Chengdu Rush

I've been having too much fun to sit down and write a blog post!  Where to even start...

I think the best part of being in a new place is the opportunity to do crazy things that you would never do back home. Yesterday in Kung Fu class, we practiced Chinese boxing. I had never tried boxing in my life and was at first reluctant to try and punch the pad that my instructor was holding as hard as I possibly could, both from the front and from the side. But by the end of class, I was able to execute a basic sequence of punches and kicks. Hai-ya! The other crazy thing that I did was race around Chengdu on Sunday with my roommate and a couple of amazing Chinese students. They had designed a scavenger hunt called “Chengdu rush” in which we divided up into teams and had to complete various tasks at various destinations around Chengdu including People's Park, Chun Xi Lu (commercial district), the Tibetan district, and other places. It took us five hours of racing around the city by bus and on foot, but we finally completed it and all went out to a traditional Sichuan family-style meal afterwards :) The fact that Chinese students designed an entire scavenger hunt and then ran around the city with us all day is a testament to how hospitable people are here.

On Saturday, we went to the manor of Liu Wencai, a former landlord in Sichuan province. The Communist party preserved his house not because of its beauty, but as an opportunity to show how evil he was. Needless to say, Mao's rise wasn't a dandy time for landlords. One professor sang us an old “red” song today which translated as something like “down with the landlord, divide up the land” to the tune of “Frere Jacques.” Propaganda abounded in Liu Wecai's house. There were pictures and statues of the stereotypical scary, oppressive peasants and starving, hardworking farmers.

 Next, we headed to the “anti-Japanese war” museum, which is what the China-Japanese conflict around the time of World War II is called here. The portrayal of the war was also extremely one-sided, with adjectives like “brutally” and “violently” preceding pretty much every instance of the word Japanese.

Another thing that I've been observing here is the status of women. Communism advanced the rights of women significantly, with the introduction of such things as the marriage act in the 1950's, which basically allowed women to divorce their husbands. 45 percent of engineering students here are female and girls outscore boys in general on the Gaokao (national college entrance exam), according to the former VP of Sichuan University. Of course, just as in America, things are not equal. There is a significant wage gap between men and women, and the “Leftover women” idea that a woman over 30 will never find a husband is still pervasive. That being said, I think that China is doing better than India by leaps and bounds when it comes to gender rights, and has improved infinitely from a hundred years ago in China when foot-binding was still popular.   (If the bones in a woman's foot are broken, she literally can't leave the house...)  One interesting thought that someone mentioned to me is that with the introduction of the One Child Policy, women's rights had to improve, because the sole female child of the family ought to be able to make a living to support her parents.   

I've been trying to make the most of my time before I leave in just eight short days... :(