Disruptions

     We've been closely following the news about the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan 8 days ago.  Several people in the U.S. have emailed us to ask if we felt any effects.  We did not.  We live more than 1,500 miles from the epicenter of last Friday’s quake.  The closest connection we had was that a person from the Levi Strauss company, who toured a textile factory near Guangzhou last week with Terry, was in Tokyo Narita Airport during the earthquake.  He ended up being stuck at or near the airport for 3 ½ days before being able to go home to San Francisco—a major inconvenience, but inconsequential compared to the devastating losses experienced by the Japanese.

     A couple days ago I was subbing in a middle school art class, where the students’ assignment was to view PowerPoint files of photos from the disaster in Japan and the protests in the Middle East, and then to pick one of the images to draw in their sketchbook.  Most of the students focused on the Japanese photos.  But it took some of them a long time to settle into actually drawing, as they pondered the unimaginable destruction and hardship portrayed in the photos.

     The recent disruptions in our lives here in Shenzhen have been far less dramatic than those in Japan, and they have human rather than natural causes.  One source of disruption is the government’s concern about the possibility of unrest in other parts of the world affecting the Chinese citizenry.  We wondered if the 6 a.m.-6 p.m. power outage a couple Sundays ago could have been a government effort to slow down organizing activity. There also has been an increased police presence at times, particularly right after there was a crackdown on electric scooter use a two weeks ago.  Without warning, police were stopping scooters and impounding them, citing new government regulations.  The day Leah stopped riding and started walking to school, the police formed a barricade around her school in an attempt to catch the scooter-riders as they left at 4:00.   The “new regulations” were perhaps meant to slow down and intimidate mobile organizers, but they've also slowed down and intimidated a 17-year-old American high school student who's just trying to get to classes and home again.  Last week we discovered that all VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, were suddenly blocked.  Expats use VPNs to access internet information from certain sources, such as blogs and Facebook, that’s censored here in China.  It didn’t take Terry too long to find a way around this, but it did eat up a lot of time.  Today as he went about setting up this next level of beat-the-censor on my computer, he discovered that there was a new block around what had worked last Friday when he worked on his own computer.  4 hours later, he again found a way around it.  The Chinese censors know what we’re doing.  We don't think they're nearly so concerned about our benign and rather boring internet use as they are about Chinese activists accessing prohibited information.  It's frustrating to get caught up in this cat and mouse game. 

     This recent increased government wariness made Leah’s and my messy visa situation even more…uncomfortable, shall we say.  After 4 visits and a lot of time sitting around getting nervous in Public Security Bureau offices the last few weeks, I finally got our passports back Thursday.  Terry and I nearly made ourselves sick, worrying that there would be yet more complications.  But there in our passports were our 10-day temporary visas, just as we’d been promised.  When I thanked the officer who handed over our passports, he responded, “My pleasure.”  Yes, I’m sure.  Visa problems like ours mean job security for him.  We also enriched the Chinese treasury by $1,800, not counting the fees we’ll pay for our regular visas.  Which Terry intended to get for us yesterday while he was in Hong Kong.  But of course, there was indeed yet another complication.  It turns out that Leah and I need to actually go through Hong Kong immigration with our temporary visas before our new regular visas can be processed.  This will slightly disrupt some upcoming travel plans.  Are you tired of reading about our visa travails?  We’re tired of dealing with visas, that’s for sure. 

     One more disruption to daily life here is all the recent construction.  There’s a huge new Hilton complex going up along my route to school, which creates lots of lumbering truck traffic and lots of dust.  Some older, forlorn-looking buildings are getting facelifts.  Many sidewalks are torn up, sometimes to replace pipes underneath and sometimes to replace the walk itself.  There seems to be some new ordinance about walls, stipulating concrete bricks with a skim coat.  So the long stretches of blue metal walls around some hibernating apartment construction projects have been replaced.  There’s a new wall around a park near us.  And the gigantic wall around what looked like a city bus staging area was replaced and a lively sea-themed mural was painted on it.

      A crummy old wall was torn down right here earlier this winter, exposing an even crummier boat salvage area and dump, right next to the harbor.  A new wall with black iron bars was put up.  Less than 2 months later, I was surprised one day to see that the brand new wall had been torn down and was lying on the sidewalk.  Here they’re digging footings for what I’m guessing will be the regulation concrete brick wall. 

     The wall construction on this stretch goes on for about 3 blocks.  All kinds of things sprawl across the sidewalk while they're working:  parked vehicles like this truck, big piles of sand or rubble, stacks of bricks, cargo bikes loading up debris, skip loaders moving at a crawl.  So I should just ride on the other side of the street, right?  Well, I tried that one day.  The sidewalk there was completely torn up for several blocks.  

     In mid-August Shenzhen is hosting the 2011 Universiade games.  This upcoming event probably explains some of the recent construction activity, and also some of the government’s heightened concern about security, given the coming influx of international athletes, spectators and the media.