“You shouldn’t drink that!” he exclaimed, wagging his finger back and forth—presumably to convey his disapproval in case I didn’t speak Chinese. “Nongfu Spring is bad!”

Nongfu Spring is the brand of water I was drinking; it’s one of the cheapest brands available in China and produces a fifth of the bottled water purchased in the country. I almost always buy it, primarily because it’s usually the only brand the convenience store outside my apartment building sells in 1.5-liter bottles, the largest size that fits in my tiny fridge. But now, I immediately guessed, it had become the latest product to fall under scrutiny in China’s never-ending parade of food-safety scandals.

I asked the man on the bus to explain, and he kept it brief. “Nongfu Shanquan bu hao he.” “Nongfu Spring isn’t good to drink.” His wife, seated next to him, silently nodded in agreement. Gesturing to the TV screen at the front of the bus, the man informed me, “I saw it on the news. You shouldn’t drink Nongfu Spring. Buy something else.” And with that, the pair rose from their seats and got off at the next stop.

As it happens, I had been away on Moganshan all weekend and had barely spent any time on the Internet during my two-day trip, so I’d missed the news that stores in Beijing were pulling Nongfu Spring from their shelves amid allegations that the water failed to meet quality standards. As soon as I arrived home, I checked Twitter and googled “Nongfu Spring contaminated,” and sure enough, got a list of search results that made me take a half-empty bottle of the water out of my refrigerator and pour it down the sink.

The latest news is that Nongfu Spring does, in fact, (allegedly) meet national safety standards, though I don’t plan to switch back from the Nestlé water I started buying instead. (And, in what can’t be a coincidence, my convenience store began stocking 1.5-liter bottles of that brand only a day or two after the Nongfu Spring story broke.) The couple on the bus notwithstanding, most people didn’t seem especially concerned about the possibility that their water was subpar: I quickly noticed that plenty of Shanghainese continued toting Nongfu Spring’s distinctive red, white, and green bottle. Riding the subway out to Pudong Airport to catch a flight back to the States, I saw a family of four (mother, grandfather, two small children) sharing a single bottle of Nongfu Spring among them.

Everyone, I know, has their own particular rubric for making food-safety choices in China. While I try to avoid seafood whenever possible, I regularly eat at small hole-in-the-wall noodle and dumpling joints that others might avoid. I rarely buy anything at imported grocery stores, but there are only a handful of restaurants where I’m willing to order a salad. Other people will make other choices—to avoid chicken (bird flu fears) or lamb (which might really be rat/fox/mink) or non-organic produce.

Such decisions have always been part of my life in China, as well as plenty of other places I’ve traveled; it’s very easy to get sick from contaminated food overseas. But in the past couple of months, the constant stream of news stories about food-safety issues in China have changed the calculus a bit. I no longer worry so much that I’ll pick a bad restaurant and suffer short-term consequences. Instead, I’m more concerned about long-term exposure to basic products—like bottled water—that are part of my daily life.

I’m reasonably confident, though, that things are going to improve: China has an increasingly active urban middle-class, and its members aren’t shy about going online and venting their frustrations with the government’s lack of control over food safety. As Isabel Hilton notes in yesterday’s ChinaFile Conversation on the topic,

… citizens’ initiatives are creating real alternative sources of information and creating transparency through direct action. With transparency comes more pressure: the government either has to clean up the mess or resort to ever more censorship, thus escalating the loss of trust.

The media has also become a powerful voice in demanding more accountability from both food producers and the government, as Alexa Oleson explains later in that same conversation, and the fact that the government allows such discussion indicates that China’s leaders recognize the need to address the problem. And, of course, people vote with their wallets. When a KFC supplier was investigated late last year for using too many antibiotics in its chicken, the popular chain’s China sales quickly dropped by a fifth. Making predictions about anything in China is generally a losing game—the country has defied predictions for decades, if not longer—but I’ll say this much: people are tired of environmental and food crises, and seem to be more interested in improving these spheres than any others. I think there are true prospects for change.

But for the time being, I still think the smart choice is to make smart choices. And that, for me, means no more Nongfu Spring … because if someone were to ask me, “What’s in your water?,” I wouldn’t have an answer.

Small Christian church on Moganshan

After visiting the mountaintop retreat of Moganshan on a somewhat rainy weekend last November, I was itching to get back there once the weather had improved. I had just started to think about finding a weekend to do so when my friend Jeremy mentioned that he was once again taking a group of students up to Moganshan for a couple of days, and I was welcome to a seat on their bus if I wanted it. I did, of course, and this trip was even better than the last: the weather was warm and breezy, but not hot, and there were almost no other tourists on the mountain. This is the perfect combination—and a rare one in China!

I wrote about our trip and the changes I saw since my last visit to Moganshan for the LA Review of Books China Blog, where I’m one of four correspondents who contribute once a month. As I say in the column, Moganshan was a beehive of activity last weekend, as workmen (no women) renovated a number of the old villas and built a new hotel not far away from the mountain’s main town. Still, there are plenty of old ruins and abandoned houses lurking in the woods, and it’s both exciting and dispiriting to go out for a walk and stumble across the decaying shell of what was once a modest but lovely summer home. Those crumbling villas are (for me) among Moganshan’s chief attractions, but I’d also like to see the houses fixed up and lived in again, even if that meant I couldn’t nose around them anymore—feeling a bit like Nancy Drew as I do so.

(If I knew how to properly plot a mystery novel, Moganshan would be the perfect setting. Alas, fiction is really not my genre. Maybe someone else will take up the challenge.)

Investigating an abandoned villa

My second trip there cemented Moganshan’s presence on the list of my favorite places in China, right up there with Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangxi. I’m hoping this wasn’t my last trip to the mountaintop, particularly since I still haven’t had the chance to go on the six-hour “Temple Walk,” a long hike around the area that’s outlined on cards available at the Moganshan Lodge. If only I’d woken up a little bit earlier on Sunday …

View from Moganshan’s highest hiking trail

Harbin had been a fishing village when Russian railway workers and engineers arrived there at the end of the nineteenth century, tasked with linking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostock. This group was quickly followed by bankers, entrepreneurs, and people engaged in all sorts of other professions, who saw opportunity in Russia’s new Manchurian outpost. They built the village into a city—the “Little Paris of the Far East”—administered by the tsar’s officials until the 1917 revolution. After that, the city came under Chinese control, and its new leaders set about creating a Chinese Harbin, though the foreign population remained an important presence in the small metropolis. In addition to Russians, there were also Koreans, Japanese, and Eastern Europeans, with an especially vibrant Jewish community.

This era of Harbin’s Russian past has now enabled the local government to promote tourism through a celebration of its “architectural museum” in the old colonial district, which is filled with early-twentieth-century buildings sporting ornate, European-style façades, most frequently described by placards as “Baroque” or “eclectic.” This development has turned Zhongyang Dajie (Central Street) into a cobblestoned pedestrian-only shopping zone, lined with outlets of the same clothing chains that fill Huaihai Zhong Lu near my apartment in Shanghai. Shopper-tourists can refresh themselves at KFC, McDonald’s, or Starbucks, though there are also a couple of small Russian restaurants on the street for anyone who desires a taste of the past. And if they’d like to take home a souvenir, they can stop into one of the many shops selling Russian tourist tchotchkes, such as matryoshka dolls, fur hats, and tea sets (as well as vodka and chocolate, of course).

Very typical of Zhongyang Dajie: old building, chain restaurant.

I spent a fair amount of time wandering up and down Zhongyang Dajie, but I tired of the music pouring from clothing stores and the touts trying to lure me into restaurants. Though the city promotes the street as a living museum, the architecture that I was there to see is really beside the point: they could have demolished all the old buildings and constructed exactly the same stores, and people would still probably flock there to shop and eat, as they do in Shanghai, and Nanjing, and everywhere else. Preserving the old façades makes Zhongyang Dajie more interesting than similar streets in other Chinese cities, but doesn’t do much to promote knowledge about Harbin’s past.

Saint Sophia’s Cathedral

Far more interesting, I thought, are two museums that truly do engage with Harbin’s history and explain the city’s uniqueness. The first is housed inside Saint Sophia’s Cathedral, a gorgeous Byzantine-style church built by the Russian Orthodox community. The Communists closed the church after the establishment of the PRC, but in the late 1990s, city leaders restored St. Sophia’s and installed a photo exhibit of life in Harbin before 1949. The exhibit highlights the city’s cosmopolitan past and celebrates both the Russian and Chinese communities that contributed to Harbin’s growth in the early twentieth century. (Not as much attention is given to other groups living in the city, though there are a few references to the “illegitimate Japanese government” of the 1930s.) When I arrived there on Friday morning, the museum was crowded with visitors examining the old photographs and pointing out small details to each other.

On Saturday, though, I had another museum practically to myself; the guard at the entrance to the Harbin Museum of Jewish History seemed surprised to have a visitor and rushed to turn on the lights so I could look around. The museum occupies the second and third floors of the New Synagogue (the first floor contains a collection of rather terrible oil paintings of Ye Olde Harbin), and the exhibits tell the story of Harbin’s Jewish community. Many of the buildings now sheltering clothing stores and Starbucks on Zhongyang Dajie were built by Jewish business owners a century ago; the city also had a massive Jewish high school (still standing) and what appears to have been an active Zionist movement. The museum celebrates Harbin as a haven for European Jews fleeing persecution—using a quotation from Henry Kissinger to drive home the message—and the final exhibit spotlights the many people who now make trips to Harbin to see the city where their families resided before the Communist revolution sent them off into the world again.

New Synagogue, home of the Harbin Museum of Jewish History

I enjoyed these ventures into Harbin’s past, and wished that more of my fellow tourists had torn themselves away from Zhongyang Dajie to explore the side streets. But I’d also say that three days is a good length of time to spend in Harbin, which journalist Isaac Stone Fish declared “China’s least livable metropolis” in a Foreign Policy article last year. I can see his point. I carefully scheduled my visit for the spring, since Harbin is renowned for its brutal winter weather, which enables it to hold a famous ice festival every February. Large sections of the city were built under Soviet supervision in the 1950s, and I passed what seemed to be miles of crumbling block housing. Harbin’s traffic might be the most anarchic in all of China, particularly in massive traffic circles that dump together buses, taxis, cyclists, and one frightened foreign pedestrian in a free-for-all. And the sidewalks—uneven, broken, and missing large chunks—would be an ambulance-chasing lawyer’s dream, ever-ready to turn an ankle or trip someone up.

Most of the residential areas have seen better days.

Harbin, more than any other Chinese city I’ve visited so far, still seems to be finding its footing in the post-socialist era. It lacks the skyscrapers and nonstop construction that I see not only in Shanghai and Beijing, but also places like Qingdao and Wenzhou; it’s far less user-friendly (a scarcity of street signs, no announcement of stops on the buses) than most other places. But its unique history as a city built in a combined effort by Chinese and foreigners lends it a certain charm that can help smooth over some of the rougher edges (at least, for a short-term visitor like myself). Walking around the colonial district, seeing onion domes next to Gucci stores next to Chinese-style pagoda roofs, it seemed entirely appropriate when a street-cleaning machine passed by, its song loudly reminding me that “It’s a Small World.”

Learn from Lei Feng Day (学雷锋日) is one of the more curious remnants of the Mao era, and not one that many people in China seem to take seriously today, though in recent years the government has tried to revive it. It’s supposed to be a day of service, commemorating the life of Lei Feng (雷锋 1940-1962), an orphaned young People’s Liberation Army soldier who (allegedly) lived to serve the revolution and devoted himself to following Chairman Mao. He wasn’t at all known during his life—despite the remarkable number of propaganda photos of him that surfaced later—but became a major figure after his death, which came when a fellow soldier backed his truck into a telephone pole and the pole fell on Lei Feng, killing him at the age of 21. After his death, PLA higher-ups (allegedly) found a diary that Lei Feng had (allegedly) written and published it to serve as an example of selfless devotion to the Communist cause. In the 1960s, kids had to memorize famous Lei Feng lines like “My only ambition is to be a rustless screw for the great cause of revolution,” and propaganda posters urging people to “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng” went up around China. [The picture at left is from chineseposters.net, which has an extensive gallery of Lei Feng images.]

As all the uses of “allegedly” in the previous paragraph indicate, I’m a Lei Feng cynic, like many others in China. I assume that his “diary” is simply a piece of propaganda composed by some Party ghostwriter when Mao decided to embark on a campaign designed to revive his base of popular support after the Great Leap Forward famine of the late 1950s. But fake or not, Lei Feng was important and continues to be held up by the CCP as a model citizen whom others should emulate. Today, he’s also a kitschy pop culture icon whose portrait adorns t-shirts and messenger bags purchased by tourists in places like Shanghai’s Pearl Market.

Beijing, 2012: subway riders are urged to “Learn from Lei Feng, A Good Model.”

Lei Feng intersects with my interest in the Sanmao comics drawn by Shanghai artist Zhang Leping. Sanmao Learns from Lei Feng is not Zhang’s most famous work, nor is it his best. Like Zhang’s other Sanmao comics, it stands as a sign of the times: between 1935 and his death in 1992, Zhang repeatedly re-invented the Sanmao character to reflect political trends and/or social issues. Sanmao Learns from Lei Feng didn’t come out until 1977, after both Mao and the initial Lei Feng fervor had died, and it’s just one of many shorter Sanmao collections that Zhang drew in the post-Cultural Revolution era. But it gives you an idea of the types of acts small children were supposed to perform as they mimicked the example of Lei Feng. I’ve picked a few panels to share here. May they inspire you to observe Learn from Lei Feng Day in appropriate fashion.

Sanmao sees posters promoting the Learn from Lei Feng campaign. He buys Lei Feng’s diary and reads it; inspired, he imagines winning Lei Feng’s approval through good deeds.

Sanmao finds an unmailed letter on the ground during a rainstorm. The address is partially destroyed: “#2 Shan___ Lu.” He sets off to find the intended recipient. Shanxi Lu? No. Shandong Lu? Not that either. Finally, on Shanyin Lu, success.

There’s an emphasis on doing good deeds for the elderly—with bonus points if they’re performed anonymously, like in this comic strip showing Sanmao and his friends secretly helping an older woman out with her laundry.

Another example of Sanmao and friends helping out someone older, this time when a gust of wind blows money out of the hands of a man emerging from the bank. They run around and collect the cash, returning it to the man without losing a single yuan.

But learning from Lei Feng isn’t all household chores and grateful senior citizens. Sometimes it involves real sacrifice and pain, such as when Sanmao tries to break up a fight between two other boys and winds up being the one who gets hit instead. But Sanmao (clearly suffering from a head injury) just laughs. Lei Feng would understand that the boys didn’t mean it.

This was the first time I’ve spent an entire Spring Festival in China, and it was an interesting experience—an experience that I’m not terribly eager to repeat, but glad to have gone through once. Shanghai felt very empty, though the incessant fireworks from 6 a.m. until midnight or even later indicated that I was definitely not alone in the city. I quickly got used to the smell of gunpowder seeping into my apartment through the (not very well-insulated) windows, and I even stopped being startled every time the barrage of fireworks began anew. But after my own Spring Festival trip to Hainan was over and I had returned to Shanghai, I felt kind of aimless: most of my friends had left for the holiday, the libraries and archives were all closed, and many of my favorite Chinese restaurants were closed as well.

After what seems to have been a fast-paced January, I slowed down a lot in the second month of 2013:

• I re-read two books in preparation for writing about them: Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. My blog post on feminism and The Good Earth should be up at the LA Review of Books China blog sometime in March. Boo’s book is part of a much longer article for the LARB on new books about India—an article that I’ve been working on for many months now and hope to finish sometime soon. It’s turned into a much bigger (but also more thought-provoking) project than I expected when I pitched the essay to them last spring.
• I knit one tiny pair of baby socks for a friend’s child.
• I tried to watch Lincoln and got bored before I was halfway through. I did watch Les Miserables, though I fell asleep for a solid hour in the middle and didn’t seem to have missed much. The high point of my DVD-based entertainment in February was finally getting around to The Sopranos, after hearing friends enthuse about the series for years. I’ve just finished the second season and can absolutely understand why people were such fans of the show; I’m looking forward to seeing Season 3 soon.
• I went to Hainan, where I walked around Haikou, “swam” in the ocean (I can’t swim, so I just sort of bob around), ate a lot of good seafood, and learned that I think coconut water is kind of disgusting.

My March is shaping up to be sort of crazy, bordering on insane: I’m heading back to the U.S. for almost three weeks to do some research, attend the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, eat all the foods I can’t get in Shanghai, and try to catch up with all the friends and family I haven’t seen in six months or more. I’m also giving three talks on Zhang Leping and the Sanmao the Orphan comics he drew: the first one will be tomorrow morning at the Shanghai International Literary Festival; the next on March 18 at UC Irvine; and the final one at the AAS conference in San Diego on March 21. My calendar is getting more crowded by the day, but it’s all stuff that I’m very excited about and looking forward to after the somewhat subdued month that was February.

The elderly man had leapt up from his stool on the sidewalk next to Nanjing Road as soon as he saw me pull out my camera. I had thought he was going to warn me not to take pictures; I could spot a security guard a few yards away watching us talk. But the man wanted the exact opposite—he and his neighbors have a message to spread, and they’re so eager to do so that he was asking me (with absolutely no idea who I was) to put photographs of their five-day-old housing protest on the Internet.

The man and four women were sitting on the sidewalk this afternoon, facing a wall where a small-scale tug-of-war is being fought. When I had walked past the wall on Saturday, it was filled with black spray-painted characters. Having grown up in Philadelphia, I usually don’t look twice at graffiti. But graffiti isn’t especially common in China, and even less so on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s most famous street. So I pulled out my camera and began snapping away, getting a vague sense of the message and figuring out that it was a protest of some sort. I wasn’t the only person who saw the writing on the wall: several fellow pedestrians slowed down to read the message as well. I went home and deciphered the text, realizing that the authors of the graffiti were protesting the poor condition of their homes and condemning the behavior of their property management company.

“The buildings are going to collapse. We will not sacrifice ourselves.”

When I walked past the wall again yesterday afternoon, I was surprised to see that only a few of the characters had been erased. But by today, that original message had been entirely covered over with a messy layer of gray paint. The group refused to back down, though, and had hung a large sheet with a shorter version of their complaint on it on the wall. This is what I was photographing when the five protestors noticed my interest in their message.

Now you see it …

… now you don’t. The wall on Saturday (top) and today (bottom).

The four women seemed content to remain on their stools and knit, but the man was excited to have an audience and eagerly explained their plight to me. Their eighty-year-old apartments are in poor condition, crumbling and about to be demolished, but the property management company hasn’t compensated the residents with the funds they’ll need to move somewhere else. Some of the buildings in the apartment complex have already been torn down; the man directed me to peer through a hole in the fence so I could see the newly cleared ground, soon (I presume) to be a construction site.

The apartment building where the protestors live, with a glimpse of their banner in the foreground.

I asked the man how long he’s lived in the condemned building. “More than sixty years,” he said. “We all grew up here. Our parents bought these apartments.” But he didn’t seem upset by the idea of moving elsewhere, shrugging away my question on that topic with the ubiquitous Chinese expression, “Mei banfa” (literally, “there’s no way/solution,” but more the equivalent of “Whaddya gonna do?”). Instead, they’re angry at the dismissive response they’ve gotten so far from the management company. The elderly protestors will happily move to newer, quieter apartments somewhere else in the city, away from the madness of Nanjing Road’s traffic and commerce, but they want the management company (quite rightly) to pay for what it’s taking away from them.

Similar standoffs happen all the time in Chinese cities, where battles over fair compensation for residents forced to move from their homes have become regular occurrences. Sometimes people will refuse to leave, leading to the “nail house” phenomenon that results when demolition crews knock down everything around the disputed house but leave that one standing (a great gallery of photos is here). For the most part, the protestors aren’t fighting to keep their homes—they know that’s a losing battle (“mei banfa”). But they do want to ensure that they get the most money they can to buy new apartments and settle somewhere else.

I don’t know the exact figures, but Nanjing Road has to be the site of some of Shanghai’s most expensive commercial real estate. A few blocks west of where the protestors live, the street is lined with massive shopping malls, high-end hotels, and bustling restaurants. Their section of Nanjing Road is comparatively quiet and under-developed, though that will almost surely change once the old apartment buildings are torn down and the ground is cleared for construction.

Lot where apartment buildings have already been demolished.

The man ensured I had taken photographs of everything (except the protestors themselves, who asked me not to) and thanked me for stopping, then hustled off to chat up the next person to slow down and read their banner. Their protest isn’t loud or flashy; it just looks like a group of senior citizens gathering on the sidewalk to chat and knit, a common sight around the city. But they’re calling on anyone and everyone to help bring this conflict to a satisfying conclusion, from a random foreign woman to someone much higher up on the food chain. “We ask Chairman Xi [Jinping],” the now-vanished message from Saturday said, “to resolve this difficulty for us.”

I’ve been receiving these Koryo Tours emails since 2006, when a classmate of mine at Yale traveled to North Korea with them and came back raving about the experience. It sounded fascinating and bizarre, and I was deeply immersed in a wonderful Korean history class that semester and thinking that maybe I would take Korean history as a second field of study (in the end, I didn’t, in part because I couldn’t bear the thought of starting yet another language), so I went to the Koryo Tours website and signed up for their mailing list. But now years have passed and North Korea has a new leader and I still haven’t gone, though I sometimes think about it, such as when reading Barbara Demick’s excellent 2009 book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (which I highly recommend, whether you’re interested in North Korea or not). I’ll travel pretty much anywhere else at the drop of a hat, so why have I declined to pull the trigger on signing up for a North Korean jaunt?

Some of the reason is economic: Koryo tours run about 1400 euros for a mid-length (four-night) tour, plus there’s an extra surcharge for Americans, who have to fly out of the country rather than take the train back to China as others do.¹ I’d rather spend the same amount of money on a few trips in China or elsewhere in Asia than put it all toward one long weekend in North Korea.

But there’s another side to my reluctance to book a tour, which a recent blog post at Shanghaiist explored. Namely, this question: “Is it ethical to travel to North Korea?”

Most of the respondents who shared their opinions with the Shanghaiist blogger focused on whether or not it is right to send foreign tourist dollars (or euros, or renminbi) into the coffers of an authoritarian regime, and whether or not doing so makes an impact on the DPRK’s economy. As several respondents pointed out, tourism brings in so little money to North Korea that this isn’t really something to worry about. Four of the five people interviewed, including one recent defector from the DPRK, emphasized the idea that foreign visitors will help promote increased openness in North Korea; from this perspective, engagement with outsiders serves to undermine the fictions put out by the Kim regime. Even if unmediated interactions between tourists and North Koreans aren’t really possible, proponents of this point of view argue that the very presence of foreigners in the country will affect the worldviews of people who spot them.

I don’t entirely disagree with these arguments, nor do I take as hard a line as the respondent who declared that “foreign visitors to North Korea are complicit in the evil perpetrated by the Kim family regime. They are helping to prop up the regime, thereby prolonging the suffering of the North Korean people.” My ambivalence about the current state of tourism in North Korea comes from an inability to shake the feeling that it treats the country as an exhibit to be gawked at—a strange, otherworldly place to be sampled and photographed before the observers retreat to their comfortable hotel and exclaim over all they’ve seen.

This resembles the debate that circulates around “slum tourism,” which questions the reputed ability of foreign tourists to bring in much-needed money and draw attention to the problems of residents in urban slums in cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janiero. In a New York Times op-ed from 2010, Kennedy Odede of Nairobi writes

I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on.

Although he acknowledges that slum tourism arises from a desire to understand how poverty affects lives, Odede argues that it dehumanizes those under observation. As this BBC article points out, slum tourism has been going on for almost two centuries, since upper-class Victorian Londoners ventured to the East End to see how the other half lived. That was also the era of “primitive cultures” exhibits being displayed in places like World’s Fairs. All of this is or was done in the name of increased cultural understanding, but it is, as Odede explains, a one-way street: “They get photos; we lose a piece of our dignity.”

So is it ethical to visit North Korea? I say that this is a situation where we each need to decide the answer for ourselves. I would love to travel to North Korea, and I hope that one day I’ll have the opportunity. I’ve decided, though, that I don’t want to do it if my only option is to be on a package tour that makes me uncomfortable. I’m less concerned about sending a few foreign exchange dollars Kim Jong-un’s way than I am with the prospect of treating North Koreans and their country as bizarre exhibits to observe, photograph, and talk about with people back home.

This might mean I’ll never make it across the Yalu River—after all, Kim Jong-un is either my age or a little bit younger, so he could be in power for a very long time. But my desire is for travel to be mutually beneficial and promote greater understanding among people, wherever the destination of that travel is. I’m fairly certain, though, that Kim Jong-un and his advisors are happy to allow one-sided tourism that involves little more than a series of photo ops and carefully choreographed experiences. And while North Korea has piqued my curiosity for years and a trip there would be a unique opportunity, those aren’t terms I feel prepared to accept.

1. I’m sure there are other tour companies that bring U.S. citizens to North Korea; I’m just focusing on Koryo Tours here because it’s the company I’m most familiar with, and they claim to bring over half of the DPRK’s tourists every year. I don’t mean to be unduly harsh on them—as their website explains, the company also has several ongoing humanitarian projects in North Korea and is committed to doing as much good work as it can in the country.↩

Jeff and I worked on revising the manuscript for most of last summer and fall, cutting some of the questions from the first edition and adding new ones in their place, as well as updating statistics and other material to reflect the changes of the last few years. Even if you’ve read the first edition of CI21C, there’s plenty of new material in the second edition to make it worth picking up. We discuss Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, fallen politician Bo Xilai, the importance of the Arab Spring in China, and the November 2012 leadership transition that brought Xi Jinping into power.

The new edition will be released in June this year and is now available for pre-order on Amazon. If you’d like a sample of what’s in the book, listen to this recent Reader’s Corner radio interview with Jeff, in which he talks about some of the major issues—censorship, protest, economic growth and inequality—that have defined China in the 21st century so far.

Only photo I can find on my computer from China in 2005. Minutes before my first (and so far only) hot-air balloon flight, in Yangshuo, Guangxi province. That explains the slightly panicked attempt at a smile.

In 2005, I actually felt like I had kind of missed the boat on China being a truly adventurous or unique place to go. I read memoirs by Peter Hessler and Rachel DeWoskin, who had come to China in the early 1990s, and it seemed like they had really roughed it. They had moved to a country in the early stages of change: a China without Starbucks, where foreigners could not hold renminbi (they were supposed to use a currency called Foreign Exchange Certificates instead), and at a time when communicating with friends and family in the States wasn’t necessarily easy or cheap. Hessler, DeWoskin, and others of the 1990s China cohort had, in my mind, so much more street cred than I, with my emails and lattes, would ever be able to earn. I inexplicably worried that China had finished whatever transition it was going to go through, and I had missed it.

Obviously, I was very wrong about that. China, and I, have both changed more in eight years than I could ever have imagined sitting on that Japan Airlines flight as it ascended from New York. But in some unexpected ways, life here now feels oddly unchanged from my early weeks in Beijing. I’ve been pondering this all day, and have put together a quick list of five things that are totally different since eight years ago, and five things that are much the same—though perhaps some change in those areas would be welcome.

What’s different:

1. On the whole, people pay much less attention to me now. With red hair and freckles, I used to feel painfully visible in Beijing, and had to grow used to people pointing and staring and asking to take photos with me. That rarely happens anymore, even in smaller, more rural places where foreigners are much less common than in my Shanghai neighborhood. People will often still express surprise when I speak Chinese, but they generally take my presence in the country in stride.

2. I no longer dream of salad. Look, I love dumplings and noodles and Xinjiang dinners and lots of other Chinese cuisine … but I also really love salads. And sandwiches. And Indian food. These used to be difficult to find (within my budget, at least) and of varying quality when I did track them down, but no longer. There were always a few places that foreigners could go to find the foods they missed from back home; now, in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, those restaurants are all over the place and serve a variety of price points. It’s a different story when you go into smaller cities, but in general, the non-Chinese dining options here have multiplied and improved over the past eight years. If Trader Joe’s would open a Shanghai store, I’d be set.

3. I’m not tall anymore. I’m 5’6” tall, usually an inch or two more depending on which shoes I’m wearing. That’s a basically average height in the U.S., but here I used to feel like a giant among Chinese women. I still tend to tower over any woman older than 60 or so, and I’ll reliably be a couple of inches taller than women in their 40s. Put me in a crowd of women between 20 and 35 years old, though, and I’m once again average height. I presume this is due to changes in the Chinese diet during the 1980s and ’90s, but it’s pretty remarkable to see the differences among generations.

4. Real-time communication. I’ve remarked on this before, but it’s now incredibly rare for me to feel disconnected from what’s happening with my friends and family in the States, or anywhere else in the world. As long as my VPN is working (though there’s no guarantee of that these days), I can email, Skype, Facebook, Tweet, and watch the latest episode of The Daily Show. Even in 2005, keeping in touch with people and staying on top of American news and pop culture was much more difficult, and it always involved some amount of lag time. That’s largely vanished.

5. In some ways, China is getting pricey. Back in 2005, when a dollar was worth 8.2RMB and prices were low, my classmates and I were constantly amazed at how cheap living in China was. That’s no longer the case, now that the exchange rate has fallen to about 6.2RMB/dollar and inflation is causing prices to rise. I used to hoard my 100RMB bills, feeling like there were few things that could convince me to part with all of one at once. Now I’m surprised if I make it out of the grocery store with a bill under 200RMB for the week. And let’s not even talk about the price of a decent cup of coffee here.

What’s the same:

1. But in most ways, China is still less expensive than the U.S. Whenever I start to worry that living here costs more than I’d expected, I remind myself of a few things: cheap bus/taxi/subway rides, inexpensive train tickets, $3 dumpling feasts, cheap DVDs (ahem), and so forth. Though my rent is just about the same here as it was for slightly less square footage in Princeton, my other living expenses are, on the whole, lower. And I can afford to travel far more here than in the U.S. or elsewhere.

2. Bureaucracy and illogical rules still vex me. I had to open my suitcase in the Haikou airport on Wednesday night and explain to a security guard why I had knitting needles and a pair of scissors inside, which for some reason he thought might not be allowed in a checked bag. He eventually let me leave them in, but we had a surprisingly long conversation about it.

I have to go for a new visa next week, which I’m dreading because I know it will involve a long line and (probably) at least one thing that I thought I’d done right that the clerk will deem wrong. (Keep in mind that I’ve applied for about a dozen visas in the past eight years and am not unfamiliar with the process.) Shanghai and Beijing have recently declared that people can visit the cities for three days without visas; I’m desperately hoping for the day when they extend that to six months.

3. Celine Dion is still popular. So are the Backstreet Boys. Both performed on New Year’s television specials last Saturday night, though I was mercifully on a plane to Haikou and missed them. At least twice in recent months, I was in earshot of cell phones with “My Heart Will Go On” as their ringtone. I thought it was kind of funny back in 2005 that these artists were still hot in China after their popularity had waned in the U.S. Now I’m just mystified.

4. China attracts a lot of great writers. If there was one single thing that drew me to China, it was reading one fantastic book about the country after another. That hasn’t changed at all, and my early favorites (Hessler, Jonathan Spence, Paul Theroux) have been joined by a list of excellent newspaper and magazine writers, radio journalists, and bloggers far too lengthy to name here. I think China writing is getting better and better as the years go by, and I look forward to reading what comes next.

5. Chinese is still So. Damn. Hard.* To whatever extent I imagined my life in 2013 back in 2005, that future probably involved perfect fluency in Chinese. Eight years? Eight years is more than enough to learn a language when you live in the country for almost half that time. Yeah … not Chinese. I definitely have far more good days than bad at this point, but I’m still discouraged when I find myself unexpectedly tongue-tied or looking up a character that I sort of recognize but can’t remember. Give me another eight years and maybe I’ll have this Chinese thing down one day. I hope.

*If you click on only one link in this blog post, make it this one. It’s a classic essay by David Moser on the joys—and sorrows—of learning Chinese. A long read, but very worth it for anyone who struggles with the language.

Getting rained out, though, allowed me to return to a neighborhood I had briefly walked around early that morning before my disappointing jaunt to Holiday Beach. On my hotel map, it’s identified as Haikou’s “old colonial district,” a remnant of the city’s 19th-century history as a port inhabited by foreigners like the British, French, and Americans. Much of the area is filled with crumbling white buildings turned partially black by mold and Haikou’s impenetrable wall of humidity. All of the structures are built with homes on the top two or three stories and shops beneath an arcade below, the overhang providing pedestrians shelter from Haikou’s intense sun and frequent rains. At first, the district reminded me of Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic—full of graceful, European-influenced architecture that deserves to be preserved, but hasn’t yet felt a restorer’s hand.

Arcade buildings in Haikou’s historic colonial district.

But then I walked up to a street blocked off by a barricade and identified as “Zhongshan Street” (named after Sun Zhongshan, more commonly known in the West as Sun Yat-sen). Zhongshan Street is a pedestrian shopping zone paved in cobblestones and lined on both sides by buildings similar to those I’d passed elsewhere in the neighborhood. The façades on Zhongshan Street, however, showed no signs of mildew or erosion from the elements; their perfectly flat exteriors sported a fresh coat of whitewash and colorful shutters closed over the upper-story windows. Planters filled with palms and other greenery stood at intervals along the street, and every few hundred feet there was a life-size sculpture reproducing scenes of life in Ye Olde Haikou. Zhongshan Street is Haikou’s contribution to a trend popular in cities across China these days: rather than embarking on large-scale historical preservation, the city builds a reproduction meant to serve as a “Best of” model of its past. Harbin, for example, now has replicas of its famous “Chinese Baroque” style, which Jay Carter has written about for The China Beat, and Beijing has re-created its historic Qianmen district, which Ian Johnson decried in a New York Review of Books essay on the city.

Haikou’s reproduction Zhongshan Street

What I found so interesting about Haikou’s reproduction street is that there’s still plenty of historic architecture remaining in the blocks around it; at least some of the time, in my experience, cities demolish the old buildings and construct these pedestrian streets as a kind of consolation prize for those who protest against the eradication of the past. But at both ends of Zhongshan Street, there are decaying old houses and shops in dire need of a thorough rehab. The original and the reconstructed live—for now—side by side, though I wondered if building a reproduction street was designed to give Haikou city officials some leeway to order the demolition of older structures at some point in the future.

Before (top) and after (bottom) photos of buildings on Zhongshan Street

I wanted to take a closer look at Zhongshan Street when I returned to Haikou in the afternoon, to see how well (or poorly) the reconstruction effort had been executed. By the time I got back there, a small exhibition hall had opened and I could check out a display of before-and-after photographs. What surprised me when I examined those photos was that the new buildings are nearly exact copies of what stood there before the renovation, down to ornamental details and even, in a couple of cases, slogans from the Cultural Revolution that have been repainted in a faint shade that mimics what they would look like after forty years of exposure to the elements.

This attention to detail is commendable; I like the idea of maintaining the unique attributes of a building, rather than replacing it with something generically “Chinese” as has been done in Beijing’s new luxury hutong communities. But a stroll down Zhongshan Street still replicates a walk down Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. more than it resembles one through the surrounding Haikou neighborhood. The building façades are too flat and their colors too even; no one lives on their upper stories, so the street lacks the liveliness and activity that residents would give to it. This was especially noticeable on Sunday, the first day of the Chinese New Year, because almost all of the businesses on Zhongshan Street were closed for the holiday. Aside from a handful of café customers at one end of the block, and a few dozen tourists like me, Zhongshan Street was quiet and empty. There wasn’t even anyone lighting firecrackers, while the rest of the colonial district was filled with the faint smell of exploded gunpowder and shards of red paper.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s actually no perfect way to do historic preservation. Zhongshan Street is the best example I’ve seen in China of a renovation that made a serious effort to maintain the uniqueness of the area’s architecture. Whoever led the restoration understood the importance of preserving the odd arch of a window and the fading characters of a decades-old political slogan. But even then, the best contractor can’t rebuild the character of a street or the personalities that inhabit it once the people are gone. Zhongshan Street isn’t part of the texture of the Haikou neighborhood that it sits in—it’s a sanitized stage for business and tourism that brings down the curtain when the shops close at the end of the day.

A Haikou building in dire need of some TLC

If you’re in Haikou’s old colonial district and searching for a latte, Zhongshan Street is the place to go. But if you’d like to see some of the neighborhood’s historic architecture and get a sense of what it’s like to live, shop, and work there, skip Zhongshan Street and get lost in the surrounding blocks, imperfect and timeworn as they are.