I am in Maine for Christmas, far from the madding crowd ( or its Vermont equivalent ), and I feel vaguely silly writing a serious post about agribusiness. One of the many infuriating things about modern industrial farming is that it makes you feel like a crank just for writing about it. You start out citing facts, and pretty soon you feel like you are out in la-la land. But that's because all of the silly conspiracy theories that you hear about large multinational corporations conniving to seize absolute power, with no thought for the public good, actually hold true in agribusiness. I usually try to take deep breaths, get some ironic distance, and just plain resist the urge to write posts like this one. But I really hit the roof this morning, when I read this article in the Washington Post about a failed pilot project in "pharming" — the use of human food crops like corn to mass-produce pharmaceuticals.

The idea behind pharming is to turn food plants into factories for making specific molecules - these can be drugs, 'industrial enzymes', pesticides, or anything else you can get the plant to make by blindly splicing in genetic material. Once the plant is fully-grown, you harvest it and extract the chemical back out, a process ( thanks in large part to massive government subsidies for agriculture ) that is cheaper than just synthesizing the stuff in a lab. In a particularly evil little touch, one of the main driving forces behind pharming is the huge market in animal vaccines and synthetic hormones that the livestock industry desperately needs to keep factory farmed animals from instantly dying of disease — precisely the kind of twist-of-the-knife that makes the whole topic so infuriating.

Proponents of the pharming idea spout all the usual horse manure about curing cancer. Opponents of the idea apparently sit on their hands, or confer with each other in soft hushed tones, for all that it has made a difference. When's the last time you heard about pharming?

It took a failed pilot project ( yes, they're already growing the stuff outdoors ) to bring the practice to the front pages of the Washington Post. It seems that, in spite of rigorous efforts by pilot project participants to make sure that corn pollen from genetically modified drug-making plants had no chance of cross-breeding with non-GM corn ( or one of the GM corn varieties judged fit for human consumption ), the pollen still got out and contaminated several hundred acres before being contained. By "contained" I mean they plowed up five hundred acres of plants and burned them.

This kind of genetic Russian roulette reminds me of nothing as much as it does the introduction of exotic species to Australia in the last century, when well-meaning botanists and other scientific adventurers decided to turn the country into a land of milk and honey by importing European plants and animals that have since devastated the Australian ecosystem. By "devastated" I mean turned most of the interior to scrub, and killed off hundreds of native species.

In both cases, the people behind the plans were eminently rational, the promised benefits were enormous, and everything went irretrievably to hell as soon as the stuff got out in the wild. We're not there yet with biocrops, but having pilot studies going on in real Iowa fields at the same time as scientists discover they know much less than anyone thought about the basics of gene expression ( that is, admitting that the whole science of genetic engineering is the microscopic equivalent of pushing colored buttons to see what they do ) is not the most reassuring Christmas gift I could have asked for.

A crazy article in today's New York Times about totalitarian hijinks and the new "Mother of All Battles" mosque in Baghdad:

First, the minarets.

The outer four, each 140 feet high, were built to resemble the barrels of Kalashnikov rifles, pointing skyward. The inner four, each 120 feet high, are in the form of Scud missiles of the kind Iraq fired at Israel in 1991 during the Mother of All Battles, known to Americans as the Persian Gulf war. At their peak, these inner minarets are decorated with red, white and black Iraqi flags.

There is more.

Inside a special sanctum, treated by the mosque's custodian with the reverence due a holy of holies, there are 650 pages of the Koran — written, it is said, in Mr. Hussein's blood. As the official legend has it, "Mr. President" donated 28 liters of his blood — about 50 pints — over two years, and a famous calligrapher, Abas al-Baghdadi, mixed it with ink and preservatives to produce the handsome calligraphy now laid out page by page in glass-walled display cases.

Are you a dusty old fetishist interested in Asian women, medical fantasies, and the delights that only a lover of a certain age can offer? And are you are interested in all three together - finding a mature older Asian woman to be your "doctor"?. While I'm sure there are a hundred porn sites that will cater to your whim (I am afraid to check, but is the Internet), I know of a better place for you. Run, don't walk, to Nanjing Lu in Shanghai.

The streets in Shanghai follow a handy naming scheme - cities run east/west, provinces north/south - and Nanjing Lu is an east-west avenue that serves as Shanghai's main commercial drag. To make it more tourist-friendly, a long stretch of it has been cordoned off into a pedestrian strollway (not that you don't risk being hit by the electric sightseeing train). The street is a combination of Fifth Avenue, Las Vegas, and general bedlam, and it is a great place to spend a few hours just strolling about. At night, the whole spectacle is lit up in the best Chinese fashion, with neon everywhere and night markets spilling off onto the side streets. You can get Haägen Dazs on Nanjing Lu, or a glass of hot soy milk, or pretty much anything in between.

You can also find the world's strangest sex shop. If you follow the street to its eastern terminus at the Bund, you will find on the southern edge of the penultimate block a little promontory of concrete with the words 'sex shop' stencilled onto the window. Stroll by this outcrop at just the right, casual pace (you might need to make a few passes). If you peek in as you pass the narrow open doorway, you will see a selection of rubber dildos, a slinky black negligée, two varieties of plastic ass - and looking right back at you, three matronly Chinese women in lab coats.

I dare you to go in. I really dare you. Because you know that the second you walk in the store, they will help you, and if you show the least whisper of indecision, they will begin suggesting items on their own. This is, after all, the country in which a waitress brings the menu and then stands patiently at the table, waiting for you to decide on an order. The country where, if you stop to examine a pen in a stationery store, a woman will float over to help you make your selection - do you really think they'll let you palpate the plastic ass in peace, the three of them, in a space the size of a walk-in closet?

I have always been terrified of helpful salespeople, especially the hovering kind, and so my first few days in China were rough. Everywhere you go, there is a mob of employees, nearly always young women, floating about in every aisle and corner, coming to your assistance whether you like it or not. China was good corrective therapy for me. It even got to be a kind of game, to see how many employees we would attract (winner: hotel restaurants, two waiters each), or whether we could stop in front of a restaurant without instantly being invited in by an alert hostess shooting out the front door.

It stopped being a game for me in Beijing when I left the hotel in the morning and returned quite late at night, only to see the same greeter shivering outside the front door, having spent the better part of twelve hours in the bitter wind without even a coat to warm her. Several times we arrived or left a hotel in the wee hours, only to have the entire staff wake up for our benefit, fully dressed, having slept at their stations.

The missing men we found in Chengdu, where the whole city was crawling with construction crews, doing hard manual labor. Everything was done by hand: carrying bricks, laying pipe, digging foundations, with much of the heavy stuff carried in two buckets suspended from a wooden yoke worn across the shoulders. Returning one night, we passed a construction site that had been busy during the afternoon, and were mortified to realize that the whole crew was asleep there under nothing more than a tarp.

For all the modernization and change, China remains a place where labor is cheap and abundant, and any job is precious. Despite the massive overstaffing, unemployment is terribly high and rising as they privatize old industries away. Much of the time you feel like you've stepped straight into Charles Dickens, and it's a powerless and guilty feeling.

But if you dream of stern Asian scientists in their golden years, waiting to invite you in to their laboratory, you might be able to forget your cares on a visit to Nanjing Lu.

There is a lot to love about Wuhan.

First, you've never heard of it, and when you go there, you are likely to be the only foreigner around. How often does that happen anymore in the big cities of this world? Make no mistake - Wuhan isn't a backwater, it's a bustling, gigantic city full of busy people, with lots to see and do. It just happens that you're the only white boy around, is all. Out of four million people, you've got the biggest nose.

Second, in Wuhan there is a small snack bar where you can feast on dòupí, a kind of deliciously greasy filled omelet made with bean curd instead of eggs. You could easily sling this in front of a trucker at any diner in America if it weren't for the suspicious amount of rice inside. It's even more tasty than your average hash, which for a hash lover is not an easy thing to say. And to make it impossibly wonderful, the correct way to pronounce the dish ( with the right tones ) is "Dough! Pea?", which makes my simple mind happy.

A third reason: Wuhan is home to the musical street sweeper truck. When you sojourn in Wuhan, in the wee hours of the morning you're likely to wake up to the sounds of "Jingle Bells" or "Happy Birthday" coming faintly in from the street outside. It's not a dream, and it's not the Good Humor man (even though it sounds just like him) - it's a street-sweeper truck shooting jets of water across the blacktop, and playing a happy electronic tune. Musical street sweeper truck! Sometimes they will even roll by in the middle of the day, sending everyone scurrying for higher ground with their raking spray of water, rolling off down the street to the tune of "Deck the halls".

And this brings up reason number four: it's always Christmas in Wuhan(TM)! During our visit (pre-Thanksgiving) the stores were filled with Christmas decorations, ornaments, and the dulcet tones of Kenny G's Christmas album. "Big deal", you may say, until you realize that it's like this in Wuhan all year round. The Wuhanese just like the Christmas spirit, thank you very much, and they'll have their decorations minus the holiday. We haven't even been able to make Easter this secular, and here they've gone and invented permanent Christmas. Merry Christmas, Wuhan!

Fifth, Wuhan taxi drivers are wonderful people, and they have all been equipped with a cassette tape entitled (direct quote), English for Wuhan Taxi Drivers. This tape contains the alphabet, days of the week, numbers, and a host of useful phrases, such as "Welcome to take my taxi", and "Bom voyage!". On our first taxi ride, we were taken off guard by a jolly "Ha Dee Dee!" from our grizzled cabbie, and left somewhat at a loss until we heard the tape player say "How do you do?". The lessons are delivered both in Mandarin and English, so you can learn to say "Please take me to the airport" in Chinese while the cabbie is learning it in English. Every Wuhan cabbie will be delighted to play this tape for foreign friends. From time to time there is a musical interlude, a spell of Kenny Rogers hits on tenor sax, and in between the instrumental bits you can relax to the mellow sounds of "Monday... Tuesday... Wonsday... " as you cross the mighty Chang Jiang river.

Sixth, Wuhan has the highest concentration of KFC restaurants anywhere - one per block - and they all have giant posters advertising what appears to be hot-and-sour soup. Some of the KFCs are enormous, stretching on for several storefronts, and they are all packed with customers. Best of all, the ubiquitous life-size statues of Colonel Sanders at each KFC door all look distinctly Asian.

Seventh, in Wuhan you can find wonderful street food, including big round disks of fried bread with spicy lamb, a steaming bowl of wontons for just a quarter, little sesame-seed covered ping-pong balls of rice dough on a stick, deep-fried in sugar syrup; tiny barbecue skewers of lamb; heated (!) lemonade and soda; whole deep-fried fishes, and stinky tofu squares everywhere.

Finally, you should love Wuhan because of the fabulous Yinfang hotel, which took us in at four in the morning after a six hour bus ride, and only charged us for the following night. A hotel where the desk lady walked our companion three blocks to the nearest bank because she couldn't change his old-style twenties herself, and had to be cajoled for many minutes before accepting a tip. A hotel where the restaurant maitre d' strolled over to our table before we got a menu and asked "So - what can I do for you tonight?", as if he genuinely didn't know what we might be after.

Yinfang hotel, with your Western toilets and spotless rooms, Merry Christmas to you!

As a college junior, I spent a semester living in Paris, occupying a prim little room in the 15th arrondisement. My French landlady, the widow of a Hungarian nobleman, was a decorous older woman with a complete collection of green Michelin guides to the various provinces of France. Apart from the famous restaurant ratings, the Michelin people put out an imposing series of travel guides to the world, and I remember leafing through them in a kind of awestruck haze of intimidation before leaving for a very brief first trip to Provence.

The Michelin guides use an elaborate system of stars, triangles, and font faces to indicate what is worth seeing, what is tolerable, and what should lie beneath your contempt. They also envelop each attraction in a thick armor of scholarship, tracing the history of every chapel, major rock outcrop, hamlet and city hall back into the mists of time. Traveling with a Guide Michelin, especially if you are an ignorant foreign student, feels a lot like traveling with a busload of stern retired schoolteachers, and the shadow of history looms large.

I mention all this by way of comparison, because my visit to China was so context-free that it almost made me giddy. Not only were we floating down the Chang Jiang on a cloud of ignorance, but there wasn't ever a serious risk of new information coming in to pierce the veil. I had been to countries in Europe where I couldn't speak the language at all, but there were always cognate words, or at the very least a script that I could look up in a dictionary. I had never known what it meant to utterly not understand a language. It turned out to be a marvelous guilty pleasure.

Thanks to this haze of incomprehension, our trip to Chongqing was pure Dada - without question the most enjoyable guided tour I've ever taken.

We had arrived in the city in the late morning after a bone-rattler of a bus ride from Chengdu, and we were scheduled to leave in the early evening on the boat that would take us down the river through the Three Gorges. To fill the time, there was offered a half-day guided tour of the city, unfortunately in Chinese only, since the foreigners among us didn't form a critical mass.

Chongqing is built on an impossible collection of hills at the bottom edge of Sichuan province, and has a complicated history, of which I was blissfuly unaware. It is a major inland port, but not especially easy to get to (until the Three Gorges fill up for good), and during the Second World War served as the capital of free China, after the Kuomintang beat a hasty retreat from advancing Japanese forces in Nanjing. Back then it was known as Chungking, a malarial sort of place cursed for its awful summer heat (together with Wuhan and Nanjing, the city is known as one of China's 'three furnaces') and under constant threat from Japanese bombers, who could easily find the place just by following the river.

I knew none of this as we started our bus ride, although the part about hills was easy enough to intuit. Instead I blithely settled in to our Chinese-language tour, with our bus half-filled with the same large friendly family that had accompanied us down from Chengdu that morning, and soulful karaoke videos playing on the video screen.

The tour was a delight. We started off with a visit to the Museum of Three Large Rocks, where a local guide showed us some big crystals in a display case for all of thirty seconds before escorting our group into the gift shop, fully six times the size of the museum proper. It was impossible to deduce anything about the museum from the gift shop, which contained the usual collection of crystal jewlery, large jade ships, miniature Buddhas and bead bracelets endemic to all of China's high-end souvenir stores. The only exit led into a scary-smelling preserved foods store, and from there mercifully out into the three-stone lobby.

Next up was a concentration camp - yes, yes, that's right - up in the hills above the city. It had been used by the Kuomintang to intern Communist Chinese during the war, and of course was the site of terrible atrocities of which we had no inkling. It was not the most comfortable place to visit, first because the entire camp had been built with American money, and second because the place was swarming with middle-school-aged Chinese kids in a variety of uniforms, who couldn't stop staring at us, but we resolved the situation by hiding in a noodle shop. All I will say in our defense is that we were ravenously hungry (we had eaten nothing but dodgy Rice Krispies treat simulacra on the morning bus ride), and not keen to see our tax dollars at work torturing Chinese national heroes.

One bowl of noodles and ice cream bar later, it was time to reconvene with our Chinese companions, who seemed to be in excellent spirits. We took off straightaway for another prison camp, this one completely across town. There were more throngs of children and many stark rooms with grainy photos of Chinese prisoners, with terse English notes that only made things more mysterious. I coudn't avoid making the vacuous observation that the prison camp had a beautiful view of the river. Here we finally pieced together the reason for the crowds: Nov 27th was the anniversary of a great massacre of Chinese Communists by the Kuomintang, who were booted out of Chongqing but decided to kill as many of their prisoners as they could before heading for Taiwan.

For all the grim history, the atmosphere was festive. It really was a spectacular day, and all the uniformed schoolkids were crazy with joy to be out of school. They walked in long single-file lines up the hill, with a Chinese schoolteacher every fifteen kids or so, keeping an eye on the rowdies. Down far below you could see the river, very low in its sandy bed, and a string of boats along it.

Next up was the Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where we got to drink a little plastic cup of strange tea served to us by a lab-coated woman, and then wander the empty halls as our Chinese friends got their pulses measured by young medical students. The walls of the Institute were covered with rubbings from a series of bas-relief sculptures depicting a traditional tea ceremony, parts of which were decidedly more erotic than any tea-drinking experience I have ever imagined. At the very end of the hall we found a tiny kitten, no more than six weeks old, standing triumphantly in a saucer of kibble. His whole body shook as he crunched on the pieces.

Back in the bus for more karaoke, and then a penultimate stop in front of a great behemoth of a building that we had passed several times earlier in the day. It looked like a cross between the Forbidden City and a giant Pizza Hut, but it turned out to be the swankest hotel in Chongqing, so upscale that they charged visitors 30 yuan just to see the lobby. There was a giant park in front of the place, into which our busmates immediately dispersed, while we worked on fending off a young hustler who really, really wanted to sell us a map. To say that the purpose of the stop was unclear would be doing an unfairness to the previous stops on our route, although again the place was mobbed.

By this point it was getting late, and the tour was drawing to an end. For our last stop, the bus parked on a near-vertical slope by the waterfront, and we ran the gauntlet of hawkers and vendors to enter a dimly-lit cavernous building. There was some kind of snack shop off the main hall, but everyone marched right through and out onto a large concrete terrace, from where we got the same wonderful view of the Chang Jiang we had seen from varioius vantage points all day. Except that now there was much excitement, pointing, and taking of pictures, until after ten minutes everyone filed back in to the snack shop, and excited shopping began.

Our snack-shopping experience was just as context-free as the rest of the day - we had to guess, based on heft and packaging, what might possibly contain good foods to eat during the three day journey, and we left with our best guesses for the departing boat. [link]

The Art of the Deal

What I learned on my Chinese vacation: if you are very shy, you will suffer torments trying to buy things. There is no such thing as being inconspicuous. You are a walking giant wallet.

I have always been a terrible shy shopper, easily spooked by salespeople and terrified at the idea of being helped, so don't think I don't sympathize. But I was lucky in my traveling companion, and I want to share what I learned these past three weeks at the feet of Mr. Baker, haggling master, who never pays full price:

First, the language. To bargain in China, you must forget any Mandarin Chinese you may have and become Ugly American, who saves much money, and is impervious to rational argument by dint of total incomprehension. The most important phrase for you to learn before visiting a Chinese market is the English word "Hello!", shouted loudly in the imperative mood.

"Hello!" is Chinese for I speak no English, but boy have I got a deal for you. Alternatively, you may also hear the phrase "Rolex!", which means I would like to sell you this expensive North Korean watch.

A proper response to "Hello!" and "Rolex!" is to say "bú yào!", which means I don't want it.

An improper response is to hold out a fistful of twenties and say "Dollars OK?".

Other useful phrases include "Looka looka!" and "Cheapa cheapa!", both of which are semantically related to "Hello!".

Depending on where you are (a market stall, or a bona-fide little store), you may or may not see items marked with an actual price. The prices will be marked and non-negotiable if you go to a department store or other Western-style retail outfit. Prices at food stalls, marked or not, are also final (because it's too depressing to bargain down a pork skewer from seven cents to three). In all other cases, you should consider the price tag to be a decorative element.

A marked price on an item allows the merchant to calculate for you a special discount, which you should also ignore, but which will occupy valuable seconds that you can use to actually look at the thing.

To begin the haggle dance, point to something you might care to buy and say "Duō shāo qián?", How much is it?. The merchant will give you a price in Chinese (perhaps even a decreasing series of them, Home Shopping Club style, if they like to impress with discounts), and then type it out on a calculator. When they do this, you must immediately respond with a shocked laugh.

There are several schools of thought on the topic - I have grown partial to a little worldly guffaw, with a certain bobbing of the head to indicate deep fiscal amusement. My girlfriend had great success with a kind of shocked gasp, followed by a loud "ha ha ha" and vigorous head shaking. Whatever your approach, it helps to have a second person nearby to relay the price to once your own incredulous laughter fades a bit - they can repeat the exercise afresh, magnifying the effect.

Now you make a counter offer. You do not want to make it too high, lest you deprive the merchant of the chance to laugh incredulously in turn, but you also don't want to get thrown out on your ear. You should pick a price low enough to feel vaguely ashamed of yourself, and then offer half of that - between ten and thirty percent of the merchant's first bid. If there is vigorous head shaking accompanied by rapid Chinese, you are probably doing well. If the merchant recoils in mock horror and yells your offer to others, so that they can reel in turn, you are doing very well indeed.

With the initial salvos fired, you must now examine the item and note its many defects to the merchant. Be sure to finger fabric, peer at hems, sniff tea blossoms, inspect the innards of your teapot, and in general look mildly disgusted with your impetuous decision to even consider purchasing something so shoddy. Call over friends and huddle cabalistically about the item, muttering in English. Point at it. Up the price a little. If you can, offer to buy two or more of the item, at a cut rate. Bid, laugh, and iterate until you get within a few yuan of the price you are actually willing to pay.

At some point you will arrive at the merchant's last, rock-bottom price, below which they can sink no further. This will be clearly explained to you with much exasperated gesturing, and a surprising amount of English ("I lose money! Last price!"). This is haggling crunch time for you - you have to shake your head, give a sad smile and walk away.

If you have done everything right, the merchant will call you back after you have gone a few steps - the more steps, the better the deal - and with much disgust the item will be given you at your last bid offer. At which point you must pay and run, because the merchant will immediately try to sell you something else.

You did it! You haggled and won! There is nothing like it in the world.