China's enormous environmental experiment

One of the many "instant" cities that have sprung up since China flooded out communities for the Three Gorges Dam project. This is Feng Du, now located across the river from the original city. 

For better or worse, I’m an experiential learner. I try to stay on top of the current events of the world, but it’s getting up close and personal with the issues of distant lands that really works for me.

So it was that I could have a headful of knowledge about China’s massive Three Gorges dam project from years of hearing about it, yet still find myself gaping at the altered landscape along the Yangtze River from a cruise-ship window last week in the realization that I didn’t actually know a damn thing.

I’d read the articles, of course. I’d seen the documentaries. Long before our family trip to China, I got that the Three Gorges project was a mighty big deal.

At stake: The promise of 100 billion kilowatt hours of “clean” hydro power for a country still burning coal. The relocation of 1.3 million people flooded out by a dammed river.  An end to the huge seasonal floods that have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. A potential environmental disaster.

But what it would feel like to sail on a river that had been so dramatically changed, in a country full of people whose lives were turned completely upside down by the project - well, it just hadn’t hit me before. We spent three days travelling the Yangtze as part of our tour, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The cruise departed at Chongqing, a city that has swelled to a staggering 32 million in recent years. It’s a knockout, as were all of the big cities we visited in our two-week holiday.

Sure, you peer through a haze of air pollution to see any of them. But underneath the “fog” (as our guides liked to call it), China’s cities are feasts of clever, unique architecture; great food; interesting people; and a neon nightscape that’s to die for if you’re a night-light aficionado like me.

 A two-week trip is hardly enough time to understand a place, or explore why Communist countries are invariably hotbeds of capitalism at the level of the people. But an extended stay isn’t required just to notice the impact that economic progress is having on China, in ways both good and bad.

We toured a few Chongqing hot spots on the day we arrived, including an odd little exhibit in a city park featuring a detailed, winding mural of the Three Gorges region painted along a concrete passageway.

The artist had depicted the towns that lined the river’s edge before the dam, and then sketched in the new water line in red. It was remarkably effective at bringing the issues home.

Our young guide walked us along the painting, her tone of voice studiously neutral as she talked about the massive human impact.  When we gasped at the sheer number of people uprooted, the cities and heritage sites washed away, she observed sagely that “the coin flips both ways.”

She’s right. For China to be an economic leader - for its citizens to have the same standard of living we enjoy in North America - it needs the hydro power, the flood control and the huge transportation savings that the Three Gorges project created.

But what a price its people paid.

They didn’t just lose their riverside homes, they lost centuries-old towns and traditions. Many were relocated to unfamiliar regions and assigned to unfamiliar jobs. The government built them new housing - generally more upscale than they’d previously lived in - but at a cost of flooding their farm land and family histories under more than 150 metres of river water.

Seen from the cruise boat, the new shoreline looks unnatural, especially in the spots where abandoned farmland now runs straight into the water. Above the new water line, “instant” skyscraper cities and massive, dazzling bridges have sprung up to accommodate the displaced - they, too, look out of place.

Like so much of what we saw in China, the altered landscape is beautiful in its own way. You can’t help but feel the energy and growth in China, the sense of possibility.

But it’s hard to imagine any government getting away with such a bold manipulation of nature. Reports of environmental degradation since the dam was built bear that out.

As for the toll on the million-plus “emigrants,” China isn’t a country that talks about such things. I can only hope that in the end, the coin flipped the right way for them.

Paying bonuses to have our services cut

Back from my travels in China (wow, what a place!), struggling with the muzzy-headed feeling of jet lag. If anyone knows of a cure for jet lag, please send it along. I try this, I try that, but no matter what I still come home to several days of cloudy thinking and weird sleeping habits.
Must admit, I've enjoyed having a break from the news these past two weeks. I woke up to this morning's headlines in the Globe and remembered why I needed the break - so much of the news makes my blood boil, and who needs that first thing in the morning when they can't think straight to begin with?
Here's the one that got me going, detailing the bonuses federal civil servants stand to get if they can cut public services sufficiently. How crazy is it for us to be paying our taxes to government so that they can give themselves handsome bonuses for cutting our services? We can presume this is some strategy taken from the books of the big corporations, but it makes no sense when you're talking about a taxpayer-funded structure.

Travelling through Thanksgiving

I'm off to China this morning for a family trip with my mother, her sister and six of us cousins. I don't think I can be counted on to keep my blog up-to-date while away, so please check back for more regular postings starting Oct. 10. 

My world in 17 syllables

I’m almost three months into an odd little creative project, writing a daily on-line haiku about some aspect of the day that stands out for me.

I’ve since discovered I’m just one of many people out there using haiku in creative, unusual ways.

Maybe it’s a trend. Or maybe a tightly constrained form of writing that forces you to cut to the chase is simply a relief in a time of too much blah-blah-blah.

Traditional haiku are, of course, exquisite jewels of 17 carefully chosen syllables, organized in three lines of five, seven and five syllables. They’re most often about nature and the seasons.

My goal was to use the form for journaling rather than to strive for high- quality haiku. So while I follow the five-seven-five syllable rule, my haiku are less like poetry and more like something you’d write on a Post-it note to remind yourself about the day.

It has been an interesting exercise. Having to come up with a haiku every night means I have to think about what was distinctive about the day. It makes me dig deep for the 17 syllables that I hope will still summon the feel of a day decades later.

I’ve been a hot-and-cold journal writer for much of my adult life, alternating between months of pouring out the intimate details of my life and years of not writing a single word.

I’m better when I travel, when every day tends to feel like a rich new experience that you want to make note of. I was flipping through one such travel diary of mine when it struck me that I wanted to work harder at identifying those same moments in my daily life.

Growing older unsettles me with the way it compresses time. Each day rolls past just a little faster, often so similar to the previous day in its routines that it’s hard to tell one from the other. I feel the need to make each day stand out.

What is it that distinguishes a day for me from the other 19,950 days that went before it? That’s the question I reflect on every night as I try to pull together that day’s haiku. It’s definitely making me much more aware that even an ordinary day is unique.

My mother has long kept a journal, of the kind that scrupulously notes weird weather, special occasions, unusual family illnesses and unprecedented sports scores. If ever there’s dissent in the family about what the weather was like in the summer of 1982 or which year Dad came down with pneumonia, out comes the journal.  

She encouraged me from a young age to follow suit, but the largely empty Barbie diary from my girlhood speaks to my early history of sporadic record-keeping.

Still, there’s something very special about seeing the inane declarations of your 11-year-old self, or the angst-ridden entries from your various periods of torment. Your life, in your own words - it’s compelling.

Doing haiku-style journaling came to me while I was flipping through an old daytimer that I had maintained off and on as a bare-bones diary for three years in the 1970s.

As an actual journal, it’s fairly worthless. My habit was to write one or two sentences in fairly random fashion, never with much consistency.

But when the book surfaced during a recent housecleaning, a browse through it reminded me of the value of even scant observations from your own past. It’s all personal history.

July 14, 1975, for instance: The start of a long, painful strike at the mill where my then-husband worked. August 15, 1977: My first cable-car ride in San Francisco. December 14, 1978: The doctor extracts a huge piece of mouldering bread from the nose of my two-year-old.

They’re not exactly the major events of my life. But they call up a lot for me in a few words. The haiku form is ideal for doing that, as it leaves room for nothing but the essence of a day.

And making the journal public forces me to write a haiku even on the nights when I’d really rather not. I’m leaving for China with my mom tomorrow so won’t post those haiku until our return Oct. 10, but I’ve got my travel scribbler packed and remain committed to the discipline.

“We do not remember days, we remember moments,” Italian poet Cesare Pavese once said. I’ll hold onto mine syllable by syllable.

Feds get "tough", but what's the real impact?

Here we go, introducing get-tough-on-crime legislation in a period when we really ought to be celebrating how effective we've been at lowering crime rates these past 20 years. But enough of the public seem to want to believe otherwise that the Conservatives see a political edge in doing this. Time will tell how these laws will translate on the ground, but you do have to wonder about what will happen to people's rights.
Case in point: The Preventing the Trafficking, Abuse and Exploitation of Vulnerable Immigrants Act. 
The act sounds good on paper. It gives power to immigration officials to refuse work permits to people if they suspect the person is vulnerable and being brought to Canada to do "humiliating or degrading" work (the nickname for the act is the "anti-stripper law," reports the Globe). Hey, nobody likes human trafficking and exploitation.
But how exactly will an immigration officer decide who's "vulnerable"? What criteria will be used? Who will be deciding whether a job is humiliating or degrading, and whose definitions will they be using?  What's the process for assessing someone's "vulnerability"? Where are the protections to ensure powers like these don't end up being used just to block certain categories of people from getting work permits?  
And really, if we're so deeply concerned about people's vulnerability, is denying them a work permit the best way to help them?
But of course, helping immigrants was likely never the goal of this act. It's just a new way of being able to say no to more people.