  The bikes have a little flange on the front wheel that locks them into the rack.  Suzhou residents can get an electronic card that allows them to unlock the bike from the rack for use.  If the bike is returned to any other rack within 90 minutes, then there is no charge.  After 90 minutes, if bike is not returned, then a charge is calculated and billed against the card.

The photo above shows a typical public bike station.  This one is just outside of a subway exit.  On the rear fender of each bike is a head/shoulders image of Yao Ming, the former NBA player and the most famous man in China.   I'm not sure why.  His endorsements are worth millions, and I do not know if this is a public service or some other type of advertising on his part.  I'll get back to you when I find out.

The bikes, though not very flashy, seem to be very popular.  I see a lot of folks riding them around.  And most stations do not look like the station above.  Normally, during the days, you see only one or two or three bikes at most available.  Also, there is a communal gravity which sucks the bikes from remote locations to be dropped off at the more heavily visited locations.  In the mornings, the city workers have to round up the bikes and truck them from the have-too-much stations to the have-not-enough stations.  Even with the low costs of labor, I find it hard to believe that these bikes aren't costing the city far more than they take in as revenue.

Celebration

The photo above is of Fred an Becky.  At least, those the Western names that they go by.  Fred is a colleague and friend.  His wife is a marketing executive at a local bank.  His true given name is LiMing.  I'm ashamed to say that I do not know the true given name of his wife.  I'm not sure I've ever been told.  So it goes.  Young Chinese professionals who do business with Westerners use a Western name because they know that Westerners can't remember Chinese names.  It's a gesture of kindness on their part to save us from embarrassment.

As a side note, Chinese names are actually very intriguing and often things of great beauty. "LiMing", for example, translates as "the dawn".  Maybe we can discuss names further in another posting.

Fred and Becky welcomed their first baby, a boy, back in mid-May.  As is tradition in Suzhou, they held a double-month celebration in mid-July to celebrate and to officially introduce the baby to the outside world.  The happy parents (and grandparents) hosted about 80 to 100 of their family and friends at a local restaurant.  Theresa and I sat with a table of co-workers, most of them people who work directly under Fred.  When we arrived, already placed upon the table were the  bottles of soda, beer, and wine.  Also there were bright-red packages of ZhongHua cigarettes.  (You know it's a big-deal celebration when the ZhongHua are out.)  Massive amounts of very good food soon came as well.

The coming-out-party for a baby is a big deal and is wrapped in layer upon layer of tradition.   The timing of the celebration varies from place to place.  In most of China, I understand, it should be celebrated at the end of the first full lunar month.  In Suzhou, the tradition is two months.  In other places, I hear, the tradition is to celebrate after 100 days.  Regardless, the tradition is to delay the celebration until long enough after the birth that one is confident that the baby (and mother) will survive.  Also, the tradition is for the grandparents take over the household and care for the newborn during the first month while the mother recovers.  This is called the "confinement period"...and the coming out party also marks the end of that.

Theresa and I had met the grandparents last year, when we took a trip together to Hainan.  (We are closer to them in both age and life-situation than we are to their children.)  The coming of the baby is, without doubt, the most happy thing that has happened to them.  Both Fred and his wife are "only childs".  So their new baby boy is the first (and maybe only) grandchild for both his and her parents.  Such are the mathematics of the one-child policy. 

When we saw the grandparents at the restaurant they were glowing.  Ecstatic would be and understatement.  They were enraptured.  Both sets of parents have been taking care of the baby since it's birth.  I don't think Fred has gotten to change a diaper yet.  I'm not sure he ever will.

In today's China, it is normal for the grandparents to move in and act as the primary caregivers for their grandchildren.  Or if not normal, it is the ideal.  The perfect life-trajectory for parents is as follows:  raise your kids and feed them well and make them study hard in school and after 12 years of hard work hope they score well on the Gao Kao exams and to get into a good university and then secure respectable and well-paying employment.  Somewhere along the way,  (at any time for the male but before the female is 30) negotiate a suitable marriage to worthy spouse who also brings solid income and family to the partnership.  After the marriage, allow 12 to 24 months for the baby to come.  Then, throw your entire life....your time, your assets, your entire savings...into the family of your children and the raising of the new grandchild.

That's the ideal.   But the realities of life spoil the dreams of many.  Not all children score well and get into university.  Not all children secure well-paying jobs after university.  And most serious of all,  not all couples are able to conceive and not all conceptions result in healthy children.  Life in China poses the same risks as for any human being in any part of the world.  But I think here, it is more complicated by the fact that each generation is so totally invested the generation that follows. 

The lady beside Theresa in the photo above is Yao Jing.  One day at work, at the lunch table, she got caught up in an animated discussion with some other men at the table.  When I asked her what the argument was over, the all broke from Chinese to English to explain that they were debating the proper foods for a woman to eat after a baby comes....during the confinement period.  She was arguing for pigeons and fish.  Pigeons because they are a "hot" food ....hot as in Yang ....and in Yin-Yang.  Evidently, the childbirth process severely depletes the Yang and the confinement period is all about replenishing it.  The others were arguing for soups and dishes heavy with ginger.

 The fish, they all agreed, is good  to help make the mother's milk.  But they argued about which type of fish is most effective.  (When the Chinese argue about food, it reminds me so, so much of the French.  Both can debate for hours.) 

At the end of the meal, each guest was given a little gift box which contained "the eggs".   You see, the tradition is for the father to pass out little gift boxes to announce the birth of the baby.  But there are no cigars involved.  The traditional gift is one of eggs - an odd number of eggs to announce the birth or a girl and an even number for a boy.  The photo above shows the little gift box we received.  The red package, at left, is the typical hard-boiled-hermetically-sealed-egg that one gets in a birth package.  Above it, to make the even number of two,  is yellow plastic egg containing sweets... a modern twist on the old tradition.   The box also included a package of cookies (at right) and some chocolate kisses.

In the time I've been in Suzhou, I've received at least 10 or 12 boxes of eggs from co-workers announcing a birth.  In most cases, I have no idea who has had the baby.  The little boxes just show up on my desk and all other desks around me.  So clueless I am.

Typhoon

For the past few weeks, the weather in Suzhou has been beautiful....thanks mostly to a string of typhoons that have passed to the East in the China Sea.  Well, finally there has come a typhoon not content to pass by at sea.  Typhoon Haikui is the circular cloud just right-of-center in the photo above.  That is a satellite photo from early this morning....just before Haikui was to make landfall to the South of Shanghai.

Suzhou is not on path to take a direct hit.  Even if we were, we are far enough inland to be sheltered from the apocalyptic effects.  The tidal surge could not come this far inland and the winds would be slowed over the distance from Shanghai.  (All traffic is slowed between Suzhou and Shanghai.)

That said, the weather has become a bit nasty.  Yesterday, Tuesday, was a morning of clear blue skies again.  By the evening, the rain had come and was at times falling in buckets.  (Unfortunately, the buckets came at the time I was riding my bike home from work.  Luckily, the Good Lord looks after children and idiots.)  By this morning the rains were steady and the winds were gusting.  Both rain and wind intensified as the day went on.  Nowhere near tornado like winds.  But strong enough to have killed my favorite umbrella.  Strong enough, also, that on the trip home from work (in a car) we could see many trees knocked down along the roads.  (To put this in perspective....many of the trees that line the roads are transplanted from other places within the past year or two. One can see, from the toppled trees, that they have not yet developed much of a root system to keep them upright.)

Tonight we stay in our apartment.  Outside the winds howl and the rains pelt.  But nothing dangerous.  It sounds like the winds of a July thunderstorm or January blizzard.   Only it has been steady for the last 12 or 16 hours.  Elsewhere in China, there are people and places taking the brunt of this typhoon's impact much more strongly than we are.  Mudslides and high waters.  Prayers for those people tonight.

Head East

 In 1996, when my employer opened it's first factory in Suzhou, the Industrial Park was brand new and still sparsely populated.  At that time, there was nothing around the lakes yet.  The development strategy was to grow from the West - from the edge of the old City - toward the East.  Since we were one of the first to come,  our plant ended up on Western edge of the Suzhou Industrial Park.

 Since then, the park has grown as many other companies have located their factories in SIP.  Walk through a Best Buy or any other electronic store and look around.  Odds are that just about any item you see will have been assembled or will include components from here.  (If that seems like a stretch of the truth, then I invite you to visit and see for yourself.)  In the last 15 years, the construction has marched steadily toward the East as the Industrial Park has filled.  So, when my employer decided in 2010 to build a second factory here, the only available land was some 7 miles or so to the East of the lake - about 10 miles from the older site.

At the beginning of June the project that initially brought me to Suzhou was finished.  But, since I was already here, the powers-that-be decided it was economical to extend our stay until the end of the year... to help with expansion-related projects.  So, since the beginning of June I've moved office to the new factory to the East.  Since the beginning of June, my new best friend has been a 110-foot-long packaging line which we soon hope to be approved for commercial use.

 The photos here show the lands to the East of JinJi Lake.  These are the flat, marshy lands that used to be but rice fields and scattered farming communities.  The land and all it's old occupants have been cleared to await future construction by some Fortune 500 firm.  Lotus plants fill the lowest spots where the water collects.  The old meandering farm roads have been replaced by a modern grid of East-West and North-South boulevards.  In a few places though, like in the photo above, you can still see remnants of the old farmer's roads and bridges.  They could not be force-fitted into the modern plan, but they've not quite yet been erased entirely.

In the mornings, the air smells of malathion.  Mosquitoes, it seems, are not part of the development plan.

I was out to dinner once with a co-worker who was raised in this area to the East of Suzhou.  He is about 35 years old - old enough to have been a child during the pre-boom years of the 1980s.  His parents were local farmers.  He said they were poor.  But so was everyone else around them. So they did not notice it so much.  (This sounds very much like the stories from my parent's generation.)  He also recalled that his parents made him learn to swim before he could go out and play unsupervised. Because of all the water in the area, they refused to let him go out on his own until he was a good swimmer - lest he should fall into a canal and drown.  Another thing he remembered as great entertainment was to walk out to the main road ...and wait there for 3 or 4 hours in hopes of seeing a car go by.  These were the boondocks and cars were rare things in those days.

Today, cars are not so much a rarity it these parts.

This area to the East is the breadbasket of the Industrial Park.  The financial and residential towers are mainly to the West, by the lakes.  Here it is the land of low, two story factory buildings.  There is a chocolate factory across the road from our new plant.  It smells like Willy Wonka Land.  Within the next two or three roads to the East you will find a a good sampling of the world's major pharmaceutical companies. There is a huge Samsung factory at the next intersection to the North.  A huge factory.  They employ more on their cleaning staff than we do in total at our site.  Surrounding it are a couple of quarter sections of land that are covered in cranes engaged in the building of more Samsung factories.   I suppose the smart phones and flat screen TVs and other yet-to-be-seen gadgets of the next decade will come from there.

The Asian Alternative to Diapers

Just a quick item to share:  Most of the young Chinese toddlers you see in public will have pants like the little boy above.  By the way, that is not a brown stripe in the seat.  That is a trap door, and escape hatch, a fireman's flap.  The good news is that it saves the parents money on diapers.  The bad news is that when the kid has to go, the kid has to go....and any grass covered surface or indoor trash receptacle becomes his target.

Blue Skies

 A few postings back, I complained about how gray and overcast and smoggy the weather has been.  As if to prove me a liar, the skies cleared about three weeks ago and we've had day after day of blue skies.  Real blue skies....sometimes with puffy white clouds, as the photo above shows.  At night, you can see the lights all the way to the horizon and you can see stars in the skies.

 Now, I don't think I'd seen 15 days with blue skies in total over the last year-and-a-half.  Since mid-July, we've had them every day.  In the mid-day sun the temperatures get up into the mid to upper 90s. (35 degrees C. or above).  But the humidity doesn't seem as crazy as it did last summer.  It is still humid - more so than in Indiana I think.  But it is not crazy-stinking-tropical-humid.  In fact, the blue skies have also been accompanied by strong breezes (also an odd thing for summer in Suzhou).  The breeze actually feels cool when it hits you, instead of like a jet of steam from a busted heating pipe.

We owe the good weather to the typhoon season.  Normally, during June, the weather patterns that bring the plum rains also keep the typhoons to the South.  Since the end of the rainy season (which was not very rainy this year) the typhoons have been coming Northward into the East China Sea.  Like a huge vacuum cleaner, they suck out the stagnant air.  They keep the breezes going too.

Most of the Suzhou Expat wives and kids have flown home for the long hot summer.   There are just a few of Theresa's friends left in town.  Within our apartment complex, the  few summer lingerers have been spending almost every day down at the swimming pool, enjoying the glorious weather.  Difficult to see, but in the photo above you might make out a train of children being pulled around the pool on their little floaty toys.

They Paved Paradise

Several times now, we've posted on the construction of the "pair of pants" building.  In the the time we've been here, we've been buffered from the hub-bub of the work by the acres of green space that surround the construction site.  The trees lining the sidewalks seemed to knock down much of the noise.  In the springtime, it was fun to watch the kite-flyers and model-airplane-crashers play out in the open fields.  Last summer, the low spots in the field were turned into lotus ponds, and we enjoyed the lotus flowers for most of the summer.  

Note the use of the past tense in the previous paragraph. 

Sometime March, they began removing all the trees which lined the sidewalks.  This was actually an interesting process to watch.  A tree would be selected and a team of workers would dig a circular trench around the base....by hand with spades and pick-axes.  Then they would begin the process making a root-ball with a netting of ropes.  At the base of the trench, they would start undercutting the roots and would work the rope netting underneath also.  Finally, as shown in the photo above, they would cut through the final roots and tip the tree over on its side. 

They must have done this to 60 or 70 trees....if not more.  I don't know if they are able to replant them someplace else.  The root balls seem too small for that.

They also brought in truck-load after truck-load of concrete Lincoln logs, as shown by the photo above.   They would make a pile of these, and then after a while they would take down the pile and reconstruct it 200 feet away.  I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of this is, but I suspect it is some type of testing for soil compression and load bearing....to gather the kind of data that you need before you start building something.

Once the trees were all down, a team of workers built a ten foot high brick and steel wall around the site.  The bricks were used to make columns, and the steel was used to string between the columns on the horizontal.  Later, then came back and bolted panels to the steel stringers.  Then they covered all the panels with advertising, like the one shown below.

In May, they had a groundbreaking ceremony.  A very big tent went up and a lot of fireworks were fired off one Saturday morning.

The top photo shows what it all looks like now.  They've poured acres of concrete slabs and have brought in drilling rigs to sink the piles needed to make a foundation for a building.

You can see the official press release from the local government at this link.  All the activity described above is in preparation for construction of the new Suzhou Center.  This will be a complex of 10 buildings, including the pair-of-pants.  There will be six or seven buildings of 40 or 50 stories built along the flanks.  In the center, the plans are to build two towers - one 450 meters tall and the other 500 meters tall. 

Now, 500 meters will not be THE tallest building in the world, but it would be ONE of the tallest.  The shorter one, at 450 meters, would be a hair taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago....or whatever the Sears Tower is called now.  The taller one would be hair taller than the Shanghai Financial Center - which is currently the tallest building in China.  I suspect, though, by the time that these towers are completed that there will be many more above it on the list.  There is no shortage of prideful communities looking for bragging rights.

YangMei Time Again

We enjoyed our second YangMei season at the end of June.  YangMei are the fruit of the Chinese plum trees whose blossoms in March are celebrated as a sign of the end of winter. Compared to last year's harvest, this year the YangMei were a bit early and a bit small.  The cognoscente tell us that this is typical of the dry years...years in which the plum rains are not strong during the maturation and ripening of the fruit.  The dry weather, though, leads to fruit in which the flavors are more concentrated and vibrant.

YangMei started to appear in the fruit markets in the middle of May.  These were fruits imported from the far South of China.  And it wasn't very good.  The fruit is so fragile that it does not travel well at all.   My Chinese colleagues advised us to fore go all other Yangmei and wait until the fruit of DongShan and XiShan were ripe.  The fruit of DongShan and XiShan, they say, are the best YangMei in all the world.    

The Chinese, like the French, always link food with a place...so that the food and the place become synonymous and interchangeable.  Yangcheng lake is the home of the best freshwater crabs.  WuXi is the home of the best peaches.  YangZhou is home to the best fried rice.  Name a Chinese city and most local folks will be able to tell you the food for which that place is famous.  Or name a food and they will tell you the city with the best of it.

The best YangMei, at least in this area, come from the shores of TaiHu lake.  XiShan is an Island in the middle of the lake.  DongShan is a hilly region on the eastern shores of the lake.  The land there is hilly and much of it is planted in plum trees to attract the visitors during the plum blossom times.  In the early summer, the blossoms become fruit.  There is only a one to two week window in which the fruit is available.  It is fragile and does not lend itself to mechanical harvesting nor to long storage. So the trick is to enjoy it as much as you can.....and then wait until the next year to enjoy it again.

A friend at work happens to have family who live on a farm in the DongShan area....a farm with a number of YangMei trees.  He and his family carefully picked the best day for harvest.  He was kind enough to bring Theresa and me about five pounds of the freshly picked Yangmei.  His gift is photographed above.

Yangmei do not keep very well at all.  You can keep them for two weeks in the fridge and not much more.  So it becomes a bit of a trick to eat a year's worth in a two week period.  We did our best, but still had to throw out nearly half of the fruit as it went soft and moldy before we could finish it. 

The local tradition is to preserve the fruits crocks of BaiJiu, which is a distilled rice liquor.  The 55% alcohol of the BaiJiu preserves the fruit.  The tradition is to preserve the YangMei in alcohol, and then to use it as a home remedy for stomach upsets throughout the coming year.  At any time during the year, you  just eat one piece of alcohol-steeped fruit and your insides will return to normal, happy functioning. I'm not sure if this is because of the fruit or because of the alcohol. But it is what I am told.

Regardless, the YangMei season has quickly come and gone.  We do not plan to be here for the next one.