Beijing Huanying'ed Me

One of my favorite new phrases is huadelai/huabulai, which mean “worth it” and “not worth it,” respectively. For example, long-distance relationships, taking Beijing buses at rush hour, and trying to understand cab drivers are all huabulai. This past weekend, though, fell easily into the huadelai category – much fun was had on very little sleep at all.
Friday was a pretty average day to start with. I had Chinese in the morning and experienced our first weekly test, which wasn’t as bad as I had thought. The tests, unlike the daily dictations, focus much more on the grammar than on the vocabulary. The grammar isn’t my strong point, but I feel like I did a decent job nonetheless. There was a written section and a short oral presentation, which was delivered one-on-one to the excellent Yu Laoshi, who made me feel like I was the smartest darn six-year-old she’d ever met. Then later I had calligraphy again, with Fang Laoshi (who is confirmed Manchurian royalty). We didn’t get to write again, which was a bit disappointing, but he talked about a lot of the history and culture behind calligraphy and gave us our Chinese names written down in a couple different styles to examine, hopefully for next time (Tuesday). After that got out I headed back to the Zhangs’ for what I thought would be a quiet evening of studying until Max called asking if I wanted to go out* that night. I made plans to head over to his school with Michael, another Northwesterner on my program, in a couple hours and spent the rest of the early evening hanging out with Bin Bin and studying Monday’s list of vocabulary. As it turns out, Mrs. Zhang was gone for the weekend visiting family, and Mr. Zhang was out playing mahjong with some friends, so when it came time to leave I told Bin Bin to let her dad know that I’d gone out (but had my phone in case of emergency) and that he should not stay up and wait for me, as I’d be back quite late.
Michael and I met up at the bus stop, and after a couple snafus where the proper bus didn’t actually stop at our stop, got up to Max’s subway stop, where I promptly proceeded to almost get hit by a train.** We met up with Max and some other people from his school and walked over to his friend’s palatial, $350-a-month-per-roommate apartment on the ninth floor. This place was AMAZING: fully functional Western bathroom, 24-hour security staff at the door to each building, spacious bedrooms, and, in the living room overlooking the city, floor-to-ceiling glass windows. We hung out there for an hour and a half or so until Michael and I made an early exit to stop by at Pyro, a nearby bar where one of our fellow IESers was celebrating his 21st birthday (pointless in China, where a third-grader could walk into any store and buy a bottle of alcohol). Upon arriving, we were informed that the group had moved on to Propaganda, a club a couple doors down which happened to have no cover. Since it was free, we figured it couldn’t hurt to go in and take a look.
Happily, this club was mostly students, so we promptly got to dancing and finally gave the guy whose birthday it was our best wishes. About half an hour after arriving, Max called wanting to know where we were and came over (this was barely eleven, so the night was still young). Everyone went in and kept dancing, emerging periodically for fresh air and drinks for those who wanted them (they were also much cheaper here than at China Doll).
The club is set up with the DJ at the from of the (subterranean – the ground level is a bar with a lot of seating) room on a raised stand, a few small sofas and tables along the side, a littler bar in the back, and a giant dance floor in the middle. In front of the DJ stand, though, are a couple raised areas under spotlights where the exceptionally brave and superfly can go to dance in highlighted view of everyone in the room.
I used to hate dancing. I thought it was stupid, and that I was awkward and bad at it. At parties, I would hang out on the couch and make conversation with people instead. (Unfortunately, this conversation often ended up revolving around why I didn’t want to dance.) Then, sometime in February, Arianne, Matt, and Max ended up having one of their impromptu ten-person ragers, and sometime that night, I did a complete 180. I started the evening refusing to move in a non-ambulatory way, and ended it dancing to no music at all while I was waiting for Matt to put his shoes on so he could walk me home. Once at another dance party, Arianne, with a smile on her face, asked me “Remember when you used to hate dancing?” My response was something along the lines of “That Emily is dead to the world now, and she will not be missed.” The point I am trying to make here, though, is that if you’d told me six or seven months ago that I’d be voluntarily, even joyfully throwing it down in the spotlight in front of 300 or so of my peers, I’d have laughed at you and then refused to dance with you. Somehow, though, I found myself in the front of the room, in plain view, and I could not have been happier.
The high point of the night happened when the DJ, after a fairly pedestrian string of songs that were really cool six months ago, busted out the 2008 Olympic theme song, "Beijing Huanying Ni”***, put this huge hip-hop drumbeat behind it, and turned up the bass. Everyone lost it. I’ve never seen such excited people at a club before, and for the first minute or so you could barely hear the song over all the screaming and cheering. I was up by the DJ stand when it came on, and it got mobbed. Everyone put their drinks down, swarmed to the front, and started singing along as much as they could (it was a mix of Chinese and foreign students, so there was great variance here). What a killer time. I ended up staying until about three-thirty and then cabbing it back to the Zhangs’ apartment, where I was happy to see that Mr. Zhang had gone to sleep.
The next morning I started regretting my decision when I woke up at 7 to go on an IES-sponsored bicycle trip of Beijing’s hutongs, the traditional and rapidly-disappearing alleys with old courtyard houses. The entire trip kind of turned me off of giant organized events; somewhere between standing in front of the restaurant for 45 minutes waiting for lunch, 50 students on bikes filling up entire road lanes, and our guide’s oddly strict insistence on sticking to a particular route, it felt like more of the trip was spent waiting around so we could move on in a prescribed manner than it was actually moving. We also only rode through hutongs for about five minutes, which was probably good given that our giant crowd filled up a whole hutong at a time, and the denizens seemed a little peeved and inconvenienced by our presence. Also, I rented a Chinese bike for the ride, and although the Chinese are good at many things, making soft bike seats is absolutely not one of them. I went back to pick up a change of clothes for going out again that night (I had cleared my all-nighter with the Zhangs) and arranged to meet Max and one of his friends for a wander in a different section of hutongs, where he had previously gone exploring on his own and randomly met a kind family who had invited him into their home and given him tea and cigarettes. We got lunch and then the friend, who did not actually speak Chinese, decided that it would be best not to visit the hutong family and went off shopping on her own. Taking note of his directions from before, which read something like “turn left at mop on wall, go straight at pot past really narrow doorway, turn left then right then right again,” Max led me through a much tinier hutong than the one I’d seen earlier, a miniature cobbled corridor only wide enough for one person. When we arrived at the home he’d seen before, the retired father was outside. He immediately recognized Max and was thrilled that he had returned with another American friend in tow, and invited us in for tea. We sat in their tiny kitchen building, no bigger than six by fifteen, and watched the mom cook some delicious-looking corn while on the other “side” of the room, some friends played a game of mahjong under the persistent whine of a couple cheap, mounted fans. The father served us some green tea with goji berries, which was the best tea I’ve ever had (and I told him so in grammatically flawless Chinese, which made him very happy), and was soon joined by his 24-year-old daughter, Lin Na, who spoke some English and spent an hour or so chatting with Max and I in a mélange of English and Mandarin. When she found out that we both loved dumplings, she quickly told us that she and her mother would be happy to teach us how to make them. We eventually had to head out, but not before we were invited to stay for dinner and Max got Lin Na’s cell number to return for a dumpling lesson. I was struck so deeply by the warm-heartedness of these people. Everyone seemed so happy to meet us and so eager to see that, as guests, we were well taken care of. This family obviously didn’t have much at all, but they still offered everything they had – their tea, their dinner, their time – so that they could spend time with us. It didn’t seem like the kind of fake hospitality you might expect from the situation, either. They were truly happy we were there, and I was genuinely sad when they saw us out. I know I’ll see them again, though, and hopefully learn to make the best dumplings ever.
As part of my end of the deal, I took Max back to Nanluogu Hutong, which I was thrilled to show him. When I got there, though, I was dismayed. It was packed with people, mostly Chinese but some white, and taxis ceaselessly honked their way through the foot traffic. Any air of calm separation from the rest of the Beijing ruckus was gone, replaced with what appeared to be just another social street. In retrospect, I should have known better to go there at 6 on a Friday night, and I should have expected that this would happen, but its charm was completely ruined. I’ll probably go back tomorrow afternoon after I get out of classes and see if I can recover. I guess such a wonderful little place was too good to go undiscovered, but once the invading hordes arrived, it was no longer wonderful.
Disheartened by my lack of success at recapturing the magic I’d felt on my first visit, we headed off in pursuit of dinner and eventually ended up at a Muslim restaurant, where we ate cashew chicken, the heartiest naan I’ve ever had, and watched the Paralympic opening ceremonies projected on a giant screen in the front of the room, a little weirded out by the knowledge that this time they were taking place within five miles of us. We left the restaurant to go back to Max’s, where we dropped our things off and relaxed for half an hour before changing and heading back to Propaganda, which was maybe a ten-minute walk from his room. The crowd and music weren’t quite up to Friday’s standards, but we still had fun and met up with several of his friends from school, one of whom was a Scottish Hong Kong resident who introduced me to an excellent and quite mild beverage called a Pimm’s Cup (in case you cannot tell from the name, this is a massively British beverage made with something called Pimm’s, lemonade, and some citrus slices). We stayed until a little before and went out to a 24-hour place for some dumplings and chicken porridge, which were both amazing, and then left to crash in Max’s room, my tentative plans to see Tiananmen Square at sunrise laid to waste by my lack of sleep.
We woke up at eleven or so the next morning (freakishly late for me, as I wake up at about eight here if left to my own devices) and decided to visit the Factory 798 art district, a bit of a taxi ride out to the northeast side of town heading toward the airport.
This, too, was completely huadelai. The area consisted of ten or so enclosed city blocks, formerly a munitions factory (see picture of me at the top), that had been converted into tiny museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces, some featuring just one artist, some with quite large themed shows. The district contained only contemporary art, made within the last five years. This is probably my favorite type – I don’t know anything about art, so all the theory and symbolism is lost on me, and I just like looking at the interesting, weird things that people come up with. Some of it definitely didn’t make sense, but there were some things there that were very visually stunning: a fairly simple, realistic painting of a young woman on a beach, some photos of an abandoned steel factory, and models of cities sculpted from used clothes and put in suitcases. My favorite, though, was a photograph someone had taken in front of one of the Forbidden City buildings at night. The photo was super-long exposure, and someone had used a flashlight to write out the words “whoever is the luckiest” in the foreground, superimposed in light over the building wall. Could I tell you what it means? No, but I found myself unable to tear myself away from it. All in all, we had a lovely time. Today was pretty gray and drippy, so it was nice to have some indoor stuff to do, and we treated ourselves to $2 plates of golden curry for lunch (the ultimate comfort food for when it’s raining) and then, later, a pot of tea. We took a cab back, got some moon cakes at the local bakery, and parted ways, at which point I went home for dinner, intensive studying, and now, for the first time in way too long, actual sleep.

Dumpling tally: 26

*This is more of a rhetorical question. What people really mean when they ask me this is if I’m able to go out. Given that I’d probably ditch my own wedding if it meant I got to dance until four in the morning, the answer is invariably yes.

**One of the streets we were crossing had a major set of train tracks, with gates that close automatically to prevent people from getting into the track area when the train approaches. However, I’d never really looked and noticed the tracks, so when the siren went off signaling that the gates were moving, I figured it was just some driver with an obnoxious horn and kept going. The guard at the gates yelled at me in Chinese and pushed me forward. Then I realized what was happening and quickly leapt back behind the gate. There was about a minute between when the gate closed completely and then train actually came through, so Michael maintains that the guard was telling me to just go across really quickly (there were people obliviously crossing on the other side). I, however, view this as an appallingly transparent attempt on my life.

***I actually really like this song and think it’s pretty. However, the line about sharing the same air under the same sun always strikes me as funny, because the air is so horrible that frequently you can’t see the sun.