Wuhan alleyway

through an alleyway
i saw the rest of China
crumbling concrete walls


one-room families
young boys smoking cigarettes
grandmas sorting trash

amidst smoke and stink
irrepressibly human
people laugh and play

warmly greeting from Wuhan

Wuhan Infectious Disease Hospital

i am super squirrel
storing it all in my cheeks
leaping tree to tree

here i come to save the day
PPTs are on their way

(too bad squirrels are mostly ignored)

Hangzhou No. 6 People's Hospital HIV department

after a workshop
Hangzhou 6 HIV crew
i'm the one with teeth

Hangzhou traffic at 6 am

rainy september
one of the four furnaces
Hangzhou wet and hot


noise never ceases
men yelling at phones
cars honking at 4 am


China is busy
creating work for work's sake
taxing the spirit

he cha guan: afternoon tea

a hot cup of longjin tea
eating lotus seed
births some interesting talk

amateur scholars at the classical west lake in Hangzhou

my cousin QingQing and me
wannabe poets
admiring fall lotus patch

my mobile office

I know that I am traveling too much when I have a specific "office desk" at SFO. You can't beat the North Food Court (in front of Emporio Rulli and before the security check point)... it's got a working electrical outlet, free wifi, a nice big clean table, decent chairs, snacks nearby, and is reasonably quiet.

I am sitting here now, typing this up with the bluetooth keyboard you see here. I took the photo with my iphone, which is why it's missing on the table (hopefully i won't get yet another iphone stolen!). Very handy... everything I need for hyper-american-productivity with less than one minute of set-up.

fast food takes over China

Hallelujah, my diarrhea has run out of steam!

Back to eating all sorts of funky things...

I am trying out this new way of posting to my blog via email... This
helps me bypass the web restrictions while I am traveling in China,
and allows me to post on the go from my iPhone. Boy, technology sure
is cool.

This post is dedicated to the Chinese Colonel (doesn't he look Asian?
Different from the american colonel, right?) and it's legions of fans
that line up to get jook (rice porridge) and yo tao (oily Chinese
fried dough sticks) every day. There's a KFC on almost every corner of
a Chinese city these days!

There are also scores of cute fast food shops popping up every where
in China. They are distinctly Chinese: or example, i had a lychee
seaweed passionfruit drink at an adorable place called Happy Lemon in
Beijing.

Hello, massive obesity epidemic!

when you're sliding into home, and your pants are full of foam...

...diarrhea, diarrhea!

I have been battling some serious loose stool and bad gas cramps for the last 3 days nicely summarized by this version of the diarrhea song:
"When you're walking like CP3O
and your crap looks like radicchio
Diarrhea, Diarrhea"

I should have known that eating 3 yuan (that's 40 US cents a bowl) street food throughout the weekend would result in this mess!

I suspect that the following cold noodle dish near the Taoist Golden Temple may have been source of the culprit microorganism. It's supposed to not be spicy, but you may notice how red the sauce is! Food is *spicy* in Yunnan. Perhaps I got too brave and felt so Chinese that I allowed myself to eat raw, not-recently-cooked cold street dishes. I don't even want to imagine how long and where these noodles and pickled veggies may have been sitting before I ate them.



After 2 days of pain and waking up with a fever yesterday, I decided it was time for some cipro antibiotic for perhaps ETEC (traveler's e coli diarrhea). When I told my work colleagues about this, they all laughed at me. "Cipro is useless! It won't do a thing against the bacteria in China!"

Bad news: since people randomly take antibiotics on their own from any old pharmacy on the street (without prescription, of course), there's a ton of bacterial resistance. That's why cipro might be useless here; it has been widely available and unregulated, so resistance to this medication is rampant. I still have loose stool after 2 doses. Hmmm.

I'll see where this goes... single case study on the use of cipro against traveler's diarrhea in China.

Hopefully this won't happen (I'm still working full force while here!):
"Now you think you're feeling better
but you keep on getting wetter:
Diarrhea, diarrhea....!"


P.S. You can check out more lovely renditions of the diarrhea song here: www.diarrheasong.blogspot.com

hooray! i'm blogging in China!

I made it to Kunming! As you can see in the photo above, Kunming is a large urban center with loads of people and concrete. If you squint through the smog, you can see some mountains in the background. I'm hoping to get to one of those hills this weekend. It's May Day (International Labour Day, Worker's Day) in China, so I don't have formal work duties on Monday. This is great because I have been working my butt off over the last several days (and in the weeks leading up to this trip). Yay for 3-day weekends!




Michael Pollan would approve of my breakfasts in China! Almost all of what I eat has a single whole food ingredient: bok choy greens, snap peas, soybeans/tofu, watermelon, honeydew, some fruit I don’t know the name of which has white flesh and small black seeds that come out in my poo.

I am slowly settling into life here. The downside of jet lag is that I get up each morning exactly at 5 am, and since I am going to bed at midnight because I am working late at night, that means 5 hours of sleep each night. It's not quite enough for me. The upside is that I have enough time before I go to the hospital to do sitting meditation for 30 minutes, yoga for one hour, and sometimes 30 minutes of deep relaxation thrown in. It's a great way to start my day, and I think it keeps me grounded amidst all the work intensity.




Above is one of the Yunnan special treats: rose petal cakes. It consists of dry flakey dough with fragrant sweet rose petals inside. The best part is that I bought it from a bakery next door to the apartment I will be moving into tomorrow called RAMBO Bread Works. GRRRRrrr…

In terms of work, it has already been interesting, rewarding, and a big (though good) challenge on this trip. I don’t have any pictures of me at work (since I am often running around at the hospital), but perhaps later.

I enjoy this work. I am tired from my 12 hour days, but this work definitely feels meaningful in a big way. I saw a bunch of patients yesterday, and feel more grounded to be connected with patients (who really put up with a lot here, as witnessed when the 27 year old man totally discolored and wasted from his advanced liver disease, TB in his lungs and belly, and another painful disease – MAC- smiled and shook my hand and told me how grateful he was to be examined even though it hurt like hell), and also happy that I can offer concrete, practical and real help to the clinicians. There are of course internal politics and power issues I need to navigate, so it will yet to be seen what we can accomplish. I have already a list of concrete interventions that I think we can help with, including big things like task-shifting to community organizations and small things like hand sanitizer. It's great to see it all coming together in a real, tangible way.




This Chinglish bag from my hotel room contained the Ethernet cable I’m using right now to tunnel to my blog (boy, that was an interesting challenge!). It says how I feel sometimes: while the internet miraculously connects me to you from around the globe and allows me to do this international work, it is also the “Non-Gift” that keeps me from being fully present to my environment. With that said, I’m going to upload this post, turn off my computer, and go out to explore the May Day parade and the temples of Kunming!

happy tiger year!

Grrrr....

food fun II

OK, guess what this is:



above: a tea egg chick fetus, a Hangzhou delicacy. Yes, the chickie fetus gets eaten with the rest of the egg. Beak optional. (Is this vegetarian or poultry? Hmmm...)

below: Bruce Lee has a fast food chain in China! (Boy, is he turning in his grave?) My cousin says that it's quite well-received among the young people. They can get meals like "healthy ginger chicken stew" there. I got the red bean rice balls. Pretty tasty... for fast food.







More to come: I have a bajillion food photos and will sift through them and post more soon.

Shanghai'ed: favorites

Here are some of my favorite images from roaming around Shanghai:



above: in an alleyway of the painfully hip commercial art area called the Taiking Road Art Centre



above: the view of Pudong River from my hotel room. Yes folks: that's SMOG.





above: one of the many the Mao Tse-Tung tribute sections of the Shanghai Chinese Propaganda Museum, though this one had an impressive collection of mini Mao statues that filled a wall.



above: OMG! A Smart Car in Shanghai! Modernization to the max.



above: Crazy Harajuku-type fashionistas populate Shanghai too.

the cake that fell from the sky

Above: China is the proud home of the world's fastest train, which I took from Beijing to Shanghai, a 9 hour trip.

"the cake that fell from the sky and landed in my lap"

My China Pangaea colleague Thomas uses this saying when something awesome unexpectedly happens.


After working 150 hours in the last 10 days (that's about 15 hours a day for 10 days straight), sleeping 5 or less hours per night, inhaling several metric tonnes of second hand smoke and being exposed to endless gobs of public spittle, double dipping at restaurants and a society with poor hand-washing and general hygiene, I of course have gotten sick with some respiratory viral infection.


I've been hacking up some mean yellow-green-black mucus, and I reckon that some of it is pollution and cigarette smoke related. Now I know why I have a bunch of Chinese women patients who have never smoked themselves but have bad lung cancer. China is a giant lung cancer and respiratory illness factory for anyone living here.


Back to the cake. Finally I have a little break from the intense work meetings and I have a bit of freedom to work at my own pace. I find that I am far more efficient this way. I decided to take the fastest train in the world, the EMU (I think it might stand for electro-magnetic something) from Beijing to Shanghai. The train was very comfortable, and I initially slept well on my soft sleeper bunk, lulled by the hum and soft movements of the train. But at 5 am I awoke with a hacking cough that wouldn't stop, and felt terrible for my 3 bunk mates: men who were rather surly to begin with. After getting off the train in Shanghai, I carried my 45 pound suitcase and 25 pound backpack up and down several flights of stairs during morning rush hour. Passengers blocked me in on the subway train and wouldn't move so I could get off, so I yelled at everyone to give way and pushed through, throwing in a couple English cuss words along the way. By the time I reached Eton Hotel, I was sweaty in my big down coat and long underwear (good for -10 degree Beijing but not for Shanghai), tired and sick, and generally pissed at the bad manners of my root countrymen.


I expected it, but my face fell nonetheless when the man at registration told me that check in is at 2 pm. It was 8:30 am. I was dying to rest without carrying luggage around. Then the cake fell from the sky: he told me that he'd allow me to get a room anyway...and then the sprinkles came down: since the non-smoking room I wanted was not available, he gave me a free upgrade to a better room with a view of the Huangpu River ...and free breakfasts. Awesome!!!



When I arrived on the 27th (non-smoking) floor, I was greeted by a statue of the Boddhisattva Guanyin (above). I have arrived. I am home!

Hurray for cakes from the sky.

i've died and gone to Pretz heaven

So much Pretz, so little time.



above: my cousin Qing and me with GIANT POCKY. Chinese people looooove their snacks. Yum!

In other news....from the January 27th "China Global Times" newspaper:
-legislation has been introduced in China and advocates have hit the streets to ban the eating of cats and dogs
-a competition has begun to decide on the renovation of Bruce Lee's house in Hong Kong
-a man in Wuhan has sued his barber 100 yuan for cutting off his 3 lucky 20-year-old mole hairs