Pingyao

This past weekend, all of the IES students were put on a weekend trip to a nearby-ish destination. I went to Pingyao, an overnight train ride east of Beijing. I had been told beforehand that Pingyao was very touristy, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I was going with my closest friends and figured I could handle the kitsch for three days. Boy, was I ever wrong. We set out Thursday night from Beijing’s train station (which has been designed to look like Tibet’s Potala Palace…oh, China).

Day 1: I Could Have Done That in Two Hours
Our sleeper train arrived at about 7:30 in the morning. We got our stuff and disembarked, expecting a bus to take us to our destination. However, what awaited us were not buses but…large golf carts! Apparently reputable vehicles are not allowed in the streets of Old Town Pingyao, so we had to take an alternate form of transit through a gate in the old city wall.
Pingyao is about in the middle of Shanxi province (not to be confused with Shaanxi province, where the terracotta warriors are), two provinces west of Beijing. It was historically a very important part of China, used both as a strategic point for various armies and as a center of commerce (Pingyao itself) and religion (the Buddhist Wutai Mountain, where some of my classmates went). Now, though, it kind of sucks. The economic changes in China have sort of left Shanxi behind – its climate is dry, dusty, and frigid in the winter/scorching in the summer, so farming is difficult – and most of its income comes from its large but rapidly dwindling reserves of coal. The pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as it is in Beijing, but the Shanxi residents’ persistent attempts at farming make for awful erosion in an already parched ecosystem, so the constantly dusty air meant my lungs didn’t get the respite I’d hoped for. In addition, it was cold, cold, cold. I lived in my commemorative Yunnan Trip hoodie the entire time, as did many of my tourmates,* which prompted us to frequently make wistful comments like “I bet Xishuangbanna is really nice this time of year.”
“New” Pingyao looks like pretty much any other place in China, but the Old Town is beautiful, at least at 8 am. It reminded me of a less-restored Dali, but more typically Chinese: all the buildings had the slanted, tiled roofs, the intricately carved wooden doors, and the paintings of traditional Chinese people in traditional Chinese clothes. Instead of being painted over and re-carved, though, all of these buildings had been left more or less untouched on the outside, which I liked. It lent the town an air of authenticity that I would be clinging to desperately in a couple hours. As we drove to our hotel, I thought of towns in the American Old West – dusty and wooden.
Our hotel, like all hotels in the Old Town, was in a converted one-story courtyard house. There was a restaurant in the front, and behind that was a courtyard lined with rooms. I was rooming with Becca again, and much to our delight, we got a room with a kang bed. Invented during the Qing dynasty (the last one before the nationalists took over in the early 20^th century, and the dynasty in which Pingyao was a thriving commerce center), the kang is a huge, huge bed (ours was maybe ten feet wide) on top of what was traditionally a fire pit but is now electrically powered stuff. At any rate, the kang is very big and very warm. I immediately knew why this was necessary; as previously stated, Pingyao in late October is not a warm place.
After settling in, we headed out in a group to explore two of commercial Pingyao’s most important sites. Almost immediately, we were joined by other tour groups, all led by flag-wielding young women frantically barking into microphones. This was about when Pingyao’s charms started wearing off. Although the Old Town was a beautiful place to explore when it was relatively unpopulated, it was a different world entirely when mobbed by tourists and souvenir vendors. Given my distaste for touristiness of any kind, I started becoming more and more irritated.
Our first stop was the office of a bodyguard company. Merchants were frequently coming in and out of Pingyao during the Qing dynasty, carrying huge amounts of goods and money, so bodyguards were needed to protect the businessmen and their cargo. This office not only handled the business side of the bodyguard operation (we saw the offices where companies reconciled their accounts, for instance) but also trained the bodyguards – we went to a courtyard filled with rusty weapons and paintings of people practicing Chinese martial arts. Apparently the bodyguards were very skilled: their salary was extremely high, and the company was so confident in their talents that they promised merchants that, in the event a robbery were to occur, the company would compensate them for the loss of their goods and “punish” the slacker bodyguards.
Our next stop was China’s first bank, also in a giant courtyard complex. Although the bodyguard operations were very successful in protecting goods and money, the system was still pretty inefficient, and so some smart people in Pingyao devised a system in which promissory notes could be written in one office and delivered to a branch in another city, whereupon the promised amount of money would be given to the person indicated on the note (this is actually more like a Western Union office than the banks we know and love/hate today, but the Chinese banking system developed from it). Each branch had a special watermark and a secret code used to indicate the date, recipient, and amount of money, and to prevent forgery. Since the robbers couldn’t collect on checks bearing someone else’s name, robberies dropped dramatically. The banking system was historically interesting, but aside from the architecture (lovely, but the same as everywhere else in Pingyao) the buildings itself weren’t that great – just offices furnished with mannequins in Qing clothes.
After the bank, we were given free time to get our own lunch and wander around until the late afternoon. The moment we stepped outside, we were immediately surrounded by mobs of Chinese tourists wanting to take pictures of us. This was a step up from Yunnan, where we had only been stared at, not photographed. Jackie, Becca and I thought quickly and started demanding that people pay for their “special souvenir photos.”** People were very taken aback, because we (myself especially) were quite loud, sharp, and insistent about it. Once we started speaking Chinese, demanding money, and pointing at people who still had their cameras out, the photos stopped, except for a few people who began fishing their wallets out before our chaperones, a teacher and a 23-year-old office assistant who spoke perfect English, assured them that although we didn’t like being gawked at, we were just joking. I wonder how much we could have made from that – probably enough to buy lunch.
Or so I thought. In a group of six or so, I wandered around looking for a cheap place to eat, comparable to Beijing’s $1.50 restaurants. We went through all the main streets, but every restaurant we found had the same food and was empty and expensive. After a wild goose chase through the side streets of Pingyao, which, we found, were strictly residential, we resigned ourselves to eating at a pricey but very nice hostel, where we sampled the local delicacy of kao laolao: thick buckwheat noodles fried with meat and green onions. We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling, shopping, and exploring a relaxing and lovely Confucian temple, which provided a peaceful respite from the touristy Old Town. The star of the day, though, was Pingyao’s freshly made peanut brittle, produced as follows:
1: Take a stump.
2. Spread some shelled peanuts and honey on it.
3. Hit it until it’s flat and looks like peanut brittle.
4. Let it cool.
5. Sell each IES student a kilogram of it for about $3.
It is impossible to overstate how delicious this was, especially when it was warm. It seemed like the only authentically Shanxi thing I was likely to find (true) so I got some for myself and some to bring back to Zhang Ran.
We met up back in our guesthouse’s lobby to get our scripts for the next day’s performance. We were set to perform a traditional Chinese comedic lawyer dialogue (yes, really) for Chinese tourists the next day. The four speaking roles were immediately snapped up by fourth-year students looking to brown-nose the language pledge section of their grade (the fourth-year teacher was one of our chaperones), while the rest of us needed only to dress up and stand on the sidelines. This was fine by me; I just wanted to escape the experience with as much dignity as possible, and memorizing five pages of lines in Chinese wasn’t my idea of a fun night.
We had a bit more success with dinner that night. The same group of people from lunch found a hostel that advertised apple pie. Although nobody ended up ordering it, the food was a bit cheaper and the owners were very friendly. We also invited a thirtysomething Chinese appliance salesman who was in town on business to join us for dinner, so we chatted with him for a while and gave him an English name (Thomas) at his request. Apparently some of the less studious students among us found some semblance of nightlife in Pingyao, but I chose not to waste $30 on drinks in a dump of a town with no ambiance or post-sunset activities. Instead, the dinner crew retreated to our giant kang and played a very intense and long round of Uno. I have never heard such insults as when Amy played one “Draw Four” too many on poor Elise, who bore the brunt of her wrath the entire game.

Day 2: I Also Could Have Done That in the Same Two Hours
The morning started with the same unsatisfying breakfast as the first day: lukewarm porridge and cold buns. I ate and ate but never felt full, which surprisingly never happens to me with Chinese food.
Then we regrouped in the lobby for a lesson in Chinese paper-cutting. We weren’t expecting to make anything brilliant, but were a bit disappointed when we were all required to make butterflies. Then the guy who was teaching us did it wrong, so we ended up with two halves of a malformed butterfly instead of a whole malformed butterfly. At the end he confessed that it was his mom who made the beautiful paper cuttings he’d been trying to sell us the whole time.
We had free time until the afternoon, when we toured Pingyao’s old courthouse and jail. After walking through an interesting array of torture instruments, we watched some professionals in fake costumes put on a court dialogue similar to the one we would be performing, at which point we were ushered into a back room and shoved into ill-fitting polyester robes and hats that had covered I-don’t-even-want-to-know-how-many heads, then shoved back out to an exceptionally giggly band of tourists. I halfheartedly yelled at them to pay for the pictures they were taking, but this was ineffective, and there was no way I could complain about them taking pictures because this time, we actually were the tourist attraction.
We were put into position onstage and started the dialogue. The crowd was pretty rude – I overheard them saying snotty things about the speaking abilities of the students who had lines, which I shushed a couple times by hissing “How’s your English?” at them – and the play had all the flow of a pile of bricks. Some of the jollier students stayed behind when it was over to take pictures with the tourists, but I fled back to the changing room, threw the clothes off, and found a quiet corner to be alone in. All the staring had started to make me almost physically uncomfortable, and I wanted a few moments to myself. The whole experience was without a doubt the nadir of my time in China so far.
We had more free time for the rest of the night, so we were led up to the supermarket by another group. Thankfully, there was a nearby restaurant that had our coveted $1.50 bowls of noodle soup, so Becca and I filled up and called it an early night.

Day 3: The Deepest Pits of Smell
We awoke for a bus (a real bus this time) ride to the Qiao family mansion, which had been home to one of Shanxi’s most prosperous merchants, about an hour out of town. A couple people said they would have liked to stay in Pingyao, but most of us agreed that we’d seen all the town had to offer, and the group as a whole was happy to get out.
I hadn’t seen any of Shanxi’s countryside on the train ride in, since I’d slept the whole way there. As I looked out the window going to the mansion, I was struck by the poverty I saw. The highway was flanked on both sides by what seemed like miles after miles of auto repair shops, and what little arable land was behind them was used for cornfields irrigated with dirty, sludgy water. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a depressing place.
As we pulled up to the mansion, I let out an involuntary groan. The tour bus parking lot alone was, I kid you not, the size of the Northwestern campus. We shuffled out of the bus through countless rows of souvenir vendors, although I did stop for a grilled yam, one of my more beloved street foods, especially in the cold weather. The mansions themselves were about a twenty-minute walk from the bus lot and were infinitely worse than anything I’d seen in Pingyao; I could barely see the walls or hear our guide due to the overwhelming crush of tourists. The buildings were indeed beautiful (the complex was used to film Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” for those acquainted with the greatest hits of Chinese cinema) but impossible to appreciate among the masses of people. Tourist groups notwithstanding, my throat was also getting hoarse from yelling “TWO KUAI!” at people trying to take pictures of us, so I was happy to leave.
We then got back on the bus and went to the provincial capital of Taiyuan for lunch. Although the ride in showcased more depressing poverty, the city center of Taiyuan was surprisingly very nice. It was clean and modern, with a lovely town square in the center that reminded me of the courthouse square in Portland. We got a good, cheap lunch, complete with dumplings (although the restaurant didn’t have rice, mysteriously) and then toured a vinegar factory. A lot of people complained about this, but I actually really enjoyed it. Chinese vinegar is made from fermented sorghum, not grapes or apples or whatever is used in the Western world, and we came in close contact with the machines that cleaned the grains and the pots in various stages of fermentation. As the distilling process continued, the pots became smellier and smellier, and the rooms hotter and hotter. By the time we reached the final room, my eyes and nose burned from the stench. Nonetheless, I always like seeing how food is made, and the factory used pretty traditional methods to make their vinegar; it was sitting there and bubbling of its own accord in big clay pots just as it had been doing for hundreds of years (and some of it smelled like it had been sitting out for a hundred years, too).
After that we had three or so hours of free time before our train left, which most of the group used to watch a Chinese horror movie (in the movie theater, you could rent a private room). Even with Josie, the office worker, there to translate, the movie made little sense – it was something about a girl going through all the levels of hell in an abandoned dorm building, but the hells were really just a figment of her imagination created by her evil psychologist. About halfway through, Josie admitted that even she didn’t know what was going on, so we all just laughed about it.
At the Taiyuan train station, we met up with the group from Wutai Mountain, which included excellent people like Dan and Michael. We had a nondescript train ride back and got into Bei Wai this morning at about nine, at which time I had two jianbings for breakfast despite my roommate’s protests.
The entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been on this hunt for “real” China – something without the modernity of Beijing, but also without the fakeness that hordes of tourists bring. I sort of came to the realization on the Pingyao trip that “real” China doesn’t exist. Real Chinese people don’t wear conical hats and farm rice. They live in cities like Taiyuan and go on big group tours to places like Pingyao. Even if they do farm rice, they have satellite TV and wear jeans. Like it or not, China is modernizing rapidly, and the longer I spend looking for some semblance of ancient China, the more and more it will disappear and become Westernized. Considering some of the Shanxi toilets, this is a good thing. Really though, I was probably a little overzealous in expecting as much Chinese-ness as I did. Now that I’ve gotten this into my head, I feel like I’ll enjoy my remaining time here a little more.

Dumpling Tally: 139

*All of Yunnan Trip’s best ladies were back: Amy, Jackie, and Becca, plus a superb young woman named Elise whose father worked for the US Embassy. As a result, Elise has lived in excellent places like Denmark and Greece. None of the dudes were with us this time, though.

**Around town, there were various opportunities to pay and get your picture taken – with the monkey in costume, with the guy in Qing clothes, in the “traditional” bridal sedan, etc. – so I can’t pretend this was an original idea.

This is probably my favorite photo of the whole trip, plus AQs

The last few days have been pleasant but uneventful, devoted mostly to studying for my midterm tomorrow (although last night we did go to the lovely Houhai Lake area to celebrate Pei Rei’s impending birthday, where I bought some cotton candy [pictured]). Tomorrow afternoon I leave for the historic but apparently ridiculously touristy and kitschy town of Pingyao. I get back on a sleeper train Monday morning. Ugh. Anyway, it’s time for another edition of the AQs.

Q: Why did the city change its name from Peking to Beijing?
A: Actually, they didn’t. It’s always been Beijing, but a different Romanization system was used back in the Old Times; hence, Peking. I believe the current method, called pinyin, was first used in the 1940s or so.

Q: Are there any weird, random differences between China and the US?
A: Heavens, yes. The ones that immediately jump out are the lack of certain personal hygiene products (for example, deodorant) and the homicidal tendencies of the Beijing drivers, who put crazy cabbies everywhere to shame. Another weird thing is that nobody here has a dryer. Instead, we all let our clothes line-dry. It’s not an issue of people not being able to afford dryers, it’s just that nobody has them.

Q: So we’ve heard about the street food. What about the rest of the food?
A: I’m actually a touch burned out on street food now (it’ll be back by the time I get back from Pingyao, though). Instead, I’ve taken to self-catering a bit more; I’ve gotten acquainted with the local supermarkets, my favorite of which is the giant Chaoshifa a couple bus stops away (Chaoshifa is an ubiquitous chain of supermarkets, not unlike Safeway or Dominick’s or what have you). My favorite thing for snacking is yogurt. Ever since fresh milk products have been pronounced safe to eat, I’ve had at least one carton every day. It’s delicious, and comes with delicious little chunks or jelly and fruit in it. My favorite thus far has been coconut grapefruit, but there are so many flavors it will take me a while to work through them. When my friends and I go out to eat, we go to places called xiaochi (“little eating”), which serve things like meat and vegetables over rice, fried noodles, soup, etc. for around $1 to $1.50 a plate. The Western food here is expensive ($6 or so a plate) but usually okay, and the Chinese “fine-dining” restaurants, of which I have only been to two, are maybe $10 a plate on average but delicious. At the end of the semester I’m going to blow $20 on a prix-fixe menu. This is exorbitant in China, but I love how cheap it is to eat here if you stick to Chinese food, which I have no problem with.

Q: What do you miss from home?
A: Oh man. A lot of things, but they’re mostly really small. A partial listing: my source of income, readily accessible hot chocolate, a dryer so that my jeans don’t get all stiff when I air-dry them, pants that fit me, Mexican food, reading the newspaper every morning, not having to remember to bring toilet paper with me every time I go to the bathroom, Chinese classes with 25 words a week, other classes, driving places, Honey Bunches of Oats, scones, granola, Comedy Central, dance ragers (although Propaganda mostly makes up for this), Clarke’s, my piercing place in Wicker Park, cooking, my philosophical conversations over Cold Stone with Miller, not having to divide everything by seven to figure out how much it costs. And there are also the bigger things: Miller herself, Arianne, Chelsea, Abby, the Fems exec board, everyone else who I’m too [thoughtless/forgetful/lazy] to mention, the knowledge that, in the same state, there are people I can spill my entire soul to, and my family. And my dog, who I will not eat.

Q: What’s Chinglish?
A: Chinglish is what happens when Chinese people try to speak English. In China, it’s most commonly found on clothes, which will look normal at first glance, but then you’ll read them and realize that the words don’t make sense, or even that the words consist of random Roman letters, which I guess is enough to fool Chinese people. It’s also quite prevalent on menus; Michael and I got dinner a couple nights ago at a porridge place, and their picture menu was a gold mine (our favorite was “bean curd with the American law”). So far, though, the best one has been on a t-shirt I found while shopping in Wudaokou, which read in large letters across the front “Run for British Prime Minister – You Too.” I would have bought it if it were my size.

Q: You go a lot of places. How do you get around?
A: Public transit, baby. If you’re willing to get a little creative with the bus and subway transfers and walk for maybe twenty minutes, you can get anywhere in Beijing you want to go. The subway is fast and efficient, but there’s no branch near my school (I have to take the bus to the subway station and then switch) so that’s kind of annoying. The buses are fine, except when the traffic is particularly bad, but unless you know where you’re going the system is difficult to use, as there’s no trip planner or even route map available online. Both the buses and the subways are always crowded. The buses stop running around nine, and the subways stop at 11:30, so if you want to get anywhere after that you have to take a cab, which is cheap by US standards but comparatively expensive in Beijing. I usually only take the cabs when I’m returning from going out.

Q: What music do young people listen to? Do they all listen to Hedgehog?
A: Sadly, no. The female roommates listen to incredibly treacly Chinese pop songs, although one of them said she liked Death Cab (note to self: talk to this person more). They are also all under the impression that the Backstreet Boys are still cool, and have an odd selection of English-language pop songs with a lot of keyboards that I promise nobody in any Anglophone country has ever heard of. However, for a truly horrifying example of what America has done to the Mandarin world, go on YouTube and look up MC Hotdog. There's also a popular song called In Beijing. The lyrics mostly revolve around things like Beijing having pretty girls, hosting the 2008 Olympics, and how you can go to the Summer Palace.

Picture Post: The Great Wall

The Great Wall of Sound

First, a couple interesting news items: the Chinese government is still trying to hush up the milk-powder scandal by threatening volunteer lawyers who are willing to prosecute families’ cases (the BBC has determined that fresh milk now is safe, and the only concerns are products manufactured a while ago with the milk powder), and they’re also considering a proposal to allow rural farmers to sell their land, which would increase the rural-to-urban migration (already huge). Thanks to the NYT for both of these and my grandpa for sending me the second one.
This weekend has been, in true Beijing fashion, a contrast between old and new, and a totally rad one at that. Last night Max and I went to see a Beijing rock band called Hedgehog at a place named Mao Livehouse, at the north end of Nanluogu Hutong. Hedgehog came highly recommended, and I figured I should dive in to the local scene eventually, so we paid $9, met up with a couple other people (a Chinese screenwriting student and a Swede from Max’s program who I kept wanting to hit on and then getting cold feet and therefore not hitting on) and settled in.
Mao Livehouse is a pretty spartan performance space: black walls, raised stage, railing about halfway back in the room (maybe 35’ by 60’? It was quite small), and painted all black, although the walls were covered in scrawled graffiti: the word “punk,” names of bands that had performed there, various profanities, etc. The opening band was a Swedish duo who spent their half-hour set ripping off Belle and Sebastian and Sondre Lerche and not succeeding, so we were all happy when Hedgehog took the stage.
They were an interesting group to behold. (The band only plays in the video from about 1:00 to 3:30.) The guitarist/vocalist and bassist both looked like James Iha circa 1994 (the bassist even had the sparkly v-neck sweater to back it up), but their drummer was something else entirely. A tiny little thing with a bowl cut, she couldn’t have stood more than five feet, and she wore a long-sleeved blouse buttoned up to the collarbone and Mary Janes. She looked like she should have been in some cram-school math class, not in a place like Mao Livehouse, and certainly not performing there.
And then they started playing.
The schedule flyer I’d received described Hedgehog as “indie pop,” which wasn’t entirely accurate. To my great joy, they sounded sort of like early Smashing Pumpkins, all with this great Smells Like Teen Spirit guitar tone. The guitarist and bassist played very solidly together, at several points busting out a feedback solo or a Guitar Hero-esque fling-your-instrument-around maneuver, and the guitarist had a wonderful air of completely not caring what his vocals sounded like. The drummer was the most fun to watch, though. I had her pegged as Meg White after she started the first two songs off with parts I probably could have played, but she amped it up admirably, and by about halfway through the set she was just a monster. It was like Animal (from the Muppets, fools) had been reincarnated in the body of this tiny Chinese girl; I would not have been surprised to find out that she not only eats hi-hats for breakfast, but does so without butter or syrup. Anyway, she was completely ridiculous (seriously, watch the video from 3:00 to 3:30), and the band played an awesome set, although I felt it was a bit brief. They’re apparently around Beijing a lot, so I’ll try and make it back to see them again sometime.
After some confusion about whether there was another band playing (only two were listed on the flyer, so I thought it was just the opener and Hedgehog, but it turns out there was more to come) I found a new place at the railing near the front of the stage and waited for the next band. The band in question, Regurgitator, turned out to be “120% Australian!” (as one of the rowdy Australian guys near us said) and came out dressed all in white, although the clothes ranged from tennis outfits to American Apparel stuff. This explained the surprisingly large Australian contingent at the show; although I’d never heard of Regurgitator, they seem to be fairly high-profile in their homeland, and a large band of increasingly inebriated, large, rowdy Australian students (they probably all played rugby or “football” or something) had come out to show their support. Regurgitator had four people: a guitarist and bassist, who split the vocal duties, a keyboard player, and a drummer.
I have no idea how to describe them, but they were not “indie pop.” There were elements of punk (a lot of elements of punk), the B-52s, hip-hop, and a bunch of other things I can’t even remember. They got the crowd going really quickly, and within three songs or so people were crowd-surfing, yelling and requesting songs, and the beginnings of a mosh pit had formed. Most of the people in the front half of the room were merrily jumping around like collegiate morons, myself included, and, as people invariably jumped into other people, the mosh pit grew and grew. By the time their relentlessly energetic set was over, I was covered in sweat, much of which was probably not my own (those Australians, man). I had been elbowed countless times in the ribs and spleen and shoved into people I’d never met by people I’d never met, and I’d done the same to those around me. It was excellent; good, sloppy, dirty, exhausting fun, and Regurgitator played really fun music. They’re doing another show in Beijing on Wednesday, so I might drag along Pei Rei and some of the other IES lame-os who missed out on this one.
After that, the four of us headed out to Sanlitun,* where Max’s friends ostensibly were. It turns out that they had been there at one point, but had either gone to a club (which we weren’t dressed for and didn’t want to pay for) or to buy yams.** We ended up at Bar Blu and danced for a short while, but the music left a lot to be desired, so we called it a night pretty soon after that.
Then, this morning, I went to do that most archetypal of Chinese things: climb the Great Wall of China. I had waffled on signing up for the trip at all, as I figured that it was one of those lame, mandatory tourist things to do, but IES was paying for it and buying us lunch, and I figured I had to see the Great Wall at least once.
We visited a remote part of the wall, which to my great surprise was completely devoid of vendors, gift shops, and tourist trappings of any kind. In fact, we were the only Westerners I saw on the trip – there were a fair amount of Chinese tourists, but far fewer than I would have expected given that it was the Great Wall. I’m glad I went to this specific place; it was completely overgrown and unrestored (a couple times we had to climb sheer faces with our hands and feet) and the views were amazing. Autumn is coming to Beijing, and the trees in the surrounding steep hills were beautiful shades of golden, orange and red. The air was beautiful, clear, and blue, as well, which was a nice break from the pollution in Beijing, which seems to have been particularly strong the last few days. I took some stellar pictures, my favorite of which is myself with Pei Rei and John Cho (up at the top, note the Regurgitators t-shirt).
I returned exhausted, as much from my lack of sleep the previous night as from the strenuous climb up the wall.*** Tonight will be an early night in, with large amounts of the hot chocolate from Jenny Lou’s and my mom, vocabulary words, and watching Weeds online. Tomorrow will probably also be pretty low-key, although I might go shopping in Wudaokou if I’m able to walk.

Dumpling Tally: 133

*I really don’t even like it there that much, but I always find myself there for some reason. WHY IS THIS.

**Yams are one of the new, winterized street foods that has popped up with the advent of cooler weather. They’re grilled until soft and then sold by the weight. They are incredibly sweet, beyond delicious, and the smell as you pass by someone cooking them is absolutely maddening. The other wintery food is freshly roasted chestnuts, which also smell great but are a pain to eat.

***If there is any justice in the world, I will wake up tomorrow morning with the most flawlessly toned legs the Pacific Rim has ever seen. Of course, the world is an unfair place, and I will still not fit into Chinese pants.

Bag Fulla Puppies

I didn’t just make the title “Bag Fulla Puppies” to draw people in. There is actually a Bag Fulla Puppies in this installment, but it doesn’t come until later. Until then you’ll just have to look at how cute the picture is and wonder.
I’m pretty sure I did nothing on Monday, so I’ll use the allotted Monday space to talk about my roommate some more. She’s very good about correcting my Chinese and asking me for help with her English homework. I looked through the textbook she’s currently using and it’s ridiculous. They’re teaching her words and phrases like “attitudinal” and “takes the cake,” neither of which I can remember anyone saying in real life, ever. I feel bad telling her that they’re useless because she obviously has to learn them, but I wish I could politely get across to her that “terrific” is not something she needs to put a whole lot of effort into remembering after that chapter’s test. Then I realized how ridiculous the textbook I have must seem – I know the phrase for “to die of a massive hemorrhage” and “socialist canteen” but I’m still not entirely sure how the future tense works. I blame the teachers, who wrote the textbook we’re using.*
My first impression was right; Zhang Ran is indeed very busy. Although I am not always around to observe in person, I would estimate that she is busy with classes and extracurricular stuff for eight to ten hours every weekday. She doesn’t usually settle in for the night until about nine. Since I hate procrastinating, I have invariably finished all my work by then, so I think I’ve given her the impression that I never do anything. In fact, I know I have given her this impression, because when she stopped in yesterday afternoon and caught me going over my vocab words, she smiled and said “Not too common!” I got kind of pissed off about it, actually, and said something along the lines of “You can’t see me work when you have classes all the time.” We both laughed about it, and it wasn’t an argument or anything, but it pisses me off that I’m giving her the impression that Americans (and me specifically as well) are lazy. I see her watching Korean TV shows online, though, so the street goes both ways.
Another interesting fact about Chinese college students: because of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in which college students caused all sorts of problems for law enforcement, the Chinese government has decided to…teach all the college students to use firearms! This seems counterintuitive to me, but apparently all students must complete two weeks of military training at some point. One of Zhang Ran’s friends made a video of it, and, although I’m sure it wasn’t fun, he made it look kind of like summer camp, albeit a summer camp where you woke up at 5:30 every morning and then ate crappy steamed buns for breakfast. Some of the things depicted in the video were standing still for half an hour to test one’s discipline, a “long march” (the actual Long March before the Communists came into power took months, while this one was roughly four miles – I have Marched Longer around the giant malls in Wangfujing) and the gun training, which only lasted a couple hours. Although they were very good at marching in unison, suffice it to say that I am no more terrified of Chinese undergrads than I was before viewing the video, although the production values were excellent.
On Tuesday, I went to this…thing…that Max invited me to. Called “Green Drinks,” its purpose was ostensibly to allow members of environment-related NGOs in Beijing to network with each other, but it ended up being a bunch of white people of all stripes, at least 75% of whom were native English speakers. In fact, I did not meet one environmentalist the whole night. Max traded a lot of business cards with people, but networking and mingling in general make me horribly uncomfortable, as I am very shy and ill at ease among new people and in new situations. I did meet a couple really sweet French students near the end of the night, though, and made tentative plans to meet with one of them to practice my French, which has gone the way of [choose one: the Backstreet Boys, anyone on VH1, the American economy]. Something I have heard about the expat community here is how small it is, and it often sounds like everyone knows everyone. This should be comforting to me, as a potential Beijing expat, but I feel like if, in a city of 17 million, you either know everyone or know someone who does, something is wrong and you’re a little too insulated. As much as I dislike changes in my broad life circumstances, I also get bored really easily, and if you stay in the Foreigner Hotspots you’re missing out on a bunch of other rad places where you could be talking to real people and doing real things instead of staying in pretend America with stores containing merchandise priced in dollars (seen it in Sanlitun, got so annoyed that I left) and other people you can speak English to. You don’t grow that way.
Anyway, after leaving the Green Drinks thing we wandered around looking for TGI Friday’s until we found a Western supermarket named Jenny Lou’s.** It had the most wonderful things inside (Pop Tarts, juice, normal bread, Italian pasta), none more wonderful than the Drinks Aisle, which not only had non-Nescafe coffee, but also nine kinds of Swiss Miss, including “Marshmallow Lover’s,” which is of course the best kind. I got some, and will undoubtedly be back for more next time I’m in the area, which is right by the Silk Market.
Wednesday was a day without class, but I spent most of it catching up on work. However, in the afternoon I went exploring with Pei Rei to a large bookstore and then to Tibetan food on Nanluogu Hutong. The cheap, $1.25-per-plate Chinese food sold at the restaurants I usually eat at had started to get a little old, so I dropped $6 on potato samosas, tomato soup, and lamb curry. ($6 is a huge amount to drop for dinner.) It was delicious and completely worth it. I love Tibetan food, and am excited to try more of it here, as the places in the US usually serve it in an Indian and Nepalese context.
While on our way to the bookstore, Pei Rei and I got off one bus stop too early and had to walk past a place he told me was called the Zoo Market (thus called because it’s across the street from the Beijing Zoo). The Zoo Market, I was told, was similar to the Silk Market, but with no white people, vastly lower prices, and less bargaining. I had some free time after class today, so I decided to go check it out.
If anything, the place is more hectic than the Silk Market – I was the only white person I saw in there the whole time, and there are more stores with less room to maneuver, which makes it kind of a hassle to get around. That said, the prices are amazing. I wanted to get a pair of tights, so I found some I liked and asked the vendor how much they were. She quoted me $4.50, I asked for $1.50, and she gave me $2. I was so dumbstruck that I just bought them. (However, bargaining is not always okay here. I got a palette of about ten eyeshadow colors for about $2, which was the price the vendor gave me and refused to bargain down from. But dude, $2.) The Zoo Market also seems much more authentic than the Silk Market; the clothes they sell there look like the clothes that actual Chinese people wear, with the Chinglish pasted on the front*** or the reckless copyright infringement. The variety, and the number of things that I would want to wear, definitely doesn’t measure up to the Silk Market, but I’m already planning a trip back there.
On the way out, I saw a group of girls clustered around a woman with a big bag on the ground. I couldn’t see what was in the bag, but I assumed it was probably pirated DVDs, so I went in for a quick look. It was not DVDs. Rather, it was puppies. Three puppies, to be exact, about five weeks old and cuter than the dickens. I cooed over them for a couple eons and then bent down to pet one, because they were the fuzziest little fellows I have ever seen. The woman selling them immediately shouted “No money, no touch!” at me in Chinese and then snapped the bag shut, causing one of the puppies to bark a couple times before she opened it back up, patted the offending puppy on the head, and fed them a little bit. Nobody, not even the Mean Zoo Market Lady, is immune to puppies.
Last thing: I wrote a column in the Daily Northwestern, our campus’ official paper, about being a foreign student in Beijing. It’s a pretty cursory look at my whole deal, and it probably won’t be anything new if you’ve been keeping up with this, but I am putting it out here because it’s my baby. It is also worth noting that the managing editor of the Weekly section, who I imagine looking more or less like Kif from Futurama, completely enervated any sense of Emily from the piece, including what I thought was an excellent story about me saying “chest hair” instead of “panda” because I got the tones wrong, so it reads kind of bland. The worst part is, the guy I worked with on the story, who was very nice, encouraged me to add more examples, and they all ended up getting taken out. I knew it.

*The textbook, by the way, is hilarious. Roughly two-thirds of the lessons are normal, and the others are just cracked out beyond belief. The lessons usually take the form of a dialogue between two people, and the two most notable ones were an argument over whether or not people should give money to beggars (one person said “Encouraging people to reap without sowing is harmful to society. They could get jobs if they wanted. If you disagree, you are doubting Deng Xiaopeng’s Reform and Opening Policy.”) and a discussion on the American legal system, which, apparently, is ridiculous because you can sue someone who you feel has done you wrong. I will be the first to admit that our society’s litigiousness has gone too far, but the lesson made it sound like it was some awful offense to be able to sue your employer. Whatever, China.

**The only thing that would make this segue awesomer is if I knew the Chinese word for “hypocrite.”

***One sweatshirt said “Heineken: Stupid Division” on the front in big, Times New Roman letters

Cultural Learnings of My Roommate for Make Benefit Glorious Person of Myself

My roommate is awesome.
Ever since I got her the hot drink on Tuesday night to help her sore throat, we’ve been engaged in a no-holds barred game of Generosity Chicken: we keep getting each other stuff, each thing slightly nicer than the last, and due to the Chinese laws of politeness and my desire to not look like a Foreign Devil, we know that sooner rather than later the other person will pop up with a gift. On Wednesday night when she got back from her meeting, she brought me back a huge chocolate bar. I reciprocated Thursday morning by giving her the jar of jam my mom made. Unlike my host family, she enthusiastically dove right in and pronounced it delicious, better than any she’d had in China. Then when I woke up on Friday, she had a bowl of oatmeal with seaweed and dried shrimp waiting, and informed me as I groggily sat down to eat that jianbings were bad for me, and she had therefore found me a different breakfast. I got her some scones Friday afternoon, and she gave me a bag of tea from Sichuan. This will probably only stop when one of us gets the other person a car. At the same time, she is not above giving me a hard time, and is gently but constantly teasing me about getting progressively fatter. (She kept feeding me Milk Duds tonight and then saying “oops, my fault” whenever I ate one.)
There are some weird cultural differences, though. The first time I wore my towel wrapped around me to go take a shower, she freaked out, and I quickly reassured her that everyone else on the floor did it, too. Then today I came back from a shower and she had a couple guy friends in the room, and they flipped. It was like I’d walked into the room naked. They promptly skedaddled outside while apologizing profusely, and then apologized some more when they came back in. I kept assuring them that I really didn’t care (which I didn’t – I’m of the belief that if you can see it in a swimsuit it’s not a big deal) and not to worry about it, but it was sort of odd how strongly they reacted to me showing relatively little skin.
Another interesting conversation went down a couple days ago. As we were getting ready for bed, she asked me why Americans changed their clothes every day, and if we washed them after wearing them once. I told her that unless the clothes got dirty, we wore them more than once before washing them, and she asked again why we wore something different every day. The best answer I could come up with was “because if you don’t, people will wonder why you’re wearing the same clothes as yesterday,” which is no kind of answer at all. I really never thought about it much; maybe someday I’ll figure out why this is such a cultural norm.*
Thursday was a bust, filled with classes, but Friday afternoon I had time to take a break and ended up going to Nanluogu Hutong with one of Pei Rei and Cody’s friends, a chill kid from Northeastern named Daniel. He seems to like wandering around aimlessly as much as I do, so I am happy to report that I may have found a new exploring buddy. I finally got my pudding, too, which was just as delicious as ever. Then that night I went out for hotpot with Max and Zhang Ran, which was fun because by the end of it we were all just good-naturedly trashing on each other and Max got all his grammar questions answered.
Saturday consisted of homework until the evening, when I met Max and some of his friends for dinner at the same dumpling place we went on Monday night. This time was even better, because there were more people, so we could get more kinds of dumplings (my favorite had cilantro, glass noodles, tofu, and peanuts) for less money per person. In the middle, I realized that I’d just eaten my hundredth dumpling of the trip, and celebrated by eating more dumplings.
We then went out to Sanlitun by ourselves, since everyone else seemed to have something else to do at nine pm on a Saturday night (this would become a theme for the night). After wandering around the area and being accosted by doormen at every awful, generic bar on the street, we finally found a couple chill places, got a beer, went to Bookworm and read for a short while (it’s free to read all their books while you’re in there, so we worked our way through a couple chapters each of various Chinese fiction novels), and then went to meet up with some more of Max’s friends. For reasons not clear to me, they all needed to head back around midnight, and Cody, who was supposed to meet us, bailed, so we wandered around some more looking for something to do before heading over to a place called Bar Blu, where some of Max’s friends ostensibly were. We never found them, but that soon became irrelevant because Bar Blu had a dance floor with many people on it. Although sufficiently fun, it was not Propaganda; the crowd seemed less into it, the music lacked a certain je ne sais quoi** (although they did play Flo Rida’s “Low,” which has been notably absent from Propaganda’s oeuvre thus far), and there were no awesome Koreans who were tearing it up while the rest of the crowd stood back in quiet, awed reverence. Nevertheless, it was a good way to kill some time.
And why did we need to kill time, you ask? We were planning to visit Beijing’s famed Panjiayuan Antique Market, which was only open on weekends. It’s essentially a giant flea market, and although pretty much all of its “antiques” are fakes, there are still plenty of knickknacks to be found from all over China. However, word on the street (by “the street” I mean “Lonely Planet Encounters: Beijing”) was that in order to get the good stuff, you had to arrive with the professional buyers at opening time, which was listed in my guidebooks and Wikipedia as 4:30 am. We got some food, sat around on the streets of Sanlitun watching the drunken, expatriate world go by, and when it came time to go we hailed a cab and headed for the building.
When we got there, it was clear that something was off. According to my watch, the market was scheduled to open in five minutes, but the area looked completely dead, and there was not another person to be seen. We went inside and checked, and the woman at the desk told us the market actually opened at six. Neither of us wanted to wait another hour and a half – I was already exhausted and whining for coffee – so we just headed home. Even this proved difficult. I quickly hailed a cab outside, but upon telling the driver where I wanted to go, I was told that it was “too far”. We argued with the driver for a while about this, especially since it was too early for public transit to run so I had no other way of getting back. Eventually he agreed to take me and I paid the highest cab fare I’ve seen yet in Beijing, then returned and somehow got a severely disgruntled (not that I blame her) fuwuyuan to let me back in. Really, though, isn’t that the point of being a cab driver, taking people places? I wasn’t even going outside the Third Ring Road and he still kept saying it was “too far”. Before arriving here, and even after arriving here, I had heard all sorts of things about how friendly and wise the cab drivers were, but thus far I have found them only impossible to understand and unhelpful – often they don’t even know where my school is.
Jackie woke me up with a phone call at about 11:30 this morning wanting a shopping buddy. I was not one to turn this down, especially since she wanted to go to the Silk Market, so I met up with her and we set off in search of a leather jacket. She eventually found one that suited her, and along the way I got my bargaining freak on with a hat, some Uggs,*** and a sweater. I have definitely improved since I first started there: whereas I got overcharged on my first few visits (and kind of on the Uggs, even), I knocked the price of the sweater down from about $95 to $12, and the hat from $25 to $8. Even my Asian friends are impressed (it’s well known that vendors will knock the price up hugely if you’re white because they think you don’t know what’s up). Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is a picture, which I did not take, of acceptable/unacceptable phrases for vendors to use at the Silk Market. The #9 unacceptable phrase, which for some reason wasn’t translated, means “you’re a man,” which I think is funny.

Dumpling tally: 124

*And maybe I’ll figure out who Mike Jones is. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he seems to have faded from the scene before anyone found the answer.

**I actually do sais quoi. Quoi is insipid lyrics about getting with chicks in your limo backed with the simplest synth and bass riffs known to humankind.

***I have promised to uphold the Responsible Ugg Users’ Code: I will only wear Uggs in natural shades (no pink, blue, purple, etc.), I will never wear Uggs with external fur on them, I will never wear Uggs with a skirt that has a hemline above the knee, and I will never wear Uggs when it is above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Northwestern sorority girls, take note.

'PLANGZ

Monday started out as a day like any other: with some Chinese. However, after the Chinese finished, things got a little more interesting. I’d met a woman during our Ladies’ Night who was trolling bars frequented by foreign students, trying to find native English speakers to come into her office and record phrases that would be used by a cell phone company. It was around $15 for forty-five minutes of work, so I gladly accepted, met her at the subway stop, and took a quick two-minute walk to her office, which turned out to be an apartment with a laptop, a copy of Adobe Audition, and a microphone. I spent about half the time reading numbers, dates and times (for example, “Friday, seven fifty-five in the morning”), but the other half she had me read random phrases, which ranged from the mundane and useful (for a cell phone company) to the weird and questionable. Examples:
I will text you on Sunday.
When should I call you?
He has returned home to the States.
Hey sweetie, what’s up?
I have no idea where the restaurant is.
I am thinking about you all the time. Love and love, Elizabeth.
If I pissed you off, my bad.
Judas Iscariot led Christ to his death.
I really miss having you in my bed.
And so on. I have no idea what half of those will be used for, but I got money, and you may hear my voice on your phone in a short while, as the phones will be sold in the US.
In the middle of the whole thing, Max asked if I wanted to go to a dumpling place he’d read about in a magazine a while back. [short pause while you infer what I did] After a short period of being lost, we found the place, which was reasonably full of Westerners and Chinese people alike. It looked like a pretty standard-issue Chinese place: wooden tables, waitresses wearing the same apron, pictures of the food on the wall, the works. But the similarities were only skin-deep. We were handed two picture menus, which reminded me of the board books I had as a baby. One was full of good-looking Chinese dishes. The other, over an inch thick, had only dumplings. While I sat back and let that sink in, Max dove in and picked out a few that sounded especially good. I soon joined in, and by the time the waitress came around with our tea we had a list of dumplings ready to go, accompanied by sautéed mustard greens with almonds and a chili-pomelo salad I’d had in Yunnan.
The first batch of dumplings (shown) came in about fifteen minutes, just after we’d finished the sides. They were delicious little things, steamed to perfection but not soggy, and crammed with meat, veggies, herbs, and spices. I quickly got out a pen so I could keep track on my napkin of how many I’d had as I shoveled them into my mouth with reckless abandon. After we finished the first plates (plateS!!!) we decided we were both still hungry and went back for round two. The next plate arrived laden with dumplings beautifully colored with vegetable juice, and we finished those off as well, although we both felt like we were going to blow up afterward (my four slices of pre-dinner pizza did not help). It was an excellent dinner, and I thought it fitting that I blew the first money I earned in Beijing on dumplings.
Fat and happy, we wandered over to Sanlitun to study (this is sort of like going to Oktoberfest to get a Coke, but it’s all true and I didn’t have a drop to drink) at a café called Bookworm which we’d dropped in on during one of our earlier bar nights. Although Bookworm does serve drinks, they also have food, coffee, and tea, and its own lending library geared toward Anglophones. It’s kind of a hub for the expat community springing up around the east side of Beijing, and it was packed with people listening to music, reading, studying, and just hanging out. Most of the time I was there, two guys were messing around on the free-to-use piano playing some lovely jazz duets. I worked on an article fairly successfully* until it was time to catch the subway back. I’d love to go back there more, but it’s about as out-of-the-way as you can get while still using public transit.
Tuesday was filled with more Chinese, but I did get to meet my roommate for the first time that evening. I am kind of in love with her. Her name is Zhang Ran (in China they use last names first, so Zhang is the surname, Ran is the given name) and she’s from Sichuan province, just north of Yunnan and home to the panda and China’s most famed spicy foods. When we first met, our conversation went something like this:
Her: How old are you? I’m twenty.
Me: I’m twenty too. What hobbies do you have?
Her: I like reading, watching movies, going to KTV (karaoke), traveling, and cooking. And eating. I really like eating.
Me [in English]: YESSSS
Nearby teacher [in Chinese]: Speak Chinese!
I lucked out. After my homestay-matching survey kind of backfired on me (and several other people I know), I had started to doubt the efficacy of IES’ ability to place people in situations that they liked. No longer. The girl is like the Chinese version of myself: sassy, constantly hungry, an efficient worker, attached at the hip to her cell phone, and straightforward. We could probably wear each other’s clothes if we wanted to, too. Then we discovered we both had sore throats and colds, so I went down to the campus convenience store and bought us some coconut powder to make hot drinks with. By the time we got back up, our “mixer” had ended, and I told her I’d see her the next day when she moved in. I’m so happy I got someone I share interests with – our only dissimilarities are that she doesn’t like to go out on the weekends (not an issue) and that she does not like eggplant, which threatens to nip our fledgling relationship in the bud.
By about 1 pm today, there was still no sign of her, so I decided to head out and explore. I’d intended to go to the Temple of Heaven today, but the walk was way longer than it looked on the map, so I ended up at…Nanluogu Hutong! I moseyed down the familiar street, excited for my red bean pudding, when disaster struck. On the whiteboard outside the pudding place, it was written that from October 6 through October 8, the store would be closed. I don’t remember much after that; it was all a blur of misery. I vaguely recall dropping to my knees and wailing in anguish, pounding my fists on the door in the vain hope that someone, somewhere, would answer my cries of distress and give me my pudding, but nobody answered my calls, and my screams faded out of consciousness as I lost the will to continue my travels, wishing only to escape from a world that suddenly seemed unbearably cruel.**
When the going gets tough, however, the tough go shopping, and I stepped into a randomly selected Nanluogu boutique and almost immediately found a tunic dress with pockets that I loved. While I was waiting for the lone dressing room to free up, I chatted with the woman at the counter, who, as it turns out, designed the store’s line of t-shirts (this is becoming pretty common in this part of town), which was interesting; she was just a couple years older than me, and already owned her own business. To my knowledge, this is standard for young Chinese people in big cities – there’s none of that go-backpacking-lay-around-at-your-parents’-maybe-think-about-grad-school gap year garbage that’s so prevalent in the US. In Beijing, everything is moving so fast that you just have to go out and do stuff, now, because if you don’t take that job or start that business, people will do it for you. The woman talked a lot about how her line of work was already really competitive in Beijing, and although she was doing well, quite a few of her friends, all college graduates, were having problems.
From Nanluogu I walked over to the anti-Nanluogu, Wangfujing Avenue. Wangfujing is a giant street that basically consists entirely of malls. This sounds really awesome at first, and it is really awesome at first, but after about forty-five minutes of the same types of stores, it gets tiring, especially at the “luxury” malls that cater to Westerners. (If Chinese people think I came to China to pay significant amounts of money for things, they are in for a rude awakening.) I was determined to find another pair of jeans, but this eluded me multiple times. At at least five stores, I tried on the biggest sizes available, only to be told by apologetic salespeople that no, they didn’t have anything larger. It was really frustrating; I’m definitely not used to that happening, and while I certainly don’t think I’m fat (I fit in average-sized Chinese shirts just fine) it’s weird to realize that your body type is completely outside the standards of the country you’re living in. I finally had some luck with a pair of corduroys at Uniqlo, an international chain that was more culturally equipped to deal with my fat American butt.
After getting carryout from a place near the bus stop, I headed home to the dorm and my new roommate, who has been in and out all night, moving in and going to meetings. She seems very busy. I’m not sure how hard Chinese universities work their students, but her workload looks intense. I hope she has time to hang out with me.

Dumpling Tally: 95

*Someone from the Daily asked me to write the weekly culture piece about being a foreign student in Beijing. I have writers’ block about 2/3 of the way through. What kinds of things are you curious to know about? Please advise; it’s due Saturday.

**None of this actually happened. I was really annoyed that they weren’t open though.

Interesting White People

This post is dedicated to my friend Hannah Jaracz, who told me that “reading American Dumpling is the highlight of [her] day.” Well, Hannah, reading you is the highlight of American Dumpling’s day. Don’t ever change.
Thursday was spent recovering from my Wednesday night journey to Propaganda, which was perhaps an ill-advised decision; I woke up exhausted and spent most of my big class trying as hard as I could not to fall asleep.* During our first break, I decided I could no longer live like this and popped open a can of Nescafe from the campus convenience store, which did its job admirably. I have always loathed the taste of coffee, but since then I have been back for more, and I feel myself becoming that most awful of creatures: A Coffee Drinker. It just wakes you up so well, like canned sleep or something.
After class I did homework, slept, and prepared for a PowerPoint presentation on our travel trips. (Although I did not get to witness this, apparently about half of T’s presentation consisted of poor-quality Photoshopped pictures of Kobe dunking on various Yunnan landmarks and Steve.) Friday morning and afternoon were pretty standard, too: I just went to classes and studied and worked on my history paper. My classes are going well – I’ve definitely gotten back into the swing of Chinese, although my retention is still lower than I’d like, and the area studies classes are getting progressively more interesting. In History we’ve gotten right to the point where things start going downhill for the Chinese, which I was looking forward to, and my calligraphy skills are improving markedly. I doubt, however, that is due to any particular talent or skill on my part. Instead, it’s likely because I started out so ridiculously badly that there was nowhere to go but up. I’m still horrible at it, but I’m less horrible than I used to be, and from what I can see in the class nobody else is doing a great job either.
Friday night was spent weirdly noodling around with people and trying to think of something to do (we ended up watching Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and then getting in an incredibly heated debate about whether it was better than the original, which of course it is not) until Max called and invited me down to Sanlitun with some people he knew. I balked at first, because Sanlitun is a fairly pricey cab ride away and I kind of hate its entire scene, but I did want to go out on a Friday, so I wound up down there. I was glad I went – the place Max and his friends had found had good food and a live jazz combo, which we listened to happily until they stopped playing. At that point we left and went somewhere else, where I argued with this guy from Liverpool about whether bands that weren’t the Beatles had more than five good singles** and talked to a recent Brown graduate about her research interests (societal influences on domestic violence in Spain, among others). I actually ended up getting her phone number, since she was new in town and wanted to have more girl time. (Her: “I’m so tired of hanging out with boys.” Me: “I’m so tired of boys”.) I’ve met some neat people here, but remarkably few of them are Chinese. Our Chinese roommates move in on Wednesday, and I’m looking forward to that. I want to speak more Chinese with native speakers, work on my listening skills, and make Chinese friends. I wonder what they do on weekends.
The next day Max and I got lunch at this 24-hour restaurant that is more or less the Chinese equivalent of Clarke’s: near campus, sunken dining floor in the back, tables lined up in thin front room, good hot cheap food. Sure, they have porridge and dumplings instead of pancakes and waffles, but the effect is the same, and it was full of students speaking both English and Chinese. Afterward, we took the subway down to Sanlitun for shopping in their Western shopping village, home to the giant adidas store (I restrained myself) and, among other things, an American Apparel, where I met an adorable, savvy ten-year-old Australian girl named Lily who spoke Chinese fluently, went to an international school in Beijing, and liked Japanese food “the best”. Despite being half my age, she was really a joy to talk to while Max was trying his pants on. As we left, I couldn’t help but think that if I ever wanted kids, I’d insist on raising them abroad. Multilingualism, and the ability to navigate among different cultures, is so immensely valuable, and I envied that she’d had the chance to learn Chinese at such a young age, and take her fluency for granted, when I spend so much time poring over tones and seemingly meaningless little lines. I have incredibly few complaints about the way I was parented – my parents are wonderful, loving people, and the issues I do have mostly revolve around one heinous dinner named “cranberry chicken” – but if I had to parent myself I’d throw two-year-old Emily into a foreign-language preschool and never look back. That, and I would buy High School Emily a cooler car.
I went back to campus for more studying and a shower and then headed out for a self-organized “Ladies’ Night” (pictured) at Propaganda with Jackie and a couple other people. It ended up being crashed in fairly short order by Pei Rei, Michael, and some more certified non-ladies, but we had fun nonetheless and discovered that the bar upstairs served passable Mexican food.

Dumpling Tally: 72

*Methods employed: doodling, seeing how long I could go without blinking, trying to translate songs into Chinese, kicking myself, making Pei Rei kick me.

**The bar where we were having this argument played REM, Radiohead, U2, Jay-Z, and Jimi Hendrix while we were talking. QED.

I May Have Gone Too Far This Time

Warning for the faint of heart: one part of this entry may be sort of disturbing to the…less intrepid?...eaters among you. My family members and Abby are particularly advised to proceed with caution. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Except for Wednesday, my day off, this week has thus far been quite boring. I’ve gotten back into the swing of classes, especially Chinese. Having 60 words a night to learn after having no work at all for two weeks was a bit of a rude awakening, but I made it work somehow, and was pleased to see that I have a straight-up A in the course thus far. I’m of course happy about this, but at the same time I feel like by getting a good grade (which requires memorizing all the words and grammar patterns for the daily quizzes and then forgetting them to make room for the next day’s) I’m sacrificing actual learning; I feel like I don’t have the time or the brain space to retain the things that are actually useful to me because I’m too busy frantically learning a twelfth way to say “although”. The other thing that bothers me about the classes is that there’s little focus on listening skills, which is by far the area where I have the most trouble. On the upside, we got a new teacher* who is now back from maternity leave. Her name is Shen Laoshi, and she is the feistiest Chinese person I’ve ever met; she keeps making these really sardonic self-deprecating jokes about how much weight she gained when she was pregnant, and she writes really funny comments on the sample sentences people provide to work on the sentence structures we learn.** I like the small classes: the people in mine are all lovely and wonderful, and include Pei Rei and Michael, who are always a ton of fun. Actually, the entire class is sort of a giant Yunnan Trip reunion.
So yesterday was my day off. I’d told Max about my creepy experience with the dog restaurant, and his response, predictably, was “you should try it.” The more I thought about it, the more I kind of wanted to. I think it’s interesting that Westerners (myself included) have a such a mental block about eating “pet meat”, which is really unreasonable when you think about it (for a very well-reasoned examination of this, here’s a great article from Slate about dog meat). I had the gut reaction that I did because I have a dog, a sweet, wonderful, loving dog who I absolutely adore, and the thought of someone ingesting him is deeply disturbing. However, I love my dog not because he’s a dog, but because he’s my dog. He’s like a sibling to me (a cuter, furrier, generally mute sibling). But if circumstances were different, and I had a pet pig (shown to be smarter than dogs), or sheep, or cow, would I stop eating pork, lamb, or burgers? No. Logically, there is no good reason to have such a kneejerk reaction, so I gritted my teeth, steeled my stomach, and told Max we’d go for lunch on Wednesday. I also picked up Jackie (I told you she was down for anything) who was genuinely psyched about eating Man’s Best Friend.
We set off on a long bus and subway ride. What I’d forgotten was that Wednesday was National Day, which is analogous to July 4 in the US: it commemorates the founding of the modern People’s Republic of China in 1949. The bus wasn’t so bad, but the subway was packed. We couldn’t even get off at the right stop because it was too crowded, so we had to go one stop further and then walk back. Just on the streets, I’ve never seen such a mass of humanity: the sidewalks and the shopping areas we walked through were crammed wall-to-wall with people, and it took us forever to weave our way through the crowds. Eventually, though, we got out of the main touristed area and into a quieter hutong-y neighborhood, and we were able to walk freely again.
The dog restaurant was just where I’d remembered it, and immediately recognizable by the large neon sign with “dog meat” on it in Chinese. We stopped for Max to take a couple pictures and went inside.
We were the only people there. The waiter/owner gave us a laminated English menu which was, perhaps unsurprisingly, completely devoid of dog and had suspiciously high prices. We checked over it quickly and then I asked for the Chinese menu instead. The waiter almost palpably loosened up and brought the much more extensive Chinese menu. Sure enough, upon opening it we were immediately greeted with an entire page of dog preparations: a whole dog, half dog, grilled dog, dog stew, dog stir-fry, you name it. We ended up asking the guy to recommend something and also got some eggplant and a bowl of cold noodles. The waiter seemed pretty surprised that we could a) speak Chinese reasonably well and b) were interested in trying dog, and we chatted a little bit while waiting on the food.
Our main course arrived first. It looked pretty good – pieces of meat cooked until soft and tender and served with green bell peppers. We stuck our chopsticks in the plate, glanced at each other, and then I ate dog meat, the one food I told myself I wouldn’t touch while I was here.
It was actually fairly good. It was cooked quite well and tasted a bit like beef, but gamier. I’d compare it to the beef in my mom’s slow-cooked beef stew. We finished most of it, along with all of the eggplant, which was superb (eggplant is always good in Chinese restaurants) and the cold noodles before wandering back up the street to try and find the Underground City, a network of tunnels built to serve as an emergency hideaway in cases of extreme disagreement with the Soviets. Unfortunately, it was closed for repairs, but Max insists there’s another entrance somewhere else.
Jackie went home to get dinner with her host family, but unencumbered by a Chinese schedule, I went up with Max to his friends’ apartment, where they played poker (I watched, as I didn’t feel like losing all my money for no reason) for a couple hours before heading out to dance. I hadn’t been to Propaganda for almost a month and as soon as I stepped in I remembered how much I love the place. Between the lack of cover (for Westerners), the student-y population, and the awesomely bad booty-grind hip-hop they always play, Propaganda is more or less a giant rager. It was like I’d never left; they were playing the same songs to the same crowd, and the same Korean guy was on the platform at the front tearing it up with his spectacular Korean dance moves.*** If a horrible natural disaster ever befalls Beijing, and then archaeologists unearth the preserved city five hundred or so years later, I am convinced beyond a doubt that the Korean guy will still be there, and he will still be shaking it to “Crazy In Love”. We stayed entirely too late, especially given that I had school the next morning, but I eventually had to head back because of the Fuwuyuan Rebellion.
The fuwuyuans (a general term for someone who works in the service industry, like a waiter or a maid or a receptionist) in the building had gotten tired of being awakened after curfew by night-owl students. Since the curfew is ridiculously early, eleven on weeknights and midnight on weekends, this was a fairly common occurrence. For the past few days it had been rumored that the fuwuyuans had been refusing to let people in if they were later than three hours after curfew, which resulted in people knocking for minutes and still being unable to get into the dorm. I didn’t want the same fate to befall me, so I left. It was confirmed today that the fuwuyuans are definitely not letting latecomers into the dorms anymore, so I have a feeling I’ll either start staying out really late (the dorm opens back up at five) or become acquainted with the local benches. (No, Mom, not really.)
Today was pretty much more of the same in terms of classes, but I did have some amazing street food for dinner tonight: delicious dumplings stuffed with minced pork and duck, scallions, and ginger, with a tiny boiled quail egg in the middle. Then for dessert I grabbed a food I’ve only seen emerge post-Olympics, skewered candied fruit. Tonight’s variation was sweet rice balls sandwiched between slices of small candied sour apples, and it was nothing short of incredible. Unfortunately, on my way back, a small ruckus broke out among the street vendors, who yelled that the police were coming, and they packed up their carts with surprising speed and made themselves scarce as the police van drove slowly down the crowded street. Pei Rei said he thought it was because the vendors were unlicensed, which is probably true, but the whole thing just seems silly to me. The street food is by far the best food in Beijing. It’s not unclean, it’s not of poor quality, and it’s perfectly safe to eat. The idea of the police arresting some middle-aged woman for selling candied fruit is beyond me, but then again, Beijing is a weird, weird place.

Dumpling Tally: 56

*How the teacher setup works: all the students in each level have class together for an hour and a half each day, which is always taught by the same teacher. Then we split into groups of six or so people for conversation practice and activities. Each day of the week, we get a different teacher in our small classes.

**Today I finally achieved my goal of having all my sentences relate to dumplings. For example, “I depend on eating dumplings to live,” “according to my research, dumplings are delicious,” “disliking dumplings goes against the laws of nature,” etc.

***For some reason, the Koreans who go to Propaganda are always far and away the best dancers. I have no idea why this is, but I’d give a limb to be able to throw down like some of the girls I’ve seen there.