'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.