Xia wu hao!

So I have been in China about two weeks now and I can say with quite some certainty that it is the creepiest place I have ever been. Maybe it's coming from India where everyone seems to care about everything, but the lack of interest in what the government has done and is doing to this country is really astonishing. My host mother doesn't know about the voting process or how the government is elected, she doesn't know what happens to people who don't have health insurance, she openly told Shannon that she doesn't care about those people because those people aren't her. No one seems to question Mao and the rise of communism, even though his policies killed thousands of people. Even our host grandmother, who lived through the rise of Mao and the cultural revolution, thinks he is a great man because he united China into the People's Republic. To me and Shannon it's like not knowing about the Holocaust, but when you consider that these people have never left China and that everything is censored by the government, its almost understandable how they could be so completely unaware of all of the bad shit that went down in the last fifty years of China's history. Also I know that there are people who are anti-government, and who do have ideas about Mao that haven't just been fed to them, but we aren't being exposed to them on IHP and that's pretty frustrating. But still, coming from the US where everyone questions everything and having spent six weeks in India where everything the government does is scrutinized, it feels really creepy to be in a place where people just accept the way things are unquestionably. The government's one-child policy is going to have serious future health implications but no one seems to want to talk about it. No one on my trip has been able to get a straight answer from any of our guest lectures about a health issue or group of people who may be being left behind. You can't email a US senator from China, and you can't do internet research on things that reflect negatively on the government.

It's also kind of creepy that I now realize how much China could and probably will take over the world at any moment.

Despite all of this, I am really enjoying being in China if for no other reason than it is so completely different than any place I've ever been. Our host family is really nice but really overbearing and paranoid about everything-like me walking across the street by myself at 8pm. Their daughter is ten, does math olympics and is an amazing pianist. All of their energy goes into raising the one kid they're allowed to have. Like she has a schedule for each half hour of each one of her days and it's taped to the dining table. Only our host mother speaks English, but she speaks it pretty well, so its been pretty easy to communicate. They live in this giant housing area called Sunshine 100 where all together 30,000 people live, and its like an assisted living community without the assisted part. Every apartment as far as we can tell is the exact same, and in the middle of this complex there is a swimming pool and a basketball court and an entire building dedicated to selling units in the complex. We live about ten minutes from the campus of CSU (where we have our classes) but Changsha is not a walkable city at all so every morning we drive to school with our family. I feel like I have so much less freedom here than I did in India, which is weird because I expected China to feel much more western and comfortable, but it's exactly the opposite. Where in India I felt like after a couple days I was on my own to get adjusted to the city and learn my way around, I am barely let out of my host family's sight here. Which reflects that they care, obviously, but is also frustrating because I've been living on my own for quite some time now and have learned adequately how to dress myself and at what temperature I like my showers, but my host family still feels the need to tell me these things each morning.

Changsha itself is not what I'd call a remarkable city, though I don't mind because the point of this trip is not to be tourists. Last night we did go karaoke-ing as a group which was really fun, except the room was tiny and all the songs were put to these bizarre videos of this one woman walking by a river with sailboats as the backdrop. We also attempted to BYOB but the only alcohol in this country-besides Bud Light-appears to be sake, which is rice wine that smells and tastes strangely like a traditional Chinese dish appropriately called "stinky tofu." So..that's kind of a disappointment, as I have yet to reap the benefits of my non-US legality (except at the India farewell dinner, but that's a story for another post, maybe one that my parents aren't reading). Barbara and I did pick up some pretty sweet trucker hats, though, which plus a big bottle of budweiser really made me feel like I was representing America.

This past week we've been visiting hospitals and schools and had various guest lectures who have more often than not read off powerpoints full of statistics about American health problems. The language barrier is turning out to be much more significant here than in India, as was expected, but it really kind of impedes our ability to get information. Plus of course no one wants to say anything bad about the government, which is maybe why instead they just say bad things about America. Which is fine, we deserve it. Last Thursday we did visit a middle school (which in the US is high school) attached to CSU, and they're really into ping pong here, and we saw what I think was the makings of the Chinese Olympic ping pong team in action. I kind of thought ping pong was a joke, but these kids were serious-they were like the most athletic people I've ever seen. And they made me play against one of them, and needless to say the dusty ping pong table in my basement did not prepare me for the experience.

This week we also all got treated to traditional Chinese foot massages, which were sort of like full body massages except the point was not to make you feel good, rather to beat all of your muscles into submission. It actually felt really good, despite the fact that some of us couldn't walk very well for a few days after and that the two Chinese women who worked on me and my friend Victoria were definitely making fun of my hair in Chinese. In China my shaved head definitely does not fit in, I've already had two women tell me on separate occasions that I look like a little boy. Great.

The farther I get from India the more I want to go back. I definitely felt this way when I left too, but the longer I think about India and the more comparison I have with China the more I feel like there's just so much of India I didn't experience, and six weeks was way too short. Besides really missing my host family and really missing the city, I am just fascinated by the whole country and am feeling very envious of people who are spending their whole semester there, or even their whole semester anywhere, because I feel increasingly like I gave up something pretty significant by choosing a program that moves around as much as IHP does. And I love all of the new experiences I am getting and I am so excited to be in South Africa for a few months, but I just really loved India and really felt at home there, and it makes me really sad to think I might not get to go back for a long time.

Anyway, I'll stop complaining now as I really have no right to. China has been an amazing experience so far and I know it will only get better as we get deeper into the country. I also know that I will go back to India and that I'm lucky to have had such an incredible experience in a really incredible country. So I'm off to go embrace communism and Mandarin, which we have been learning every morning and which I am still pathetically inept at. But hey, wo shi ge mei guo ren! (I am only an American!)