Suz goes to China!

The following post is from Suzanne Merkelson who is returning to Catalina Island Camps for her fourth year this summer. Suz has been a cabin counselor, skin diving instructor, Lead Diver and will be the Girls Camp Director this summer. She is a senior at Colby College.

January 9, 2009 was an especially strange day for me. By dinnertime, I found myself at a fancy round banquet table piled high with colorful, steaming dishes I couldn’t begin to recognize or name. A bowl was placed in front of me. Looking down, I saw what looked like a simple bowl of pasta, covered in a white sauce. I took a bite. This was definitely not spaghetti.

“Jason,” I whispered, turning to the guy next to me, posing a question that I found myself asking constantly throughout the month: “What exactly am I eating?”

“Shark fin soup,” he replied, happily taking a slurp. I recoiled, remembering everything I’ve learned at Catalina Island Camps about the terrible practice of hunting sharks for their fins. Of course, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I was in China’s Jiangsu province, along the Yangtze River. While sharkfinning is looked down upon in the United States, here shark fin soup is a delicacy and demonstration of affluence.

I spent January traveling around China with an economics class from my school, Colby College, which is in Waterville, Maine. Colby has this thing called JanPlan, which is a shortened semester between the fall and spring. As an International Studies major, I’ve been able to take advantage of JanPlans, traveling all over the world: teaching English in rural India my sophomore year, backpacking around South Africa and Lesotho my junior year, and now China. Our class focused on the Yangtze, which is the third longest river in the world and the center of trade in China. We visited factories, toured a panda breeding center (let me tell you, these guys are the cutest things in the world), saw steel being made, hiked up a Taoist mountain, and celebrated Chinese New Years in Shanghai.

We also learned a lot about dams. China is on a dam-building spree, and one that is incredibly controversial. We began our tour in Shanghai. With Shanghai’s thick and potent air pollution, damming seems like an environmentally sound fix to China’s massive growth. However, when we started to visit the dam sites upriver, the answer was suddenly not so clear.

Part of the last week was spent hiking along Yunnan province’s Tiger Leaping Gorge, in the shadow of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, home to the southernmost glaciers in the northern hemisphere. We traveled through villages inhabited by Tibetan and Naxi (“Na-she”) minority people, and hiked for awhile alongside an old man with a smiling weathered face, leading his mule up the trail. This was one of the most stunningly beautiful places I had ever visited (other than Catalina, of course). It was also in danger—the government has a proposal to build a dam along this part of the river. If it passes, a dam would create a reservoir that would forever change this bucolic area and the life of the people who live here.

China is a country that loves superlatives. The most populated country in the world is home to the largest dam, the largest container shipping port, and third longest bridge—all of which I had the opportunity to visit. The Chinese people are incredibly proud of what their country has achieved. Millions have been lifted from poverty at an enormously rapid rate. Yet they face challenges in learning to solve the environmental and social problems plaguing many parts of the country. To me, the sharkfin soup is a good analogy for what’s happening in this fascinating place. China is both anxious and ready to prove its riches to the world (just look at the opening ceremony of the Olympics). It also is about to come to terms with the repercussions of that growth. Hopefully China can enjoy development in a sustainable way.

After all, imagine what camp would be like without leopard sharks.