Living in China 1987

International Symposium of Traditional Dwellings and Lifestyles, July 1987

Tianjin, China

1987

January

My salary will be increased from 600 yuan per month to 900 yuan (from $240 to $360 Canadian dollars/month), but a return ticket to Canada was not included. On January 18, classes ended for a four week Spring Festival holiday. Qiu Kang invited me to his parent’s home for their family Spring Festival dinner. In their small flat at the Teachers College at Liu Li Tan I also met again his younger brother, Qiu Jiang, who was studying architecture at Qinghua University in Beijing.

The foreigner teachers were offered the option of an inexpensive holiday trip accompanied by staff from the University’s Foreign Affairs Office (Wai Ban), including my friend Liu Defu. This year the trip was to Hainan Island. It was still a Special Administrative Zone; in 1988 it would be established both as a province and as China's largest special economic zone. As the train went further and further south, traversing China’s eastern flat-lands, the smell of the air shifted from the pungent smell of coal to the moist fragrance of earth and crops. Now, in central and southern China, Spring Festival in February made more sense; here were fruit trees in blossom, bamboo groves, and warmer temperatures. On the way to Hainan we stopped in Guilin on the Li River. We stayed for a day to see its karst limestone formations and men on bamboo rafts using cormorant birds to catch fish. The next day, across the river in Seven Star Park, I was alone for a while. There were many families, mothers and fathers holding the hands of little ones. I envied them.

The places we visited in Hai Nan Island were typical tourist scenic spots except for Dong Jia Zhen, a small village near the town of Wenchang, about 70 km southeast of Hai Kou. The village Spring Festival ceremony included visitations by a portable “god” in a large glass box carried around by four poll-bearers. The line of children ran excitedly in a chain, back and forth, under the icon as it made its way from house to house. At each stop a table loaded with fruit and chickens was laid out as a banquet offering to the sacred statue. The members of the family greeted the icon’s arrival standing behind the festal board. Behind them, beside the main door of their home, were revolutionary slogans and stencil prints of Chairman Mao, fading but still visible.

As the holiday season drew to a close, we began our return to Tianjin. From Hai Kou we traveled by ship to Guangzhou across the South China Sea. As the ship prepared to leave, I looked down from the upper deck at the crowd of travelers and the people seeing them off. I watched one group. A young man, probably a student returning to university, was saying goodbye to five or six family members. They looked like parents, grandparents and a younger sister. When it was time for him to go, except for the young man picking up his bag, there was no movement; no hugs, no handshakes, no waving, no sign of tears. But the pain of separation rose from them like a heat wave.

We stayed in Guangzhou for a couple of days. Liu De Fu taught me some Tai Ji Quan on a roof terrace beside the hotel dining hall. I went for a walk by myself and came across a small site commemorating Islamic missionaries who had come to China during the Tang Dynasty. Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqaas (595-674), is said to be buried here. His sons built the first mosque in China. He was seventeen years old when he converted to Islam, and was the 17th follower of Mohammad. He was a grandson of a maternal uncle of the mother of Muhammad. He is mainly known for his conquest of Persia in 636, governorship over it, and his diplomatic sojourn to China.

Tomb of Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqaas

In 650 AD, only eighteen years after the Prophet's death in 632, the Caliph Uthman dispatched a deputation to China under the leadership of Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqaas, He invited the Chinese Tang Dynasty Emperor, Gaozong (628–683), to embrace Islam. The Emperor gave him permission to build a mosque. Gaozong was the same Emperor who had received famous Buddhist monk, Xuanzang in 652, two years after meeting Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqaas. In honour of Xuanzang (602-664), the Emperor built the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda.

Tang Dynasty Emperor, Gaozong (628–683)

Buddhist Monk Xuanzang (602-664)

Xuanzang was a contemporary of Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqas. Xuanzang arrived in western India in 630 AD while Persia was still the Sassanid Empire. When it was conquered by Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqās just six years later, in 636, Xuanzang had reached central India. Xuanzang returned to Chang'an in 645, and brought back a great number of Buddhist texts. His journey and the legends that grew up around it, inspired the Ming novel 'Journey to the West', one of the great classics of Chinese literature. Xuanzang just missed encountering an Islamic Iran.

* * *

Back in Tianjin, I continued to enjoy discussions with the graduate students I had met in 1985. Zhu Jian Fei, for example, now a young teacher, was eager to go abroad to study. He later obtained his PhD at University of London in the UK in 1994. He was interested in understanding larger, lobal processes and China’s role in them. The following quotes and sketches are some of the territory we explored together:

Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus, in 1919, said:

“In our profession we cannot be creators today, but we are seekers and callers. We shall not cease seeking for that which later may crystallize out, and calling for companions who will go with us on the hard path, who know in deep humility that everything today is nothing but the very first light of dawn, and who prepare themselves in self-forgetful surrender for the rising of the new sun. We call upon all those who believe in the future. All strong longing for the future is architecture in the making. One day there will be a world-view, and then there will also be its sign, its crystal architecture.

Jean Baker-Miller, concepts from her book “Towards a New Psychology of Women”.

- Women have the psychology of a minority (permanent inequality). They know the men, the majority, better than the majority knows them.

- Women’s desire for affiliation (more than independence) is a strength. Farzam Arbab (member of the Baha'i Universal House of Justice 1993-2013) “No people can be said to be walking in their own path of development unless they are somehow participating in a common learning process, in generating knowledge about themselves and their surroundings and applying their accumulated knowledge as well as that of other peoples to search for higher degrees of material and spiritual well-being…….mere literacy and vocational training is insufficient.” Barbara Ward

Her numerous articles and books included The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations published in 1962, Spaceship Earth published in 1966, Only One Earth published in 1972 and Progress for a Small Planet published in 1980.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish. We are obviously in a position of deadlock…a miserable deadlock, without ideas, without visions, without any sense of our mutual interests and perhaps most of all without any moral convictions to sustain our governments or direct our purposes. And this is possibly the most dangerous situation in which humans can find themselves”…”we have entered a new period of history. And in this period we are either going to become a (world) community or we are going to die”. Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, 1959, pp 33-4. “If we stand back a little, and look at the human phenomenon as a whole, we can see that all is not confusion. For it has become apparent that this accumulation of features, bewildering at close quarters, does in fact outline a face: the face of Mankind gradually acquiring the knowledge of its birth, its history its natural environment, its external powers and the secrets of its soul. “….the whole human race must pass its growth from infancy to maturity……In the passage of time a state of collective human consciousness has been progressively evolved which is inherited by each succeeding generation of conscious individuals, and to which each generation adds something. Referring to the ideals of the East and the West, de Chardin said we should “rejoice to be among them”. He said, “Exposure to new culture releases undeveloped parts of your self”. * * *

I felt disappointed I still could not use the video tapes I had brought from Canada last year in August. In February, a letter came from CIDA saying thank you for my application to their grant program, but there were so many good applications there were no funds left for mine. That door had closed. I still need an alternate way to be in China when the work at Tianjin University runs out. Later in February, Sun Hua Sheng sent me a letter inviting me to come to the Ministry of Construction in Bai Wan Zhuang in Beijing and give a talk in mid-March. When the day arrived, about an hour beforehand, he greeted me at the gate of his office compound. He signed me in and took me to the fourth floor to a large room with about 100 seats. At the head of the room was a long table covered with a white cloth. Behind it were a few chairs and for each chair a cup of tea, cups with lids. They had prepared the two projectors I had asked for; I often wanted to show, at the same time, two aspects of one thing. I got my slides ready and retired to a small adjacent room to mentally prepare while the audience filed in. Sun Hua Sheng had asked an old friend of his, a woman called Zhang Long, to serve as translator. She was the Chief Editor of a magazine called “Building in China”, published in English by the China Building Technology Development Center, a subsidiary of the Ministry of Construction. Intimidated by the large audience and the formality of the room. I fought off nervousness. Sun Hua Sheng introduced me. I gave pretty much the same talk as I had given in Tianjin in 1985, including a short blast of a Harbour Symphony. It seemed to go well. After the lecture, Sun Hua Sheng invited us to lunch at a nearby restaurant. The dishes he ordered included Guangzhou stir-fried noodles; it was worth coming to China just for that! He was the most well-mannered, gentlemanly person I had ever met. We all spoke in English, which was a break for me. Zhang Long gave me a few copies of her magazine. Although her English was very good, she would like to have a native speaker check her translations. She asked whether I could help proof-read articles for future issues. I said I would try. Zhang Long and her husband were to become link number three, after Dong Qing and Sun Huasheng, in a chain of people who helped me get established in China. Over the years, proof-reading English written by native Chinese speakers would become a frequent task. There is a tendency when you express yourself in another language to use the words of the new language, but the thought structures of your own. The more “Chinese” the English was, the harder to massage it into natural-sounding English. Sometimes you had to guess. It did, however, give me a greater understanding of Chinese thought patterns.

Before heading back to Tianjin, I bought some imported juice at the Friendship Store (intended for foreigners) near Jian Guo Men Wai. To buy the juice, I had to show my passport. In March, another letter came from CIDA saying one of the recipients had withdrawn and would not accept the grant, so it was being offered to me because I was next in line. This was one occasion where I did not mind being second best! This was a two-year grant at $12,000 CAN per year. Relief! God, thank you for this gift! It was not a lot but it would keep me going. In June, I received a confirmation letter from Monique Landry, the Canada Minister of External Relations.

Federal Minister Monique Landry

Letter from Federal Minister Monique Landry

One evening, in the Student Dining Hall on the Tianjin University campus, I went to a dance class. I was looking for “somebody”. Ballroom Dancing was popular; this was a Western import well-suited to China. It was dignified and the movement matched Chinese people’s light feet. At another student dance organized by the African students, I had seen a young man from Africa trying to show a Chinese girl how to “get down”, to “groove”. She was stiff-looking, and her center of gravity was too high. The tables and chairs in the Dining Hall had been pushed back to create a large open space. A handsome, smartly-dressed couple stood in the middle. I joined the students in a large circle around the dance instructors who turned on the music and started doing sweeping gracious moves in front of us. The more we wanted to see, the more we pressed in. The more we pressed in; the less room the instructors had to dance - and the less we all could see. The agile couple stopped a few times to push the circle back out to a suitable radius. The last time it happened, the male dance instructor reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of white chalk. He drew a large circle on the floor. The Chinese habit of obedience kicked in. The line on the floor was as strong as an electric fence; and no-one dared cross it.

June 24

At the Ministry of Construction in Beijing, I attended a lecture by Arthur Erickson, a famous Canadian architect. It was in the same room where I had given my talk in February. Notes from Lecture "The future of China is great but the present is confusing. The remains of the Qing Dynasty can be seen everywhere including attempts to make it the architectural expression of China today. Drab Russian buildings have blighted many Chinese cities. Slick high-rises from Hong Kong are starting to appear and now a few American ones. This blight may be even greater. Fortunately, since the Cultural Revolution, there is a move to preserve cultural monuments and districts. Land-use planning is essential to stop encroachment of cities on agricultural land and forests. Historical continuity depends on care and love for the land. The Chinese notion of the harmony between heaven, people, and land is needed more than ever. In the Western tradition, man is superior to nature. There is an emphasis on exploitation not relationship. China needs to follow the latter. Find you own voice, not the voice of the past or the voice of the West. You have one of the worlds greatest cultural heritages. Study the masterpieces of your past to find the spirit that was present in Han pavilions, Tang temples, Song pottery, and Ming furniture. China’s pottery is the greatest the world has known. n a pot you have everything you need to know about design. Look carefully at your rural architecture; it is the base of high architecture. See how simply they used materials and made beautiful solutions to practical problems in a unique, elegant way. Why cant architects do as well? Don’t borrow details from the past, find the spirit that infused it. That’s the voice you have to find. It took India 30 years, Japan 30 or 40 years. Japan is now leading the world in design. China’s turn will come. Canada has no tradition, so my task is easier. We have to invent our tradition; find the rules with which to work. Mine are: 1. The building must fulfill its purpose in an elegant way. 2. Buildings don’t move, they must look good in that place. Place is part of design." * * * The Tianjin University Foreign Affairs Office informed me I could have a contract or the next school year, 1987-8, but funds were very limited; they could only afford a half-contract. The plan was for me to teach half-time. I could pursue my CIDA research in the other half time. Liu De Fu was helping me find a way to prolong my stay. It was near the end of term and I planned to go back to Canada for part of the summer. Since my contract did not include the price of a return ticket, I had to get the ticket myself without the help of the Foreign Affairs Office. It was not possible for me to buy the ticket in Tianjin. I had to take the train to Beijing, go to the CAAC booking office near the National Gallery and first book my flight. Two weeks later, I could go back and pick up the ticket. And, then, when the time came, return to Beijing again to take the flight. The Department of Architecture organized an International Symposium on Traditional Dwellings and Lifestyles to be held from July 15 to 19, 1987. I would return to Canada immediately after the symposium. Participation would help my CIDA research. In these still early days of China’s ‘opening up’, an international conference in China attracted a good response. There were 40 papers submitted, about one-third from Tianjin University, another third from other parts of China, and the last third from abroad: USA, Peru, Japan, Germany, and Canada (me). All the papers had to be in English and submitted in advance to be included in the 'proceedings', a book containing all the papers. As resident native English-speaker, I was in charge of proof-reading the proceedings.There were only two speakers at the whole conference for whom English was their native tongue, so the proof-reading task was considerable. Attending the conference sessions was even more challenging. No translation was provided; participants could read the papers in the proceedings, and glean what they could from the speaker’s presentation. Before the symposium, several of the Tianjin University presenters came to my room to rehearse; they would read, and I would help them with pronunciation. Imagine heavily-accented English from Japan, India, Peru or China, all trying be understood by each other. It was very difficult. Although English is the default world language, it has not been taught well enough everywhere to function well as the medium of global communication. One of the papers I received ahead of time was from Beijing, from Qinghua University, by an author called He Hongyu. The paper was about some beautiful Ming Dynasty villages in the Hiu Zhou area of Anhui Province.

One of the themes in my paper, called “The Future of Tradition”, was the relationship between built form and social vision. He Hongyu’s paper, more than any other, said something similar. It had an integrated perspective combining physical, social, aesthetic, historical, and political aspects of the settlements looked at. The drawings to illustrate the ideas in the paper were so beautiful. I found myself wondering, “Is the author female? If so, I’d like to meet her”. I presented on the morning of the first day and He Hongyu, definitely a “she”, presented in the afternoon. Unlike all the others, she didn’t read her paper; she just showed slides and talked, in adequate English, responding to the images on the screen. She was the most relaxed and interesting speaker. I was attracted, and pretty well stayed beside her for the rest of the conference. Later, she told me she was married. Her marriage was collapsing and heading for divorce. We exchanged contact information, and I put her in the “wait and see” category.

July 20 Fly to Canada via Beijing I spent the rest of the summer in Ottawa with my parents and brothers. Dad had retired in 1979. In the last years of his career he had been working alongside Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to update and improve federal-provincial relations, He had met and consulted with all the provincial leaders, and worked on repatriating the Canadian constitution from England while adding a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He never talked about his work, and I was too uninformed to ask. It was many years later, after he died, that I began to understand and appreciate the nation-building drama of those days. This awareness gap reminded me how inspired I was by Expo 67 while unaware of the depth of change in Quebec in the 1960s; or living with native people in Yellowknife while unaware of what they had been and were going through. I checked in at CIDA and met the people responsible for administering my grant. I found as much information as I could in Canada about housing, and participation in housing, to take back with me to China. In St. John’s, I was still renting my house on Cochrane Street.

I learned that a modified version of my proposed Youth Urban Awareness Project for St. John’s - with most of the ideas intact - was being carried out from June to August, 1987. [The Project Coordinator was Sheilagh O'Leary. A booklet about the project, including my original proposal, called "Report on Youth Urban Awareness Project, June - August 1987”, was prepared by Susan Wood and published by MUN Extension Arts, Division of Extension Service, School of Continuing Studies and Extension, MUN, 1988.] September 4 I said goodbye to Mom and Dad at the Ottawa bus station. I had booked my flight to China to depart from Toronto so I could have another visit with Ann Wilson and an old friend from St. John’s, Ginny Rochester. It felt odd separating from my parents to go to China at a bus station. The windows of the bus were heavily tinted; I could see them, they could barely see me. They waved at the bus, not knowing whether they were waving at me. I waved back anyway. I cried.

September 13 From Hong Kong I flew directly to Tianjin, instead of going through Beijing. Lan Jian was there, again, to meet me. In my luggage were more video tapes about architecture that I hoped to share with students and staff in the School of Architecture. I also had a set of tapes of a TV series done by the BBC called the “Heart of the Dragon”. The customs officials searched my bags and confiscated all my video tapes. There was a heightened sensitivity at the time about the importation of “cultural pollution”, about subversive or pornographic materials. I settled into Room 308 at Bldg. 22, the first dormitory I had stayed in, in 1985. The same sounds every morning; loudspeakers all over the campus played patriotic martial music, followed by disco exercise music, and a reading of news. My room felt so small compared to the one-bedroom flat I had last year in the Foreign Experts Building. The smaller room was cheaper and matched my half-contract. Professor Jin wanted me to continue teaching full time, but it was difficult, he said, to get funding for me for full-time work. The contract also had no money for a flight home next summer.

I found out later that Tianjin University, in fact, had no budget for special profession-related teachers, only English teachers. I was an anomaly. The only reason I was able to stay in China was thanks to the influence of Liu De Fu. She had persuaded the authorities to give me at least a half-contract. Other departments in the University complained to her, “Why can’t we have foreign specialist teachers too?” In the meantime, Jin Qi Min said he would complain to the president about my having to pay to teach at Tian Da.

Xu Su Bin phoned the people at the Customs Office about my tapes. They said they didn’t have a machine to watch and inspect them; could they bring the tapes to Tianjin University and watch them there? I had a warm visit with Prof. Jin and felt encouraged. I am full of doubts about my ability to teach. I am preparing a more detailed plan for my CIDA research, but it sounds too “lofty” and “theoretical”. I am writing it on a small portable, manual typewriter that I brought with me from Canada. My fragmented, fragile life; I feel I am someone who isn’t making it in the ‘real’ world. September 16 I talked with Liu De Fu about modifying my contract; not the amount, the conditions. I feel very cramped in Guest House 22; it’s hard to have guests in a bedroom. Yes, I could have my old flat in the Foreign Experts Building, but it was going to cost me. The total value of the contract would not quite cover the rent; there would be a shortfall of 245 yuan/month. I had a little reserve; I took the bigger accommodation. Now I am paying to be here. Xu Su Bin helped me borrow a three-wheel “truck-bicycle” (san lun che) to move my things from my room at Building 22 to my old “home”, Room 403 at the Guest House. I tried to drive the tricycle myself. It looked easy but it wasn’t. I had to let Xu Su Bin - a small, thin young woman - do it. I started teaching second year design, full time, with a group of eight students, including Gui Ke and Zhang Xiao Xin. The first project was a kindergarten. When their ideas started to take shape, I asked them to pin their drawings on the wall so we could talk about them. Each student introduced their ideas. They had never done this before. The learning experience before was one-to-one with the teacher, and their own informal conversations with each other. The rest of the thirty-or-so students in the studio came over to listen. One of my students tried the idea of regulating lines to control the design of the site plan. I encouraged her, but she had great difficulty and ran into problems. I helped her search; she made a valiant attempt, even crying once with frustration, but I avoided telling her an “answer”. I wanted her work to be her work. One evening in my flat, Prof. Zhou Zu Shi and Lin Ning came over to discuss the content of the Architectural English class. Because Lin Ning’s English was so good, I focused on her and kept addressing her with my thoughts. After a while, I noticed a strange look in her eyes; she would stare at me very rigidly and then, slowly, rotate her bulging eyeballs sideways until they were looking at Prof. Zhou. After she did this a few times, I started to understand; Prof. Zhou was the important one, Prof. Zhou was the senior person in the room, Prof. Zhou should be the focus. I shifted my attention to him, and Lin Ning stopped giving me her revolving “stare”.

Lin Ning

I renewed my Chinese classes with Chen Laoshi, but this time they were private lessons, twice a week. I knew I wanted to stay in China, so I tried to learn as quickly as possible. We focused on speaking rather than reading or writing. I never did learn to read very much.

September 19 Sun Hua Sheng mailed me a ticket to see Giselle at the Tian Qiao Theater in Beijing. I couldn’t go. September 20 Prof. Wang Nai Xiang, a professor in the Architecture Department, and her daughter, came for a visit and gave me a book she had co-authored. It was full of beautiful hand-drawn sketches of traditional dwellings in Fujian. September21 The Immigration Officers came to Tian Da to look at my video tapes. I told them what they were about and left them alone to do their work. September23 I helped Prof. Jin Qi Min submit an article about Xinjiang Turpan rammed earth houses and grape-trellis gardens to Ekistics Magazine. I started an informal once-a-week English class with 11 students. I used songs, such as Cindy Lauper’s, “Time after Time”, or Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind”. I would play the song once and the students would try to guess the words. As they guessed them, I would write the words on the blackboard. If they didn’t get a word I would leave blank. After listening to the song three or four times they had most of the words and were singing along. I didn’t use John Denver’s “West Virginia”; it was too sickly sweet, and had become as well-known in China as the national anthem. I prepared A3 sheets of materials for the Architectural English Class, same as last year, but with new articles. I made 108 photocopies, one for each student. I paid for them. The customs official found nothing offensive in my tapes, so I could use them in class. The tapes were a series hosted by the American architect Robert Venturi. I could start and stop the video tapes at any time and explain, on the blackboard, what was being said. Lin Ning helped me open a bank account and went with me to the new international post office. I had helped her polish some letters she wrote to the professors from the University of Minneapolis who had attended the vernacular housing conference last July. She was busy finding a way to study abroad. She told me the professor Sprungala from Germany had invited the Department of Architecture to send a group of students to study for a month at his university in Aachen. They could not afford to fly so they were going to take the train through Russia. Tianjin University gave each of them 500 yuan to buy clothing so they would make a good impression. Qiu Kang’s father dropped by with a message from Qiu Jiang, the younger brother of Qiu Kang. I was invited to housing conference in Beijing on Oct. 8. “Yes, I’ll go!” Good for my research. Although my accommodations were relatively expensive, my living room was well-used, and hardly a day went by that I wasn’t receiving a guest. These included my students who used to come nervously in groups of two or three to have me look at their designs and to practice their English. Although it was hard work, the twice-weekly visits of the kind and cheerful Chen Laoshi were welcome respites. One of her methods was to never say a word in English. This increased the energy required, but her merry laugh, her ability to anticipate what I wanted to know, and her skill at weaving the events of my daily life into our lessons, always left me feeling I had made another big step into the Chinese language. September 26 I went to the Telegraph Office, designed by Jin Qi Min, and sent a telegram to my bank in St. John’s asking for money to be wired to China. With my VISA card I could only take out 500 yuan per day from a bank on Jiefang Lu (Liberation Street) in the old British Concession. I also sent a telegram to Zhen Kai Yuan in Nanjing telling him I would attend the upcoming International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH) Conference. There was a US$200 registration fee and hotel rooms were US$40 per night, a lot for me. “The International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH) was mainly aimed at improving shelter / housing for the poor in general (and not just homeless people), especially in developing countries. It was also a follow-up to the Habitat I conference in 1976.” Wikipedia

September 30 It was going to cost about 7.50 yuan per book to photocopy and bind the results of last year’s “Quick Research Project”, the measured drawings of some Tianjin Concession housing. This was about three times what the students could afford. Prof. Harvey Shapiro, an American working in Japan, was coming to Tian Da to give a series of three lectures on Ecological Planning. He had been a student of Ian McHarg, the University of Pennsylvania father of ecologically-sensitive regional planning. I had read McHarg’s book “Design with Nature”, and felt these lectures would be very important. I told Prof. Jin Qi Min I wanted to have the main points, from an advance package that Prof. Shapiro had sent, translated and give them out at the beginning of the first lecture. He said it was a good idea, but there was no budget for photocopying. In my design class I asked for volunteer translators. After class, ten students came forward, all keen. The girls suggested a boy-girl division of labour; that way they could work together in their respective dorms. The girls insisted on taking the longer passage. Each group came later in the week to my room to ask questions. October 1 National Day I went for a walk in the Tianjin Zoo. Foreigners rarely went there so, compared to the sleepy animals, I was more interesting. Like the animals, I felt caged and observed. As I left the zoo, outside the gate in the crowded plaza, at its edge, a woman sat holding her baby in her lap. She shot me a smile and waved her baby’s hand to say hello to me. I sent a big smile back. I felt less exotic; she knew I was not predatory or extraterrestrial. I received an invitation from the Tianjin University Vice-President, Zhu Lei, to attend a National Day banquet at the Building 22 Dining Hall. (copy of invitation) Prof. Jin Qi Min was there. He told me he had been talking about me with Prof. Gao Yi Lan, the Dean of the School of Architecture at Qinghua University in Beijing. He reported she said Tianjin University was lucky to have me. It was nice of him to share that with me.

October 6 The talks by Harvey Shapiro were very good. Eco-planning was something China needed. He expressed concern about the proposed dam for the Yangtze River; the delta regions need the nutrients in the silt from the upper reaches of the river. I paid for 100 copies of the handout introducing his main ideas in Chinese. They were eagerly grabbed up by the student audience just before the talk. Lin Ning translated, and did a very good job, as far as I could tell. She even managed to flash a smile sometimes as she spoke. She stuck to me after the first lecture; “How did I do?” She was “high” from her success, but still needed reassurance. At Prof. Shapiro’s last lecture, I had a chat with Peng Yi Gang, one of the senior professors at Tian Da; he gave me a copy of his book about Chinese gardens, full of his own beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. That evening, Qiu Jiang phoned me in my room to say everything was prepared for my attendance at the housing conference in Beijing. He had asked Huang Hui, a well-known architect at the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design to issue the necessary, formal invitation. I had met her last year when I met with the Beijing Women’s Architect group

October 8 I met Jin Xin at the main gate of the university at 4:45 am and we took the bus to the train station. She even got a platform ticket so she could send me right to my car. I didn’t really need so much help, but she insisted. I sat beside a man on the train from the US Embassy in Beijing. He had been in China one month and confided in me, “China is my destiny”. I had a similar feeling, but I don’t tell anyone. Qiu Jiang met me at the station in Beijing. We took the subway and a bus to the conference venue. He apologized. Originally, he had wanted to serve as my translator but something had come up at school and he couldn’t do it. He asked another graduate student to take his place. I would meet the alternate translator at the conference. The substitute was He Hong Yu, the bright lady from the vernacular housing conference last July in Tianjin. We were both surprised. She didn't know the foreigner she was going to help would be me. This was one of many examples of ‘fate’ that we were to experience together. I wrote a more specific plan for the second year of my CIDA research project. I intended to visit a few countries where the principle of participation had been applied to housing, document that experience, and submit the report to the officials I had met at the Ministry of Construction. I presumed they would be interested. At one of the conference banquets, I sat beside Zhu Yi, Deputy Director of the Urban Housing Bureau, Ministry of Urban and Rural Construction. His main concern was housing reform; how to change the system from housing as payment-in-kind delivered by Work Units, to housing purchased by individuals. He thought out loud, “Should we take big steps or small ones? Or quickly take small steps?” He welcome

d me to send my CIDA proposal to him for comments. Little did I imagine at the time that in only about ten years, China would have jumped from its socialist housing system, passed over all schemes of participation, cooperative. or subsidized housing, and enter a dizzying ascent into a fully commercialized, private-ownership, housing market. At the time I didn't see it but my research was not their central concern. My lessons with Chen Lao Shi were helping. At the conference, I was able to engage in simple conversation and, listening to the papers, understand about 20% of what I heard. I was not an official speaker at the conference, so I could focus on absorbing. I was invited to say a few words. I mentioned the importance of the family with respect to housing planning and design; and the importance of horizontal links in administration and research about housing.

October 15 Xu Su Bin dropped by; I helped her with an English article she is writing. She will cover for me in design class while I am away in Nanjing at the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless Conference, October 17-23. Later, Lin Ning dropped by. She said she is a loner, and wants to go abroad. A package arrived from Zhang Long in Beijing. It had 200 yuan and a copy of the proceedings from a housing conference in Yunnan. The money was a thank you for proof-reading some articles for her magazine, Building in China.

October 16 IYSH Conference At the Nanjing Railway Station I went out through the “people’s” gate and waited. There were two gates; one for regular ‘hard seat’ travelers and another for those who had paid more for a more comfortable ‘soft seats’. Someone was supposed to pick me up. I waited for over an hour and finally gave up; I bought a map and took the local bus to the conference hotel. Soon after, I met a young woman, relieved to find me, who said she had waited for me for an hour at the railway station, at the “soft seat” exit. When I arrived I associated myself with the ‘people’ and went out by the “soft seat” exit. The person sent to meet me associated me with soft-seat foreigners. Chinese presenters at the conference focused on housing estate planning and design, and on the implementation of housing reform. Reform in China meant weaning society away from the Iron Rice Bowl housing delivery system, where there was no individual home ownership. At that time housing was not a commodity; it was allocated as a brick-and-mortar wage by the work unit. China had high degree of social organization. The government wanted to increase the responsibility of the individul for the cost and maintenance of housing. The IYSH was different. Its aim was to increase social support for the provision of housing for the homeless and for the poor in general. Participation was emerging as an important principle by which people, as much as possible, could help themselves. China’s solution was to move in the other direction; less support, not more. It wanted to move away from 100% social housing to a system where work units could buy and sell housing, as a commodity, and eventually to ownership by individuals. Most of the non-Chinese participants were dealing with the failings of the market economy to deliver housing for economically lower strata of society, while China intended to increase the role of the market in the economy. Most of the non-Chinese participants were focused on housing in developing countries and not expecting that condition to change quickly. China had the conditions of a developing country but its leaders had high expectations their nation could quickly become a developed country. The capacity of individuals in China was looked upon by its leaders mainly in the context of their economic power. ‘Participation’ related to this dimension of the individual. The non-Chinese participants were more focused on the capacity of individuals to manage and even build their own housing. The were interested in housing associations, coop housing, social housing, and self-help; China passed these by and by the late 1990s had switched to private home ownership. Property management of large housing estates in China would be done by property management companies often subsidiaries of the construction company that built the housing district. [Note from 2021: It would not be until the election of resident committees, a process that started around 2010, that condominium self-management would begin.] The conference helped very much to deepen my understanding of the housing system in China. The contrast between the different standpoints soon emerged at the conference. Some of the foreigners were very upset; “We came here to talk about shelter for the homeless. We did not come all the way to China to talk about middle-standard housing for the emerging middle class. What about the people in the greatest need?” I shared a hotel room with Professor Bohdan Lisowski (1924-1995) from Poland. I met:

Larry Richards, Head of the School of Architecture at Waterloo in Canada;

Rod Hackney, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, someone who had been an activist in poor urban neighborhoods in Britain helping people help themselves to repair and own their own homes;

Nick Wilkinson, editor of a magazine called “Open House International”;

Michael Kirkland, the architect who had designed the Mississauga Toronto City Hall.

Professor Bao Jia Sheng - the professor I had written to in 1984, when I was trying to fnd away to be in China. At that time I proposed a research collaboration. I was interested in his courtyard style apartment buildings with flexible floor plans. He was surprised to see me. On one day of the conference we all went on the train to Wuxi to see housing he had designed. Fig: Sketch of Danwei - Individual Transition Fig. ID from Conference

October 25 Back in Tianjin, I received a note from a student saying no-one wants copies of the measured drawings of Concession Area housing we did last year. I felt very disappointed; a year of part-time effort for nothing?

Fig: Copy of letter/note from Student. This turned out to be another lesson in patience, and the development of a habit I called “triangulation”. When you receive information in an environment that is new to you, do not assume it is correct until you have confirmation from at least one, and preferably two other sources. It turned out other students did want copies. The person who sent me the note had never spoken to the others. October 29 I was looking for a wife. How to meet someone? How about dance classes? Through one of the western English teachers, I had met a Ph.D. student called Harry (Sun De Cai). He went with me to the Ba Yi Li Tang (The Eight-One Auditorium) to help me register for ballroom dance classes. The Auditorium’s name comes from the fate of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army on August 1, 1927. In Chinese, the months are indicated by number; August 1 is “8-1”. The fee was 10.00 yuan for men and 6.50 yuan for women. Market forces were at work; there were more men than women wanting to get into the class; so they paid more to get in. They didn’t refuse a foreigner. I dropped into a printing shop on the way back to get covers made for the Concession Housing Quick Research Project. I have to go back next week to approve a sample. I received a letter from Dennis Barry, my lawyer in St. John’s. The good news is the house has been sold; half of the net proceeds are mine and half are for Cathy. Dennis is able to give me most of my share now, but can’t give it all until Cathy agrees to accept the amount allocated to her. My financial situation is not good, so this helps. There is a steady flow of students and young teachers coming to my room asking me to look at their designs, to polish English translations of articles and papers they wrote, and to write recommendation letters in English so they could apply to foreign universities. Nearly all the young people I met in 1985 on my first visit had left, mostly to North America and Europe. I missed them. I was trying hard to stay; they were trying hard to leave - and I was helping them. November 3 Prof. Jin Qi Min said no other school of architecture in China has had a foreign teacher for so long. They are very pleased with my work but cannot afford to have me return next year. Good news - bad news. Chen Laoshi gave me tickets to buy soy milk at a shop on the campus. I brought a pot to the shop. They filled it and I carried it home on the back of my bicycle. I mixed it with my oatmeal breakfast. Although the focus of our Chinese lessons was on conversation; we use a textbook called 'Practical Chinese Reader' that follows the adventures of Gu Bo and Pa Lan Ka, two foreign students studying in China.

Gu Bo and Pa Lan Ka

November 5 Meeting with Liu De Fu and the Foreign Affairs Office: I told Liu De Fu I would like to spend 1988-89 at Tianjin University doing research about housing. I would pay my own way with a grant from CIDA. Could Tian Da be my “Receiving Work Unit”, responsible for me while I was in China? She knew about CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency. It was funding a management course at Tian Da. She liked my idea, thanked me for coming to discuss it, and said she would give me an answer in January. She needs to clear it with the President of the University. She asked how my Chinese was coming and for a while we conversed in Chinese. We like each other. A box of my books arrived from Canada. Welcome! November 7 Beautiful letters from Mom and Dad. Mom hopes I can find a new wife. Me too! I took 18 sets of the Tianjin Quick Research Project to the printer. He will attach covers, and bind the pages into books. Tasks like this I am now able to do on my own in Chinese. November 8 Clifford Wong, a McGill graduate of 1960, left in his will (1985) an annuity, $12,000 per year for graduate studies in the School of Architecture at McGill. He made his money as a property developer. First preference will be given to students coming from the People's Republic of China and second preference to students coming from Hong Kong. In the absence of suitable candidates from these two regions, the fellowship would be available to suitable candidates from any country. Maureen Anderson, secretary at the School of Architecture, asked me to make a list of the Schools of Architecture in China so she could send out information about the Fellowship. Until that time they had not been able to find a student from China, because no-one in China knew about it. The first award went to my friend Robert Mellin. He is not Chinese! I asked Jin Li Chang to get me a list of addresses of Schools of Architecture in China. I had helped him with his application to study abroad; now he was helping me. I went alone to my first ball-room dancing class at the 8-1 Auditorium. The hall was huge, gymnasium-sized. The teachers were a couple, svelte and smooth movers. The man asked the men to line up along one side of the hall; and the female teacher asked the women to line up on the other. For each type of dance - waltz, tango, rumba, etc., the male teacher taught the young men and the female teacher taught the young women. When they felt we were ready, they gave the word, “Choose a partner”. I had not been aware that the testosterone level was so high on my side of the room. While I was struggling to learn the steps, my fellow students had also been carefully surveying the other side of the room. As the last syllable of the teachers command to find a partner was uttered, there was a motion not unlike the rapid spinning of feet seen in cartoons. They buzz-sawed across the room and left me in a cloud of dust. They were grabbing their desired partners when I was halfway across the room. The numbers in the class were controlled; there had to be an exact number of male and female students so everyone would have a partner. I found mine, the girl no-one else wanted; and she found herself with me, a foreigner. She was brave and I was brave and we danced. November 12 The architecture students look like zombies; they have been up all night preparing for a deadline. Some have not slept for two days. My heart goes out to them. Several are still not finished. They need at least until 12:00 noon to finish. Zhang Chi and the other teachers say the students must hand their work in at 9:00 am, finished or not. I pleased with the teachers to give the students until noon. They relented. Many students are very relieved. When they submit their work, all hand-drawn in watercolor and ink, the teachers grade the student work collectively. I tend to give more marks for good thinking in the design and for build-ability; they tend to give more marks for an eye-appealing presentation. We struggle a bit. November 12 Sun Hua Sheng sent me a letter with tickets to a variety show that evening at the Friendship Club Auditorium near Jian Guo Men in Beijing. I took the 3:30 pm train and had to find a hotel before the performance. Time was tight. First buy return ticket to Tianjin for tomorrow. The taxi line-up was too long so I made a deal with a man with a Ping Bar Che (Flat-bed tricycle) and sat on the back while he pedaled me to the Huang Guo Hotel near Guo Mao. Problem: no rooms!

They recommend the Le You further to the south. Run to Bejing-Toronto Hotel to get a taxi to Le You. Music in the taxi was a disco version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. My heart aches on Ludwig’s behalf. No rooms at that hotel either! They help me get a room at the Tian Tan Ti Yu Bing Guan for 89 yuan/night. It’s 1/5 of my month’s salary. I ran upstairs, threw my bag on the bed and took another taxi to the Friendship Club. I got there 10 minutes before show-time. The visit with Sun Hua Sheng was very nice; his company was better than the show. He gave me some proof-reading work from Qin Feng Xia for China Planning Review. He also gave me copies of previous issues of the magazine with some of my proof-reading work in them. I said good-night to Sun Hua Sheng. I had had no time to eat supper before the show. I walked to the Jian Guo Hotel to have a club sandwich and ice cream. About once a month, I get a chance to eat Western food. However much I like Chinese food, the stomach will demand something familiar. I went back to my hotel and watched TV news in English on CCTV 9. It’s not available at the Foreign Experts Building in Tianjin. The next day I went with Hongyu to visit Ju Er Hu Tong in the Old City about a kilometer east of the Drum Tower. It is the site of an experimental housing project by Qinghua University’s School of Planning and Architecture; an attempt to regenerate an old run-down courtyard area of Beijing. Hong Yu is part of a research and design group led by Prof. Wu Liang Yong, and has done a lot of social survey work. We visit a group of thirty families all sharing one cold-water pipe. It’s a 100 meters to the nearest public toilet out in the street. Hongyu said she had to meet another architect student friend, Liu Yan, at 3:30 pm; and she wants me to meet her. When Liu Yan arrived, Hongyu did not introduce me. Finally, I introduced myself. They talked and ignored me; I felt invisible. And, Hong Yu didn’t say goodbye when I left to go back to Tianjin; an upsetting end to the day.

On the train back to Tianjin, I met Jim Walker from Intertech in Tianjin. We agreed to meet again sometime. He had been in Beijing to send off his wife who was going back to the US for a while. November 14 I dreamed I was with Sun Hua Sheng on a long narrow bridge that crossed a deep chasm. Two other people on the bridge fell to their deaths. I wanted to find a way down to help them. Sun Hua Sheng wondered whether he would be blamed. I also dreamed I was secretly in a building, trying to find a safe place to spend the night. I pretended to be a janitor. I spent the morning with Prof. Zhou Zu Shi watching some of the “Sense of Place” tapes by Robert Stern. I had brought them to China over a year ago. Now we are about to use them with the students. I bought some Christmas gifts for Mom and Dad; a Chinese art-print, and some hand-painted cards at Yang Liu Qing Art Society. Later, I bought myself some peanuts from the peanut lady at the outdoor market. She sold her wares from a small cart on the campus street connected to Nan Kai University. I bumped into Chen Laoshi, also buying peanuts. The three of us had a chat; it felt so happy and normal. November 15 He Jian Qing dropped by to discuss her thesis. The second year students are now doing a kindergarten project. November 17 Watch more videos with Zhou Zu Shi. I will transcribe some of them to have handouts for the students. I started to type out the list of Schools of Architecture in China. November 19 I went to my bank on Liberation Street (Jiefang Lu) to take out another 500 yuan with my credit card. An old man in the bicycle parking lot asked me where I was from. "Jia Na Da" (Canada), I said. “Zui hao!" (The best!) he said. And added “Bai Qiu En" (Norman Bethune). Dr. Bethune casts a long shadow in China. Like most Canadians, I did not know who he was or how revered he was China until I came here. Below are a few excerpts from Chairman Mao’s eulogy to Norman Bethune that everyone in China had memorized when they were children: “Comrade Norman Bethune,a member of the Communist Party of Canada, was around fifty when he was sent by the Communist Parties of Canada and the United States to China; he made light of traveling thousands of miles to help us in our War of Resistance Against Japan…..Comrade Bethune's spirit, his utter devotion to others without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people. ……..We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone can be very useful to the people. A man's ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.” November 20 Early Christmas gifts arrive from Ottawa. I received a distressing telegram from Harry’s fiance, She wants to contact me without Harry’s knowledge.

November 21 I delivered copies of the Concession Housing Quick Research Project to the students; most of the participants wanted a copy after all. Finally, after a year, this project is complete. The students were very pleased with the product. Dong Qing will collect 2.50 yuan from each student as a contribution to the printing costs. That evening I went to the western style restaurant on Cheng Du Dao - one of two in the whole city - with Harry. He wants me to go with him to the Friendship Store (Chinese people are not allowed to enter unaccompanied by a foreigner) to buy western style clothes for his wedding. I didn’t tell him yet about the telegram from his fiance. Later that evening, in my room, I wrote a letter to her expressing concern. I don’t want to do anything behind Harry’s back. November 22 They are renovating the front of our building and, at the same time building a new foreign student dormitory out back. The most prevailing sound is the high-pitched whine of the vibrators that settle the wet concrete into the bottom of the forms. Work continues twenty-four hours non-stop and none of us can sleep. On the second evening, with no let-up in the noise, the other foreign teachers asked me to phone the Wai Ban. I could only reach someone who didn’t speak English. I said, “Women bu hui shui jiao!” (“We are not able to sleep”), but the form of “able” I chose implied we had forgotten how to sleep and needed lessons, not we are “unable” to sleep because of external circumstances. I should have said, “Women bu neng shui jiao!” The noise did not stop; I pulled my mattress out into the hallway and slept there. It was a little quieter. The next day a fellow teacher, Michael, from Germany, was angry about the noise and took out his frustration on a waitress in the dining hall. I was angry with him for being rude to her. We flared a bit. We are all upset, and agree to have a meeting to discuss action. To the tune of concrete vibrators, I begin typing/transcribing Robert Sterns, “Sense of Place”, so students can follow the videos more easily. November 23 Students are working on their Kindergarten designs. In an Architecture English Class for the teachers, I used a segment from “Heart of the Dragon” called “Caring”. It was easy to start and stop the video player to explain what was said and answer their questions. They enjoyed it! At last I am able to use these tapes. Noel Flynn, in St. John’s, had kindly made them for me over a year ago. The foreign teachers met with the Foreign Affairs Office about the noise. They said it will only last one more night. English Chinese class with Jin Xin. She said her life is busy, but monotonous. She almost started to cry. She likes our evenings together, she can relax. November 24 Qiu Jiang dropped by. He is in Beijing working on the Suzhou Street restoration in the Summer Palace. He will apply to McGill and for the Clifford Wong Fellowship. He said Qiu Kang, his brother, was now in California. Prof. Zhou Zu Shi dropped by with more audio tapes to transcribe from the Sense of Place series. I brought the originals of the Heart of the Dragon series to lend to Jim Walker at Intertech, but he had gone home to the US to see his wife. He had just found out she has a brain tumor. November 25 Architectural English Class using BBC tapes about China. The class is usually two hours long, but the students liked it so much, Prof. Zhou agreed everyone could watch for a third hour. November 26 AM: Teach 2nd year design, kindergarten project. Not enough time to see everyone during the allotted class hours; I arranged to see the others, Jiang Sheng, Guo Ke, and Feng Hai Xiang, on Friday night in my room. November 27

A third year student, Han Qing Men, agreed to help the African architecture students. Later he said he couldn’t because his mother didn’t want him to catch AIDS. I told him his mother’s idea was wrong. I wrote a letter to Wai Ban about this problem. I prepare Christmas gifts for my family in Canada. Harry’s girlfriend phoned me and asked when I am going to Qi Qi Har in northern Haarbin Province (her home) to see her.

November 28 Saturday in the Post Office, not far from the Hyatt on Nanjing Lu. The staff was very helpful. I got my parcels inspected by Customs, then gift-wrapped, and packaged. I've learned the routine; this time I am going solo. A Chinese woman approached me speaking perfect English. For a moment China disappeared; I felt I was talking to a suburban woman with a station wagon parked outside full of groceries, kids and a St. Bernard. She said her daughter had two masters degrees from universities in the US. “Is she coming home to live in China?” I asked. “Oh no, she has a boyfriend.” She asked me many questions, including, “Are you married?” Why did she ask that? Do I wear my heart on my sleeve? Her name was Yan Jun Pei; she invited me to her home. She teaches English to the children at Intertech. She knew Jim Walker; she said his wife has about one year to live. “Are you a Christian?” she said. “No.” “Are you a Christian in name, but don’t practice?” “No.” “Well, what are you?” I told her I was a Baha’i. “Never heard of it”, she said. It was a cold ride on my bicycle to and from the Post Office. My nose red and runny. Wind sucked my breath away. That afternoon I photocopied the list of addresses of Schools of Architecture in China. Continue to transcribe “Dream Houses” video. Evening The Wai Ban organized an outing for the foreign teachers to watch a Czechoslovakian dance troupe. I had a good chat with Margaret, another foreign teacher. This was also her second year in China. She was a Harvard graduate, could play the flute, spoke Chinese very well - I was jealous - and was the most enthusiastic and warmhearted person in our little foreigner community.

November 30 I wrote a letter to Dennis Barry. There’s still no sign of a financial agreement with Cathy. I must write a six month progress report for CIDA and update a statement about my proposed research. Meeting with Zhang Chi and Qiang Yuan, my fellow teachers, about student work. Previously, the students would hand in their work and the teachers would spend a few days correcting it and give it back to them. I suggested we could keep this method for the weaker students, but for the stronger ones, why don’t we first discuss their work among ourselves, and then, together, make a presentation to the students about the strengths and weaknesses of their work? Also, before they hand in their work, why don’t we let the students introduce their designs to their classmates? All the teachers gathered for a short meeting to discuss my proposal. So many questions were raised I was ready to make an alternate proposal. After everyone had their say, cordial with some laughter, sometimes with great energy, they all agreed with it, with a few small changes. I was surprised at what seemed to be a quick turn-around. I held an English class with the teachers in the School of Architecture. We watched Robert Stern’s “Proud Towers” video. It was difficult for them. Next time I will have the text written out, so they can follow it more easily.

Left to right: Xu Subin, Joe Carter, and Jin Xin

Jin Xin bought tickets to a movie that we would see after one of our English-Chinese language exchange evenings. We went by bicycle to the theater; it was very cold and the roads were dark and icy. We had to walk our bicycles sometimes. There were no streetlights. Trucks and a few cars blinked their lights in flashes to conserve electricity and not blind the cyclists. The movie was not very good. The audience was mostly students from Tianjin University and Nan Kai University.

December 3 I explained to the students how to introduce their own work; they had never done that before. I asked the other students to ask the designer some questions, and they asked many! The other teachers who were present also made some comments. The students were not nervous. The morning was successful, I think. This new system allowed many participants, a variety of opinion, and a chance for questions and consultation. I received a package from McGill with application forms for their Master’s Program and the Clifford Wong Scholarship. They asked me to mail them to the Schools of Architecture in China.

December 4 Jin Li Chang and Liu Hen Chen dropped by to talk about their master thesis work. Jin Li Chang included the temple as an urban building type. I received a letter from Sun Hua Sheng inviting me to a ballet performance in Beijing. This time I booked a room ahead of time by phone. I invited Harry to go with me to Beijing; he had been asking me to accompany him sometime to get into the Beijing Friendship Store to buy clothes for his wedding. You had to show a foreign passport at the door to get in; you were allowed to bring a Chinese person in with you. We agreed to meet at the Beijing Hotel at 9:00 am Sunday morning. I spent all day Saturday proof-reading work for Qin Fengxia - Shen Hua Sheng’s colleague - for the English section of the MOC Planning Review magazine. I continued to work on it on the train. On the way out of the Foreign Experts Building to catch a 3:30pm train to Beijing, there was a little package for me at the front desk - a set of flashcards with Chinese characters from Harry’s girlfriend. They were a gift to help me learn Chinese. On the train, I continued proof-reading for MOC Planning Review magazine. I enjoyed a western supper in the Beijing Hotel Dining Hall. My stolen time - a break. I went to the Tian Qiao Theater and joined Sun Hua Sheng to watch a performance by the China Central Ballet. It was a medley from various ballets, mostly western but one from China, the Red Detachment of Women. Sun Hua Sheng’s wife had played piano for this ballet company before she retired. During the Cultural Revolution she hid the score for Swan Lake in her room. Sun Hua Sheng said, for a while, it may have been the only copy in China. I gave him the proof-reading. He said, if I sent Qin Fengxia my 80 yuan hotel receipt, she would cover the expense. That’s good news. The next morning I indulged in a western breakfast, again at the Beijing Hotel Dining Hall, a gymnasium-sized room with church high windows, deep-silent carpet floors, white table cloths, whispering waitresses, the smell of coffee-eggs-bacon-toast-jam……! Harry joined me for coffee and then we went to the Friendship Store. I didn’t tell him about the gift from his girlfriend; I wasn’t sure what it meant. Unfortunately, Harry didn’t see anything he liked. At the Silk Market nearby he bought a long overcoat. This market was also one of Beijing’s largest black-market money-changing locations. From behind many counters came the question, “Chain-zhe ma-knee? Chain-zhe ma-knee?” We had lunch in the Sichuan Restaurant in the southwest corner of Ri Tan Park. I haven't told him about his fiance's approaches to me. With its generous courtyard looking on to an ancient park, this became one of my favorite destinations. Back in Tianjin, Hua Guang dropped by. He showed me his proposed design for a Chinese center in London. It looked interesting and large in scale. I admire his ability to handle that with ease! He enjoys borrowing my books.

December 6 China Daily reports power shortages are common in China; production is cut to four days a week in some places. Experiments with a five-day work-week, instead of six, saw production go up by 30%. Also, they were starting to undo the Iron Rice Bowl by experimenting with profit-sharing programs in some factories.

December 7 A long love letter arrived from Harry’s girlfriend. Pm: Teach English to Architecture Department teachers. We studied words I transcribed from Robert Stern’s video called “Dream House”. Ren Ke Qi phoned while I was out. There was a letter from Qiu Jiang asking for help with application forms for graduate studies.

December 8 Chinese class with Chen Laoshi. I told her about the situation with Ren Ke Qi, who then called me during class. I told her I am not her boyfriend; she already has one! I said I would say more in a letter.

December 9 Architecture Undergraduate English with Prof. Zhou Zu Shi. He talked to the students about discipline. At a command from the class leader everyone jumped to attention. The blackboard had been cleaned. I didn’t know why the new routine was imposed and I didn’t ask.

December 12 I gave a bottle of my Z-Bec multi-vitamins to the “sickly” student. He came up with a new idea today that was very good. When I praised it, he looked so happy. My students invited me to join them in a volleyball game but I declined. I typed a letter for all the schools of architecture in China, informing them about the Clifford Wong Scholarship at McGill. After supper Jin Xin came to visit. She couldn’t sleep last night worrying about the future. She’s a single mom with a daughter. She aspires to be a teacher in the School of Library Science. She must improve her English. Her Dept. Head at the Architecture Library where she works does not want her to leave. She doesn’t share her dreams with others in case she fails. As she described her troubles she started to cry. I told her I cried sometimes. She was surprised. She asked whether I missed my parents. I said yes, but not so badly. What I really missed was having my own family.

December 11 Chinese class with Chen Laoshi. She showed me some photographs of her trip last summer to Chicago to see her daughter who was studying there. In one of the pictures the two of them are standing in front of the Baha’i Temple in Wilmette. There was no recognition of the Baha’i Faith in China, so I did not mention I was a Baha’i. In the afternoon I was just starting to work when Hong Yu arrived, unannounced. We went to look at some participation housing in the southwest of Tianjin at a steel wool factory. Despite having their new housing with indoor toilets, some people were still using the public toilet in the street. Their new indoor toilet under a stair had become a storage room. Storage space was more important than an indoor toilet. People everywhere trusted Hongyu and welcomed her into their homes. She looked at them with a very bright and friendly face. We had supper at Nankai University and then she came with me to help my 2nd year students. She stayed that night with a couple she knew, some Buddhist artist friends. December 12 I went with Hong Yu to see some ping fang (one story) housing at “san ji tiao”. The roads were a half meter higher than the courtyards, so, in summer, the homes flooded. Many families have 5000 yuan saved, and most can afford 3000 yuan toward a new house. We visited a one-room home that had a bed, a cooking area, and living space all in 10m2. I was ashamed by the space I lived in, so much bigger than theirs. We had a friendly lunch at Hongyu’s friend’s apartment. Their home was a workshop-studio, littered with tools and materials. He taught me how to hold a bowl while eating rice; fingers under, thumb on top. I went with Hongyu to the British Concession and showed her around. She took pictures with a camera better than mine. We walked back to the Foreign Expert’s Hotel. We listened to some music. She started to cry; troubles coming out. After supper more good talk. She went again to stay at her friend’s home.

December 13 AM study Chinese Lunch with Hong Yu at our dining hall downstairs with all the foreign teachers. We carried a bubble of space around us. She spoke to me in Chinese….then - if it was Chinese I couldn’t understand - she would say, “Oh, I forgot! You’re not Chinese.” We set out on a tour of Tianjin Concession architecture with some of my students. We went to the British and German Concessions, along Jie Fang Lu and across the bridge to the Italian Concession. One place we visited was the two-story courtyard house with a glass roof over the courtyard. One family invited all nine of us to sit down to tea. I saw a picture of a woman with a black cloth draped around it. Someone said to me “Jin tian mama se le.” (Today, mama died”) and she started to cry. I led everyone out. Chinese hospitality had been stronger than mourning. December 14 I helped the Architecture teachers watch a “Dream Houses” video. We review the words I typed out for them and caught them in the video. Zhang Chi dropped by later for a chat. He says he hears I am a good teacher; he doesn’t say it himself. I started a letter to Harry's girlfriend asking her not to write to me for a year. December 15 Chinese class with Chen Laoshi: I showed my letter to Harry's girlfriend to Chen Laoshi. She said I better not ask her to wait a year because she will do just that; I am giving her hope. I took her advice, changed the letter and asked her to focus on Harry. Later I went looking for letter-size envelopes (A4) to send information about McGill’s Clifford Wong Scholarship to all the architecture schools in China. After two hours of search in several shops, I found none. Are they not made yet in China? I took a shopkeeper’s suggestion to buy brown paper and make my own. I work on Qiu Jiang’s application form for UBC. Harry's girlfriend phoned saying in pleading voice, “Love is important…when are you coming to see me?” Eve: Help students with their kindergarten design.

December 16 AM Class with Chen PM English class for 3rd year. I used the same “Dream House” video and passed out a paper with a few keys words and translation. I caught a cold. In middle of night got up and soaked in my long tub. The bathroom in my apartment has hot water from 8 at night till 8 in the morning; a luxury most Chinese people do not have.

December 17 Class with Second Year I was invited to a “propaganda” event about the department that was taking place in front of Building 9, the central building on Campus. A photographer came by to take pictures of me with the students and teachers. The word “propaganda” in Chinese translates as “promote-spread” and doesn’t seem to have political overtones. PM I met with Zhang Chi and Qing Yuan to discuss second year designs. Zhang Chi gave me some “gan mao” cold medicine. Jin Xin dropped by with apples for my cold. We watched “One World” on TV and studied some Chinese and English. She wrote all the addresses of the schools of architecture in China on my home-made envelopes. December 18 AM Chinese class. Gan Mao very heavy. PM Huo Guang showed me his design for a Chinese marketing center in London; very strong work. He wanted feedback, but I couldn’t help him much. I think he is one of China’s future great architects. December 19 Cold still bad. PM Arch. Department Party at the Campus Club (Ju Le Bu). In the opening speech I was thanked for my work in the Department and for my help with the International Conference. One of my students from last year, Xiao Quan, told me she had won a prize for her Culture Center design…one I had helped her with. She had won 300 yuan in a national competition. We had our picture taken with the other Tianjin University prize winners and their teachers. Hong Yu is having serious marriage difficulties and wants to talk about it. Liu Xiao Yi, also married, is frank about her difficulties. She wrote me saying she wants to introduce me to her friend who is “clever and pretty”. Ren Ke Qi phoned. She had just received my letter and she was in tears. “When are you coming to Qiqihar? When can I come to Tianjin?” “O God, Guide me, protect me!” I received another invitation from Sun Hua Sheng to go to a ballet tonight in Beijing. I wrote a letter to Maureen Anderson, at the School of Architecture at McGill re the Clifford Wong Fellowship, telling her I will begin mailing the information out to the schools of architecture in China and she should expect to begin receiving applications.

December 20 I went with Liu Jing, Liu Xiao Yi’s younger sister, and her friend on a long bus ride to Liu Jing’s apartment building, a six-story walk-up in the southeast suburbs of Tianjin. The room had bare concrete floors, a coal space heater that also doubles as the stove for cooking, a desk as a kitchen counter and dining table, one chair, and one bed. There are a few books in the room; some structural engineering textbooks, an abbreviated Shakespeare in English, and a “Glamor” magazine from the US. The building’s heating system is not working; the room is cold and we make jioazi. I forgot to wear long underwear; my legs are cold.

December 21 Gan Mao is getting worse. AM I went to the studio to give students some quick direction and then go back to my room to sleep. Cancelled PM class with teachers.

PM Tao Wei dropped by and kept knocking despite the “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door. I got up to talk with her and just when she was leaving, a group of teachers from the Architecture Department came by to see how I was doing. When they left, I had just got back into bed when some painters came to do some touch-up work in the bathroom. When they left and I got back into bed, Xu Xin Feng came by with a Christmas gift from the Wai Ban and from the Ministry of Education. When I got back to bed, she came again with another announcement. Just in bed again and Qiu Jiang came by, from Beijing, for a visit. I wrote a letter to Hong Yu saying it was OK to be friends but I will stay away from “intimacy outside marriage”. I tried to explain my “view”. If she doesn’t like it, she will withdraw; if she accepts we can be friends.

December 22 AM Chinese class PM Zhang Chi picked up his letters that I had proof-read. I mailed the Clifford Wang Scholarship information package to seven more schools of architecture in China, now a total of nine. Eve. Work with students on their designs. Still feel sick. December 23 My window sill is full of Christmas cards from Chinese friends; none of us are Christians. AM Class with Chen. She speaks to me more quickly now and with a larger vocabulary. PM I gave an English class, a slide show about housing to 100 students. The other teachers at the class got some tea for me because they could see I was struggling with my cold. They made me go home early. Prof. Zhou Zu Shi invited me to go later with him and a group of Tianjin Design Institute architects for a tour of new projects in Tianjin. I welcome this because, so far, my contact outside Tian Da is stronger in Beijing than Tianjin. Eve: Help students with designs. After graduation they will be assigned to workplaces around China. I hear Work Units prefer to employ men; men don’t have to stop work to have children.

December 24 Letter from Hong Yu. She has left her husband and will live in the Qinghua Dormitory. She faces the “opinion of society that she is a wicked, evil woman”.

Lin Ning came back from Germany; she said they took the train to and from Europe, through Russia and Mongolia to China. She was very glad she went; it made her appreciate China more. She thinks people here are more human. We talked of many things including the device of hiding your true feelings in unfriendly environments. We talked about injustices we knew of. The conversation was engrossing; we didn’t watch the time. We ran downstairs to the dining hall but the kitchen staff was already eating their supper; it was too late for us to eat. “Come to my place; I’ll feed you”. Lin Ning’s parents had a small apartment; her sister and husband shared one small room, and shared a kitchen and bathroom with the neighbors on their floor. Her mother made soup. Her father came later. He was a structural engineer at the Tianjin Design Institute. He had just been the translator for a lecture given by a visiting Canadian engineer. They were very interested that the Canadian engineer was born in India and had lived in Canada for 17 years. Lin Ning’s mother was happy to see me despite the unannounced visit. She kept apologizing for the food. If my visit had been pre-arranged she would have been cooking all afternoon. Lin Ning can’t cook but she says she wants to learn. The colour TV was on during supper; soon all three stations were showing something uninteresting. I suggested turning it off. We listened to some music from Lin Ning’s record collection. She played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D directed by David Ostrach. Lin Ning swished her finger around, directing. Later when I looked at the family photos, whenever there was a picture of her, she quickly put her hand over it. Lin Ning took me to meet her elder sister. She had a little boy called Niu Niu. After supper, later, Jin Xin came by for a visit. Then James, from Uganda, came by. Three of us – black, yellow, white.

December 26 AM I arranged for a long-distance telephone call to Canada from my room. I was 13 hours ahead of Ottawa, so I could phone my family just after their Christmas dinner. I talked with Mom, Dad, and Mark; too short, very expensive. I went to the Hyatt for lunch. I hadn’t had a western meal since September. I spent about 70 yuan, about 25 Canadian dollars, about 1/7 of my monthly income. I make good progress on my CIDA report; papers all over the floor. Fig. Thank you note from Jin Li Chang Fig. Invitation to Wai Ban New Years Party. Fig. Sweet card from student, Xiao Quan.

December 25 I went with Prof. Zhou Zu Shi and members of the Tianjin Municipal Culture Bureau to look at historic western buildings in Tianjin. We visited residences that had been used by Pu Yi, the last emperor, by one of Pu Yi’s uncles, Yuan Shi Kai, and Liang Qi Chao.

December 27 A normal, cooled-down letter came from Ren Ke Qi and an angry, sad letter from He Hong Yu. Lin Ning criticized me for trying to be everybody’s friend. Flurries with occasional sun.

December 28 Jin Qi Min is supporting Lin Ning’s application for the Clifford Wong Scholarship. The Architectural Department is helping her get through the Chinese red tape.

December 29 Chinese lesson. I gave Chen Laoshi a cassette tape of Nana Moskouri. She gave it to the campus broadcast office and that afternoon it was heard all over the campus. That afternoon, Lin Ning came by for some help with her “Statement of Purpose” for the Clifford Wong Fellowship. She invited me to get out into the fresh air and do some errands with her. Her mother had given her 300 yuan to develop her European photos, a lot of money. She said she had stayed in a dormitory on campus in Germany and didn’t like it. “I know what your life is like; I want to get you out. What are you doing on News Years Day?” Eve: Help 2nd Year with design.

December 30 AM I go with Chen Laoshi to a children’s party at the Tianjin University Kindergarten. The children’s choreographed dances, long and graceful, were called “Gathering Apples and Gathering Mushrooms”. Whenever confusion crept in between acts - a confusion augmented by the presence of a TV camera crew - a teacher would start clapping her hands rhythmically. The children would join in, get focused, and as the clapping got quieter, so did they. I thought it was all wonderful except for the appearance of Santa Claus. He had three expensive gifts. The children were invited to rush toward him to get a doll or a stuffed Mickey Mouse. First come first serve. It was created as a “scene” for the TV coverage of the event. When I had passed the kindergarten before, I had often seen the children lining up for things, not competing. Basic justice. This was the only blemish on a beautiful party. At the end, we all joined the children in a dance.

PM Slide lecture for students about housing. I included pictures I had taken of their work.

December 31 AM The Half-day Quick Design Test. We teachers just walk up and down the aisles, making sure it is individual work. I mentally rehearse my skit for the party tonight.

Went to the Post Office, a package had arrived for me. It was coffee from Dorothy Watson. I went home and drank two cups. I rarely drink it anymore; it’s so hard to find. I responded to a letter from Dennis Barry, the lawyer. Cathy has still done nothing to settle our financial affairs. Some of my share of the money from the sale of our house is frozen until she takes her share. My financial situation is not good; it would be helpful to get this process finished. The New Years Banquet hosted by the Wai Ban is held downstairs at our Guest House. This was not Chinese New Years; they were celebrating the western New Year. After dinner, it was time for performances. All the foreign teachers sang “Frere Jacques” together, each of us in our own language. It worked beautifully; perhaps more beautiful than all of us singing the same language. Michael sang in German, I used French and my “Ding, Dang, Dong” rang well with the American “Ding, Ding, Dong”.

I had prepared a story in Chinese about funny mistakes made while learning Chinese. I did a monologue, pretending to be two people: a foreigner learning Chinese and local Chinese person. “Ni duo da?”, the Chinese person asks the foreigner. The foreigner replies, “Wo shi 60 gong jin.” Literal translation of the question is, “You how big?”. “Big”, in this context, means how “old”, not how “heavy”. The literal translation of the answer was “I am 60 kilograms”. The correct answer to the question should have been “I am 39 years old”. Another mistake was confusing Xiang Jiao and Zhao Xiang, “banana” and “camera”. Not hilarious, but it was based on real experience, and people enjoyed it. I blanked out at the beginning in front of the floodlights and cameras. Chen Laoshi prompted me, got me started, and I was OK. The Director of the Tianjin Municipal Higher Education Bureau was there. I think he was the one Liu De Fu had to persuade to let me stay at Tianjin University. My students invited me to their New Year’s Party. I walked in around 9:30pm. They were all sitting in two groups, one on either side of the studio classroom. When I came in they all shouted a welcome, offered me a seat and filled both my hands with sunflower seeds. The desks had been pushed aside to make an open space in the middle. The game they played required one team to sing a song and the other team, across the room, to sing a different song whose first word was the same as the last word of the song just sung. I was asked to perform. I wrote the words for 'Frere Jacques' on the blackboard and led a few verses. They divided themselves into boys and girls to sing it alternately. I hesitate to call them “boys” and “girls”; they are 19 and 20 years old. To Western eyes, a party where people sing songs, perform for each other, play volleyball with a balloon using their foreheads, cook food (bao jiaozi), take pictures of each other, laugh a lot as a group, dance ballroom dances with grace and modesty to music that is not deafening, where girls can dance with girls and sometimes boys with boys to learn the steps (and they are not homosexual), dancing with different partners…no strong pairs; all has the innocence and exuberance of children at play. Why is their peer’s party in the West so different? Deafening music, strong pairing - or wanting it badly, dancing with sexual flavors, a lot of alcohol, cigarettes, and some drugs…Although I was about twice the age of my students, I was welcome. There was cheer and beauty; pure hearts. There was no sense of cliques, who’s in, who’s out, who’s cool, and who’s not. Even the somewhat ostracized, socially-challenged student with terrible health was there. He wrapped himself around a guitar most of the night. I moved closer for a while to listen and he played me Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and finished it with a beautiful shy smile. One performance that evening was an athletic young man who did a kind of brake dance. It had the rubbery grace of American street dance combined with some snapping sharp kungfu moves. Sometimes his feet leapt to the lights in the ceiling falling in leg-splits on the concrete floor. I stayed until 2:30 in the morning. My Guest House was locked every night; a collapsible metal gate was drawn across the door and padlocked. I use to wonder what would happen if our building caught on fire - how would we get out? I imagined a newspaper headline: “Fried Foreigners Meet Metal Gate”. I had to wake up the guard to open the gate and let me in.