Alive and well in Shanghai

It's been longer than I'd hoped since I last wrote, but a whole heck of a lot has been going on. A whole lot of difficulty. Monday last week, the professor in charge of international cooperation came out to the field station with a couple of colleagues to host lunch with us. I knew they were coming, but I didn't know that they had called ahead to arrange a dumpling-making party for us. So while we waited for their arrival, the cook had prepared all of the fillings and bought the wrappers, and all of the students working at the field station came to join us in making our own dinner. Great fun! After the bigwigs arrived, plates and plates and plates of food hit the table, and the three of us Americans decided that we should eat family style at one big table rather than dispersed among the 5 tables around the room. So we moved furniture around to join up three of the long tables into one big long feast table. The cool thing about that is that as far as I know those tables are still arranged in that manner. The atmosphere at meal times went from groups of students working together sitting together and not interacting much to one big happy family laughing and chatting throughout dinner. And I noticed they all started playing pool more and even moved the pingpong table down to where it could be used. I like to think we had a little something to do with that.

The rest of that day was difficult. Unfortunately I have developed the reputation for being able to handle the strong alcohol they drink, so the main purpose of hosting that lunch was to down two bottles of baijiu. I'll spare the details, but it didn't end well for all of us. No long term damage done, and everyone is recovered, but I think my phone landed in a stream that was doubling as a toilet at the fish restaurant we ended up at when someone decided I should meet some random dude who works for fisheries.

This whole experience set us back a couple of days recovery, and we had to work hard to make up for lost time and get all of Talia's data recorded. The last night at the field station we had great plans to get out to the desert early, get cameras set up, get the last of her data, and get back to bed. But other things were in store for us that I didn't know about. I was told that some people had a special dinner planned that we should be there for. Okay, fine, let's say our well wishes, eat quickly, and go. Time ticked by, and Talia and I started to get a little anxious that we would be getting back later and later. Finally, we walked into the kitchen to see a fabulous spread of dishes. Our dear cook had been busy all afternoon preparing a joint birthday party for me and Talia (her birthday was in mid April, mine coming up in late May), and Sarah had gone into Fukang to get us each a cake. So we donned our obligate paper crowns and blew out the candles on the crazy spinning candle thing that shoots fireworks and sings "Happy Birthday" until you beat it to death with a rock. Dinner included big plates of shrimp. I'm not sure where he got shrimp in that little town. It's not far from the geographic center of the Eurasian landmass - in other words we were almost as far away from the sea as humanly possible, and I ate shrimp in the desert. No harm no foul. Or is it no foul no harm?

So we made it back to Urumqi, survived yet another banquet, said our goodbyes and the requisite thank yous and "I'm sorry for being so much trouble" and boarded a 46 hour train to Shanghai. The Hangover Express. It was wonderful to be on a train for two days with no one to be held accountable to and no one trying to pour 50% or greater alcohol down our throats to show our happiness! Talia and I slept and slept and slept and read two books each and watched the Chinese countryside whiz past. Our cabin companions were friendly. One was a man who designs jade jewelry and has a fondness for good tea. He shared some tea with us and showed us photos of his work. Talia showed him some of her high speed video of the jerboas which he seemed to find pretty cool. I'm just glad we made it with all of our belongings and the box of embryos was still cool on arrival to the lab in Shanghai. That was the purpose of the two day train - to get the embryos from Xinjiang to Shanghai. Since 2009, it is difficult to do much out there. Shipping or flying with anything remotely questionable is nearly impossible. But at the train station I think they hardly looked at the X-ray machine. 

Two days in Shanghai and then I'm on my way home. I can't wait to be back. I'm looking forward to a big fat cheeseburger and onion rings. And I'm going to start running again and get to the gym more often. This place takes a little something out of me every time I come. In many ways. But I learn so much from the experience, and I guess that counts for a lot.

More on where food comes from

Last night was another late late night of filming in the desert followed by a beer with Talia to unwind. It wasn't until about 3:30 am that I finally drifted off, only to be awoke at 8 am by the woman who had been out with her husband collecting 3-toed jerboas for Talia's work. To make it worth it for them, I agreed to take 40 animals (males and females) so I could go through the females and maybe get a few more embryos. A few ended up being 2, but that puts the final embryo count for that species at 415. Pretty good numbers. Meanwhile, Talia and Sarah finished building the trackway constructed of reclaimed cardboard from the recycle center and filled the bottom with the sand we'd collected yesterday. I think they got some pretty good movies of the animals running along the track and sorted ones that are the most active and easy to get to do what we want.

Once we finished that part of the day's work, we went into town to meet the daughter of the couple collecting jerboas for us. She speaks reasonably good English and had sent me a text message the day before to see if we wanted to hang out. After we got ice cream, we wandered through the market and around town a bit and saw the most amazing thing. I don't know how many people will remember the Sarah Palin interview that was done right around Thanksgiving 2007 where she was standing in front of a guy dropping turkeys into funnels to have their heads chopped off and drained. Well, we saw the chicken equivalent. I looked over to see a pair of yellow bird legs flailing from a body that was head down in a metal funnel. Below the funnel was a bucket of partially congealed blood swarming with flies. Once the bird stopped kicking, the man pulled it out by its feet and dropped the animal into a giant wok full of nasty brown water set over hot coals. The hot water started to loosen the feathers and scales so they started to come off the body. He then took it out of the hot water and dropped it into a big metal drum that had ridged finger-like projections protruding into the barrel. He leaned down to flip a switch, and the drum started to rotate like a washing machine on the spin cycle. As he scooped more hot water into the contraption, the rubber projections caught the feathers and scales until all that was left was a completely naked chicken. He then turned off the motor, fished out the plucked chicken, and handed it over to his wife who gutted it on a makeshift table set up over a cage of live chickens and bagged it up for the person who had purchased the bird. While the whole experience was a bit morbidly fascinating, I think the strangest part was seeing the live chickens in the cage looking at the dangling head of their brethren who had gone before.

Every experience like this just reminds me of how detached we are from our food. We don't even know where our meat comes from. It arrives prepackaged in styrofoam and plastic wrap and could have been butchered days and days ago someplace far from the consumer. I once asked someone here why they don't buy meat from the supermarket, since I've seen packaged meat here also. The answer was that if you buy from the supermarket, it isn't fresh. If you buy from the person at the local market, the animal was killed that morning - or right there in front of you. Every day at this local market, there are 4-5 vendors selling fresh pork. If you arrive early in the morning, you can see the whole butchered carcass - organs, feet, and all - laid out on the table, often with the head on a motorcycle cart in the background. By the end of the day, nothing remains, and each vendor will stay until the last cut is purchased. Nothing is refrigerated which would probably gross people out back home. But it's also not bleached a fake red color or turning gray-green from being kept for too many days before being marked down to the budget meat price. Makes me want to find a local farm share when I get home and do this omnivore thing right.

And of course there's a hedgehog...in the car

We have been getting pretty good videos for the past few days, but it seems the animals have realized we aren't actually predators and have gone on strike. After the first night of filming, Talia was dissatisfied with the lighting and visibility of the animals, so we decided to get a few more lights and dust the jerboas with glitter to make them more reflective and easier to track. Yes, we bedazzled already adorable rodents. Each one got dropped in a plastic bag and exploded out in a poof of fabulousness. I have named one particularly good runner "Speedy Sparklepants". They are hilarious.

 

It's okay that these individuals gave up on running for us, because these 5-toed jerboas are actually not that hard to catch. They do freeze in the light better than the 3-toed ones, so we've actually been able to catch them along the road. The driver has an eagle eye for determining whether objects in the road are rocks or jerboas, and he navigates the car to help catch the animals in the high beams. Tonight Yang even caught two with his bare hands since we had given our few remaining unbroken nets back to the guy who is off catching 3-toed jerboas for us tonight. These jerboas are amazing runners, and Talia got pretty good infrared video of a chase and catch as one went zigzagging along the asphalt. I wish they would have the fear of an untimely demise like that when we're filming in a calibrated setup where she could actually track their movement and get useful data out of it.

 

As we were approaching the field station this evening, a football-sized trundling critter appeared along the very edge of the road. It wasn't moving very fast. Turns out it ordinarily doesn't have to. It was a hedgehog! We all jumped out of the car, and Yang still had on his work gloves, so he just scooped it up into the palms of both hands. The poor little guy immediately pulled his face and legs into a completely enclosed ball of spines. We stood around laughing and marveling at his coolness, and then Yang said "ok, I'm going to take it back to Urumqi tomorrow." He's returning for a day or two to take care of some things, and the folks in his lab seem to have decided that they can care for any small animal they can catch. The trouble is that we no longer had any empty cages in the car that could contain the guy. Yang was close to just dropping him in the trunk until we convinced him that was a really bad idea, so he jumped in the front seat instead. We were only just around the corner from the field station anyway, but the driver seemed quite concerned he would unball himself and get loose in the car, so he held a screwdriver at the ready and tapped the hedgehog a few times when it seemed he felt the coast was clear. He's now chilling in a cage in the lab. Probably a little annoyed that he was just trundling along, minding his own business…

 

We've also been having a great time immersing ourselves in the local Kazakh culture. Yesterday we had to head into Fukang to find glitter and a few more flashlights to illuminate the arena, so we made an afternoon of it. I now know the Chinese characters for camel, and I have to admit that I now understand the pictographic nature of the language – the characters luo tuo actually really do look like two camels. Yang asked if we wanted to try camel's milk, so we all had our eyes peeled for the characters for camel until we found a lower level shop selling camel's milk and camel yoghurt. This was such a huge traveler's no no – unpasteurized dairy products. But the local people were coming in a steady stream, it was all refrigerated, and I have a supply of antibiotics just in case. It was tasty. The yoghurt was a bit strange. Super tart and tasted very slightly carbonated with tiny chunks. The milk though was amazing. Thick rich whole milk with a slightly grassy flavor more like yak's milk. We bought a half liter and used it to make milk tea the next morning. Yummy. The same shop also sold fabric items: Kazakh wedding dresses, pillow forms, and various bits of bedding and decorations. Sarah and I spent a solid hour rifling through piles of gorgeous pieces with brightly colored floral patterns embroidered in a traditional Kazakh style. I found a wall hanging that's meant to go behind a bedframe or along the wall behind a sofa. It's going to be a gorgeous conversation piece in my future house some day.

 

We set off this morning in search of cardboard pieces so that Talia can build a trackway to film the animals' movement up close on a sandy substrate, and after scavenging through the local recycling center, Sarah and Yang went off to the desert to bring back buckets of sand while Talia and I took care of a few things at the field station. They returned about an hour later, and Sarah bounced out of the car yelling "Hurry, they're going to take us to the horse races! Kazakh horse races!" So we all piled into the car and drove a  few minutes south of 222 and out into an open field full of people, cars, trailers, and motorcycles. There were several hundred Kazakh people excitedly watching the horses race past on the bare dusty earth. The story I got was that a wealthy Kazakh man in the area arranged the races in celebration of his son or daughter's wedding. The Kazakh horses are a bit smaller than horses we're familiar with, and they were ridden bareback by young men/older boys. The track is 5 kilometers around, and they have to run the track in 6 laps, so it's more of a race for endurance than speed. These poor horses had worked up a lather by the time we arrived since they were on the last lap. I'm not sure who won, because I was too distracted by all of the men trying very enthusiastically to communicate with us. As soon as we arrived, so many curious pairs of eyes focused on us. Two big burly guys kept wanting to pose for photos with us, and a whole family asked me to take their picture. Super warm and friendly people which made the whole experience just as much about the folks watching the race as it was about the race itself. And back to the topic of camels – apparently the top prize for the race was one camel. I wish I'd been able to race and win a camel.

Of course there are chickens...

We just got back from the desert about a half hour ago, at 2:30 am, after a pretty successful evening. We went earlier in the day to build a fenced off enclosure where we could run the animals in front of Talia's infrared cameras. As we were getting into the car, I said to the girls "I'm not expecting anything, but I'm curious to see if the driver decides to pitch in at any point since he seems really interested in what we're doing." I didn't expect it because we're just paying the guy to drive, not to help with the field work. But he quickly surprised me by heading straight up the sand dune with us and then helping Talia to construct the fenced area while Sarah and I set traps to see what we might catch this evening (6 more gerbils for anyone who is keeping count). By the time we returned to where they were working, they had all of the stakes in the ground and the netting in place and were wiring the last side. Pretty good teamwork with some charades and basic Chinese.

The driver was concerned about leaving our things in the desert and wanted to call someone to come keep watch while we went back into town for dinner, but we convinced him that no one would bother any of it. Plus he stopped as we were leaving and asked some folks who were collecting medicinal plants in the desert to just keep an eye out for as long as they would be there. It was getting dark soon anyway, so I wasn't too worried about more people coming along. After dinner, we rallied again and headed back to our study location to get some animals moving. The Chinese man who had been catching animals for us came along, and we sent him and Yang off to do some catching and bring a few more of the 5-toed jerboas. They weren't even gone long before they returned with five animals. I think they really are pretty easy to catch. They jump around a lot more than the 3-toed ones, but they seem to startle in the light better.

So we got all of the lights and cameras set up and got animals into the enclosure one by one, starting with one of the gerbils. He just kind of went bonkers everywhere and kept trying to climb the netted walls of the enclosure.  His galloping run looks pretty awesome on the high speed video. The 3-toed guys just sort of hop about and don't seem bothered by much, but the 5-toed ones are a lot more active. Toward the end, once we got all of the lights in the right positions and figured out how to get good video, the last one we used was hoppy all over the place.  Really good study animal, so he got a star in hopes he'll continue to perform well.

After about three hours of running around, we decided it was good for a first trial and packed up shop to head back. As we were loading things back into the research building at the field station, I noticed there were two boxes in the middle of the entry way floor that were about the size of old TV boxes. And they were making noises.  Clearly something alive was inside. I was surprised, because I thought we were the only ones working on animals here. Everyone we've talked to is doing work on soil or plants. So we flicked on the lights and cautiously approached to discover that each box contained about 10 live chickens. Sarah and I busted out laughing. She pulled out her iphone and started documenting a short video. She's been pretty good about narrating videos of what we've been seeing and doing. I think it's the delirium of the late hour combined with the fact that there were two boxes of chickens in the research building, but we just kept laughing between blank-faced statements of "Of course there are chickens. Why wouldn't there be?"

So I'm back, it's 3 am, I'm showered, and I know that every mole or skin tag on my body really is a mole or a skin tag. That had to be determined before I could sleep well tonight. I've blogged about this in past years - the drawback to the awesomeness of camels in the desert is that there are also camel ticks in the desert. And they're disgusting. I've seen a half dozen or so, including one I pulled off my leg before it had managed to latch on for a meal. That was before I got smart and tucked my pants into my socks. They drop out of the shrubs and follow you through the desert, so  you have to keep moving to keep them off. That's tough when you're in a fixed position next to a camera for an extended period of time. Sarah flicked one off her leg earlier in the day and pulled another off of the back of Talia's shirt. She thought they were spiders because they have weirdly long spindly legs, but nope. They're definitely ticks. And we have another week of experiences that are starting to give me signs of delusional parasitosis.

Baby Camels!!!

Now the real adventures begin. We arrived at the field station on Sunday and met with The Fixer on Monday afternoon to discuss arranging a driver for the next week or so. We explained to him what the goals are, where we'd like to go, the time of day/night, duration of the trip, and asked for a price estimate before we go to negotiate with the drivers. There are a bunch of drivers at the market, so I figured we'd just go that way and see who gives us the best price. He started to go on about how it's complicated to say how much it will cost because of variables like the time, road conditions, etc. I just wanted a ballpark for price per kilometer or price per hour so I'd know what to expect and where to start. Somewhere in these negotiations, a driver pulled up - a friend of The Fixer who he wanted us to hire. At some point in the "it's complicated" negotiations that a Chinese student (Yang) was trying to help me with, Sarah interrupted and took over negotiating for me. The whole game changed. She got them to understand that it doesn't have to be complicated because they already know all of the variables. She also got them to agree to an estimate for the first day with room for each side to negotiate if either I or the driver don't think the price is fair. The Chinese student seemed a little astonished that this worked so well, and it validated the argument I'd been making about her value to the institute - she managed to help reach an agreement far more quickly than if we'd done things in a more Chinese way while leaving room for flexibility. This was probably only possible though because I've cultivated a reputation for honesty.

So off we went to explore the desert. We visited the location I'd gone to a few weeks ago along the oil highway where I'd seen lots of tracks and where we'd been told there are lots of 3-toed jerboas. One of the things Talia wants to do is to take soil compaction measurements using a penetrometer.  It's not as dirty as it sounds. It's basically a hand held tool that measures the amount of force it takes to press a small foot into the ground by a set amount. She's been taking readings in all of the different locations and at the top and bottom of sand dunes and samples of the earth so that she can better understand the environment with which the jerboa feet are interacting as they bound along.

We had planned to visit another location last night, but we got distracted instead by camels. It's just one of those times when you sacrifice a little bit of work for an amazing experience.  A Kazakh family with a house by the roadside had about a half dozen baby goats that had lost their moms, so that was pretty cute to begin with. But then we rounded the corner of the house and walked over to where there were three mamma camels with their babies. Soooooooo painfully cute.  They even have little baby humps. But a baby camel is no small fry. Each of these little guys was probably no more than a couple weeks old but already stood at about my shoulder. The mamma camels were a bit unpredictable, and I kept expecting to get clocked by a giant head suspended on a long neck. At one point, one of the gals started to walk toward me, but they each have a rope tied to one foot, so she accidentally stepped on the rope and managed to hobble herself. Good for me, because I think she had more than "hello" in mind.

This morning we went to make up for the lost hours last night and visited a couple of other jerboa capture sites. More camels! We had to wait for a whole herd at a camel crossing before we could continue on the road to a flat dry field where the 5-toed jerboas are supposedly prevalent. So once we had the lay of the land, we returned to the field station where everyone else too an afternoon siesta, and I got a little work done before we set out to lay some traps in a field near here.  We will probably only catch sand rats (gerbils/jirds), but since Talia wants to compared with bipedal and quadrupedal rodents, those are still useful.

After dinner this evening, we set out once more to a place where we were told there are both 5 and 3-toed jerboas. I walked along the top of the dune with my headlamp sweeping slowly in each direction and managed to see about a dozen 3-toed jerboas. Mostly though I just got good at spotting spiders since their eyes also glow in the light, but they're much smaller than rodent eyes and kind of green in color. The jerboas are really quick though, so about all I got to appreciate was their escape maneuvering as their eyes bounced off into the distance. Fortunately my companions are a little quicker and managed to net a jerboa and a sand rat before we left that area. The driver was super helpful also. He stayed with the car, but every once in awhile he would flick on the headlights and change position so he could highlight animals for us. I think he finds this whole adventure to be funny and fun at the same time. 

On our way out of the desert, along a dirt road, we saw a whole bunch more 3-toed jerboas, and Yang eagerly hopped out to chase them down. I think he wore himself out, but he was successful and caught another two jerboas before we left the desert. We then stopped at a place where there were supposed to be 5-toed jerboas but didn't see any until we were leaving along a paved road and caught sight of them in the headlights of the car hopping down the road. The driver passed the first once by before realizing we wanted to stop and try to catch it, so he threw the car into reverse. I remember saying "it'll be either gone or squished" not really expecting the latter until we once again passed it and saw the poor thing lying in the road. The good thing is that he didn't feel anything for long, but I can't understand why he didn't hop out of the way. Fortunately we caught two more alive also along the road, so Talia now has some research subjects for her filming.

A horse is a horse of course of course...

Unless it's a Prezwalski's horse!

The embryo collections came to completion on Wednesday, and now we are
on to Phase II. We returned to Urumqi on Thursday so I could give a
talk at Xinjiang Normal University and we could pick up Talia at the
airport on Friday. Sarah and I decided to take the public bus back to
the city since we weren't carrying much and were feeling adventurous.
That involves taking a local bus for about 50 cents from 222 to Fukang
and then the long distance bus from Fukang to Urumqi for about $2. By
the way, in past years I thought the town near the field station and
the city 20 minutes away were both Fukang. I always called one Fukang
town and the other Fukang city. But this year I finally learned that
the agricultural community here near the field station is "Regiment
222". There is a long back history that I will leave you to explore
and question for yourself.

Upon returning to Urumqi, Sarah and I met up with our friend from one
of the labs here who is delightful. She spent a couple of years in
Reno as a postdoc, so she's familiar with American culture and
personalities. Sarah wanted to introduce me to Pizza Hut in China,
which is a fancy date destination. We did a sampling of the menu and
stayed until close – cackling so much we probably interfered with a
few romantic evenings. It started because I had been waiting on the
bus while Sarah went to the market in 222 to get water and yogurt for
the trip. To entertain myself, I was looking up the word for "wrench"
that I had learned from a student at the field station when I wanted
to take the regulator off our CO2 tank. Chinese is made up of a lot of
compound words, so the word for wrench is ban (to pull) shou
(manually). I have a dictionary on my phone that gives the meaning for
each character and other compound words that use that character, so I
accidentally discovered another compound word using the character shou
that has a sexual meaning. I had shared this discovery with Sarah who
not so innocently brought it up to our friend in the way of "I learned
a new word", and she intentionally pronounced it with the incorrect
tone so that our friend would puzzle it together to figure out what
she was asking. Her face exploded in shock, and she laughed. So that
started a whole conversation about the worst words in English and
Chinese, and I realized that learning a bad word as an adult doesn't
give it the same meaning. She could throw around some of the worst
words in English as though she was saying "table" and "chair", but
when we asked her to tell us bad words in Chinese it was like we were
asking her to stab her own hand. Likewise, we could toss around those
words playfully in Chinese, but there is no visceral meaning. It's as
if you have to have had your mother threatening to wash your mouth out
with soap to really feel the wrongness of a word.

On Friday morning, I was picked up and delivered to Xinjiang Normal
University to give a talk in the biological sciences department on
invitation from my hosts at the arrival banquet. They are all really
friendly and enthusiastic to have me here. After my talk and tour of
the natural history museum (great teaching resources), we walked
across from the campus to a restaurant for another lunch time banquet.
This was more informal than the baijiu fest from the first night, but
again the fish hit the table and bottles of pijiu (beer) were opened.
Speeches all around. The dean of the college of life sciences couldn't
make it to my talk but made an effort to come for lunch even though
she was only able to join for the last half. She said she likes me. I
joked that it's because she knows I can drink well. She's great. We
talked a little about careers as women, and I asked about the numbers
of women who start careers in biology at the masters level compared to
the number of women who achieve full professorship. The Normal
universities are teacher's schools, so there is a slightly higher
percentage at her institution, but it still hovers around 20% even
though greater than 50% start out at the lower levels. I knew what the
answer would be but asked "Why?" anyway. Of course she said, "Because
they want to devote their time to family." I asked if she thought it
would ever be possible in China for men and women to both contribute
equally to caring for the family so that both could have fulfilling
careers if they want, and she said "No" (even though she later said
that she is married and has a son, and her husband is very supportive
which is what allowed her to reach the position of dean). One of the
young men on the faculty who is recently married loudly protested and
started arguing with her that yes, men will take on a more equal role
and support their wives. I didn't understand the rest of the argument
since it was all in Chinese, but a young woman across the table from
me who is a new professor and has a 15 month old son of her own just
stared at me with amazement at what I'd started. I just gave a little
grin and a wink to let her know I knew exactly what had happened and
watched the debate unfold.

Later that evening, Talia arrived from Boston, and I managed to
successfully retrieve her from the airport even though I hadn't
written down any of her flight info, didn't know her airline, and
didn't know what terminal she was flying into. Thank goodness for
small airports. I'm terrible about doing things like this. We kept her
up the first night and planned outings for Saturday to get her over
the jetlag. Sarah knew of a vegan restaurant she wanted us to try
since Talia is vegetarian, and Xinjiang is the Chinese equivalent of
Texas. We had several of the common Chinese dishes, except that
everything that looked and tasted a lot like meat had no animal
components at all. Really interesting. We then met up with my Uygur
friend to go south to where I've lived before, because I wanted to
show Talia all my favorite places and let her and Sarah get to know my
dear friend. We got out of the cab, and it was an immediate sensory
overload. The food vendors were starting to set up their carts in the
area of the night market, so we wound our way through the rows of
tumeric dusted roast chickens, sheep's heads, and mounds of glass
noodles. Talia and Sarah decided to get some sort of frighteningly
fake sweet beverage because it was a shooting fountain of neon orange.
We darted into a Uygur medicine shop where a man read our health
histories in our pulses. I think he was a bit of a quack though – I've
done this before and felt like the guy who saw me was at least paying
attention to my skin tone and the health of my fingernails. This guy
seemed a little cocky, barely looked at me, and his major comment was
that I don't absorb enough nutrition from my food. Not a startling
discovery.

The narrow side streets are bustling with foot traffic, so we inserted
ourselves in the river and wandered about watching as all the locals
did their evening shopping. The tourist markets were all closing, but
they mostly sell a bunch of kitschy things that aren't made in this
area anyway. It's far more fun to roam the streets with the guys
selling t-shirts and shoes shouting "Besh quai, besh quai, besh
quai!!!" which means 5 RMB in Uygur. I made one guy laugh by joining
in his call and smiling to let him know I wasn't making fun of him. We
found ourselves passing a halal butcher right after they had
decapitated a lamb. It hadn't yet been eviscerated, but the pelt lay
in a pile on the ground, the head and feet were no more, and it was
hanging by a wire cable threaded through the Achilles' tendons over a
bucket of fresh blood. Had we only passed by 10 minutes earlier, we
would have gained a new appreciation for where our food comes from.

Wandering these streets again with my friend brought back a flood of
memories from past years, as he and I reminisced shops we'd been to,
funny things we'd seen, dinners we'd had. It was nice to share
memories and tell Sarah and Talia our stories while watching them
write stories of their own. And I keep learning more and more about
Islam and life in this part of the world that hurts my heart and brain
to think about how little we as Americans really know about this great
big world past our borders. After yet another fantastic meal, the
three of us girls left my friend behind since that neighborhood is his
home and hopped back into a taxi to return north to the institute.
Once we got to the hotel, I kept Talia up another hour sharing my
experiences and observations of the ethnic culture clashes of this
region, and right as we were drifting off to sleep at a quarter to 2
am, I got a text message to my Chinese cell phone. It was a professor
at the institute who wanted to be the one to bring us back to the
field station asking what time he should meet us. Seriously. He sent
me a message at 2 am. Sarah had warned me about this. The phone
culture is strange. They can call or text at any time from anywhere,
and it's all okay. So I replied politely, said I was going to sleep,
and turned off my phone.

This morning after some lengthy discussions and slight political
issues, we arranged for him to pick us up since he really wanted to
take us to the Prezwalski's horse breeding center. That was worth the
2 am text message and ensuing drama. And worth braving the dust storm.
Somehow overnight the temperature dropped about 40 degrees, and the
winds came howling in from Russia. If I wasn't Russian before, I am
now on the inside and out. I feel like my eyeballs, my skin, and the
insides of my nose and ears are coated with the dust carried from the
winds of the north. But it was worth almost being lifted off my feet
to see these amazing horses. Apparently before the breeding center
started in 1985, there were only about 2,000 Prezwalski's horses in
the wild. They are a species of wild horse that is native to Xinjiang,
Inner Mongolia, and Mongolia (Inner Mongolia is a province of China.
Mongolia is a country.) The breeding center started with 18 horses and
now has a population of about 400. They have been reintroducing many
of the captive bred horses into the wild, and have managed to have a
real positive impact on the population of this species. They are truly
wild horses. They are smaller than what you think of as a horse and
look more like a donkey or a mule with a short mane and short flat
tail. They still have most of their thick winter coat, and the younger
horses look like they are wearing leg warmers. And they are mean! They
get really grumpy and fight with each other. They have to be kept in
families of one male and about 5-6 breeding females. Even the females
will fight with each other. When one gets irritable, she backs her
rump into another and just keeps pushing and pushing until the other
gets annoyed. Then they separate just enough to get a good kick it.
But it isn't just a kick. It's an ears back, teeth bared, two-footed
bucking kick. Sarah kept making noise to spook and separate them, but
that's just what they do. They're really truly wild horses.

The rest of the drive was fascinating. All along the mountains is
mining country, so there are great big holes in the earth surrounded
by digging equipment. And even though it isn't a major oil field like
what we wandered into up north, there are pumpjacks dotting the
landscape. In addition to that, it's a major industrial zone, so one
after another we passed by some sort of manufacturing/mining/power
station/etc type of location. The air was thickly brown with the dust,
but not just from the dust. All around are mounds of coal piled high,
and the dust from the coal gets picked up in the wind right along with
the barren earth and sand. So it's no wonder when I scratch my face,
the underside of my nails is black. In fact, I have been writing this
while waiting for my hot water heater to warm up. I think that ought
to be done by now, so I'm going to shower my nasty self and get to
bed.

Hazards of field work

Let's start off this list with Pee. In. My. Face.

The Chinese collector folks brought a big cage with a *ridiculous* number of 5-toed jerboas this morning. They are apparently far more plentiful and easier to catch. Unfortunately, they are more plentiful than in the area they went yesterday where they brought me 3/5 that were pregnant with nice stages, but this time I wound up with only 6/55 with anything useful. Most were either just about to give birth or already had. So I think what makes the biggest difference is the local population size (the probability of them having met a mate early in the season). When they change to a new location to make more money, it affects my harvest rate. Bummer. But further validation of my base rate plus "perfect embryo bonus" pay structure, so I can now convince them to go back to the other place even though it's a little more difficult.

Anyway, back to the hazards. There were a lot of males in this batch, because it is much harder to distinguish male from female in this species. Since I am only paying for the females, I had to check and sort each one. By much harder, I mean that in both species the junk is all internal. With the 3-toed jerboas, you can tell without too much difficulty by the anogenital distance (further apart in males than in females). That's much smaller in the males of this species. So with these guys the best way to tell is to press down on either side to make the business bits pop out. I've done this also with the 3-toed guys and met with no great peril other than an attempted bite of my well-protected hands. So I was inspecting one of the animals who turned out to be male, out popped his penis...and a very thin but highly pressurized fountain of urine sprayed across my chin and thankfully (barely) missed my mouth. This happened a couple of times (second time across my shoulder since I quickly learned to aim away from my face). There was also the one that launched herself out of my hand and quickly scurried under the fume hood. The guy who had delivered the animals though this was all the most hilarious show.

Up to this point I had thought it was bad enough that I have to swat away the mosquitoes while dissecting if we're working into the evening. And all along I've had to maintain my ninja-like skills of crushing the errant flea who tries to make an escape for a warmer body. Add to that the mental health burden of feeling like an executioner each day going through more and more animals. I keep telling myself that this will set up the next 2-3 years of my career, and if I were to spread this out over that amount of time, it would be no different from the number of mouse dissections I do. But it's much more challenging when it's compressed into two weeks of work.

Perils of language

Anyone who has known me for awhile probably knows that I really really despise carrots. Yes, I know. I am a freak. No one hates carrots. In my whole life I think I've met one other person with the palate I have...

Sarah and I decided to skip lunch at the field station and go for jiao zi (boiled dumplings, my favorite food in China) at a shop we walked past a few days before. While we were there, an older pair with their young grandson came in. I say "pair" rather than couple because it was the maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of the little boy - very cute. He took a quick liking to me after I tickled and taunted his neck a bit. As part of our play, his grandfather started pointing to items on an illustrated poster on the wall of food laid out on a table. I think he was trying to teach the kid and me at the same time since I'd made a joke earlier about how my Chinese language skills are about equivalent to this 18 month old child. There are two carrots on the poster, so I pointed as if to ask "what is this?" They told me the word for carrot, so I pointed to myself and said "Mei yo hong luo bo " thinking I was essentially just negating the carrot and getting my point across. I saw Sarah's face go rigid since she knew what I was trying to say. The incredibly sweet and enthusiastic woman who owns the shop waited for a moment and then disappeared into the kitchen with Sarah in close pursuit. Apparently what I actually said was "don't have carrot" so the woman was excited to introduce me to this new exotic food. Sarah tried to explain, but the woman insisted "No, she said she doesn't *have* carrots". So she cut a (thankfully) thin slice of an enormous carrot and brought it over to me to try. As I said, I'll eat anything that's not an insect, so I smiled graciously and hid my distaste. But I did learn that lesson. Maybe she really knew what I meant but figured this would be the best way to fix the phrase in my head.

Yesterday on return to the field station from our day of adventures in this small town, we ran into a group of five middle school girls who we have spoken with a couple of times now - including the one very enthusiastic hugger. They were really excited to see us and practice English again, and they asked if they could come to the field station to see where we work. Since there were only 5 of them this time rather than 50 as before, I said "sure, why not". I love seeing the faces of young kids, girls especially, when they discover how cool science really is. So we took them to the lab and showed them some of the live animals we still had from earlier in the day. They were completely fascinated by the one white jerboa we had in a small cage. They're usually sandy brown with white bellies, but the folks catching for us brought us one male that was all white with black eyes. The interesting thing is that he said he knew something was different as soon as they shined the light in his eyes, because the regular jerboa's eyes shine yellow, but this one shined red even though his eyes are black. In the thousand or so jerboas that I've seen around here, this is only the second white one I've come across, and the last was of the 5-toed species while this was a 3-toed one. I took a little snip of an ear for DNA, and we wanted to set him free along with all of the females that were obviously pregnant with embryos too old for my needs. So we got the girls to each take a trap and help us carry them to the end of the road. The four older girls were brave and excited, but there was one little one probably about 7-8 years old who seemed a little bit terrified of the scurrying going on inside her trap. But she put on a brave face and followed along. We got to the end of the road, and I set each one loose. At first there was a lot of squealing - especially when one would hop up onto a girl's shoe. But within about 5 minutes they were each doing the gentle one-finger head pet, and one girl even stole my glove away from me so she could try to catch them on her own. I love seeing that transition from fear to fascination.

And all is good with the couple who are collecting for us. It is interesting to see that the challenges we are going through together are solidifying this relationship. What started in the beginning as a big dramatic negotiation every day has morphed into an easy conversation as the trust builds. I think it helps that when we changed the pay structure we incorporated a "bonus" for each animal with embryos of a perfectly young stage for my work. This was to encourage them to keep collecting at locations with good embryos rather than moving on to places that might not be as useful. They bring the animals, we pay an initial fee, then the following day when they return we pay a little for each that was perfect the day before. They were skeptical at first, but after I have made good on my word for a couple of days they seem really happy and a lot warmer. They even brought their 26 year old daughter to meet us today so she could practice her English a little bit. And I have reached great success with the collections! 397 embryos of the 3-toed jerboas. Also, in past years the 5-toed ones haven't had embryos until well into June, but this year since the 3-toed ones seemed to breed so early, I took a chance and had them bring a few of the 5-toed ones this morning. 3/5 had embryos, so I am going to continue to hire them for a few more days to build up a stock of those ones for comparison. It's a bonus I wasn't expecting and rounds off everything really nicely.

Let's do the time warp...

I don't even know where the last 72 hours went. Well, I do. And it wasn't spent sleeping. Since I now have 2 groups of people collecting for me, that means twice the amount of work. The Kazakhs live about an hour away, so they prefer to bring the animals to me when they finish collecting which has routinely been somewhere around 2 or 2:30 am. Since I would like the embryos to be as young as possible, and I expect the Chinese collectors to arrive each morning with their bounty, that means the best approach is to just go ahead and power through all of the dissections in the middle of the night which has put me in bed somewhere between 4:30 and 5 am each day lately. Then by 8:30 or 9 am I have been woken up by *rap rap* two second pause *rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap rap* until I go scowling and growling to the door to greet the woman of the couple in charge of the Chinese jerboa collective. Each morning I demonstrate that it takes no more than one polite knock to get my attention, but she cheerfully squawks on and on about how I need to be up because it's light out and I'm missing breakfast. This is what's understood from my limited understanding of Chinese and a lot of hand gestures. So then I crawl out of my jammies and into my clothes and out the door to settle the payment and dissect the next batch of animals. I'm functioning on very little sleep and showering only once in 2-3 days. And that's my day sung in a round.

This particular morning was extremely tough. The Chinese folks brought me 45 females which is unbelievable. Except that I was feeling of their bellies as I sorted them, and I set aside 19 as too pregnant to be useful for me. I really want embryos from the first half of gestation and have a HUGE box back home of older embryos from previous collections that have hardly been touched. Plus, the whole reason I was excited about hiring this Chinese couple and had arranged a generous and motivating pay structure is because just 4 days ago they brought me animals that were either not pregnant or had very young embryos. Since then, they've been moving around to locations with more animals so they can make more money, but the problem is that animals in areas with a high local population also had a higher chance of encountering a mate soon after coming out of hibernation and therefore bred quickly. I was looking back on my notes from 3 years ago, and the pregnancy rate was closer to 60% with a majority of embryos at mid gestation as of about April 20th. The climate this year is very similar to that year, but this year I have a pregnancy rate near 95% and a much more advanced stages of development at this time on the calendar. So I think there's been a recent population boom that's affecting my numbers. In summary, field work in developmental biology is really hard.

So I wasn't very happy about the fact that half of the animals I'm paying for are useless to me, so we discussed in more details what my research needs are and what I'm looking for in the animals. I explained how to tell when the females are really too pregnant and asked them to try to find areas with a lower population so they'd be more useful to me. I know it sounds like I'm asking them to make their work more difficult, but I explained that if they keep bringing me animals with old embryos, I won't have a need to hire them anymore. The husband seemed to really understand and was patiently listening and wanting to learn more so they could bring me what I need. He seems to have a good business mind. His wife, on the other hand, went ballistic that I was changing the terms on her since all she seems to see are the finances. She's always the one to take and count the money and has previously been the negotiator while her husband quietly stood by. Where it got really awkward was when the man got angry that she was interrupting, getting greedy, and didn't seem to understand that they needed to be flexible to keep my business. After her persistent arguing, he lost patience and got really physical with her. He kept shoving her out the door, yelling at her, and seemed to really want to hit her. I was extremely uncomfortable and so far out of my cultural comfort zone. So I was grateful when the man and I came to a professional understanding we could agree upon and settled on a new pay structure that still fairly compensates them while adjusting for my needs. In truth, they're making about 2000 RMB per day split among 8 people in a place where the average day of wages is only about 100 RMB (equivalent to about $15), so I'm already paying better than the going labor rate.

The good thing is that as awkward and painful as negotiations in China can be, once a deal is made it's amazing to see how quickly a person's whole persona will change. I've seen this especially in the woman before when she's been the one negotiating with me. They all have the most pained expression and loudly beg and plead and complain that it's so hard and I'm so cheap, and surely I can afford to pay more. But then as soon as a deal is made, they are all cheerful and friendly. We ran into the woman again this afternoon in the market, and I was nervous about seeing her after the difficulty of the morning. She was talking to some friends when we walked up, and Sarah wanted to say hello and delicately express our concern for her. She didn't come right out as say "I'm sorry your husband is an ahole" so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends, but she said "we were concerned for you", and the woman stopped us from saying more. She seemed really touched and said don't worry, that's not our problem. She said she can tell we are good people, and she is happy doing business with us. She kept grasping my hands and even let Sarah give her a hug. So I think all is well in terms of our relationship. And given the spunk and vigor of this small but fiery woman, I have a feeling she holds her own with her husband as well and it was just a case of him needing to be in charge of the situation. I hope so at least.

MetaBlocking

I just had a hilarious discovery. We were watching the Neverending Story this afternoon (after watching the Truman Show last night. As a side note I think it's funny that Sarah and I just sort of randomly picked two social commentary movies that are so so American. It felt just a little awkward wondering what my Chinese colleagues were thinking about the Big Brother and thought manipulation aspects of the Truman Show or the death of imagination theme of the Neverending Story).

Anyway, that's not the hilarious discovery. During the Neverending Story I was thinking "hmmm, I wonder what happened to the kid who played Atreyu?" I always wonder that about really good child actors who had a major role in one big movie and then sort of disappeared. So I went to look him up on IMDB when Sarah said "no, you can't". Seriously?!?! IMDB is blocked in China. Why? I don't see any reputable news stories on the subject, but there are speculations ranging from the listing of movies that paint China in a less than favorable light (documentaries about Tibet) to the fear of user generated content (forums, comments, etc). So I started looking up more and found that the Wikipedia site "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China" is itself blocked in China. How very meta of them to block the page with the list of blocked pages.

Yes, I know I shouldn't be playing with the censors again just in case the last time the internet went down was more than a coincidence (apparently it had something to do with an unpaid bill and the long holiday weekend interfering with the ability to rectify the situation.) But I just can't help it. My curiosity gets the better of me sometimes.

UPDATE: directly through google blogger since I realized I have a very easy way around the firewall. I knew you could get past the chinese firewall through a VPN client. Everyone here does it. The firewall restrictions aren't effective for people who know what they're doing. But I didn't want to trust some shady third party VPN client (many of them you have to pay for), so I figured it was no big deal to live with the restrictions for a couple of months. Until today when I realized that HARVARD has a VPN client. It's intended for access to files when not on campus, but it can also be used for secure remote web browsing. So HA!! Take that, China. I now have unrestricted web access. Although I could still deal with it for a few more weeks, the great benefit now is that I can watch Netflix movies since netflix now thinks that my computer is in Boston! Well, and besides. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't like to be told I can't do something. Even if I don't *really* want to...

Mobbed again

The field station is right next to a middle school, and I was "attacked" with enthusiasm last time I was here while out for a run one day. Well, it happened again.  Friday evening after school, the kids were all out on the road sweeping and burning piles of trash along the sidewalks (yes, children here do actually have to do chores at school). The first time we walked past I just got a lot of nervous stares, but by the time we walked back around some of the boys were poking and making fun of each other (as boys do) while the girls were giggling and clearly trying to build up the courage to speak. There were a few meek "hello"s and then the path in front of me was blocked by a gaggle of giggling girls. One particularly bold young lady walked right up to me and said "hello, how are you? What is your name?" in eager but stuttering English. I replied and then she nervously asked "Can I hug you?" Of course, so I gave her a hug while all of the other girls squealed, and another stepped up for her hug as well.  The boys were all hanging out around the perimeter looking bored and uninterested and saying "we need to go". I stuck around and chatted with the girls for a little while, mainly the one very outspoken one, and they wanted to know where I stay.  As last year, I told them but also said I spend a lot of time walking around the town and they are welcome to come say hello anytime they see me. I'm hesitant to encourage a bunch of kids to descend upon the field station to disturb my and everyone else's work.

Also, yesterday Sarah arrived. Sarah is an American working at the Chinese Academy, and she and I have hit it off well.  We decided it would be fun for her to spend some time out here seeing what some of the scientists at her institute do for their research and also learning some grant writing skills with me so she can better help edit some of the science she sees come her way. The group of us went for another walk yesterday, and just as we were about to set off to explore a temple-like new construction at the end of a bare stretch of dirt nothingness, two little girls on a bicycle teetered by and quickly turned around when they saw me - the huggy girl from the day before. She was so excited to see me again and said she had a gift for me. She was off to her piano lessons and wanted me to come so she could play a song for me. Of course! So we postponed one adventure and traded for another to go listen to her play a few tunes in a room full of keyboards. She had also drawn a picture for me. I think it's actually a picture *of* me. It's a very Asian-style cartoon girl with a white face (the rest of the body is colored in skin toned) round eyes, and red hair. She said she'd drawn it for me the night before hoping to see me again. So sweet. Her teacher ushered the kids to their keyboards, which was our cue to leave, but we arranged to meet her and her friends again later in a nearby park.

Meanwhile, we went back over to the mysterious temple-looking building, but all entrances were bricked up so it wasn't too exciting. But right behind it was a talk bank of dirt with a front end loader perched on top, and I made some comment about how it looked like it could be the perimeter wall of a landfill. Just a passing comment. Sarah said "Now I'm curious!" and bounded off to scramble up the steep slope and shouted "It's a cemetery!" So we all scrambled over the bank and down to a road on the other side to wander through the cemetery.  I love cemeteries in different places, because they're all so different depending on the local customs and culture.  Apparently most people in China now are cremated. But this was a regular cemetery with mounds of dirt at least 3 feet high or concrete tombs over graves of people whose family was clearly a little more well off.  A lot of the sites had a second marker immediately in front of the family marker and oddly completely blocking its view. The front marker was placed by the government in cases where the person died while at work. There were a lot of those markers which makes you wonder what goes/went on around here. And since it was recently the Tomb Sweeping festival, several of the gravesites had rotting fruit, remnants of small fires and fireworks, and fake flowers strewn about. We heard faint music from a small radio or cell phone and looked up to see an old man who we first thought was perhaps visiting someone...until we saw the grain sack in his hand. He seemed to be wandering about sort of aimlessly yet pointedly avoiding us, so I think he was going about picking over the gravesites for items that might still be edible or useful.

At this point we were running late for our play date so headed back to the park to meet the young girl and her friends.  They all had notebooks they wanted us to sign, so we each wrote a nice message and left our email addresses. I felt like I was signing a yearbook ;) The very confident and outspoken girl stumbled over asking me what animals I like, and when it wasn't clear I understood she asked "kangaroos?" I chuckled and said "Yes, kangaroos are very cool." We chatted a bit more about her school, and I worked with her and her friends on pronounciation - Thursday, Birthday, Thirteen, Thirty. Words that are really hard to say for Asian students learning English. All of this is on video, so that ought to be entertaining where I'm trying to encourage her to get her tongue out from behind her teeth. At one point she got all excited and said to my friends in Chinese that it was the first time she met someone from Australia. They corrected her and said, "No, American". She suddenly got all embarrassed and excited at the same time. Such a confusing little bundle of emotions. Apparently she'd misunderstood me the day before, thought I was Australian, and then went home that night to read everything she could find about Australia so she could talk to me and not embarrass herself. Explains the question about kangaroos. Oops. She also keeps calling me "big sister" (a common greeting of respect in more rural areas of China), and I keep thinking she's going to hyperventilate from enthusiasm for trying to find the right words to communicate with me. She's fun to talk to, super cute, and who knows...someday in 10 years when she's finished college and her English improves, I may get a random fluent email from my new little friend.

Inspiring Chinese Entrepreneurship

This whole thing is almost getting away from me but in a really really good way. A few days ago, The Fixer brought a Chinese man who said he can collect any animal we want. He enthusiastically bragged about his great skill and refused to take a net (fisherman's landing net - round hoop on a long pole - essential jerboa catching gear). He did take one headlamp and said he would purchase another but insisted he could catch the animals with his hand (demonstrating this in the universal body language of "cacha!" So awesome, I said go to it, and I'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow.  So the next day he and his rather outspoken wife show up with 5 animals but they weren't sure of the sexes. Since I'm only paying for the females, I checked and confirmed that 4 were in face female and counted out the appropriate amount of money for 4 animals. The woman was not pleased. She pleaded and whined and complained that it was sooooo hard to catch these 4 animals. (What ever happened to "cacha!"?) They were up all night collecting and fell off the motorcycle. (Though I later found out they only collected an hour or two). And she said The Fixer told her I was paying a higher price. I basically said, I know it's hard and handed over a net to the sheepish guy. I'm sorry you were promised more money, but that wasn't a promise I made. After 20 minutes of earnest pleading, her whole mood perked up when she happily took the money I had to offer (after suggesting a more progressive payscale), and cheerfully took off on the back of her husband's motorcycle. I'm sure she was just trying to pry more money out of me.

Fastforward two days. Today they came with 11 animals, and 9 were female. Again, I count out the appropriate amount of money, and she gets all upset because again The Fixer told her I was paying more. I said (through translation) if he promised you more, then he's responsible for the difference. I am the one with the money, so all negotiations have to go through me. They want to hire more people to help. I'm all for that since they seem to be hunting at a good site with lower pregnancy rates and younger embryos. So I told her (again through translation) that I would pay a higher price for the next 3 days to encourage them to hire people and let them get better at catching. Then after 3 days I would return to the original price for the first 10 animals, a bit more for the next 10, a bit more for 10 after that. Encouraging them to keep working at it. It's a full moon right now which makes it really tough to sneak up on a quick bouncy animal with better eyesight than us. She seemed okay with that but wanted to be sure this was *my* agreement, so she turned to me, grabbed my arm, and with earnest enthusiasm said in chinese "50 each for the next 3 days, then 40 for 10, 50 for 11+..." I do know my chinese numbers, so I was able to repeat what she was saying and convince her that we are indeed now on the same page. So hooray, more people to collect.

So then the Kazakhs showed up with their bounty from the night before. I also explained to them that the animals they were bringing me are pregnant with babies that are too old (I release anything where I can feel lumps in the belly, but I'm still paying for useless animals). He said maybe it's just because the ones that are really pregnant are slow and easier to catch. Ha! But I also explained that they seemed healthier and better fed that the ones the other folks were bringing which indicates to me that they are in an area with more vegetation and the animals have recovered more quickly from hibernation. So he said they would try a few different sites over the next few days to see if they hit a place with younger embryos. At the end of these negotiations he had a rather long chat with my colleague who then turned to me and explained that he wants a guide book. This is the older Kazakh man who made the original deal with me. He saw the field guide to the animals of Xinjiang that one of the students here has, and he is interested in learning about the animals he sees. He's also apparently the only one of this group of people who can read and write in Chinese (their second language), and thinks it could be useful to teach some of the younger men. I'm all for advancing education, so now I'm really excited about the next time I head back to Urumqi. I'm going to hit up the bookstore with a couple of the students and find a really nice and well-illustrated guide to the animals and maybe also another book or two that he might find interesting. They're being so helpful. Granted they're getting paid really well for these collections already, but they're such good partners in this endeavor that I'm happy to do some extra little thing to help.

A minor inconvenience

It's been a few days since I updated, because on Monday we returned to
the field station to discover that the internet is still down. I can't
help but wonder if it's entirely coincidental that I was testing the
boundaries of censorship just before it went down last Thursday. Oops.
Won't do that again. Although I'm pretty sure I did it before and that
this was perhaps the same result...

Otherwise all is well. The Kazakh family is unbelievable. They have
been catching more than 20 females each night although almost every
one of them died the first two nights. So now they're bringing the
animals to me each night after they finish the collection which was
about 1 am the first night and 2 am last night. I am becoming one with
my nocturnal animals. The unfortunate thing (besides my lack of sleep)
is that these guys are much more agressive than the animals in my
colony back home, and especially pissed off and active at night after
being trapped in a small cage. Thank good for my gloves with leather
fingertips. They try desperately to take their vengance on my and
instead get a mouthful of leather. Perhaps it still makes them feel
good to think they're punishing me.

Many of the embryos are too old for my analyses, but the pregnancy
rate is almost 100% this year so I'm still getting a lot of embryos of
the stages I want. 25 litters so far, to be precise. Which is more
than 60-70 embryos for two night's work. At this rate I'll have a
bumper crop in no time and perhaps be finished a bit early. Definitely
in time to switch gears for phase 2 of the biomechanics work when the
grad student working with me arrives from Boston in a couple of weeks.

Not sure what happened this year though. The climate is no different
from when I've been here before.The temperatures are tracking the
same. There's hardly any vegetation yet, and the trees haven't budded.
But the jerboas have all clearly fed well and are breeding at least
1-2 weeks earlier than before. Maybe there are annual cycles I'm not
aware of. A professor at the Academy of Sciences told me that about
once in 5-7 years there are almost no jerboas. Maybe this is the
opposing peak of that valley.

In any case, I can't complain. Given the difficulty of this work and
all of the many many factors that are out of my control, I have to say
I am pretty pleased. Fingers crossed this run of good luck continues.

I was so hungry...

I ate a horse. Seriously. I ate horse meat tonight. I wouldn't have ordered it, and I don't feel so good about myself for doing it, but I believe in adapting and respecting a culture which includes eating pretty much anything (that's not obviously unsafe) that's put in front of me (with the exception of bugs). I had been invited to join another banquet in honor of an English couple and their son who are visiting to studying some of the chinese herbal plants. We went to a big multistory fancy "Uyghur" restaurant that's more in the Chinese style with Uyghur influence. The first restaurant I've been to here with security guards out front and a bag check before you walk in the front door. We were taken up an elevator to the third floor and ushered to a small banquet room where each seat had a hotpot burner with broth and the waitstaff passed out aprons.  What a scene. My good friend "Alice" (her English name) was instructed by the host to order, so a whole bunch plates of raw meat and vegetables came out onto the table. She seemed to take great pleasure in ordering some of the most expensive things on the menu knowing the host (a retired scientist and regional party official) wouldn't refuse. The meat and vegetables get dunked into the pot of boiling spicy broth until they're cooked and then fished out and eaten.  A small plate of what looked like sliced salami rolled around in front of me, and Alice gave a sly smile and said "horse". Really. Horse. So I took a piece to try it - in part so I can now say I've eaten horse.  It was already cooked - dry roasted and lightly smoked and tasted different from any other kind of meat I've had. Interesting.

Other than that I've just been spending my weekend in Urumqi arranging things to return to Fukang on Monday and dive into the dissections. I had to make a few solutions, so now all of that is done.  I needed to find a freezer and fortunately a professor here decided to buy a new small chest deep freeze for the lab and loan it to me first for a few weeks.  So we spent 2 hours yesterday and another 4 hours today running about between three different stores trying to find a freezer in stock that would be easy to get paid for by government money. As we were leaving the institute this morning, a throng of about 200 middle school students carrying pails of water rushed passed us led by kids holding red flags. I asked what in the world was going on, and my friends said it's international environment day. I thought they meant earth day, but that's not for a few more weeks.  I have no idea what was the holiday, but I saw so many ordinary people (not city workers) out cleaning things - street lamps, fences, bus stops. There was a whole line of about a dozen people with rags squatted down busy wiping the black grime off of a fence that runs between the street and sidewalk. All in business suits.  Common attire here.  Years ago I once saw a guy laying paving stones wearing a business suit and dress shoes.

And the first part of this week is the festival for the ancestors, so there are carts all over the city selling fake paper money, incense, plastic fruit, and small plastic trees.  The custom is to visit the cemeteries and give these offerings (burning the money) in honor of the ancestors. And since Monday and Tuesday are a holiday, everyone has had to work saturday and sunday to make up for the time. Fascinating...

Exhausted but satisfied

The breakfast bell rang early this morning, so I've only just gotten my shower this evening which is a good thing since I was filthy and covered in sand. We headed back to the spot where we set traps last night, and lo and behold I think we only lost one.  And I could be wrong on that.  I'm guessing because the spacing at one point was longer than it should have been, but I haven't yet counted.  It's too bad I have no interest in those stinking gerbils! Out of the 50 traps we placed yesterday, 12 had a gerbil in them but not a single jerboa. Some of that could have to do with the fact that we set them early in the day, and gerbils are diurnal.  So it's hard for a jerboa to land itself in an already occupied trap.  But regardless, fail. We did, however, see good jerboa tracks this time since the sand was dry.  They're pretty easy to tell since they are in pairs spaced about 10 inches between strides. The gerbils make scurrying tracks, so they're quite distinguishable from each other.  So the animals are out and now to catch them!

After collecting the traps, we drove up to the forestry station we'd been sent to where we thought the people were located who collected for me in the past. The driver didn't think the station was the right one when we passed it the first time, so he kept driving another 20 minutes or so until about 2 dozen pump jacks appeared on the horizon. Oil country.  The road was blocked off by a security station, and I muttered to one of my companions "this is not good for me" thinking they'd stop and check the car, but they just raised the arm and let us right through!  Super bad news. I recently heard a story (and my colleagues knew of the same) where an American was fined $4,000 for illegally obtaining GPS coordinates in Xinjiang. Military and oil field/refinery sites are particularly sensitive here.  And I'm not sure if my companions have a GPS in the car, but I hope not.  I could get in some trouble for having one "in my possession" even if it's not in *my* possession. So after I said "I can't be here", the driver chuckled a little but then agreed and whipped the car around to exit as quickly as we'd entered.

We headed back to the forestry station we'd passed after realizing that was probably the place we were looking for and waited and waited but no one showed up.  Turns out they had a kid turn sick and went to Fukang city for the day.  So we made our way back to the field station to wait for some phone calls to be returned and in the meantime got hooked up with the man I will call "The Fixer".  I remember him from before.  He's good at arranging things.  And he remembered me and the people we were talking about.  However it wasn't the family we had gone to visit today - it was another Kazakh family off along a different road.  So we loaded The Fixer into the car with us and went off to meet with the right family who did turn out to be the folks we've hired before.  A small leathery old man with green eyes and wearing a flat cap took us into a room to sit down for negotiations on the rug covered platform that doubles as the family bed. We came to an agreement for a set price per female jerboa they catch and bring to us for the hour drive to the field station.  Not a bad deal.  All were pleased, we provided them with nets and great headlamps, and we will see the outcome in a couple of days.

Wildlife abounds, but jerboas?

If you want to see what life is like without the EPA, come to a large city in northern China in the winter. There was still some snow on the ground when I arrived since they'd just had a heavy fall a few days previous, but by now what is left of the snow is indistinguishable from the road since everything is black.  It was raining yesterday, and the black on everything is so thick that it's difficult to tell if that's how the water falls from the sky.  And all along the sides of the road lies the detritus of lost items and litter that lay buried for the last few months. I know there is always some stuff left behind after the snows in Boston, but this is different.  It's like the piled high snow bank is just replaced with a smaller but no less impressive trash bank. It's a sight to behold.

But we are now up to clean air and brown brown brown as far as the eye can see.  Spring has not yet sprung here, and while it's not so cold anymore, it's clearly still on the crest of warming up. We arrived at Fukang in the late afternoon and were greeted by the woman who has run this place for as many years as I know.  She's not the director but rather the caretaker - dorm mom and keeper of the keys.  She remembered me from before and seemed overjoyed that I was back. But I am apparently too skinny.  This is common in China - the topic of weight is never off limits, and I have had people let me know if they think I have gained or lost weight. Then she went on telling my companions about how she and I have always been able to talk to each other even though we don't speak a word of the other's language.  She's so vocal and expressive, and I've always been able to tell from her gestures and the tone of her voice exactly what she was trying to tell me - whether we were fixing my toilet or finding a way for me to do laundry. And I know quickly if she's happy or annoyed. So it's good to see her again.

And the cook is the same.  He was busy tossing a mound of food in a giant wok set over a blazing propane fire when I walked in for dinner, so I just stood behind watching the food and sweat fly.  The caretaker walked in behind him and must have asked if he saw who was back, because he turned around with a look of utter shock on his face and said "You!" in English. He couldn't seem to get over staring at me (and also saying I'm thinner) and invited me to sit next to him among some of the other students at dinner.  His English isn't very good, but he tries really hard.  I asked about his cat. "Mou?" I asked, because he had a new kitten the last time I was here. "Died" was his blunt answer.  Poor kitty.

This morning after a breakfast of fermented tofu on steamed buns, rice and boiled peanut soup, spicy strands of seaweed, and a plate of mixed onion, peppers, and tomato in vinegar, we headed off in the jeep in search of the right kind of desert for jerboas.  I knew one of the places where we'd trapped animals with snap traps before, so we went up the highway to some of those dunes and walked around for a bit looking for tracks.  It rained last night, so where we could see tracks they were too dampened down by the rain to tell if they were jerboa or gerbil.  There are a lot of gerbils around here.  Nasty critters.  So we decided to go back to the jeep and loaded up with 50 traps, peanut butter, and a bag of oats to walk along a trail and set live traps for the night. Every 20 steps I scooped some bait into the trap with a stick and set it, and at every 5th trap we placed a flag to mark the line so they wouldn't get lost.  I hope they don't get trampled by goats or stolen by herders since those are borrowed and will be expensive to replace.  But fingers crossed we have more than gerbils by morning.  The driver said there was no reason to mark where we started since he's sure to remember.  I took note of the surroundings just in case.  Road marker 535 between the radio tower and the big blue sign - past the third herd of camels on the left. Love camels.

On the way back to the field station, we stopped by a yurt on the side of the road to see if we could persuade people to do some catching for us tonight.  It was an older Kazakh couple who were crouched over a goat in a pen as we walked up.  They must have thought we were an obnoxious group of tourists since while I was just pleasantly smiling and doing my best to put them at ease, my colleagues were eagerly snapping photographs. It was something to see though - the woman was in a red/orange/pink brocade jacket with coordinating scarf over her head, and she and her husband where holding a goat down on the ground so her two newborn kids could nurse.  The poor little things couldn't have been more than a day old and still had recently dried bits of afterbirth attached to their fur and incompletely resolved umbilical cords.  One was stronger than the other and kept pushing his sibling away.  Neither could get firmly up on all four feet and kept stumbling forward on their ankles before toppling flat on the ground.  I hope they make it but they seem so vulnerable and stand only maybe 10 inches from the ground. It's a tough life out here. 

We asked about jerboas in the area, and the woman said she thought she knew what we were talking about and had a dead one.  She led us over near the remains of a fire where it seems the animal had been attracted to the light and was killed.  Gerbil. Stupid stupid gerbil.  So we thanked her and drove on to the local forestry station since I knew we had hired a family to catch for us before who work at one of the forestry stations.  The men at this station knew the animals, said yes we are in the right place, they are further into the desert, and there is a family at the field station further away who we should talk to.  I have a good feeling these are the people we hired before, and we are headed there tomorrow to investigate and negotiate. Fingers crossed...

Grassroots Diplomacy

Today was extraordinarily educational.  It started with a long meeting with a professor at the Academy who has spent his whole career studying the mammals of Xinjiang - including an extensive study of more that 70 species of rodents about 20 years ago.  He knows the jerboa habitats and how to catch them, so tomorrow I am going to buy a 200 meter long, 2 meter wide net to stretch across the desert and catch jerboas that get tangled as they're hopping across in search of food.  Apparently if you go in the early morning before they get a chance to chew their way out,  you can pluck them off the net unharmed and alive.  We will see how well this works, but I am of the opinion that just about anything is worth a try.  He seemed thrilled to teach me all he knows and wants to take me deep into the Taklamakan (one of the largest deserts) in search of more jerboas.  Unfortunately that's about a 2 day drive and not suitable for my current itinerary, but image search Taklamakan to see why that would be pretty freaking awesome.

The rest of the evening was spent in fascinating conversation with a dear friend of mine from years past.  I told him that I was back in Urumqi, and we were planning to see each other, but I happened to run into him on the sidewalk yesterday just by chance.  It's been three years, so he looks older and has  suddenly turned from a fresh faced young college student to a young man. I recognized him but didn't want to make the assumption in case it was just someone who looked very similar, so I smiled big, and his face burst into shock and disbelief followed by a bright grin.  There are two different cultural reasons why the Chinese and Uygurs don't hug.  The Chinese have more personal space in individual interactions (though not in a crowd) and exhibit less physical affection.  The Uygur women who are my close friends will hug me and hold my hand.  But Uygur men of strict religious faith won't even touch a woman who is not a wife or relative.  My friend isn't that strict, but I know better than to throw my arms around him in a big bear hug, even though I think I could tell he sort of wanted to do the same.  Instead we approached each other with one palm out face forward to intertwine our fingers and clasped each others' hand in a way that was like the best hug I could have gotten.  It's so good to see him.

We took a long walk yesterday but spent most of the time just catching up on the civilities of the last 3 years.  What each of us has been up to professionally and future plans.  Today we met up again and went to dinner where we spent at least 2 hours lost in conversation like old times.  I have had the best conversations with him about cross-cultural comparisons, and we joked today that it's like we are cultural ambassadors for each of our groups. He told me some pretty amazing things that he's been taught in his community lately.  That the Free Masons have met as a secret society in the UK to discuss the problem of overpopulation and what to do about it - distribute poisoned medication as charity in developing countries to kill off large numbers of poor people.  So some people here will no longer take medicines that are made overseas.  He knew that Lady Gaga had worn a meat dress, and his imam said this is considered normal in the West and is an example of why young people here shouldn't have access to the internet. And that the US military was somehow responsible for the earthquake in Sichuan. He seemed to be telling me all of this as if he hoped I would refute it all but he didn't quite know what to believe.  I reassured him that this is me.  I am American.  This is American.  Not these propaganda stories he's been hearing.  But it goes a long way to explain the mistrust and downright hatred towards us in this part of the world.

But I also explained to him that it goes both ways and that I am doing my best to do the same for him and his culture that I hope he is doing for me and mine.  That there are a lot of Americans who think all Muslims are violent extremists.  That most Americans have never met anyone who follows Islam and don't understand that it's a different culture, but we are all the same at the core.  We had a really long and fascinating conversation about comparative religion and the steps from Judaism to Christianity to Islam and how similar it is to the story of the Tower of Babel - a story that is common to all of our religions because we start from the same book. And I learned a lot about the Islamic belief of conversion and redemption and how they see religion as a choice of free will. And we talked about how faith is not the problem, and at the core each of the religions is really not so different.  But just as some Christians choose to believe the parts of their faith that support their personal ideology and thus have started many of the world's most brutal wars, many Muslims now do the same.  People are the problem.  Lack of education and mutual understanding is the problem. Every time I come here, I have some of the most insightful and educated conversations with him, and it's always a delight.

Other than that being the same, a lot of the neighborhood where I have lived before is different.  I will refrain from writing more while I am here, but suffice to say there is a lot of new development.  A lot.  The people are still the same.  The culture is still the same.  The context is different.  And it's interesting.  Makes me wish I'd taken more pictures.

Bed for now and off to the desert tomorrow...

Forbid nippingcurved and roll over and close to the heat source

Instructions on the back of my hotel room card.  Apparently in Chinese it says "Do not bend the card or place it close to a heat source".

The last couple of days were eventful. Friday morning I was met at my hotel and escorted to the main building of the CAS to give a seminar on my research.  It went really well.  I had a lot of interest and some pretty good questions all around.  Most were interested in how to catch and how to raise the animals.  There is a lab here that is interested in studying hibernation in the jerboas, so I'll be doing my best to advise.  That same lab is also doing genetic barcoding of a variety of species in Xinjiang, including the rodents, so it looks like I have extra company for at least part of the field collections.  Fantastic for me.  I could use as much help as people are willing to offer.

After a tour of the lab spaces, including a room with five small areal surveillance aircraft and another room with a nice new fancy scanning electron microscope, I headed back to my room to rest for a bit before the scheduled tour of the natural history museum. They have a fantastic museum here, a really wonderful educational resource. The animal rooms have mounts of many of the species that are native to Xinjiang, and they were incredibly well prepared.  The feathers and fur are in excellent condition with really good eyes and mounted in postures that make them look ready to leap right off their perch and out the door. More importantly, they have about a half dozen jerboas that are all in accurate postures.  This is in stark contrast to all of the mounts I've seen in the US and in London that are contorted and weirdly posed in ways you just really don't ever see of a live jerboa.  So I guess it does make a big difference for the preparator to actually see the animal their stuffing while it's still alive.

After the tour I was whisked away in a black towncar to a restaurant on an upper floor of a highrise building and down the hall to a private dining room.  Ahhhh, the Chinese banquet.  They lulled me into a false sense of comfort with their low key first evening when in fact I was not getting off easy. I know enough by now to linger about the edge of the table while everyone fusses and argues over the seating arrangement.  I sit where I'm told to sit, when I'm told to sit.  The custom is that the seat furthest from and facing the door is reserved for the host.  The seats to the right and left are seats of honor.  And then it goes around the table from there.  I was second to the right of the host.  Not bad.  The other, more important seats were reserved for directors of the Xinjiang Normal University. Chinese banquets are lavish affairs with about twenty times more food on the table than the guests could or will ever consume.  There is a lazy susan at the center of the table, and you just grab whatever looks appealing as it glides by.  Fortunately, I am happy to just eat whatever lands in front of me without asking what it is.  One of the first things I picked up was what I thought was some kind of mushroom.  The taste and texture was not inconsistent with that inoffensive thought...and then the professor to my right leaned in to tell me I'd just eaten chicken stomach.  Delightful.  But you really never know what you're going to get, so it's best to keep an open mind.

And while I didn't get the highest seat of honor, I did get the fish.  The last dish to hit the table is the whole fish.  And the lazy susan gets turned about until the head is pointing straight at the guest of honor. The person who gets the head gets to take the first bite of the fish.  I asked to be sure that didn't mean I had to actually eat the head.  But what they failed to tell me until later is that if the honored guest takes a full drink of baiju (I'll get to that later), he or she can then order the others at the table to take certain parts of the fish - the eyeballs, lower jaw, dorsal fin.  Each has some specific symbolism that I can't remember because by that point I'd had too much baiju.

Ah, the baiju.  Chinese for rotgut white lightening. 65% alcohol served in tiny little eyewash glasses.  The glasses are deceitful and make you think you aren't drinking as much as you are.  This is also the first time I was introduced to the culture of the three toasts. At past banquets, the host gives a speech and everyone drinks. Then another important person will speak, and everyone drinks. Then the guest gives a speech, and well, you get the picture.  This time there were those same kinds of speeches, but the host gives three speeches that can be interspersed with other speeches, but they are all group speeches.  Once the host gives the third speech, then the party can move on to the one on one more casual toasts.  The foreigner is always the target in curiosity - how much can you drink? And it's very critical to doing business in China.  I heard this time that there is a written law in Beijing that says no business can be conducted without baiju.  I think the top politicians in this country must have liver disease by now.  It's a way of showing your strength, your happiness, your honor.  I managed to show remarkable strength and made a good impression on my hosts without spilling my "honor" in front of anyone. Business has officially begun.

But that made yesterday kind of sort of suck. I crawled out of bed at 10:30 only long enough to get breakfast before they closed and then crawl back into bed until 1 pm. Then I managed to hook up with Sarah and her boyfriend Charles to go to the Texas Cafe for a real hobbit style "second breakfast" of honest to goodness authentic biscuits and gravy.  That helped quite a bit. Later in the afternoon, I disappeared off with Xu Feng to do some shopping for the fieldwork, and we ended up in the most awesome market area ever. We wandered through the lumber yard, past the flower market, and into the pet area to see turtles, salamanders, tons of fish, some frogs, loads of birds, puppies, kittens, and the very very unfortunate cages that barely contained rather large dogs.  We were searching for large fishing landing nets to catch the jerboas and found them in this spectacular multistory megamall that was all fish stuff.  Store after store after store of fish, aquariums, and aquarium supplies.  I still do not understand the Asian phenomena of shopping areas where every business sells the exact same thing. But it was a wonderous thing wandering three floors of expensive aquariums wondering who in this area could possibly afford this, but as I've learned there are apparently a lot of folks in this region with a bucket ton of $$$.

And then it was off to the Fubar! I first discovered the Fubar 4 years ago and have since become good friends with one of the owners.  Read back to the end of my last time in China to see why Hiro is my hero - he got my food poisoned and dehydrated self into the "best" hospital in Urumqi.  So it was good to see him and to see the old bar and do some people watching for the night.  Again, more changes have come in the years since I've been gone.  Affluence.  Unbelievable affluence. This used to be a backpacker bar.  It still has its share of foreign travelers and expats, but it's gotten too expensive to be a watering hole for the vagrant westerners.  Instead it's full of large groups of multinationals from around this region - lots of rich Russians in particular.  As well as upper class Uygurs and Chinese. And there's an attitude that pervades - an attitude of snobbishness that says "I'm better than all the rest of you, and more importantly I can *buy* you".  Hiro tells me he had to start putting a price to "buy" a table (minimum order) because fights were breaking out when the occasional rich Russian would come in and demand people who weren't spending the kind of money he was willing to spend should vacate their table for him.  Perhaps not the way I would have handled it.

So last night ended at 3 am, I'm completely beat after two nights out on the town, and perfectly happy to turn in early and quietly. More planning and preparing tomorrow, and we should be leaving for the field station on Tuesday. Off to the peace and quiet of the desert.

Happy Dance

I know maybe I will jinx myself by getting too excited too early, but so far this visit is going exceedingly well. I was met at the airport in Urumqi by the young assistant professor (more like a postdoc by the American system) who will accompany me to the field station and assist with the work.  He's kind and quiet with really good English. I think he'll be an excellent companion.  After getting me checked into the hotel and a nice rest for a bit, he met me again to take me to dinner with the two older professors who have been helping to arrange all of this planning.  Read back to previous entries to understand my past experience, and you'll know why I was expecting a private smoke filled room with a giant round table of excessive amounts of food and people in suits who speak little English.  I was stunned to walk into a nice recently renovated restaurant where I was led to a small table to join the two professors and an American woman working at their institute.  Everyone was casually dressed (and me in my suit), and they were light hearted and fun sharing travel stories and jokes about the difficulties of learning new languages.  The American, Sara, is working at the Institute as a manuscript editor so that she can improve her already very good Chinese. After a really fun meal, where I applied my previous knowledge of how it is impolite to discuss work over the first dinner party, Sara and I went to the local KFC for milk tea and shared stories about our experiences living and working in this strange land. She's great fun and enthusiastic, and I think I have her interested enough to overcome her fear of camel ticks and perhaps join us at the field station.  I am going to pitch the idea to our colleagues of how useful it would be for her to learn more about the process of science and to develop a relationship with me and Xu Feng while we work in the desert so that perhaps she can help in the future with establishing international research connections and helping to write international funding applications from the Chinese side.  Plus it would just be good to have another set of hands to help set traps and catch rodents. And more good company for me.

This morning I gave a seminar at the Chinese Academy on the work that I'm doing and included some ideas for collaborative projects that we could work on together.  I think I generated a lot of interest and got a ton of questions at the end.  Several people here are studying biodiversity and cataloging the wildlife that is found in Xinjiang, so they are interested in perhaps sampling some of the species with me.  I think this could turn into a much bigger project than just what I am planning for myself, which would be really great for them and great for me to generate even more enthusiasm and offers of assistance. I'm just overjoyed by how helpful everyone has been already and look forward to getting out into the desert and getting busy.

It's been an eventful 36 hours since I started this post, but since it's 3 am here and I'm exhausted, I'm turning in and will update again soon.  Suffice it to say all continues to go well, and I'm having an excellent time.