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