Commentaries on and insights about China.
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"Buck" Freeman, by Mike Palmer
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While house hunting in North Carolina recently, I met a professor whose work in East Asian Studies at Davidson College is supported by a grant from the Freeman Foundation. In the course of our conversation I told her of my interest in the Stilwell Museum in my home town of Chongqing. She asked if I knew that the Freeman Foundation had made a large grant to that museum. My curiosity piqued, I decided to write Houghton "Buck" Freeman to ask how this came about. Since we were both boys in Shanghai years ago, I am sure we must have known one another, but memory fails me as to how or where. |
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I received a nice reply and some pictures of the refurbished museum. It seems that four years ago, Buck returned to Chongqing for the first time since he was a junior naval attaché at our embassy there during World War II. (At that time the name of the city was commonly spelled "Chungking.") Noting that the museum looked a little seedy, Buck contacted the city government and offered to help spruce it up if the City of Chongqing would match his foundation grant. That same day his offer was accepted.
The photo below shows my brother and me, in 1993, donating our Dad’s wartime invention, an aluminum drum for transporting aviation fuel by air over the "Hump" (the Himalayas) from India. This was an important technique for reducing the weight of the fuel containers, allowing more of the precious payload to reach Chongqing. The woman in the photo is Nancy Easterbrook, one of General Stilwell’s daughters.
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For those whose historical memories don’t go back quite that far, let me explain that Joseph Stilwell was one of the outstanding military leaders of his day. While his peers, the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, received more glamorous assignments, Stilwell, who spoke Chinese, was ordered to create a Chinese force to prosecute the war against Japan on the Chinese mainland. This was logistically and politically an almost impossible job, not least because President Chiang Kaishek, whom Stilwell grew to hate, was uncooperative. Nevertheless, Stilwell created a force which he led against the Japanese in Burma, successfully opening a supply road into China. For a brief period at War’s end, he was quite famous, even being mooted as a possible presidential candidate. But he was far too blunt and plain spoken for that. He died of cancer not long after war’s end. |
CAFAM members may be interested to learn of some of the many ways the Freeman Foundation has benefited activities in Maine. For example, the Chinese opera demonstration at Bates on March 26 came courtesy of a Freeman grant. Each summer there is a seminar for Maine teachers, called, "Views of the East: Teaching China, Korea, and Japan in Maine Schools." This is also funded by the Foundation. Of course the three major private Colleges in Maine have all received substantial donations as well. And attentive listeners to National Public Radio will occasionally hear credit being given to the Foundation for support of Asia coverage.
Probably no single individual has done more to sponsor East Asian understanding than Buck Freeman. One might ask how one arrives at a position to give away up to $50 million annually. That itself is an interesting business saga. Perhaps I will write an account of that in a future Newsletter. [By Mike Palmer from May 2005CAFAM Newsletter]
If It's Dusty, This Must Be Beijing, by Mike Connelly
A few years ago, the spring dust storms here were so large and so powerful that they blew across and hit Seoul, an unwelcome surprise for the Capitalist South Korean neighbors. Locals in Beijing may not exactly enjoy the spring storms that some years sweep in and dump tons of desert dust everywhere, but they are at least able to deal with them. It's not like Washington, D.C., hit by half an inch of snow and municipal paralysis shutting down the federal government. Here, whether snow or sand, people just put on their face masks and get out their brooms and sweep it all up.
Supposedly, these are the worst such storms in six years. But as with the biggest, best, worst or most, you want to know exactly what they mean. Do they mean the winds were the most powerful? Or that they lasted the longest? Or that they dumped the most dust? Or that they caused the most economic disturbance, or triggered the highest jump in broom sales? Statistics are a great way to mislead, and having seen some really good storms in Beijing, I have my doubts about this new record.
Less than six years ago, I walked Louis and Patrick to their school, and when I turned around to head home, the buildings two short blocks away were gone. Not obscured, not hard to see, just invisible. The sun should have been up, but you couldn't tell. Our street had vanished. It was like being in a very large, noisy box, with some buildings in it, and some people, and some trees, with the sides and top of the box made of yellow-brown grit and noise.
That storm left a layer over every surface in our apartment, despite the closed and locked windows, and the outer and inner doors opened only long enough to admit people. Floors, tables, chairs, desks had a layer of semi-sticky grit.
If these recent storms were so bad, I ask the news editors, where is all the grit? My desk is clean. Even my bike, which has been sitting on the porch since we left in February, has just the usual dust on it.
But if it's howling dust one day, it's a steady rain the next. And then, Ahh! Blue skies and a lovely blustery day follow, such as yesterday. White clouds tearing after one another, the trees with their new, light green leaves bending in the breeze, white fluffy stuff from something like a cottonwood or dogwood rolling along the streets like tiny tumbleweeds. And the flowering trees, of which there are many, all basking in the sun, giving people something to glance at, something other than the recent unpleasant weather to chat about. It's odd that spring should produce some of the dirtiest weather and some of the freshest air of the year, all so close.
For visitors passing through, who have the rotten luck to meet with a couple days of sand storms followed by cold steady rain, and who then miss the payoff of freshly laundered air, one can only wish they had more time to linger.
But for us, listening to the winds outside and the children playing mahjong, we know that days will follow when the air smells brand new, and the sun shines so brightly everything seems to sparkle, and we might think that there is balance after all. [By Michael Connelly from March 2007 CAFAM Newsletter]
Nanjing, by Fred Fagin
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It was a Very Good Year. Yes it was, and it was a time of self-inflicted trial; a great sadness at being away from home, and yet – sweet opportunity, discovery, growth, and sharing. My son Colin (Fan Wei-cheng) and I, Fred (Fan Cen) ventured forth in late June of 2005 to the Middle Kingdom, specifically to Nanjing, the native place of Zhang Li (now Angela in America), my dear Chinese bride and mother of said Colin. |
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Here son and I shared almost a year of fascinating, fulfilling, and frustrating experiences: in the realms of learning, of friendships, of history witnessed, of challenges met and overcome, of travel to many places of beauty and spiritual significance, and of surviving the onslaught of air pollution and the standard "China diet" of the modern city.
It had been Angela's and my decision to bring our nine-year-old to this birthplace and childhood home of his mother, to "immerse" him in the culture, language, trials, and joys of life in modern China. Here were the homes and lives of his PoPo (grandmother), two aunties and their families, some chums of mine from an earlier stint working in China in 1993, and many new and fascinating people to be met during this year of teaching - for me, and learning - for Colin.
Our abode was a homey four-room apartment (see the reality check on this in a future episode!) in the "foreign experts" residence at the prestigious Southeast University. The campus, which is located in the heart of Nanjing, is an old and lovely place, and this northeast corner teachers hideaway had been created in the style of a park, with a variety of beautiful trees, bronze statues honoring men of letters, fragrant flowering shrubs, and numerous flowers and ornamental grasses, arranged in a soothing and meandering pattern below and around our "experts" five-story bastion of security. The wide wild world lay outside, just beyond the perimeter wall.
Bicycles were readily acquired, safety rules practiced, and we made the city our own in very short order, finding remote back roads of unheralded sub-cultures, colors, sounds, sights, and aromas. Foods of every description were proffered for our enjoyment, and we dined and 'funned' at the bright-lights entertainment strip of Hunan Lu and the south end riverside ancient red-light district of Fuzi Miao, at the Hui (Moslem) redoubts with their special menus. And we climbed through bamboo forests and agricultural research zones - up the slopes to the top of the city's own Purple-Gold Mountain. From the peak of this lofty height, we could peer down across a 270-degree panorama of the eastern, northern, and western sectors of this great city. We could see miniature trains winding along the riverbanks and in and out of tunnels along the lower foothills of the sprawling suburban perimeter of the city below us. This is but a sample of the many scenes we would be thrilled to enjoy.
Nanjing, with more than 4000 years of recorded history, is a city steeped in both fabled charm and unimaginable tragedy. At a strategic location on a bend of the great Yangtze River, she lies only about 160 miles inland from Shanghai, the hub of modern China.
Nanjing and its greater metropolitan area are proud of their many schools of higher learning: universities, colleges, technical schools, science research institutes, forestry and mining engineering schools, teachers colleges, and the burgeoning and ubiquitous schools offering the MBA, avidly sought by young Chinese as the way to "Strike it Rich"!!
I taught across the river on the suburban out-campus of Southeast University, in the capacity of professor of English for Academics, Speaking English for Business, Writing English for the English majors, etc. Meanwhile, dear Colin bounced from public school teachers to an inept tutor at the home of an old friend of Mrs. Fagin’s. He nevertheless enjoyed the life of Riley, or maybe Wai-Lei (Foreign Thunder), while gaining nada in the realm of scholastics, but acceding to the lofty pinnacle of Cute Little Foreign Kid in the eyes of his charmed teachers and contemporaries.
In the ensuing year, the scenario shifted a good bit in Colin's favor, while I experienced some rewarding highs in my teaching, together with some lows in the theater of relations with the omnipresent and insidious Waiban, known and despised by all. These Commie Campus Cops, ostensibly poised to "assist" foreign teachers with their various financial, cultural, legal, healthcare (or lack thereof), etc. needs, in fact aimed to spend as little effort, as infrequently, and with the least possible charm on the mongrel Laowais (Dear Old Foreigners), having planted their proboscises firmly and unpleasantly in the region of one’s situpon. Nasty beasts. [By Fred Fagin from November 2006 CAFAM Newsletter]
New Year in Beijing, by Mike Connelly
We call it Chinese New Year, but they call it Spring Festival. I've argued with many Chinese over the years about this misnaming. I think it should be called Winter Festival, because the weather is always cold. "No, no," they tell me. "Now it is Spring and it will soon be warm!"
One interesting thing I just learned is that until recently the Chinese did not use weeks. Weeks, with weekends, are a Western concept not used in China until the adoption of the universal calendar. The Chinese lunar calendar (also misnamed, as it doesn't really match up with the lunar cycle-- which is why the Chinese have not mere Leap Days, but entire Leap Months) simply started on chu-yi (Day One) and spun through until the end. There was no weekend of rest, just steady work or school, punctuated by the holidays.
Which may be in part why Spring Festival lasts so long. Starting with what we might call New Year’s eve, the night everyone stays up late watching special programs on CCTV and playing mah jongg, the holiday runs through until the Lantern Festival. That comes on the fifteenth day of the new year. But school kids have vacation starting about two weeks before New Year, so they really have about a month off. In Beijing, many restaurants and shops close for ten days or so, as the staff disappears to hui jia or “return home” to visit family and friends. Planes, trains, and busses are absolutely jammed with people on the move. This year, unprecedented winter storms disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands.
In Beijing, officially sanctioned fireworks stores (more like large tents) sprang up. There were about 550 of them across the city. The result was predictable. Fireworks are officially allowed only on New Year eve and New Year day (plus the fifth, the day to eat chun bing or "spring rolls" filled with sprouts, vegetables, and shredded meat, and the Lantern Festival). However fireworks were a daily, or rather nightly, barrage. Nightly there were Roman candles, firecrackers, and pyrotechnics in the sky. The mood was quite jolly: "Could you sleep last night?" I would ask. "Oh, not very well. Ha ha ha!" [By Michael Connelly from May 2008 CAFAM Newsletter]
NGOs in China, by Jasmine Qu
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Newsletter editor’s note: Among many issues created by China’s rapid development, the issue of organizations not controlled by the one-party state has repeatedly emerged. Before "Reform and Opening" the socialist system sponsored and controlled all organizations, whether national, provincial, or local; economic, social, political, or cultural. The recent advent of entrepreneurialism, a freer labor market, a freer press, and the (limited) rule of law has challenged the government to loosen up. NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are a particularly interesting phenomenon. They were unheard of before the 1980s. Still in their infancy, they face official suspicion and have no tradition of private philanthropy to tap. In this follow-up article to her account of waste pickers in the November-December issue, Jasmine Fei Qu sheds light on one particular case, and reflects on the difficulties facing China’s NGOs. |
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The Institute of Contemporary Observation (ICO) is a China-based NGO in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong. My two-month internship there in 2006 offered me an opportunity to work with waste pickers as well as a valuable experience inside a Chinese NGO.
In some ways, what ICO has achieved is very impressive. Its name has appeared in major international newspapers because of its expertise on the south China labor movement. Recently, its director was even interviewed by the Brunswick Times Record for a report about Shenzhen city. Besides its reputation as a research institute, it has conducted several projects relating to south China migrant workers, including a Migrant Worker Community College, in cooperation with UC Berkeley, and the waste picker project. It has offered free or low-cost education and vocational training to 3,000 workers. It also provides training programs to factories and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) audits to multinational companies. It is a partner with many famous brands, such as DuPont, Fuji, Xerox and Nokia.
It is not surprising that ICO has received a number of awards from both Chinese and international institutions. In short, ICO is a successful model of a Chinese NGO. It should be a good representative of the emerging Chinese non-profit world.
In 2006, with questions in mind like, “How does ICO work, and what makes it successful?” I went to work for ICO as a summer intern. I mainly worked in the Waste Picker Project, a one-year project, sponsored by the World Bank, aimed at improving the lives of people who sort through refuse. It is one of ICO’s major undertakings.
Although it was a major undertaking by an institute which has more than twelve full-time employees, the World Bank funded it for only $30,000, or $2,500 per month for the whole project. This modest level of support meant that there are things that ICO could not do.
For example, ICO arranged for a group of waste pickers to have physical exams. Serious health problems were discovered. However it couldn’t treat these problems because the funding was not in the budget. Financial limitations also meant that ICO lacked the staffing for follow-up. Staff replacements happened just when project coordinator had worked for a few months, causing the trust just established between the coordinator and waste pickers to collapse.
This problem was exacerbated by the fact that ICO’s operating expenses (such as rent and utilities) as well as expenses on the Migrant Worker Library were not covered by any funding. ICO’s funds only come from oversea resources. Raising money or receiving donations are constrained by extremely tight governmental restrictions.
Financial resources, or their absence, have become a severe issue. Through the study of its history, I discovered that ICO has developed a strategy to deal with this. It has attempted to create as many channels of funding as possible. In particular, it makes money out of promoting CSR. This includes training classes in factories, CSR audits for supply chain factories, and workshops for promotion of the idea of CSR in China. Through these channels, ICO gets money from factories, multi-national companies, and international labor institutions.
However, I wonder whether this solution to ICO’s financial problems will become its principal focus. Will the mission of ICO be altered by this solution? Through interviews of other south China NGOs, I learned that all Chinese NGOs have similar problems. All are funded by foreign sources. Some small ones have only one project based on such funding. Even some large ones, like ICO, can be totally destroyed overnight if they lose financial support from abroad. Survival is the measuring stick of success, and because of the restrictions of fundraising, Chinese NGOs are facing a more difficult challenge than should be the case. [By Jasmine Qu from March 2007 CAFAM Newsletter]
On Chang E,, by Craig Dietrich
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Chang E, the lady in the moon, appears in different versions of Chinese folk legends. She is usually paired with her husband, Hou Yi. The two immortals get demoted to mortals. Hou Yi manages to acquire a pill of immortality, but Chang E swallows it and flees to the moon. (Husbands take note.) |
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In one version, the heavenly couple are doing just fine, when Hou Yi notes that the Jade Emperor’s ten sons have transformed themselves into ten suns (son/sun is not a pun in Chinese, in case you wondered). To rescue mortals from this situation, he shoots down nine of the suns with arrows, leaving just one remaining. Not amused, the Jade Emperor banishes Hou Yi and Chang E to earth and makes them mortals.
Now the Queen Mother of the West gets in the act, when Hou Yi talks her into giving him a pill of immortality. For some reason, he brings the precious medicine home, puts off taking it, and is shocked when he learns that Chang E has popped it in her own mouth. Immortal again, she floats heavenward, and ends up on the moon. She is stuck there because, after all, the Jade Emperor is still mad, so she can’t go to heaven, and she can’t get back to earth, where she would have to deal with a cranky Hou Yi.
Another version has her as an immortal, banished to earth by the Jade Emperor for accidentally breaking something. Down there she meets Hou Yi, who shoots the nine suns from the sky. Now a hero, he wants immortality. Hence the pill, and hence Chang E’s taking and swallowing it and floating off to the moon. (What is it with wives? A fellow can’t leave anything laying around!)
Seems that Hou Yi always ends up lonely on earth and Chang E ends up lonely on the moon.
More recently, Chang E is the name given to the Chinese lunar probe space program, which began a couple years ago. "Chang E 1", the first probe satellite, is scheduled for launch this year. [By Craig Dietrich from September 2007 CAFAM Newsletter]
On Learning Chinese, by Barry Hilton
Some western missionaries felt that Chinese was invented by Satan "to keep the gospel out of China." Is it the most difficult language in the world?
If you ask professional linguists that question, most will probably say that every language is complex in some ways and simple in others, and that they average out to around the same level of complexity. But that’s probably not the kind of answer you’re looking for. If we ask, though, which language is hardest for native English speakers to learn, a pretty good case can be made for the group of closely related languages we call "Chinese". Let’s look at some of the reasons.
One difficulty is that Chinese is unrelated to English. When you study one of English’s cousins in the Indo-European language family, like Spanish, Russian or Hindi, you find plenty of cognates—words similar in sound and meaning—to use as stepping-stones. Learning Chinese means acquiring a vocabulary totally new except for a few borrowings like "typhoon" and "gung ho".
As a second obstacle, Chinese has a phonetic feature that’s hard for English-speaking learners to hear and reproduce. Like English words, Chinese words are made up of consonant and vowel sounds, but each word also has an intonation pattern, or "tone," that’s not optional. The Chinese word liu4 六 means "six"; liu2 留(same consonant and vowels but different tone pattern) means "remain". Ying2mu4 應募 means "screen"; ying1mu3 英畝 means "acre". Jia4zhi2 價值means "value"; jia3zhi1 假肢 means "artificial limb".
Many other languages—like Hungarian or Arabic or Indonesian—lack cognates for English-speaking students to rely on. And some, like Vietnamese, are also tonal. But there’s another obstacle that puts Chinese on a whole different level: its writing system.
If you’ve ever volunteered as a literacy teacher, you know what a frustrating handicap illiteracy is, and how empowered an adult learner feels, as he or she masters the "code" that links familiar sounds with the few dozen squiggles that represent them on paper. People learning Chinese have a far more complicated "code" to master. It impedes not just their ability to read but their ability to broaden their vocabulary and develop other linguistic skills.
The squiggles the Chinese writing system uses—usually called "characters"—don’t represent simple consonant and vowel sounds, the way English letters do. Each one stands for a whole one-syllable word or word element, combining sound and meaning. For example, if a Chinese-like system were used to write English, the word "unbearable" might be written with three squiggles, one for "un", one for "bear", and one for "able". And that "bear" squiggle would be different from the squiggles used in "grizzly bear", "childbearing", and "the right to bear arms"—to say nothing of "barefoot", "Bering Strait", and "baritone". That adds up to a lot of squiggles for learners to memorize—several thousand characters instead of a couple of dozen alphabet letters. Not surprisingly, illiteracy is a major problem in China. (Japanese writing, based on Chinese, uses fewer characters and includes phonetic aids.)
And when you meet a new character (or one whose sound and meaning you‘ve learned and forgotten), how do you look it up? There are hundreds of Chinese dictionaries, and almost as many different systems for arranging characters. Without alphabetical order, tracking down an unknown character is much more labor-intensive than flipping pages while silently mouthing the ABC song. Even when you find the character, you won’t necessarily know—without still more searching—whether it’s a standalone word or part of a compound like "unbearable".
I hope these comments serve less to discourage than to challenge people interested in learning Chinese. On the upside, the sound system of Chinese is pretty simple except for the tones, and its grammar poses no real difficulties for English speakers. Even the writing system, devilish as it may seem, has fascinated foreigners for centuries, and offers a key to understanding the classical literature and modern economic vitality of one of the great civilizations of the world.
Barry Hilton is a free-lance writer. This article is adapted from a radio program "Talkin’ About Talk" on South Carolina Public Radio. For more, visit http://www.cofc.edu/linguist/archives/. [By Barry Hilton from September 2005 CAFAM Newsletter]
A Voyage to Yangkow, by Donald MacInnis
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Last weekend I visited Yangkow, the small market town downriver from the Nanping Teachers College where I live and teach. I took a 2-hour train to Nanping, and then a one-hour ride in a friend's car to Yangkow where I spent my first year in China at age 20, 1940-41, teaching in a Methodist boys' high school. China was in their third year of a terrible war that ended with VJ Day, August 1945. Our own school was menaced several times when Japanese planes flew over, but they never bombed us, although they did hit an Anglican mission boys' school just upriver from us, killing several students. It was just as well, for we had no bomb shelters; we just scattered outside the town gates into the overgrown hillside. |
In 1940 the only way to get to Yangkow from Nanping was either by small boat or walking. The boat had to be towed through frequent rapids, and was an all-day trip. No wheeled vehicle could get to Yangkow. The farmers carried their produce to town on bamboo shoulder poles, and we depended on local craftsmen to make everything we needed -- chairs, desks, bedding, shoes, clothing, bamboo-pulp paper, etc. We had no electricity, radio, telephone, newspaper, running water, sewers or bakery; but local food was adequate and salt, kerosene for lamps, matches, and other things were brought in from the coast.
Thus, in many ways, life in Yangkow was primitive, yet we had three thriving churches, Methodist, Congregational, and Catholic, all founded by the early missionaries. Two of them had Chinese pastors, but a German missionary priest who smoked cigars (shock!) was pastor of the Chinese church.
All three were destroyed by the "Red Guards" in the 1960s. Pastor Li, an impressive young seminary graduate with a wife and small daughter, told us something of the bad years, when many pastors and Christians were put into labor camps, and worship was forced underground.
Now a new united Protestant Church has been built that has 300 for Sunday services (double that crammed in for Christmas), and other services for young people, women's groups, Bible study, and preparation for baptism.
Pastor Li proudly showed us the Chinese Bibles, printed in China (over 30 million printed so far since 1988), that are now available to anyone in China, and sold at cost. There are other new churches in neighboring towns and villages, most of them new or rebuilt since the bad years of the Cultural Revolution, and most of them without an ordained pastor. Even so, the lay preachers have Bible study guides, and they minister to new and old Christians alike, offering the good news of the birth of Jesus at Christmastime and His death and resurrection as proof of our own salvation through faith.
There is now a thriving new primary school on the steep hillside where our school had been; the old classrooms and dormitories are gone, and a railroad track cuts through the center of our former campus. Nor is there anyone left from my era; all of my teacher-colleagues have passed on, and a new cohort of bright young teachers has replaced them. It is no longer a mission school (there are none in China today), but Pastor Li and the new church have a strong youth group and youth choir and a Sunday School. The gospel is preached openly here and all over China. [By Donald MacInnis from January 2005 CAFAM Newsletter]
Waste Pickers in China, by Jasmine Qu
Jasmine Fei Qu is an exchange student at Bowdoin College majoring in Government and Economics. Her summer internship with a Chinese Non-Government Organization (NGO) involved several projects. One had to do with waste pickers. Here is her account of that experience.
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This past summer I worked with the Institute of Contemporary Observation (ICO), a China-based NGO in Shenzhen. I went to ICO because of its concern for migrant workers and its vision of empowering this underserved group. They are China’s cheap labor force, During the internship, I was mainly involved in ICO’s Waste Picker Project. Funded by the World Bank, it is a one-year project aiming to build a network among Shenzhen waste pickers. This network would allow waste pickers to help each other, enhance their capacity of self-protection, and provide them development opportunities. |
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Shenzhen is very close to Hong Kong and has been booming for the last twenty years. There are about 200,000 waste pickers there. Most come from the rural areas in Henan, Anhui, Hunan, Hubei. They are mostly middle aged or older and lack education and skills. They collect waste to make a living. They are usually homeless and must consume unsanitary food and drinking water, so they are vulnerable to injuries and diseases. They do not have access to urban welfare facilities because of the Chinese hukou household system. (Hukou refers to the residency system, which requires an individual to live in the area designated on his/her permit. Access to education and government services is available only to those who have hukou in that area.) Therefore, waste pickers’ children cannot go to school in Shenzhen. And the city management department often arrests them or destroys their dwellings because they are illegal residents. They endure the urban residents’ discrimination against them. In short, waste pickers are the most vulnerable and most needy segment of the Chinese labor force.
The ICO project started with getting to know waste pickers. Although they live among urban residents every day, no one is interested in knowing who they are, what they do and how they live. Lacking previous research, ICO had to start from scratch. We went to talk to the waste pickers on the street. At first, they were very suspicious about our motivation. However, after reading the description of our program and getting to know us for several weeks, some of them were willing to talk and work with us.
The two groups I worked with were very different. One was composed of people from the same hometown. They come to make extra money in summer and winter and go home to plant and harvest rice during spring and fall. For them, it is a job with a flexible schedule and fair pay (compared with their income at home).
The other group included people from all over China. Some were drug dealers, thieves, or criminals. Almost all have lost their ID cards. We never knew their real names and their true stories. Most have lost contact with their families. They are forced to be waste pickers. It is a way to earn money, to hide from the police, or just to go on with their hopeless lives.
We tried our best to be friends with them and move towards our goal: to build a network. However, the differences among waste pickers were so large that it was impossible to build one network to serve them all. It was extremely hard to keep in touch with some, since they always move around, and the people who we knew left their original group.
Waste pickers were also always suspicious. They tended to focus on what direct personal benefit ICO could bring to them, instead of how to cooperate with ICO and establish a beneficial network. Despite all the difficulties, we still tried to use our limited financial and human resources to make some progress. [By Jasmine Qu from November 2006 CAFAM Newsletter]
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