Trips: part II

South Korea

So Oct 1^st is a national holiday in China. People get a week off (though strangely they have to make up some of the days on weekends---imagine telling American kids they have to go to school on Saturday…) to celebrate the nation’s founding. This year was an even bigger deal because it is the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. For weeks leading up to the celebration, Beijing would close down the roads around Tiananmen to practice for the parade, one day would be the kids practicing, the next would be some floats, the next the tanks and missiles…BUT, unlike in the US, you can’t just camp out the night before and watch the Macy’s thanksgiving parade. In Beijing, they blocked off the parade routes which was much of the center of Beijing. Everyone from work seemed content just to watch the whole thing from home, it’s a better view anyway.

Tiananmen square was still lit up at night even in the week after the parade.

Beijing also tightened up its security, going so far as to stop all flights coming and going to Beijing for a day during the holiday. And they also mandated all people using trains and buses going to Beijing to have their IDs and a permit (something which caused me some issues—see earlier blog).

Anyhow some friends and I decided to escape the madness/lockdown in Beijing, and we headed for the place with the cheapest plane ticket from Beijing---South Korea! To be honest I had never really thought about visiting Korea, I wasn’t sure what there was to see, but man, I soon discovered there was a TON of things to do there.

So in our 7 day vacation we visited Seoul, Busan, and Jeju Island. We took planes, trains, buses and even a ferry within the country.

Here are some snapshots from the trip:

We visited the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Korea. It's a 4km wide swath of land separating the two Koreas. Here we could look through the binoculars and see the flags of the 2 countries facing each other. The North Korean flagpole there is the tallest in the world. They both also had "propaganda villages" which had speakers mounted on the both sides blasting propaganda at each other up until a few years ago.
Here is one of the fences between North and South. People leave signs and messages expressing their hope for reunifications. We also got to go inside some incursion tunnels or "tunnels of aggression" which were dug by North Korea to invade South Korea. So far 4 have been discovered and it's estimated that there might be 20 more out there...

The weirdest thing for me visiting the DMZ was how touristy it was. You basically had to take a tour bus and you were bussed from site to site with a guide, and people hawking memorabilia. oh capitalism.. I wonder what the Northern side is like...something tells me it's not the same.
Here is Gyeongbokgung, one of the big palaces in Seoul. It was beautiful with a garden attached and 2 museums! As I was repeatedly told, it was a lot like the Forbidden City, though smaller, and maybe better maintained (it was after all recently restored.)

On Jeju Island we hiked up Hallasan, a volcano. This pic is of the top where there's a crater. It was a steep climb and we had a time limit since they close the route a few kms from the top at 12:30pm and we didn't get there until 10:40am. By the time i climbed the 9.6km ascending 2000m up, I was tuckered out.
The beaches on Jeju were nice, it made me miss bonfires at Corona Del Mar though... I also was bitten 50 times (literally) by something in the water and had a wicked allergic reaction (luckily no throat closing up though...)
Jeju Island is also home to some lava tubes which are formed from... you guessed it... lava! specifically lava coming from volcanoes which flows under the surface and eventually cools leaving a tunnel. pretty cool! This pic is from Manjang Cave which was ginormous and is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Another pic from Jeju island. It's so pretty.
Some hungry kids eating a delicious Korean BBQ meal.
This is from Busan, which is the second largest city in Korea after Seoul. It's a port city and thus fishing is a big part of its economy.
here is the Jagalchi Fish market in Busan. It really big and has lots of seafood, some of which I recognized and much which I did not. We actually saw this eel-like creature with a sucker mouth which we unknowingly ordered later at a local restaurant. We eventually deduced it was lamprey eel which is a parasitic fish which sucks the blood of other bigger fish...eeew.
A ocean-side temple in Busan.

Check out this kimchi flavored chocolate...

Anyhow, been back in BJ for the last few weeks, enjoying being home and catching up on work (and blogging!). I'm leaving soon for another trip to Yunnan in Southern China where I both get to work with this NGO which is bringing doctors to do cleft palate surgeries, and I get to visit some physicians and hospitals which collaborate with my lab!

Trips: part I

Once again I’ve fallen behind on my blogging! I’ve gone on a couple trips since I last wrote and they were super fun.

The "Wild" Great Wall

One of China’s greatest treasures, built on the blood and sweat (and some say actual bones) of thousands upon thousands of Chinese laborers...it’s quite a site to see. There’s lots of different sections you can visit, and my previous visits had been to more tourist-y sections. However, this trip we went to Jiankou, a technically restricted section of the wall which is unrestored. There was no one selling a “I climbed the Great Wall t-shirt” up here!

gotta love old signs. debar clamber.
this section was called eagle flying upward. we managed to clamber :) up it

It was a pretty difficult hike, lots of climbing with hands and feet. There were some sections which looked like a forest, with nature reclaiming what man had tried to subdue. Other parts were so broken down we had to go a different route. On a funny note, while my friends and I felt we were doing some pretty difficult climbing, we kept running into this elderly Chinese man picking up trash who would ask us why we kept going the harder way.

new sign. lots o corn.

We stayed with Lao Zhao at his house/bed&breakfast. Many of the farmers here know they can do a good business with people wanting to see a section of wild wall.

obligatory jumping picture.

Being me, I got into a little trouble on my second day there. I ended up having an ENT problem (of the 5-year old variety—long story), but thanks to a friend of a friend I was able to see a doctor super quick and with no hassle once I got back to Beijing. In China, it’s all about guanxi!

Henan and Shanxi Provinces (or how we snuck back into Beijing)

I got back from Henan and Shanxi Provinces about a week ago, and let me tell you, it’s nice to be back in Beijing. Especially since I almost didn’t make it back (more on that later).

The trips themselves were great. In Linzhou (meaning Lin Sub-prefecture)—it was formerly Linxian (Lin County) but it got too big and had to be renamed—we got to take part in a conference commemorating 50 years of esophageal cancer research there.

Linxian- even though it's a city, corn is being harvested in every free plot of land.

There’s a super high rate of esophageal cancer there (back in the day 140 per 10,000 people-that’s really high). We got to see the screening program our cancer hospital does there (imagine colonoscopies but for your esophagus), and even got to see an esophageal cancer surgery. It was a big tumor and required three incisions (chest, abdomen and neck). HIPAA is not such an issue here, and I took lots of pictures, I posted the less gruesome ones.

Unfortunately, this lady had severe dysplasia in her esophagus.

Can you read the film?

Positioning the patient.

But man, talk about speed and skill, from first incision to esophagus took less than 10 minutes! I suppose it helps when body habitus is not an issue and anatomical landmarks are very clear. Plus the surgeons in Linzhou are experts at this kind of surgery. 95% of the surgeries that this hospital does are related to esophageal cancer, so they get lots of practice. About 1000 such surgeries every year. People from other countries come to this hospital for esophageal cancer treatment and training. The whole surgery and hospital stay costs about 7000RMB for the most complicated procedure (about $1030 USD). And the government covers a pretty substantial part of it for Chinese farmers, something like 70%.

Here are some men playing chinese chess. It's a very common sight to see people randomly on the sidewalk playing this game or poker.

Next we headed to Xiangyuan and Chengzhi in Shanxi Province. The bus ride there was 4 hours of winding mountain roads, but we made it safe and sound, all while watching 1980s movies in which the Japanese are always evil.

On the bus to Shanxi.

In Xiangyuan we have a cervical cancer screening program site. I was constantly amazed by the efficiency of the health care practitioners here. Between two gynecologists they saw 130 patients in one day for screening. That’s a lot of pelvic exams. On another treatment day, one of the gynecologists did 26 LEEPs alone! I did a couple gyn exams myself and was glad I could still find the cervix.

I hope that biopsy specimen is ok.

It’s crazy how different attitudes toward exams are in China. The women have their pants half down as they walk into the room, don’t mind as 15 people filter into the room and take pictures of the procedures as they are half naked, and when told they might have to have a procedure done for precancerous lesions, they just say go ahead and do it without much deliberation. One interesting thing I found was that though these women were bused in from rural areas, they all wore their crazy-tall high heeled shoes to the screening. Maybe they were dressed up, or maybe they just like high heels. I don’t think I could stand in those.

The Heels and the sandals the ladies have to change into.

We also went to visit a museum about the “War of Resistance against Japan” which was from 1937-1945 and blended into WWII, when Japan tried to take over China. There was a famous battle fought at Taihang mountain in the province. They had some pretty gruesome pictures and illustrations of Japanese atrocities against China. I think in some ways the Chinese like to emphasize the gruesome more than in the US, pictures of rotting dead bodies and drawings of Japanese soldiers roasting babies over fires aren’t something I’ve seen in US museums, but to be fair I haven’t gone to too many history museums.

They liked displaying lots of guns in the museum.

Here is what the gift shop at the War of Resistance Against Japan museum sold. You have Mao cards, ancient Chinese emperor cards, and lots of Hello Kitty cards (made by the Japanese company Sanrio.)

During the trip we got to meet with hospital directors, mayors of towns, and were treated like 贵宾(gui4bin1) or VIPs. We were wined and dined, and when we went to visit one hospital, we even had a photographer follow us around and take pictures of us touring the building. Talk about undeserved attention.

This is the photographer taking pictures of us.

This noodle dish is a Shanxi province specialty, 荞麦灌肠 (qiao2mai4guan4chang2), it was so yummy!

The trip was progressing smoothly, until we tried to return home. You see, in my last post I talked about the very complicated process of getting our residence permits. Though we had gotten approved to receive our permits, they took our passports (uh oh) and said they needed them for a week to process. We had to leave for our trip while they still had our passports. We thought that we would be ok with copies of our documents, but when we tried to board a plane to Beijing, we found out we were wrong. Then we were told that starting on 9.15 all trains and bus stations would also be checking people’s IDs (not a common practice) and that it would be very hard to get into Beijing unless you were a Chinese national with a Beijing residence ID. This was all in preparation of 国庆节 (guo2qing4jie2), or National day. This October 1^st is the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Maybe in response to the ethnic violence in Xinjiang, or maybe just because it’s always like this, the government is seriously hiking up security measures in its capital city. Anyhow we were in a pickle, trying to figure out if we would be allowed back in Beijing at all.

However, in China it’s nice to have friends in high places, and after an extra day in Shanxi, we got the hospital director of the hospital we were stationed at and the director of the local public health bureau to contact the local police department who issued us a letter stating we were who we claimed we were with some important red Chinese seals/stamps. We even got a police escort(!) onto the train back to Beijing and so bypassed the ID checking. So our journey back ended well, with a few scares along the way. As my Chinese friend was telling me, in China it’s always like this. You have lots of problems, then magically a phone call or a letter comes with the right Chinese stamp, and suddenly everything is good again. I only wonder what happens when there is no one for you to call.

Taking Care of Business

So I’ve been a bit lax in my updating! Things have picked up here, and it’s been hard finding time to blog. In the last few weeks I’ve been taking care of logistic type things, figuring out more stuff about my project(s) here and generally exploring Beijing.

First big item I had to take care of was the residence permit business. When we last left off I was told by my local police station to go register at the big public security bureau. In order to register you need about 7 pieces of paperwork, most of which I had, but I was missing the physical exam form! So I had to way to the outskirts of town (where they send all the foreigners) to a designated building to get examined. The physical exam is a process. Lots of waiting in line: to register, to pay, for each of the 6 exam rooms. The exam consists of: taking your BP, your height and weight, a quick look in your mouth, a quick eye exam, a chest x-ray, an EKG (more on that later), and bloodwork. I was pretty amazed by the efficiency of the whole process and how docile the entire foreigner population was (myself included) with being poked and prodded.

Ok, the EKG was maybe the one place where I felt a little violated (just slightly). You go into a room with a curtain drawn for some privacy and a middle aged Chinese women talks to you in rapid Chinese. She told me to take off my shoes and lie down on the table. Then she said something about my shirt which I didn’t understand. She clarified this by grabbing my shirt and lifting it up to my neck. She then said something else I didn’t understand, which she also clarified by pulling my bra all the way up off my chest. I was recovering from this shock when she started squirting my now naked chest with cold water. Then she started attaching the EKG leads, which are kind of like suction cups (hence the water). She then kept shaking my ankle and telling to me to relax while laughingly saying I must never have done this before. She was quite right.

As for the bloodwork, the phlebotomist was excellent, though I think I kind of insulted her when I asked to make sure the needles were new (yes, I’m paranoid). Oh and though they don’t say what they’re testing you for, when I got my results back it turns out they test for syphilis and HIV (informed consent, take that!). I spent some time discussing with my friend the purpose of this whole exam. Some stuff was obviously to stop sick people from staying in country, but other stuff (vision check?) I wasn’t sure of.

After I picked up my physical exam results, I came with what I thought was everything I needed to the public security bureau, ready to get my permit. But alas! It turns out one of the forms I had was wrong, and I was missing some stamp on the other one. I spend the better part of a day tracking down this stuff, only to be told when I came back that something else was wrong. I wasn’t quite clear on what happened, but after an hour or so of waiting as this poor man made about 10 phone calls to someone or another they accepted my paperwork. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up the finalized document sometime next week.

Other than that and work, I’ve been having fun with friends, checking out cool
bookstores and food places and parks near me. Parks in Beijing are beautiful, the whole water, tree, rock aesthetic is awesome. Tomorrow I’m off to a meeting in Linxian which has a super high rate of esophageal cancer and then Shanxi where they’re currently doing some cervical cancer screening/treatment programs.

Oh and I want to say a quick congrats to all my classmates who have now decided what kind of doctor they’re gonna be, that is so cool!!!

Even more pics

A friendly face in front of Carrefour, the French Walmart...in China

Beijing on a goodday 蓝天白云

Beijing on a not good day

A girl with some sort of lower extremity malformation writing chinese sayings outside the cancer hospital.

Random Musings: Week 2

Lemme just say, it takes so much effort to post pics on a blog from China. I need to find a faster way. Any ideas?

I could have danced all night…

At night I like to walk around my neighborhood. Summer in Beijing is hot and humid and since many people don’t have AC, everyone spills into the streets. There’re old men playing cards sitting on stools. There’re children chasing around the neighborhood dog. But most of all, I enjoy wandering through the parks, where no doubt there will be dozens of Chinese couples ballroom dancing, or more accurately, Chinese ballroom dancing, as there is a distinctive Chinese flavor to their moves.

Go to almost any public square or park and you’ll see them, women and men with perfect posture, moving regally and more or less with the rhythm of loud Chinese music. Elsewhere children are taking dance lessons, repeating the same step over and over with loud Latin/western music in the background.

Subway

Something mildly upsetting happened the other day. We were on the subway, and this clearly inebriated man heard us speaking English. At which point, he, for some reason, decided we were Taiwanese and started saying that China would drop bombs on us. He was yelling at us in a subway full of people, while we tried our best to ignore him. Even the other people on the subway were calling him a lunatic, mostly for randomly shouting at a bunch of strangers.

What truth is there in the ravings of a "lunatic"? I was left feeling very unsettled.

Interestingly, in a brief respite from his yelling at us, he handed us a card which stated his profession, a curer of cancer using traditional medicine. He told the people around him he could cure all cancers, except for brain and lung cancer, and that curing cancer was like curing the common cold for him (you all get the joke here.).

By far, the vast majority of people I’ve met have been friendly. Especially the ones at work; they’ve been super helpful. People on the street are kind of hit or miss, but that’s the case in any major city in the world, I think. As one of my friends was saying, when you live in a huge city, the likelihood of running into the same stranger again is very small, so what’s the point of being nice to them? It’s much easier to brush them off and continue on your own way. In smaller communities, or especially villages, this mentality won’t get you far.

Chinese Television

Watching Chinese TV is a trip. Not only because the one CCTV channel in English is fond of interviewing people who proclaim the end of American dominance and the rise of China as a superpower, but because on the other 70+ Chinese channels, you never know what you might see. One afternoon, after watching a particularly stirring rendition of John Denver’s "Country Road" sung in thick Chinese accents on one of the many variety shows popular here, I chanced upon the strangest game show….

Imagine this. There are two teams of 3 kids, ages 7-10 years old. One team is the red team, and they wear red clapboard signs with "X"s on them. The other is the blue team with blue clapboard signs with "O"s on them. In the center of the field is large tic-tac-toe board. The goal of the game is for the kids to get three in a row. Doesn’t sound too hard right? Except as they’re trying to get three in a row….they’re being chased by a bull.

Now, to be fair the bull is a young bull, and his horns looked somewhat dulled. But one kid definitely got gored and run over before someone pulled the bull off of him. I think the game show was a special on Spain and may have been filmed in Spain as one of the teams looked white and the other was Chinese. But the host of the show was Chinese and was speaking in Chinese, so I’m not sure. Either way, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t fly in the US.

More Pics! He is pointing at the mayo that this pseudo-japanese restaurant puts on watermelon.mmmmm.....these street stands are ubiquitous in BJ, serving lots of jummy danbing

at a restaurant. are you seeing a pattern? riding on the back of an e-bike.

Settling in in Beijing

Week 1 in Beijing

Hey all!

I arrived safe and sound in Beijing a week ago. It’s been a pretty busy few days. Mainly I’ve been apartment hunting like crazy which is both exhausting and stressful. Unlike in the US where you walk around the area and look at buildings that are renting, in Beijing you have to go thru a middleman whom you have to pay a hefty finder’s fee. Plus the market here is crazy! If you look at an apt and don’t buy it that day, it’ll be gone by the next morning. This happened a couple of times to friends of mine looking here. Also, sometimes the middleman doesn’t really understand or chooses not to understand what you want. He’ll show you a place with dirty concrete floors and walls with holes and a bathroom outside in the street, when you just told him that you didn’t want that. And if you want to live really close to the subway, you’ll be paying a ton for a very small size (think Olin dorm room) and not very nice quality. Still it all worked out, and I have a lovely apt (nicer than my old apt in St Louis!).

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a gastronomical tour of Beijing. I have yet to be disappointed. There’s some stuff I’ve been reluctant to eat, like the piles of sea snails and the actual head of a chicken in stew, but mostly I’ve been pretty game. I’ll put up pictures soon.

Yesterday I had my first snafu with bureaucracy. So it turns out I was supposed to register at the local police bureau within 24 hours of arriving, (though in my visa it says I have 30 days, apparently there was some other slip of paper I missed). So I went with some friends in a similar situation to the police station where they told us to go to a bigger station 20 min by cab away, where they told us that we should get fined, but since we’re students we just had a sign a piece of paper apologizing for our badness and getting “punished” with a warning. Then this morning we had to go back to our local police station where they issued us temporary residence permits, and now we have to go register at yet another big bureau to get a different permit, so that we can go back to our small police station and register again. Apparently if we don’t complete this by a certain date we get fined 500 kuai a day(about US$75! Ah!) Thank goodness for friends who speak and read Chinese fluently, or else I’m not sure what I would have done. Hopefully this will all work out.

Oh btw, so far people have thought I’m Taiwanese, Singaporean, and I did get one Korean the other day. They don’t usually guess American at first. They can tell I’m not from here either cuz of the way I speak Chinese, or keep busting out into English, or the fact that I look confused when they talk to me. At one restaurant the waitress asked us where we were from and we said we were Chinese, but then we kept talking in English and didn’t recognize any of the vegetables on the menu and she kept asking: “Are you really Chinese?” haha, maybe by the end of the year I’ll blend in better.

:)m

What's in a name?

For awhile now I’ve been racking my brain over what to call myself when I get to Beijing. I mean a name is kind of a big deal right? I’ve had friends who, whether by mistake or choice, ended up going by completely different names when they went to a new country or school. I myself have gone by different nicknames throughout the course of my life (and 3^rd year rotations, attending dependent). Plus my English name is kind of hard for Chinese people to pronounce. So, you may ask, why not go by your Chinese name, didn’t you attend 8+ years of Chinese school? To this I would respond…what Chinese name?

You see for those of you who don’t know, a lot of effort goes in to making sure that a Chinese name is just perfect. Chinese names usually consist of the last name and then two characters. Each character has a meaning, whether it’s elegance or intelligence or something like that. The number of strokes in each character is important, as is the total number of strokes in the whole name. The sound has to be pleasing to the ear. Often children in the same family are given similar sounding names to highlight their relation. If you mess up in choosing a Chinese name, your kid could be screwed forever (she’ll never get into that ivy league school now!). My dad was thinking so hard about all these things that he had not yet formulated the perfect names for me and my sister before we started Chinese school.

This led to some humorous incidents. For example… My sister plays the violin. As a kid she won 3^rd place in our Chinese school’s violin competition (which is pretty impressive given that all the kids in Chinese school play violin). So to honor the winners, our school decided to hang a big banner with the winner’s names (in Chinese of course). But alas! My sis didn’t have a Chinese name! So in her place it just said our last name and then “???” in nice big text at the front of the school.

When this happened, my mom decided enough was enough. She figured any name was better than no name, so she translated our names phonetically into Chinese. These led to functional names which we used in school. However, we ended up with names that didn’t mean anything, sounded weird to Chinese people, and didn’t really sound like our English names either.

Finally when my sister graduated from medical school, she told my dad as a grad present she either wanted her Chinese name (how would she succeed otherwise?), or a cannondale bicycle. He gave us the names.

Of course, being 22 at the time he gave me the name and never using it, I promptly forgot it (whoops). So recently, I’ve been thinking, should I take my old phonetic name, ask dad for the one he thought about for 22 years or come up with a new one of my own.

I decided to use the one dad worked on for so many years. Maybe I’ll help me succeed.

:) m

Beijing, here I come!

Hello friends :)

As many of you know, I'm spending my next year in Beijing, China doing cancer research. I was lucky enough to get a fellowship which sends people all over the world to work on global health issues. I'm super excited about this opportunity, though a bit sad about missing out on fourth year of med school with my friends. (For all you med school peeps, I want to hear how it is to be sorta maybe kinda almost a doctor! Please don't pimp me too hard if and when I'm your med student...)

This summer has been a bit crazy for me. Been back and fourth cross country a couple times for weddings, classes and orientations. So far I've been to STL, OC, Boulder, Lake Powell, Michigan, and DC. Soon off to NC to meet with my mentor and then off to Beijing!

I intend for this blog to be my way of updating you all about what I'm up to. Hopefully it'll make me slow down and reflect a bit on the year as well. I would also love to hear what you all are up to!

:) m