Meet the parents?

One of the 25098734 Chinese words I had to learn today meant “succeed at a test or trial”. How timely.
Friday was a fun day – we did another “mystery Beijing” trip, except this one was sort of modeled after The Amazing Race. In teams of four, we were given clues that led us to different places in Beijing, where IES staff would give us the next clue, etc. The first one to return from all the stops won. We lost despite having taken a cab everywhere. Fortunately, everything is super cheap. After that we had a fancy dinner to celebrate our last day of orientation (HUZZAH) and then I met up with my friend Max (those of you who don’t know him from school will recognize him as either my BFF Arianne’s boyfriend or the kid who’s obsessed with looking up islands on Google Earth) who is also spending the semester here but at a different school. After some fruitless walking around we decided to cab it over to a club in another part of town with some of his eight-hour-old British friends from school. The club was amazing – it was the archetypal fancy-bordering-on-ridiculous expatriate-ish club – not least because ladies did not have to pay a cover charge (although the ridiculous phenomenon of seven-dollar-drinks was alive and well – why places charge that much for something I could make is beyond me). I danced my little heart out until about 3 a.m. and then headed back for the last night in my hotel-dorm.
In the morning I packed, absconded with the hotel-dorm’s shampoo, body wash, toothbrush, comb, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, took a walk, and fairly promptly got lost along a back road. I’ve heard people (in my textbooks…) say that Beijing is laid out very practically, but I assure you that in my part of town nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve found it nearly impossible to do things like walk a block over – the streets aren’t laid out in a grid, and they frequently dead-end or turn or don’t intersect with the other streets like they should – which has led me to some interesting places. For example, yesterday I just wanted to buy a peach to eat, so I went to get one from my fruit-vending lady* and then decided to just walk south a block and go back to school down the next street over. However, this proved impossible, and I found myself wandering about two bus stops’ worth of distance farther than I’d intended to go. (Buses don’t stop every five feet here like they do in the US, so this is a pretty significant distance, probably a couple miles or so.) I finally found a street that led back the way I wanted to go, which to my pleasant surprise ran along between a canal and a pretty park area. However, on the same walk I saw probably the most severe poverty I’ve encountered here thus far: houses with plywood sides and tin roofs, ragpickers whose “yards” are filled with junk that they sell for however much is possible, etc. I know that it’s hugely clichéd to say that “Beijing is a city of contrasts” (special thanks to Gawker for calling out every stupid journalist who says that) so I won’t say it, but the gaps here between rich and poor are probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. As I walked past the ramshackle houses, I invariably thought back to the night before at the club, where people who wanted to sit at a table in the room with the dance floor had to order a minimum of RMB 2000 (about $300) worth of drinks. The tables were all in use, and about half of the occupants were Chinese. The reason I know this is because Max and the Brit Squad and I unceremoniously got kicked off of a table because we didn’t want to order the equivalent of a bottle of Special Stoli each just for the sake of resting our feet.
At any rate, I eventually did find my way back to school, headed to the supermarket** to buy a notebook, and made another excellent discovery, this time food-related. I’ve been eating street food with great frequency because I usually don’t have the time to sit down at a restaurant, and when I do I can’t read most of the menu. With street food, though, you just point and pay, and it’s always good. This time I stopped at a small stand that that sold chuanr (pronounced chu-ar, or churrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr if you’re in Beijing), skewers of mutton developed by the Uighur people, a minority group native to the westernmost part of China, north of Tibet. The Uighurs are ethnically Kazakh/Kyrgysz (OH SPELLING, CHECK IT)/Uzbek/etc, and they are Muslim so they don’t eat pork, which is the default meat for most Chinese. So instead, they take skewers of seasoned lamb and quickly cook them in hot oil, as the woman running my lunch stall did today. It was delicious – hot and greasy, and the pieces were pretty small, so it was easy to eat and all you got was flavor, instead of eating big chunks resulting in an uninteresting wad of meat in your mouth at the end. I got two normal chuanr (the skewers were pencil-length) and a chicken one that also looked really good. It had this white stuff in between the chicken pieces, which I thought was fat (the Chinese eat a lot of fat by itself – it’s in chunks on most of the chuanr I’ve seen and has even been the “meat” in one dish I ordered at a restaurant. Thing is, though, it’s always been really good. Yes, I am disgusting.) but I am now about 99% sure was cartilage. I ate it anyway, because the seasoning was superb and I didn’t want to waste my delicious chuanr, putting cartilage in first place for Weirdest Food Eaten Thus Far. I would not recommend it.
I hurried back to the hotel-dorm to pack my things and prepare to meet my host family. They ended up living in an apartment complex literally right next door to my school, which is super convenient. The Zhang family has two parents, probably about my parents’ age, but retired – the mother was a doctor, and the father owned his own company – and a 28-year-old daughter named Bin Bin, who is super cute and speaks English quite well. However, Bin Bin doesn’t live here, and only comes over a couple times a week at most. The Zhang parents are both very kind, but they don’t speak a word of English, and they don’t seem to understand my Chinese that well, which is probably because it’s not very good. I have trouble understanding them too, frequently, and without Bin Bin around to help out it’s been difficult making conversation; my confidence in my Chinese has gone down since I’ve started talking to them and realizing they didn’t understand a lot of what I was trying to say. However, they are obviously very caring (right off Mrs. Zhang offered to help me with my homework), sweet as pie, and Mr. Zhang is a good cook. (They also have this adorable Pekingesey-looking dog who they are constantly feeding meat to. As a result, the dog is massively fat and waddles around a lot, but he’s cute as the dickens and very friendly). I felt bad for these people and quite uncomfortable myself; I didn’t want to seem unfriendly, aloof, or ungrateful, but it’s hard to have a conversation when people don’t really understand each other.
This morning I woke up, had some of the worst pastries ever for breakfast with a warm bowl of powdered milk and felt sorry for myself until Max called and asked if I wanted to go to the Summer Palace that afternoon. I immediately took him up on it; the Zhangs were spending their day watching TV, and I wanted to get out and explore. After a subway/bus/cab ride there, we spent a few hours walking around the giant park, which was built as a playground for some of the last emperors (and Dowager Empress Cixi, who is pretty much the same person as Austria’s Empress Sisi and pronounced more or less the same too) during the very hot summers. It was a gorgeous day – the sky was clear and blue, with very little trace of the pollution that has plagued the city for the past couple of days – and we had an excellent time fooling around with three kinds of popsicles in our hands (including a corn-flavored one, which was far and away the best) and seeing the beautifully restored temples and halls, which all had names that followed the pattern of “Hall of [overly romanticized adjective] [prissy noun]”. The most impressive, though, was Cixi’s marble boat, ostensibly commissioned with the Chinese navy’s money and very lavishly painted. The boat is about as long as two semis and has a lower floor and a balcony, and was apparently the place to party if you were in the good graces of the Qing royalty.
We went back to the area around my campus and hunted for street food, which consisted of three kinds of dumplings, chuanr, little egg-custard tarts that were ridiculously flaky and delicious, and bottled rose-flavored tea, which is possibly the most delicious and refreshing beverage I’ve found for the hot days here. We took our haul and sat on the steps of a restaurant and talked about various things, including me telling him the Cheerio joke, which he did not find that funny. I had been asked to be home by five for dinner, which was served promptly at five. I wondered why it was so early, and after the second night in a row that the Zhangs went to bed at 8:30, I understood.
When I was trying to decide between staying with a family and living in a dorm with a Chinese roommate (my other option) my BFF Abby, who had stayed with a family during her tenure in Aix-en-Provence, told me that the most important thing was to be sure that I was happy with the family, and to speak up if I didn’t feel like it was a good environment for me. I feel bad because I had really wanted a homestay, and had told the director that, but I feel like it’s too much freedom to give up. The returning students I’ve talked to from this program all listed their favorite things – going out for karaoke with their Chinese friends, dancing on the weekends, taking nighttime walks in the parks and people-watching – as things that would be impossible for me to do when my host parents go to bed an hour after sunset. I want the freedom to live in a dorm on my schedule, study late at night if necessary (and it will be, since I have more words to learn than you can shake a stick at), and go out with friends if the situation calls for it. Since both the Zhangs are retired, they stay in most of the time, and I don’t want to spend my evenings watching Mr. Zhang change the channels in his boxers and then have the apartment to myself starting at 8:30. When I signed up to live with a host family, I envisioned a family who had the hobbies the program director assured me were common: going out to eat, making new friends, touring Beijing. I don’t like to be alone, and I’d like someone to go out to eat with, someone who could be a friend. Having a Chinese roommate, who is more flexible and possibly knows some English, is sounding better and better. I would love to make some Chinese friends who are around my age, and even Bin Bin is pretty well out of that age group. I came to Beijing to see how Chinese people lived, but I’d intended to live the life of a Chinese student, someone whose lifestyle I could identify with. The Zhangs don’t seem like they’re very well-off, either (host families get a stipend from the program for letting a student stay with them), so I feel weird asking them to go out for dinner or go sightseeing somewhere that’s within my reach, but may be financially difficult for them. I tried to break the ice by asking what their favorite places in Beijing were, to see if there was somewhere cheap or free that we could go, but after asking four or five times and not being understood I gave up.
This is by far the bigger problem - I am basically incommunicado with my family. The fault for this definitely mostly lies with me, but I’m a little confused since many of the other Chinese people I’ve talked to, be they at the supermarket showing me where the towels are, telling me what’s in the dish I just ate, or making conversation with me while they drove me to the club, have seemed to understand me pretty well. With my new family, though, I can count the number of sentences I’ve understood on one hand. A day and a half spent with them doesn’t sound like a lot, but imagine living in your own parents’ house and understanding three things they’ve said over the course of 36 hours. I have tried everything in my admittedly small arsenal: asking them to say things again, speak slower, use simpler words, etc. I’ve even resorted to writing things down on a couple of occasions, because we do not understand what the other person is saying. Most of the time I can tell if what they’re trying to say is a question or a statement; if it’s a statement I smile and nod, but if it’s a question I try to see if I can get by with the Chinese equivalent of “uh-huh”. When I ask them something, or try to talk to them, the same thing happens: they usually look confusedly at me, and I generally end up telling them that I’m sorry and not to worry about it. I feel trapped here. There is a waiting list for people who would like to live in homestays but whom the program director wasn’t able to fit in. I know a couple of those kids speak better Chinese than I do and don’t want to go out frequently, if at all, and I think they would fit in here better than me. The Zhangs are very kind, and from what I can deduce from their demeanor, very friendly. They are sweet people and they deserve to live with a student who can talk to them and who can fit into their lifestyle. I don’t want to live under a dusk-to-dawn house arrest for a semester, especially not when there are other students who would likely be a good fit for this homestay but aren’t able to live with any family. I think tomorrow I’ll ask the designated homestay RA if there’s still time to switch; when I moved out yesterday the students who weren’t in homestays were still in their dorm, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable or a lost cause. I hope not. I feel deeply embarrassed that I’m so unhappy here, in large part because I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those obnoxious American students who only cared about going out all the time, and I can see how someone might perceive me that way now. I absolutely didn’t come here to have that be my focus in any significant amount, but I’m not sure I can have a good experience here living the lifestyle of someone fifty years my senior, and spending time in China is too precious an experience to spend it being upset, bored, and unable to talk.
(I’m not actually as depressed as I sound; I had a great time at the Summer Palace eating the Cornsicle today, and I’ve met some friendly, funny, and kind people from my program as well. I’m just unsure and uncomfortable about the living situation.)

Dumpling tally: 23

*A uniquely Chinese quirk I’ve noticed is the fruit stand: my neighborhood has a TON (like, two or three on every small block) of fruit vendors, all selling more or less the same selection of fruit for almost identical prices. Most of these people have small storefronts, but quite a few operate out of their vans or even on a big blanket set out on a street corner. I am quite sure the latter two are illegal. By far the most omnipresent and popular fruit is watermelon, but I’m not entirely sure why this is; it’s not especially cheap compared to the other fruits for sale, but every vendor always has a ton in stock and most of the people I see shopping for fruit check out the watermelons.

**The supermarket is also sort of different from those in the US. The produce section is virtually nonexistent, as the overwhelming presence of fruit vendors like the ones mentioned above renders it unnecessary. At the supermarket nearest to me, the top floor is pretty normal-looking and has most of your standard-issue food,*** tweaked a bit for Chinese tastes (for example, live seafood). The bottom floor, though, has weird things like towels, shoes, and ready-to-hang art. The really cracked-out part is that despite the bottom floor being patrolled by no less than four police officers (not rent-a-cops, but actual police officers), the store sells a lot of obviously fake designer stuff, like the Fuma bag I saw the other day. After witnessing the Great Fake Fuwa Raid of ’08, I thought that knockoffs would have all but disappeared due to the Olympic-induced increased police presence, but none of the officers seemed to care.

***At the seafood counter, I saw a flat metal tray full of egg-sized live brown pupae. I was looking at them wriggling around in this really perturbing way AND THEN I SAW THIS LADY GIVE THE SEAFOOD GUY 2 RMB AND SHE JUST ATE IT, LIVE, LIKE YOU WOULD EAT A CARROT STICK OR PERHAPS A COOL RANCH DORITO. EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW!!!!!!!!!!! Unfortunately, I promised myself before I left that I’d tried every weird food offered to me except dog meat (which is apparently only served in Korean restaurants anyway), so if someone asks if I want a live pupa I’ll have to take them up on it. Evidently, though, the more common method of preparation is to stir-fry them, which kills them. I’m not sure which is worse: having that kind of blood on my hands, or eating a live pupa.