When I wrote my "What to pack for China" list I forgot one small, very lightweight thing -- it's something that will remind you of home and you'll be glad for your foresight.  It is, of course, your Remembrance Day poppy!

Ross and I saved our poppies from a previous Remembrance Day in Canada and brought them to China. Here is Ross at a diner in Beijing with our son Gus, wearing his poppy.  We saw one other girl with a poppy that day.

And at 11:00 am Beijing time (all of China is on Beijing time, btw) on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we were just about to exit the beautiful Summer Palace grounds. The Summer Palace was a resort on the outskirts of Beijing by a beautiful lake for the Emperors and their Empresses and concubines to escape the sweltering summer heat of the Forbidden City. Now it's open to the public. We stepped off the pathway and huddled together with heads bowed to observe a moment of silence in this unlikely setting.

I figured that once I blogged about the fact that I couldn't find Western-sized dinner plates anywhere, I would start seeing them for sale everywhere. You know how that goes. And, pretty much, yeah that's what happened. These plates might typically be used as serving plates by the Chinese, but they would work as dinner plates for us. I spotted these at YiWu, the large maze-like shopper's paradise I've written about before.

Julie, my TESL teacher, gave us aspiring ESL teachers a lot of useful information and ideas for classroom activities. But I found the textbook material broke down into two categories -- the first was what I call the no sh*t, Sherlock stuff, such as blindingly obvious remarks about the advantages and disadvantages of different classroom seating arrangements. Student teachers have to read sentences like this: "In any classroom, pupils will be drawn together for many purposes and we can refer to such within classroom contexts as 'groupings'".... Seriously. Get your yellow hiliters out and plow through that stuff.
Then there's the edu-speak, the jargon, which I simply loathed. Example: "...that sees language as a semiotic system, that is, a meaning-making system that constitutes a resource, not a rule-governed object...."

I've been looking forward to a visit from one of my sons, along with my husband's return to China after some time working, golfing and fishing back home. Our pre-trip preparations are a breeze compared to what my Chinese colleagues would have to go through if they planned a trip abroad.

Recently, two of my colleagues mentioned to me that they have had to surrender their passports to the authorities. Everyone on staff at the managerial level had to turn in their passport. If they want to go abroad, they have to fill out forms, get things stamped, their boss has to sign off for them, and so the boss's career is on the line, too.

This curtailment of their civil liberties is an attempt to stem mostly corruption+ and to a lesser extent espionage. For me, this was a reminder that behind this civil society (and by "civil," I mean orderly, courteous, safe and the trains run on time) lies a dictatorship. 
 
In my year and a half in China, I haven't seen a prison or an orphanage, but I know that they are out there. Somewhere in this province, political dissidents are being held and baby girls and disabled children are being abandoned by parents. One such "baby hatch" is located in the provincial capital of Jinan, just a few hours by train from where I live. Shortly after its opening the authorities were overwhelmed with the number of foundlings.