Migrant Worker

I caught Newsweek’s “Four Hours in Kunming” piece online, part of their continuing series of pared-down travel recs, and was inspired (or perhaps uninspired) enough to write a couple of my own:

Four hours in Kunming for the bourgeoisie:

Instead of Yunnan Nationalities Village, check out Yunnan Nationalities Museum. Granted, there are no giant stone phalluses surrounded by crowds of half-naked Wa minority dancers, but the overall picture you’ll get of the ethnic minorities of China will be a bit less exploitative. This is one of the best museums in Kunming (read: actually worth going to) and boasts a wide range of textiles, jewelry, and displays of the art, archetecture, and traditional tools of the 25 official minority groups represented in Yunnan.

Climb Xishan if you’re feeling energetic, but if you’re super lazy like me, catch a bus to Golden Temple, north of the city. Make the much shorter trek to the top for a decent view of Kunming and then explore the temple complex and surrounding parks and gardens. Bring a frisbee and take advantage of some of the only open grass in the province. If you’re rich, head next door and pony up the 100 (or is it 200?) RMB to visit the World Hortacultural Expo 99 gardens, then feast at the excellent Thai restaurant inside.

Skip 1910 La Gare du Sud and try out ShiPing Huiguan for Yunnan fare in a historical courtyard complex just south of Green Lake Park. Same food, half the price, half the tourists, and better local atmosphere (although the place is upscale and really clean). Periodic performances of traditional Yi minority songs by beautiful girls in costume are unintrusive and actually add to the experience. Stroll down to Green Lake Park after dinner and watch all of Kunming come out to play. (For the adventurous, try out any one of these restaurants specializing in Yunnan mushrooms. It’s all in Chinese, I know, I know, sorry.)

Instead of drinking Pu’er tea to relax, head to the natural hot spring spa, Dianchi Spring Spa, near lake Dian. Forget four hours, because for just over $10 US, you can the whole day relaxing in beautiful outdoor pools of scalding hot water. Throw in a few more bucks for massage, rubdown, fish eating your skin off, bowls of delicious ramen and pitchers of ice cold beer etc. This place is posh and clean and will give you fluffy terrycloth bathrobes and enormous towels and will not steal your swimsuit if you leave it behind. Oh yeah, they’re open ‘till 3 AM. Find them here.

Four hours in Kunming for the proletariat:

Check out the awesome free (or very cheap) exhibit on the minorities of Yunnan at Yunnan Nationalities University on 1-2-1 Street. Bus 10 and/or 55 will get you there, get off at the Minzu Daxue/ 民族大学 stop, walk through the main gate and ask around, someone will direct you to the museum.

Grab a map and stroll through Yunnan University’s campus south to Green Lake Park and then over to Yuantong Temple. Admission to the temple should be around 5 RMB, it’s a legitimate working temple filled with average Kunming people and few tourists. Don’t be afraid to wander off the main streets into some of the tiny alleyways and explore along the way. If you notice a wet market, step in and check out the selection of unidentifiable produce, tofu products, and animals you’d never want to eat. Help yourself to some grilled tofu, deep fried corn cakes or potatoes, fruit on a stick, or whatever other street food you happen across.

Eat at Heavenly Mana (located just next to Salvador’s Coffee Shop on Culture Alley). The menu boasts all the local Kunming specialties and has been fully translated into English. It’s a challenge to spend more than 15 RMB/person on a meal here, but if you’re looking to splurge, grab some homemade ice cream (10 RMB) at Salvador’s after dinner, or walk north along the alleyway about three minutes and get a cup of pure mango (5 RMB?) in the blender from Fresh juicebar.

If all the walking around tired you out, go to Linna’s Massage for a fantastic massage in a very unadorned little shop. Linna is blind, fluent in English, and reads English braille fluently as well. Her mother and a couple other staff also give massages — prices are clearly marked and last I was there it cost 25 RMB/hour for full body massage. Linna’s is located a 5 minute walk past the main gate of Yunnan University on Qingyun Jie/ 青云街.

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Just ran into this article on South Dakota State University president Peggy Miller, who has just retired. I don’t have much of a personal connection to SDSU, although I spend a couple weekends there back in high school competing in their debate tournament. On the other hand, I did run into a group of SDSU reps, including Mrs. Miller’s husband, on the campus of Yunnan Normal University in 2004. I heard some rumors floating around that there were people from South Dakota on the campus, so I headed out and managed to find them finishing up a dorm tour. I exchanged some cards and contact info with the reps, but never heard back from them.

One way she has done that is by expanding SDSU’s international studies programs. Students now are able to attend universities across the globe, paying only what they would for tuition at SDSU. Last school year, almost 175 South Dakota State students studied abroad. In September 2004, she and her husband, Bob, led a contingent of SDSU staff and students to Kunming, China to visit Yunnan Normal University and discuss an ongoing exchange with that school. She not only wanted students to check out the study opportunities there, but the nightlife and the social opportunities to ensure it was a place young Americans would want to go. Matt Anderson, a 21-year-old biology and pre-med major from Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, was on that trip. A product of the prairie who had never strayed much beyond the Midwest, Anderson said the culture shock was enormous - but the experience was priceless. “It was incredibly valuable to meet students over there and get their perspective on America,” Anderson, a senior, says.

I always hoped that there would be progress on the study abroad program they were hoping to establish, but haven’t heard anything about it in the last 16 months in Kunming. Most kids from South Dakota, even the brightest and most successful ones, don’t consider out of state options for college, let alone international study abroad.

A cursory search seems to indicate that SDSU has made a few exploratory trips to Kunming but has yet to establish a formal exchange program of any kind. They’ve also published a serious mis-estimate of Kunming’s population (they say 1 million, accurate figures over 4 million).

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Last Friday, my usual 10-minute bus ride from home to the office was extended to over 20 minutes as the bus crept through a teeming crowd at the corner of Longquan and Baiyun road. I’d been watching the progress of renovations to the old ShengXing supermarket each day as I passed for the last six months, but only recently did I realize what was going on: the huge building had been sold to Carrefour, and a new branch was opening in Kunming.

I did a bit of snooping around to see if the expansion was being greeted with media attention, and found this article in the International Herald Tribune. It explains that Carrefour, a French company, has pursued aggressive expansion in the developing world. Kunming gets a mention, too:

Carrefour has about 7,000 outlets in 29 countries and opened its 80th Chinese superstore in Kunming last month, according to its Web site.

But wait! The branch on my bus route just opened last week! What gives?

Turns out Carrefour has opened two new Kunming branches in the last month or so, to augment the two branches we already have. I can’t say I mind, because weekend trips to the downtown Carrefour generally make me feel as if I am a salmon, slowly swarming upstream to my ancestral breeding ground (whole wheat bread and imported cheeses) while attempting to avoid bears (businessmen screaming into their cellphones), dams (housewives with heaping carts who have run into each other — literally or figuratively — and having a lengthy conversation) and toxic waste (the fish section).

If anyone has any specific political objections to these stores or the company I’d love to hear them. As I see it, they provide safer meats which they are sourcing locally, they sell organic produce (can’t tell where it’s sourced, possibly outside of province but not international imports), and their non-organic produce is pretty worthless so people who don’t want organic will still buy at farmer’s markets. Their clothes and plastic crap section isn’t any cheaper than smaller stores, so they are only getting the business of people who don’t want to bargain or people who are willing to pay extra for one stop shopping — still a very small proportion of Chinese consumers.

Most big box stores in China actually generate an extensive market area of smaller shops in the surrounding areas. I think eventually these stores may do some local economic damage, but at this point, I’m not seeing it.

See the above map for the locations of old (red) and new (red-yellow) Carrefours in Kunming. The red labels are generally what I would tell a taxi driver if I wanted to go there (along with Jia Le Fu 家乐福 of course).

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I’m hopefully well on the way to getting my Chinese text fixed (a big thank you to Michael, Princeton University alum and IT wizard who also knows Chinese). I’ve also been messing with the way things look a bit in the last week, please pardon my schizophrenic style updates for just a while longer, as I hadn’t touched html, movable type, or really anything like this in my life until about 3 weeks ago.

Along the same vein (learning new skills for a new environment), Lexi, the other Princeton in Asia fellow here in Kunming, pointed out this excellent resource to me a few days back. This website gives you access to a search-able, route-generating bus schedule for the city of Kunming. I guess it is only useful if you are 1. in Kunming and 2. read/write Chinese, so that is probably a grand total of one other person reading my blog (Lexi) and since she is the one who told me about the site in the first place, what I should be doing is apologizing for wasting your time. Sorry.

And now for something completely different —

I enjoyed this article in Chinadaily about a man who was beaten up for refusing to hire a prostitute. After turning the girl down and refusing to pay off the owner of the hotel (near the train station — best place for anything illegal in Kunming), some hired thugs beat him up.

Based on what I’ve heard from other NGO staff who work in the field, the going rate for a sex worker starts around 15-20 RMB/sex act and in sketchy hotels near Kunming’s railway station, it probably won’t get any pricier than 200 RMB. My advice to you, dear reader: just hire the hooker. Worst case scenario, you’re out about $23 US and you don’t get assaulted by hired goons.

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As you may already be aware, discrimination during hiring in China is not only permissible, but completely accepted and at times encouraged. Height, weight, and “attractiveness” requirements are commonly listed on job descriptions for a broad range of positions in which you would never have imagined that looks played any role. The vast majority of offices will require all applicants to attach a photo to their CV. I took my own resume head shot photo a few weeks back, wearing a blouse and jacket above the waist and a scruffy pair of athletic shorts and dirty red slippers below the waist. But local Kunming news has been reporting on a new obstacle between this soon-to-be-unemployed migrant worker and her next job: PREGNANCY TESTING

Apparently a few young women were asked to take a pregnancy test before starting work at a Kunming company, as reported by China daily here.

Feeling angry and embarrassed, the three went to the human resources manager, who said their refusal to take the test indicated that they were pregnant and told them they would need to have abortions to keep their jobs.

The article goes on to mention that 4 out of 10 companies that require health checkups for employees also request pregnancy testing.

I grudgingly attach a photo to my resume, although I know it is used to discriminate on the basis of race while hiring. I’ve thought long and hard about this one, but I am not really sure how I can both effectively resist the picture-attaching thing and actually get jobs.

But let it be known that I will NEVER NEVER NEVER take a pregnancy test in order to get a job, regardless of what is locally acceptable. This is almost as bad as South Dakota, where abortions are only legal if you have been “Napolied”

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Everyone in Kunming goes to Salvadors a lot. They’ve got a pretty decent business going, built on the fact that they take good care of their staff so there is very little turnover, and thus, the service doesn’t suck. Also the ice cream is excellent, as in, if I were eating this in a boutique ice cream shop in the US, I wouldn’t be disappointed. Anyway, I was impressed to see this article from CNN… I wonder who covered this and why anyone from CNN — or even a freelancer— was down here in Kunming looking at businesses.

The guys who own Salvadors have done a great job leveraging their “restaurant” into a broader range of businesses, including selling packaged coffee (Starbucks style) and logo T-shirts (gotta get me one of those). Dunno if the article mentions this, but last I heard, the guys were looking into expanding to new locations around China. Great idea, but why would anyone want to leave Kunming?

One gap that needs to be filled here is a creative tour/trekking service based near Kunming… almost everyone on their way to Vietnam/Laos or Northwest Yunnan/Tibet is stuck here for a couple days twiddling their thumbs. Meimei’s Cafe (which may or may not still exist, since the entire city block it occupies in Jinghong was scheduled for demolition) used to do a good job of this for backpackers in Xishuangbanna. I have often wondered if Salvadors could do the same. I think the biggest catch would be figuring out cool stuff to do within a couple hours’ drive of Kunming.

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My friend Chris, who runs a consultancy called Meridian Group HK, recently released a new version of the website GoKunming.com. I have high hopes for this site, because at this point there is absolutely no competition for blogs, information, or forums in Kunming. So far the content isn’t very rousing, but hey, nothing interesting really happens in Kunming anyway.

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