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.