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.