Baishui, Part 2

Monday the 21st was our first full day in Baishui, and straight after breakfast we (Prof. Li, some students, Julia, & I) piled into a van and drove into town to visit the county apple bureau. There we had a long meeting with an extension agent/administrator who was very helpful and gave us a lot of information about apple production and cooperatives in Baishui county, including two books on those topics (one in English and one in Chinese – both with lots of pictures). Much like Prof. Li, he was eager to help us and answer our questions. Best of all, everyone was very encouraging about both our survey and photovoice projects. We also met a woman who worked at the bureau, Jinhua, who would be helping arrange our village visits.

Julia and I were hanging out in our room at the apple station after lunch, when we were visited by two girls who lived next door. They were cousins spending the summer at the apple station while they took driving lessons in town (the mother of one works at the apple station). We chatted a little, and when they found out I like to cook they wondered if I could teach them how to make some American foods, like pizza and cookies. UM, CAN I?!?! Obviously, I was delighted and began plotting immediately. More on that later.

In the afternoon we loaded up the van again, this time with three graduate students (Pengjuan, Qiuming, and Yanjing), and picked up Jinhua from the apple bureau. She took us to a nearby village and introduced us to the president of their apple cooperative. The two of them arranged for women apple farmers to come talk to us, and as they arrived I could barely contain my excitement. Based on my previous experiences in Shandong, I was expecting them to say, “Actually, never mind, no thanks,” and leave at any moment. But the atmosphere was completely different. Everyone was very relaxed, hanging out in the home of the cooperative president, and we were introduced to the women by two people they knew (the co-op president and Jinhua). Much better than just approaching people cold as strangers.

I don’t think I mentioned on this blog that a few days before leaving Shandong, I was able to hold a 90-minute focus group with some women peach farmers who were very friendly and willing to answer my questions. Plus it gave me a chance to try out the questions I’d had translated, and see where those conversations led. These were questions like: “What kinds of work do you do in the orchard? How long do you spend cooking every day? What do you do in your free time? How often do you talk to other women farmers? Who drives your household’s vehicles? Who manages your household finances? Whose name is on the lease for your land?”

Of course, the answers are always fascinating. I’m hesitant to post too much of the results here while we’re still in the midst of our research. Maybe I can publish a summary here when I’ve had a chance to sit down and analyze it all. One thing I can share is that at the end of our focus group questions (which lasted about an hour) I asked if the women had any questions for Julia and me, about us or America, and they absolutely did. They wanted to know what the typical age is for getting married in America (obviously pretty old, based on Julia & me…), who cares for the kids (fascinated to learn about stay-at-home dads), who pays for weddings, and who cares for the elderly. For all these questions, we gave our best representation of the various options available in America, and where traditions are changing. The women also commented that they had seen on TV that there is much broad, open space in America, while China is very crowded. We agreed that in this instance the TV portrayal was actually pretty accurate. Then again, few places are as crowded as China.

The moment of truth came when I brought out the cameras and asked if they’d take photographs to help us better understand some of the topics we had discussed in our conversation, and they all agreed! I was ecstatic. They wound up taking only one camera, saying that the rest of them could just take pictures with their cell phones. We arranged to meet up again three days later to discuss their photographs. It all happened so smoothly that I was afraid I’d jinx it somehow, and tried not to get my hopes up.

We returned to the apple station around 7:00. During our morning meeting, Prof. Li had suggested that we give a presentation to the students at the apple station, talking about what it’s like to attend college in the US. During supper, Prof. Li informed us that we should give our presentation that evening, so Julia & I ate quickly rushed back to our room to put the finishing touches on the powerpoint we’d started earlier in the day. The presentation itself was pretty easy to give – Julia and I have a lot we can say about our college experience. And the audience was about 15 students our age, so it wasn’t terribly formal. We talked about the differences between admissions in the US and China, the different kinds of colleges/universities in the US, what we studied, what we liked best about our schools, and how we paid for it. At the end we had some extra time, so we pulled up the internet and showed them more pictures of our schools. They had asked us to talk about American culture in general, so we were also trying to tease out what aspect of American culture they’d like to talk about, and we landed on food (surprise, surprise). So that led us down a long rabbit hole that primarily featured foods-Julia & I-miss-du-jour. People seemed to enjoy it well enough, because they requested to have “English Corner” again the next night. So we prepped a presentation on “Summer in the US” for Tuesday night and “Agriculture/Farming in the US” for Wednesday.

Over the next two days we left the apple station each day to visit nearby villages and conduct surveys. The architecture of the houses in this area (the Loess Plateau of Shaanxi) are really interesting. Traditionally homes were built into caves in the hillsides, and even though all the homes we’ve visited are free-standing, they still have the same design of long, domed rooms built side-by-side. They’re not technically underground, I guess, but they are insulated on all sides except the front doorway by a thick layer of earth (see pics from Huangling) that keeps the rooms quite cool (and presumably cozily warm in the winter).

On Thursday morning Julia went out with a couple students to collect more surveys while I stayed at the apple station to do some cooking with Jiaying and her cousin. We decided to start with pizza. Jiaying had assured me we could use the station’s kitchen, and some of the ingredients they had in stock (we’d gone a grocery run for everything else we needed the day before). I should explain that there’s a single kitchen & dining hall that feeds all the staff, students, and visitors and the apple station. Julia said it reminded her of camp, and I agree. The kitchen staff was really sweet and friendly, and there were a couple families with small children staying at the station, so mealtimes did have a bit of that homey, communal feel of camp.

Anyway, we went to the kitchen and first asked for some yeast to start the pizza dough, only to find out that it was mantou-making day, and all the yeast was used up. So we improvised, and decided to use some of the mantou dough as our pizza crust. In fact, the big blob of white dough on the counter reminded me of the batches of pizza dough I’d help make in the Grinnell bakery, quantity-wise at least.

 

pizza-shaped mantou

 

We grabbed a big hunk of dough and rolled it out, and spooned some pizza sauce on top. I’d thought we’d have to make our own tomato sauce, but Jiaying had already bought some – apparently she’s been ordering ingredients like pizza sauce, mozzarella, and butter online for awhile now with the hope of learning to make some interesting foreign foods. The pizza sauce turned out to be a little thin and sweet for my taste (I could have probably made a more typically American sauce from scratch) but she was super excited about using it. We chopped up some red bell peppers and mushrooms (which we managed to brown in the kitchen’s enormous wok) and threw them on the pizza with the mozzarella and slices of Chinese sausage (think pepperoni, but slightly sweet and not spicy at al). All chopping was done with a enormous Chinese cleaver, of course.

 

 

The tricky part was figuring out how to bake it – ovens are pretty rare in China. Jiaying had rustled up a small toaster oven that we were planning to use for our cookie experiment later, but for the pizza we decided to be adventurous and try cooking it on the press used to make bingzi (Chinese pancakes, basically – the egg & scallion ones are probably most well-known in the US). And it actually worked pretty well, provided we wedged a spatula under the lid so the cheese wouldn’t stick to the top, making the crust nice and crispy on the bottom.

“pizza” in the “oven”

Mmmmmm so much fresh mantou!

 

The flavor of the crust wasn’t exaaactly right – probably because it was meant to be soft, fluffy mantou, not dense chewy pizza crust. But close enough, I say! Certainly better than what passes for pizza at Pizza Huts here. There was just enough for everyone in the kitchen to get a slice, and people seemed to like it. (Which was good, because I felt bad for getting in their way while they were trying to make lunch for everyone.

In the afternoon we returned to the village where I’d done a focus group on Monday, to see if the women had taken any pictures. I was a little anxious about it – What if it turned out to be awkward and weird? What if no one had taken photos? Or no one showed up at all? But it was wonderful! We were in the same room where we’d had the focus group on Monday, and we didn’t have to wait too long for the women to turn up. It turned out that the women who’d said they’d use their cell phones had sort of forgotten about it, but the woman who’d taken the camera had taken over 100 photos! And it looked like she’d shared the camera with some of the other women, so she wasn’t the only one taking pictures, and they captured aspects of their lives I’d never have been able to take pictures of on my own. Sorry for all the gushing and no examples, but for ethics and privacy reasons I can’t post the pictures on the internet. I can, however, share them with you in person once I’m stateside. :)

We sat together discussing the photographs for nearly 2 hours. I hadn’t meant for the focus group to last that long, but the women seemed to be enjoying themselves, and I was reluctant to bring our discussion to a halt. Julia was kind enough to let us videotape the entire conversation on her camera, so we have a recording of that as well. Jiaying had tagged along with us, and assumed the role of videographer.

When we returned to the apple station we got supper and then headed to the kitchen to bake chocolate chip cookies. I was totally winging it recipe-wise – How many tablespoons in this block of butter? Who knows! My water bottle has markings for fluid ounces, so I poured water from bowls into my water bottle to estimate volume measurements. (Measuring cups are not a mainstay in Chinese kitchens). Miraculously, the cookies actually came out pretty well! My kitchen helpers were kind of shocked by how much butter and sugar is in the recipe, and I can’t really blame them. It was also very helpful that we had a fridge, so we could chill the dough a little bit before working with it. (This was the major obstacle to making cookies in Lesotho. The only time we had a fridge was when room temperature = fridge temperature.)

We baked the cookies in the little toaster oven on a tiny tray that fit just five cookies at a time. But that was okay because it didn’t have any temperature options – just top burner, bottom burner, or both burners, so it took a few tries to work out a combination that produced cookies that weren’t too toasty on the top or bottom. (For the record: preheat both burners & bake for one minute, then bottom only for 4 minutes, top only for 6 minutes, then turn off heat & leave cookies in oven for 2 minutes.) But even the rejects were edible, so everyone was happy.

Due to the small batch size we didn’t finish baking all the dough off that night. So we had a second cookie party Saturday afternoon, when we were joined by a few of the little boys running around the station. And seeing them all descend on a plate of cookies was just about the most precious thing I’ve ever seen in my life. They were definitely fans, and got the full, fresh-out-of-the-oven-melted-chocolate experience.

We collected more surveys on Friday and Saturday – about 100 total! – and then returned to Yangling on Sunday. Our week in Baishui was absolutely a highlight of our summer in China, not only because it was so productive research-wise, but the people at the apple station made us feel so at home. I was truly sorry to leave – I could picture spending a whole summer there, hopping around between villages and conducting more kitchen experiments. But we had to be off to explore new places. Our second Shaanxi destination was Huangling, which we just left yesterday, and I’ll write all about our experiences there in my next post.

Stray Thoughts

• At the apple station the kitchen always made perfect mantou – big, hearty, and kept warm in the steamer cabinet. I got in the habit of eating one or two mantou at breakfast split open and stuffed with lots of chopped green (hot) peppers and a little bit of chopped scallion. Whether this is a Shaanxi thing or not I can’t say, but people in Baishui definitely like it. And like all great breakfast foods, after a couple days I felt like I’d been eating mantou with hot peppers every morning my whole life.
• The one downside to Baishui was the prosperous mosquito population. Despite the fact that we never opened the windows and kept the door closed as much as possible, they somehow found a way to infiltrate our room. Mosquitoes don’t usually bother me that much, but these were different. One morning I woke up with two bites on my eyelid, and after that I became fairly aggressive about going on a mosquito killing spree each night before I went to bed.

Baishui, Part 1

Yeesh, I was just looking over my last post to see where I left off, and I may have been a little overzealous in my play-by-play of events. I think I was just excited we had a full week of researching to report. I’ll try to do a little better job of editing this one.

Which will be difficult, because so many wonderful things have happened in the past week!

Last Saturday (the 19th) we bid farewell to Qingdao and got on a plane to Xi’an (only about a 2 hr flight). Two students from Northwest Agriculture & Forestry University spotted us before we even made it to baggage claim, merrily waving a sign with our names on it, so we immediately felt welcomed to Shaanxi. The drive from the airport to Yangling, where the university is located (just west of Xi’an), took about an hour and offered many views of corn and orchards, but also grapes, which I hadn’t really seen in Shandong.

After checking into our hotel, we went to meet the professor in charge of our stay in Shaanxi, Professor Li, who has turned out to be an absolute delight. His English isn’t the greatest, but he more than makes up for it in his friendliness, ready laugh, and willingness to listen to our plans & keep us informed. He’s constantly asking if we have any questions or need help with anything else, which is such a welcome change for Julia and me – we can hardly believe our luck.

We found out during that meeting that we’d be hitting the ground running in the best way possible – the next day we would leave for an apple research station in Baishui (northeast of Xi’an), where we’d be closer to villages and could begin our research. And best of all, we could stay in Baishui for a full week! We also met some other students that work in his lab, including Qiuming, who would also stay at the apple station for the week and work as our translator.

 

After dinner (dumplings!) several students gave us a little tour of campus, which is really beautiful. I suppose when you have ‘forestry’ in the name of our university, having an abundance of pretty trees makes sense. We walked alongside a wide promenade of peony bushes lined with cherry trees, which must be stunning in the spring. There was even a small bamboo forest that reminded me a lot of hiking through larger versions in Hangzhou. I also took pictures of a fruit tree I’m still trying to identify – the tree has orange trumpet-shaped flowers and the fruit is green and oblong now, but will turn yellow when ripe apparently. Stay tuned! Edit: Upon closer inspection, I think those orange flowers are growing on a vine and not actually part of the tree. Still no idea what it is. 

Anyone know what this is?

As promised, on Sunday around noon some of Prof. Li’s students escorted us to the bus station. Once we all arrived it turned out there were eight of us traveling together – Prof. Li, Julia & me, and five of Li’s students. We first took a bus from Yangling to Xi’an (about 2 hours), took the subway from the west to east bus station (maybe 30 minutes?) and then another bus from Xi’an to Baishui (about 3 hours). I sat by the window on both buses, and there was some really pretty scenery as we neared Baishui. It’s nestled on a hill next to a big gorge with gently sloping sides that are completely terraced. I only ever really had a good view when crossing the bridge in a vehicle, so my attempts to photograph it yielded pretty pathetic results. You’ll just have to take my word for it when I say it was very scenic!

Immediately after we got off the bus the group of us started tromping through the streets looking for food. We drew quite a few looks as Prof. Li led the way and the two laowai with big hiking backpacks flanked him on either side. Julia and I have spent very little time on this trip in any locations that could be considered a tourist destination, but Baishui especially receives relatively few foreign visitors. (I mean, its population is only 200,000, tiny by Chinese standards.)

We settled on a place that mostly sold dumplings, but I ordered a bowl of noodles with tomatoes and eggs. While we were waiting for our food to be cooked, one of the students went out and bought everyone a roujiamo. This is a snack that Shaanxi is famous for, sometimes called a “Chinese hamburger”. Like so many great regional dishes, it’s very simple – just two thin fist-sized circles of dough quickly cooked on a hot wok to give it a crispy, almost cracker-like exterior, stuffed generously with hot shredded pork. Simple and satisfying, and available everywhere in Shaanxi, it seems.

By the time we finished supper it was nearly 8:00. From the restaurant we took a minibus to the apple station, about 10 minutes outside of town. We were shown to our room, which was very nice – similar to our hotel room in Qixia, but only 30 yuan (about $5) per night! Including meals! (Every time I return to the US from China I am temporarily horrified by how expensive everything is.) I was feeling pretty sleepy by that point, but Prof. Li energetically led us around the center, introducing us to as many of his colleagues as he could find. At one point, we were outside, walking between buildings, and spotted the station’s big dog walking around. Prof. Li pointed to it and said, “Cuddly! Cuddly and warm!” and then dissolved into chuckles. He’s just the best. He finally let us go to sleep, which is good because the next day was busy, but I’ll leave that for another post. There’s much more to tell, but I’m anxious to get something posted on this neglected blog before my vpn quits again – sequel coming soon!

Stray thoughts:

• WATERMELON. WATERMELON EVERY DAY TIL I DIE. Seriously, there are truck beds piled high with mountains of watermelon at every corner, and it makes me dizzy with happiness. I have also been introduced to hami melons, which originally come from Xinjiang and are sort of like small, mild cantaloupes.
  

  I want them all.

• So far in Shaanxi no one’s mistaken us for Russians – so I guess that’s a Shandong thing. But one guy did guess that we were Italians, which is a new one.

Return to Qixia

As promised, last week Julia and I were able to hang out in Qixia (self-professed apple capital of China) doing the on-the-ground, talking-to-farmers, data-collecting research we’ve been anxious to do since we arrived. As usual, we were given notice of our departure about an hour in advance, so we threw whatever clean-ish clothes were handy in our backpacks and hopped on a bus for the quick (~2 hr) ride to Qixia.

When we arrived we met with a few members of the Qixia Fruit Bureau, who organized our visits to the villages. They dropped us off at the same hotel where we stayed last time, and we had a brief meeting with the Bureau employee who would be responsible for us. We quickly described the research methods we wanted to use, and it occurs to me now that I have yet to do the same for this blog. So here you go:

Basically our methods thus far fall into two categories. First, Julia wrote a survey intended for Chinese apple farmers that investigates how they currently obtain agricultural information and how ICTs (information communication technologies) might serve their unmet needs (or not). It asks questions like “How often do you listen to the radio/watch TV/use the internet?” and “When you have an insect problem in your orchard, what’s the first thing you do to find a solution?” and “Does the weather forecast impact your farming decisions?”

The second method, which I’ve been working on, focuses on the gender aspect of our research. In order to better understand the lives and concerns of women farmers in China, I decided to try out a method called photovoice. This involves giving cameras to research participants and asking them to take photographs that respond to some question or prompt. For example, members of a First Nation community in Canada participating in a photovoice project were asked to take pictures of environmental and health risks in their community. One of the earliest uses of photovoice was a study conducted in Yunnan, China in 1997, where women were asked to take photographs that represented the “spirit” of their village.

After taking the photographs, participants would then meet to discuss their photographs in focus groups, expanding upon the ideas their pictures represented. I had hoped to do something similar in the villages that we visited, asking women farmers to take pictures of things that made their lives more difficult or easier. The advantages of this approach are at least two-fold: 1) The photographs give a marginalized group (women farmers) a tool for expressing themselves that transcends the language barrier between us and 2) the photographs are a launching point for tackling complex issues that can be difficult to begin talking about cold. In addition, by allowing the women to choose the photographs, and therefore the topics of discussion, we can ensure that we address the issues that are most meaningful to them (and may not have otherwise occurred to us).

Back to our meeting with the Fruit Bureau representative – we quickly realized that he had been stuck with baby-sitting us and was none too pleased about it. He wanted us to complete the surveys as quickly as possible, and was very pessimistic about the photovoice idea, saying some rather condescending things about women farmers. After several difficult minutes we finally coaxed him into allowing us to at least try, but we clearly couldn’t count on any assistance from him.

Our first full day in Qixia (Tuesday) our Bureau friend met us at 8:00 and took us to a nearby village. He then handed us off to someone he knew in the village (whose name I never caught) and said he’d see us later. The morning got off to a great start, as our village escort took us to a little shop where a bunch of farmers were hanging out. We happily sat down and started chatted and interviewing people. The survey had been edited down so that it only took 20-30 minutes; people were curious and perfectly willing to answer our questions. Hanging out with those farmers, chatting with people wandering over from the morning market, was probably the highlight of my trip to that point. It was just such a relief to be away from the oversight of the University and the Bureau, talking to farmers one-on-one.

Of course, strictly speaking it wasn’t one-on-one because the bulk of communications went through Yongbo, our fearless translator, but I worked in a few side conversations. These usually begin with farmers asking me (or Yongbo) if I speak/understand Chinese, me replying “Yes, I can speak/understand a little”, and them reacting with delight or skepticism or both. And even Julia was able to work in some of her stock phrases like “My father is a farmer!”

After we finished several surveys, we set about trying to get a photovoice group together. Feeling optimistic from the morning’s success, I delighted that our village guide immediately led us to a group of about eight women hanging out a little ways up the road. We explained the idea of our project to them, and they were really enthusiastic about learning how to use the cameras, smiling and laughing while taking pictures of us and each other. For a moment I felt like everything was finally falling into place, and everything would happen just as I’d imagined it. (I should have known better, of course.) As soon as we started asking whether they would commit to taking photos of their lives, and whether we could come back in a few days to have discussions, they balked and started handing the cameras back, much to my disappointment.

In retrospect, I think our errors are fairly clear. Photovoice is not a commonly used method (not nearly as common as surveys, anyway), and the concept takes some explaining. Add unfamiliarity with the process to the fact that we’re foreigners they’ve just met, and it’s no wonder these women felt wary. They weren’t totally closed to the idea, but we hadn’t given them much time to mull over the process and ask questions, in addition to getting to know us and our goals and motives.

So in the future, I think it’s really important that we first explain the photovoice to a trusted member of the community, and then have them help explain the project to the participants. That way, the idea is just coming from a bunch of strangers, and people are more likely to ask questions. Also, the environment was part of the problem. We were basically just standing to the side of the main road, and a lot of people were dropping in and out of our conversation, including husbands, and I think it’d be better if we were in a more relaxed, less public environment, like someone’s house.

Anyway, lessons learned! We were whisked away to the local government offices for lunch, and then dropped off in the same village afterwards. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the village collecting more surveys. We started by returning to the place where we had done surveys in the morning, but people were pretty absorbed with their card games and mah jong and didn’t really want to talk to us. So we ambled about town and interviewed whoever we ran into – a moderately successful strategy, but time-consuming. We collected eight surveys total that day.

Wednesday was much the same except that our Bureau friend was with us for the whole day, more or less. We started by interviewing a guy who had a fairly large farm, somewhat separate from the main village, and had won a bunch of awards for his apples. He was really friendly and eager to talk to us, and just a cool dude in general. We also made a stop at an inputs dealership and surveyed a farmer there, and then were back to our usual village-based approach. We did a few surveys set up for us in what looked like a classroom with farmers our Bureau guide thought we might like to talk to. Then in the afternoon we were back to wandering around the village on our own, surveying whoever would talk to us. People were generally very friendly – one guy even took a break from house construction (making mortar for ceramic tiles) to talk to us. We seemed to be getting a little more efficient at conducting the survey, and collected 10 total for the day.

On Thursday we were completely on our own – our Bureau guide had guests from Japan visiting, and didn’t have time to help us. We were all a little nervous about striking out on our own, but it actually turned out to be one of our most successful days. We left the hotel early and walked down the street to catch a taxi. Our plan was to tell the taxi driver to take us to a village other than those we had already visited, and just hope that we wouldn’t be run out of town.

Luckily, our driver turned out to be super friendly and helpful (much more than our Bureau friend, actually) and drove us to a village near his own hometown. Even though we were still in the same general area, just outside of Qixia, the drive to this village had scenery totally distinct from where we’d been previously. We were much closer to the mountains, and the views were really gorgeous – orchards on terraced hillsides supported by stone walls, and reservoirs in the valleys. The road we were driving on reminded me of Lesotho (except that it was paved), a single lane twisting around the mountainside, one blind curve after another. I thought Lesotho had given me nerves of steel where mountain-driving-taxis are concerned, but we did have a near head-on collision that really took me by surprise. We were totally fine, but afterward I noticed there was a road sign at that curve that was just a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in the middle, which seemed appropriate.

We exchanged phone numbers with the taxi driver so he could pick us up in the afternoon, and he dropped us off with a farmer in his 70s, just outside the village. He was really friendly and happy to talk to us, so that made us optimistic for the rest of the day. After the survey I asked him about the intercropping we were standing next to – I recognized the peanuts and taro, but not the one in the middle. The farmer said it was called “little red bean”, something used for medicinal purposes. He was a vague as to what purposes exactly, but it had something to do with cooling down the body. We walked into town and found many more people who were happy to complete our survey. We wandered down the main road through the villages, and actually wound up visiting two or three. Everyone was very friendly and pointed us in the direction where they thought we would find more people.

Later in the afternoon when we were interviewing a woman in a small group of other women, I was holding a clipboard and one of the women started looking over my shoulder and reading the survey softly to herself and answering each question out loud as she went. I’ve been more than happy to let Yongbo take the reins on interviews, but I thought, ‘Well, I can at least mark down the answers I understand, as long as she’s answering the questions anyway’, and that is how I found myself conducting a survey in Chinese, with a dialect I barely understood, by myself. Obviously I couldn’t accurately write down the more complicated qualitative answers (like, what aspects of ag TV programs do you like or dislike?), but I could handle the simpler ones pretty easily, like ‘How many mu of apples do you have?’ and ‘Do you use your phone to text’, etc. So I did as much as I could and Yongbo swooped in to fill in the blanks when he was done with his interview. The same thing happened later, and I wound up interviewing a woman while Yongbo interviewed her husband, which was interesting because their answers weren’t identical.

In general people were curious about our survey. At one point we were sitting on stools on a bridge and people kept wandering over to us, so we were able to do 3 consecutive surveys without even moving. This made us a lot more efficient (not getting dragged away by the Bureau guide saved time too), and we were able to collect 18 surveys, twice our previous rate! The weather was also in our favor – unlike the previous two days, it was cool and overcast, so there were undoubtedly more people hanging out outdoors.

The funniest thing was that at the end of the day, we were making arrangements with our taxi driver to come pick us up, and we were trying to figure out which road would take us back to the village where we had started, so we could meet our driver in more or less the same place. We passed an empty taxi parked on a bridge, but we had just called our driver and he said he was on his way, so we presumed it was just some other taxi. However, as we walked through town we passed about a half dozen older villagers, and they insisted that the taxi was ours. We didn’t see how that was possible since we had just talked to the driver, and we hadn’t told him what village we were in. But they were persistent, saying that we should wait there and the driver was coming back.

We had talked to these same people earlier, and didn’t want to appear rude or ungrateful, so we decided to wait, and when the driver arrived it would be clear that there was a misunderstanding. But the villagers noticed our skepticism and assured us that the driver was meeting us at 4:00, which was surprising because it was true – how could they have known that? Sure enough, a few minutes later our very own taxi driver materialized, to our astonishment and pleasure. Apparently when he said he was on his way (“on the road”, in Chinese) his meaning was more literal – he was parked on the village road. It turned out that the last village we visited was his hometown, and, as Julia has often remarked, word travels fast in small towns.

Friday presented a new challenge. Yongbo had to go back to Xi’an (he’s joining his family for a summer vacation) so we were without a translator. Julia and I assumed we wouldn’t be able to do anymore surveys without him, and we were making plans to check out what attractions we could find around Qixia. But to our surprise we found our Bureau friend waiting for us in the hotel lobby with a younger colleague who was willing to serve as our translator. That day’s surveys actually went very well, and we learned another valuable lesson. We told our new translator that we only had 12 more surveys printed off, and that gave us a defined and attainable goal for the day. So, instead of wandering around villages all day on our own trying to complete as many surveys as we could, the people we were working with had motivation to bring farmers to us and complete the surveys as efficiently as possible.

I don’t mean to give the impression that our translator was trying to get rid of us. He was actually very kind and patient, and conscientious in completing our survey according to our instructions. The difference from the previous days was that each time we arrived in the village he spoke to the village leader or someone else with influence, and they helped us track down farmers. Also, because we had a local to explain our survey and purpose to the farmers, they understood our request and agreed much more quickly than when we approached farmers on our own.

Again, I helped out with the interview whenever we were in group setting and could get a farmer started with the simple, straightforward questions. Eventually we found ourselves in a classroom doing something of an interview cascade, with the translator and me doing surveys separately as people came (were called) in, and a guy who came along from lunch helping out, and even Julia jumping into the fray, and the translator cleaning up after all of us. In this way we finished 8 surveys in a little over an hour. The atmosphere in the room was really pleasant – kind of a survey party, with everyone happy to be there & a team spirit. So we’ve taken note may use explicit daily goals to help move things along in Shaanxi.

We returned to QAU on Saturday, and have had a fairly relaxed few days since. The weather is heating up noticeably, and I don’t think it’ll be any cooler in Shaanxi. We’ve been working on trying to get a focus group of women together (without the photography component) and meeting with graduate students here to help them with their English abstracts. In three days we’re off to Xi’an for part two of our summer!

Stray thoughts:

• Everyone thinks we’re Russian. On the street, in the villages – the first question people always have (after “Do you speak Chinese?”) is “Are you Russian?” I have no explanation for this, but it happened multiple times a day in and around Qixia.
• Peaches are in season and piled high on the street vendor carts, and they are delicious. So far all are the sweeter, milder white peach variety.
• You may have heard that dialects of Chinese vary widely throughout the country, and Shandong is no exception. For the most part Yongbo can communicate with rural villagers in his standard Mandarin, but the difference in accents is obvious. At one point one of the villagers I was talking to said she had 9 mu of apple trees, and if she hadn’t made the hand symbol for 9 (a hooked index finger) I never would have guessed that that’s what she was saying.
• Yongbo is the greatest translator ever. That is all.
• There’s apparently something of a drought around Qixia (most obvious to me from the corn, which had extremely spiky leaves). So when we were walking through and between villages on Thursday, we kept seeing tricycle trucks loading up big plastic barrels of water from the reservoirs to take to the orchards for irrigation.
• Sometimes villagers would invite us into their homes to conduct interviews, and several of them had these really interesting traditional beds. They’re made of brick or concrete and built into the house in such a way that smoke is channeled underneath it from the cooking fire before exiting through the chimney. Sounds like it’d be pretty cozy in the winter. (And it’s adjusted somehow so it’s not heated up in the summer.)

Twists and Turns

What a week! The last seven days have certainly brought some ups and downs in our research (and our fun, actually) here in Shandong, but Julia and I have been doing our best to take it all in stride.

Last weekend began on a very positive note, as Julia and I both found out we received generous research funding from UC Davis, the result of applications we submitted during spring quarter. It definitely takes the edge off of personal resources committed to this project. :) To celebrate, we took a bus downtown to visit the Tsingtao beer museum and brewery. Tsingtao is by far the most common/popular beer in China; it practically has a monopoly on the beer market. It was established over a hundred years ago, when Qingdao was a German colony. (Tsingtao is actually the same as Qingdao in Chinese – the spelling difference comes from an older romanization, rather than the more modern pinyin.)

The museum wasn’t too difficult to find, as it was appropriately located on “Beer Street”. Signs in both Chinese and English led us through a self-guided tour of Tsingtao’s history and brewing process, which was pretty fun and informative, and included two free samples – one glass of unfiltered beer (which we really liked – very flavorful) and one glass of the final product.

super classy fountain

 

I won the beer quiz! Take that, small child.

Beer Street lit up at night

After the museum walked to a nearby sushi place that turned out to be amazing. I’m surprised it’s not all over the China travel guidebooks, because it’s totally the type of place foreigners would love – cute, cozy, friendly staff, great food, and even a picture menu. Its location location makes it easy to miss – we had to walk through a nondescript side street market to get to it. I stumbled upon it just from a baidu search of restaurants in the area, and realized I’d never had sushi in China, so I wanted to check it out. We wound up ordering 4 big plates of sushi that was every bit as good as what I’ve had in the US, and soooo cheap – about $15. Total. Plus we ordered two big bottles of Qingdao, of course. :)

  

After sushi, we took a bus to Zhongshan park, a large green space near downtown with walking trails and a zoo. We were too late to tour the Buddhist temple we’d heard about, but fortunately not too late to get a ticket for the cable car across the park! (By cable car I mean one of those ski-lift-type rides you see at state fairs and amusement parks.) We ascended just as the sun was setting, and the route was fairly long – probably took about 45 minutes total – so we had great views of the bay and city lights.  

Now, up until this point I had been pretty proud of my ability to navigate the Qingdao bus system, which isn’t too different from that of Hangzhou or Beijing or anywhere else. But the QAU campus is much farther from downtown than the ZJUT (Hangzhou) campus, and I failed to account for this important detail when assuming it would be easy to catch a bus back home on a Saturday night. So as we were happily taking blurry pictures of downtown Qingdao from on high, the last buses to Chengyang district were leaving. Naturally, we didn’t realize this until we had left the park and walked to the bus stop. Even then, we gamely looked up an alternate bus route on Julia’s smart phone, with the hope that there would be another bus we could catch. But that bus had stopped running even earlier, as a friendly middle-aged Chinese guy kindly informed us. At this point Julia and I started thinking we needed to come up with another way to get home, and the guy I had just talked to, plus a couple women hanging out nearby selling drinks, became rather invested in our predicament.

The whole situation was a really great example of two things: 1) If you know a little bit of a language, even just enough to explain your situation in broken phrases and understand the advice given to you, it will make a world of difference in the experience you have in a place. 2) By and large, Chinese people are incredibly patient and willing to help hapless foreigners who clearly don’t know what they’re doing (based on my biased anecdotes, anyway).

Cut to this guy looking very concerned about us, and insisting that he personally lead us on a 20-minute walk to the one bus stop that might be able to get us home at that hour. This was completely out of his way – I was so turned around by the time we actually arrived that I had no idea where we were. We suggested a couple times that it’d probably be simpler for us to get a taxi, but he’d just worriedly shake his head and say, “Oh, it’s so expensive! You are students!” When we found that even our last-hope bus had stopped running, he finally accepted that a taxi was our best option, and hailed us a cab, talking to the driver to make sure he knew how to drive us there. (QAU is about a one hour drive from downtown.) I had to basically dive into the front seat to physically block our friend from giving money to the driver for our fare. Even as we thanked him profusely and said goodbye, he looked worried; I wished later we could have texted to assure him we got home okay.

For the record, the taxi fare was about 90 yuan, or $15 – totally reasonable, especially when split between us. But sometimes it can be difficult to translate what is & isn’t expensive for us. Anyway, at this point you may be imagining that we returned home in the wee hours of the morning, when in fact it was barely 11:00. Such is the fate of would-be partyers living so far from downtown.

On Sunday we thought we would spend a relaxing afternoon wandering along Qingdao’s beachside trails and piers, leaving ourselves plenty of time to catch the bus, in light of the previous day’s lessons. Simple, right? However, barely an hour into our stroll, Julia & I managed to completely lose each other. Usually this would have been quickly resolved with a phone call, but we learned the hard way that Julia’s phone had just run out of minutes (and she had no idea how to buy more). In short, we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering along the coast on our own, trying to predict where the other one would be (often missing each other by a few minutes, as we later calculated), but generally having a pleasant time nonetheless.

  

Qingdao has a long continuous trail along the bay, linking piers to small parks and beaches; we each walked for a couple miles and saw maybe half of it, so we might return if we have time. We each made our separate way home – me by bus, Julia by a resourceful bus/taxi combo – and arrived home within 45 minutes of each other, to our mutual relief.

Monday brought Yongbo to Qingdao! Yongbo is an undergraduate IAD (International Agricultural Development – the same as the MS program Julia & I are enrolled in) student who’s been assisting our research project for the last few months. He’s provided us with a wealth of insights and proved indispensable for Chinese-English translations, so we were very happy to have him rejoin us. Also, he happens to be a native of Xi’an, so he’ll be even more of an asset when we go to Shaanxi in a couple weeks.  To toast his arrival we tried a restaurant near campus that turned out to have no set menu – the waiter tells you what dishes they’re preparing that day, and you choose from these. I’m confident Julia & I could have ordered on our own, but definitely not as smoothly as with Yongbo’s help. We decided on two vegetable dishes -the first garlicky, slightly sweet eggplant, the second spicy roasted cauliflower – and a chicken (complete with head and feet) cooked in a slightly spicy broth and topped with thin, square-shaped noodles. Super delicious.

The next day we took another trip to visit orchards, and were finally able to test out Julia’s survey! We each interviewed two farmers (with students helping translate for Julia and me), for a total of six farmers. It took about an hour, and we certainly obtained some interesting results, but the most important lessons were about what worked well and what didn’t.

As I’ve mentioned, Julia’s research focuses on information communication technologies (e.g., cell phones, television, internet), and how these tools can be best used to deliver agricultural information to farmers. So a lot of her questions focus on asking farmers what channels of communication they use to solve different types of problems. We spent much of the next day revising the survey, streamlining these questions to get to the heart of the matter quickly. But we also developed some ideas for how to best conduct the survey. For example, in some cases it may be helpful to interview two farmers at a time instead of just one. When there are two surveyors (the American grad student and the Chinese translator) this can help correct the power imbalance there would be with just one survey subject. Also, the second farmer is something of a second translator – conferring with the other to make sure they both understand the question. And the farmers have a little time to mull over each question while the other is giving an answer. Of course, there are disadvantages – namely, influencing other farmers’ responses and taking more time. And the methods we use will depend on both circumstance and Julia’s research design. But it’s details like these that I never would have considered before actually trying them out in the field.

My research interests are primarily focused on the needs of women farmers, and while surveys aren’t my method of choice for this project (more on that in another post) some interesting gender-related points did come up in our conversations that day. I learned that often 80-90% of the hired temporary workers in apple orchards (who do labor-intensive pruning, thinning, bagging, and harvesting) are women, while full-time workers are generally men (who do machinery-related tasks, like spraying pesticides and weed-whacking). For temporary work, women are paid less than men (by about 15-20%) because they work shorter hours so they can attend to children and cooking, etc. at home.

As interesting as this visit was, Julia and I had started to become concerned that we weren’t getting enough time with farmers to collect data (spending more time than we would like touring with professors and hobnobbing at nice dinners), and thought the purpose of our stay in Shandong might be getting lost in our communications with our hosts at QAU. We were also becoming a little impatient with the planning of our orchard visits, which left us in the dark for indefinite stretches of time. So, in an effort to make our orchard visits more fruitful (sorrynotsorry) we crafted and email outlining our concerns and providing suggestions for moving forward.

Yongbo interviewing; me pretending to be helpful

On Thursday we took another short trip to a nearby orchard (primarily managed by a woman, so it was particularly fascinating to me) and collected another survey (again, learning a lot about how it make it more effective). On the ride back to campus, we were finally able to have a discussion addressing the concerns that we’d raised in our email, partly because our QAU colleague was trapped in a vehicle with us for an hour. Unfortunately, we were met with a pretty harsh rebuke. In the interests of keeping this blog tactful and professional, I won’t go into too many of the details here. Basically, in addition to some miscommunications, we were on the receiving end of some complaints that really had more to do with the agreements between two QAU professors than our survey and methods. And the hierarchical and cultural obstacles that inevitably make it difficult for foreigners to have much independence in visiting the Chinese countryside were also an element. Sorry for being vague on that point – ask me about it when I’m stateside. :)

But, in keeping with this week’s theme, our luck quickly changed course again! We appealed to another professor, and soon got approval to spend next week in Qixia visiting orchards from there. (One of our frustrations was wasting time – both ours and professors’ – traveling to and from QAU, when it’s really not necessary for us to be based on-campus.) We’re very excited about this plan; fingers crossed it meets our high expectations!

Happy 4th of July!

Wishing merry picnics and fireworks to all of you in America! Love, China.

We’ve had quite the roller coaster of a week here, so I have several stories that I will be sharing here soon!

Waiting & Wandering

The pace of life at QAU has decidedly slowed for Julia and me. After a whirlwind week of getting to know professors and students here, familiarizing ourselves with campus, and taking introductory visits to orchards, we’ve suddenly found ourselves with a lot more time on our hands. The next step in our project is to go out into the countryside and start conducting surveys and focus groups with extension agents and farmers. Planning the logistics of these visits has been left up to the professors we’re collaborating with, as it’s very difficult for foreigners to spend time in the Chinese countryside without an invitation/escort. Our collaborators have been very generous with their time, but a conference on food science and agricultural economics, featuring several South Korean speakers, has delayed working out these logistical plans.

This has meant that Julia and I have felt a little bit cooped up on campus, but it’s also meant that we’ve had some time to sit down and tidy up our research plans (like finalizing the Chinese translations of surveys). Also, I chose this time to pick up a rather nasty cold. This hurt my pride as much as anything, as it spoils my record of not getting sick in general, but especially while traveling. I think Julia had the worst deal though, because she was both anxiously awaiting news from our collaborators and trapped with a cranky layabout WHO WOULD NOT STOP WET COUGHING. Luckily I’m feeling much better now, and if that good fortune continues, we’ll be out visiting orchards again in no time.

We also took advantage of our freer schedule to have a bit of fun. The 2014 International Horticultural Expo (never heard of it before? neither had we) happens to be in Qingdao this year. We imagined that this would be something like an expanded botanical garden, when in reality it was more like a kitschy yet elaborate flower-themed amusement park. The grounds were divided into gardens with names like ‘Children’s Dream Garden’ and ‘Science Garden.’ Most entertaining by far were the ‘International Gardens’, which were an assortment of many small gardens representing different countries, with varying accuracy. Mexico, for example, was mostly giant sombrero sculptures, with a few scattered cacti. Many of these gardens also had a gift shop as their centerpiece.

In addition to the international gardens dedicated to different countries, there was also a garden dedicated to each of China’s provinces. One of the highlights of our visit was finding that the Shandong province garden featured, of course, enormous apples. (All Expo photos courtesy of Julia, as my batteries promptly died upon entering the park.)

If you look closely, there are actually 4 apples in this photo…

The whole expo was certainly a feat of landscaping, if nothing else. There were some beautiful water gardens featuring lotus blooms and lily pads, and a huge amphitheater sheltered by sweeping flowerbeds. (This is difficult to describe; see the picture please.) We spent a solid 5 or 6 hours walking around, and definitely didn’t see the whole thing. However, none of the gardens were what I would describe as traditional Chinese gardens, like those I visited in Suzhou a few years ago (which I highly recommend, if you ever get a chance to visit).

It was easy to get disoriented, so it’s a good thing maps were plentiful

Aw yeah frog topiaries

I joined the wrong marching band

 

Aside from our expo adventure, we’ve also been exploring the culinary options near the university. The cafeterias on campus are decent enough, and reliably cheap (I have to work pretty hard to spend much more than $1 per meal), but do get a little monotonous after awhile. Our best discovery so far is a great hotpot restaurant just outside the university’s south gate.

For those unfamiliar, hotpot  (火锅) is a style of dining where each table has its own vat of boiling broth, and you order plates of raw ingredients to drop into the broth and make delicious soup. For example, we’ve ordered slices of beef and pork (cut paper-thin, so they cook almost immediately), prawns, crab rolls, potato slices, noodles, and many varieties of mushrooms, tofu, and leafy greens for our hotpot concoctions. The results are delicious, and the whole process is a lot of fun.

Mmmmm hotpot

That’s all the updates for now – here’s hoping the next post is more field-based!

Qingdao Agricultural University

 

My family has been threatening to post my rambling emails on the interwebs, so to prevent that I’ll give a quick summary of my first week here in Qingdao.

First, a little background on why I’m here. I’ve been working with Julia, another student in my graduate group (International Agricultural Development at UC Davis), on a research project that surveys the experiences of Chinese apple farmers. I don’t want to bore you with our entire research proposal, which basically boils down to this: Julia wants to know more about how information is shared between farmers and extension agents, and I would like to know more about the challenges faced by women farmers in China. To investigate these questions, we’ll be visiting apple orchards in Shandong and Shaanxi provinces (both in northern China).

We’ll spend a total of 10 weeks in China, 5 in each province. First up is Shandong province, where we’ve established a collaboration with Qingdao Agricultural University (QAU). This means that they’ve graciously welcomed us to China, put us up in a very comfy dorm on campus, and fed us lots of seafood and Tsingtao beer (Qingdao’s culinary signatures).

We spent the first few days getting acquainted with the QAU campus and meeting professors and students in the pomology department. This included a full day listening to graduating students present their theses to the department (in Chinese). I was able to feed Julia very useful information (“Now they’re talking about the results… they said that that bar on the graph is very tall…”) Luckily Professor Zhu translated a few more details. He also gave us English abstracts for most of the presentations, and asked us to work on editing them, which we’ll probably continue to do over the next few weeks.

We’ve also made two overnight trips to nearby counties to visit three apple orchards and one nursery. The first trip was to Wendeng (way out on the tip of the Shandong peninsula), and the second was to Qixia (one of the highest apple-producing regions in the world). These were somewhat preliminary visits to familiarize Julia and me with what orchards actually look like and what’s being practiced (compared to what we read while in the US). We’ve also been consulting with professors and graduate students at QAU, finalizing methods and translating surveys. Hopefully we should have a schedule of villages to visit (and a team of Chinese students to work with us) and we’ll be able to collect our first set of data!

That’s the basics of what we’ve been up to in the last week – I’ll try to fill in some more of the details soon!

Stray thoughts:

• The last time I was in China I was part of a language-immersive study abroad program in Hangzhou. My Chinese language skills improved tremendously during that program, but I also spent most of the semester in the company of classmates whose skills were far more advanced than mine, and teachers who always pushed me to do better. I haven’t practiced Chinese very often in the three years since graduation, so my current Chinese skills are truly mediocre. However, the expectations for Americans are still mercifully low here, so every time I speak some broken Chinese it’s greeted with effusive praise. If I ask for dou jiang (soy milk) at the cafeteria – “You speak so well!!” If I write two simple characters – “Your handwriting is beautiful!!!” I don’t believe it for a second, but it’s a nice ego boost.
• Our flight from Sacramento to Beijing had a 12 hour layover in Honolulu, so Julia and I obviously decided to ditch the airport and go hang out on the beach. We also tried some Hawaiian shaved ice. Now, I had heard of shaved ice being a typically Hawaiian treat, and I had always thought this sounded pretty unimpressive – what’s so exciting about a big snow cone? I was so, so wrong. Shaved ice is a magnificent mountain of heavenly frozen delight. It’s a big scoop of ice cream buried in a tower of fluffy shaved ice and drizzled with actual fruit juice syrups (not the artificial technicolor midway stuff) and sweetened condensed milk. It is fabulous, and so refreshing. We have another layover in Honolulu on the trip home, and I will probably spend the entire time eating shaved ice.
• A tour of the pomology lab included a trip to the tissue culture room, which brought back a rush of memories of doing tissue culture at Peking University seven years ago.
• New foods that I have tried so far: jellyfish, silkworms, really wonderful dumplings filled with locust tree flowers, fried balls of taro and sweet potato.
• There are badminton courts right outside our dorm – so naturally I promptly bought rackets and birdies and coerced Julia into playing with me.

Shaved Ice!

Mocha for Julia, mango & haupia for me

Qixia

“Apple Capital of the World” – there were apples everywhere in this town, including strings of lights in the shape of apples all down the main street.

Wendeng

This also happens to be the hometown of the professor who took us here.