Roommate Musings

As of today, I have exactly two weeks left in the Beezh. I have loved my time here, but by this point the weather/ pollution/ complete lack of organizational skills on IES’ part (I still don’t know when my finals are! Nor do I have regular internet access!) have made me ready to head back home and eat Mexican food with my loved ones. Nonetheless, I still have two weekends left and I am determined to squeeze as much out of them as I can while still having tests sometime in the next couple weeks.
Nothing noteworthy has happened since I got back from Shanghai, so I’m going to use this space to expound upon an aspect of my time here that I haven’t talked much about: my roommate. People keep asking about her, and I feel lucky that I get to live with her. In my experience, Chinese people are hard to meet. Even when we’re sent out into the Bei Wai neighborhood to talk to the locals for class, they’re often hesitant; we’ll ask them if we can ask them a couple questions about [Spring Festival, family dinners, their hobbies] and often anyone over thirty won’t even verbally respond to us. Instead, they’ll shake their heads and wave us away. Before I arrived here, I read all about the Chinese notion of politeness and conflict avoidance, but if I were to judge by the rude drivers and closed-off Beijingers I’ve met, I would think Chinese people were incredibly impolite.
Thankfully, there’s Zhang Ran. Although not a native Beijinger, she is adorable and super sweet (and her native Beijinger friends are too). Although our overlapping time in the dorm is short (she has classes until about the time I head out for the night), we talk quite a lot, and we’re fairly close; she’s given me advice on various issues related to the Unfair Sex, which probably would have been great if I’d ever had the chutzpah to use it, and we talk about the general stresses of collegiate life, and deciding our futures, a lot.
The one thing that stands out specifically, though, is the vast difference in maturity level between us (and, I would venture to say, between most of the other Chinese roommates in general). Example: Zhang Ran, within the past week, has acquired her first boyfriend. I probably have no right whatsoever to be talking about this, as I’m in the middle of an 18-month dry spell with the gentlemen, but I was fourteen the first time I dated; without exception, everyone I know had their first actual relationships in high school, usually toward the earlier end of it. According to Zhang Ran, though, most Chinese students don’t date until college, or sometimes later (this is applicable to young people in general, as about 90% of Chinese young’uns go to some type of college/tech school/etc.) Her boyfriend, who I have only met once, seems particularly inexperienced in the ways of romantic etiquette. Zhang Ran reports that upon seeing a picture of me for the first time, he commented that I was “prettier than her.” Fortunately, I wasn’t present at the time; if I had, I probably would have chewed him out as best I could in Chinese.
Last night, she told me she was going over to his building “to study overnight.” I bid her goodnight with what was hopefully a knowing look on my face and returned to studying. She returned fifteen minutes later saying that the guard in the boyfriend’s building wouldn’t let her in (I guess they’re equally obnoxious about curfew on the other side of campus), and when I asked her where she would have slept, she wrinkled her nose and said that she had actually planned to pull an all-nighter with him. With the workload she and the other Chinese students seem to have, I’m not surprised this qualifies as a date. The Chinese students rarely, if ever, go out – the most I’ve heard of this is a couple of the guys’ roommates getting some beers after dinner.
At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if this – the school-sponsored team jump rope competitions, the popular (among college students) brand of t-shirts with school-uniform-clad teddy bears on them, which would have gotten anyone laughed out of the fifth grade in the US – is evidence of actual immaturity, or if I’ve just become sort of numb to what’s “normal” for people my age after having spent two years immersed in promiscuous alcoholic scantily-clad* party-hearty American School (not that Northwestern is a particularly egregious example of any of these). At any rate, it’s been sort of an interesting thing to reflect on, and I’ve had to adjust my worldview to realize that the Chinese students’ lifestyle doesn’t mean they’re weird or “behind” like it would in the US; instead, it just means they’re Chinese.

Dumpling Tally: 267

*Overheard in the Northwestern student union: “Your North Face is so sexy!”

Picture Post: Shanghai

From top: old-style apartment blocks, the new theater academy, Max two-fisting pure liquified America (it's flavored Starbucks lattes), the outside of a fancy private school, the inside of the Source store, trendy Xintiandi shopping area, garden in the French Concession, me and my new boyfriend, quiet residential street, Christmastime at one of the malls, Nanjing Lu at night, me with Haibao (Haibao is the omnipresent mascot of the 2010 Expo, whatever that is), excellent Chinglish, me narrowly escaping ingestion on the Bund, the old customs house, Bund buildings, and a typical downtown scene.

Shanghai'ed!

So last Thursday Amy, Amy’s friend (a last-minute replacement for Elise, who had lost her wallet and her train tickets), Max, and myself departed for Shanghai. Our train on the way in was a soft seat, the second choice of accommodation, as all the hard-sleeper tickets were sold out. However, this proved a very pleasant way to travel; the second car of soft seats was almost completely empty, and so, accompanied by another roving band of IES students, we invaded it and sat around its tables playing cards and very intense word games. (I defeated Max in a hotly contested round of “ghost” despite his repeated boasts that he “hardly ever lost” at it.) When it came time to sleep, though, things got less comfortable. Soft seats are analogous to plane seats: they’re about as thick, roughly the same size, and they recline the same negligible amount. I’ve never been able to sleep well on planes, and catnapped fitfully throughout the night even though I had a row of seats to myself.

Day 1: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
I woke at 7 am with the recorded announcement that we’d be arriving in Shanghai shortly. Despite approaching China’s largest city, the view of the countryside from the window looked as provincial as any countryside I’d seen in Shanxi or Yunnan: the same poor farmers in their fields and thin brick houses, heated by the same coals that sent plumes of smoke lurching into the already filthy air. I was equally unimpressed once we entered Shanghai proper. It looked almost exactly like Beijing, with nondescript concrete buildings punctuated by China’s uniquely hideous 1970s apartment blocks. By the time we stepped out of the (standard) train station, I started to worry that I’d wasted my time and money coming here. This was not alleviated when we tried to catch a cab to our hotel, which, judging by the map I had, was a fairly short ride from the train station. The first cab we hailed tried to make us pay a flat rate of about $9, a huge sum given the short distance. The second told us it was “too far.” Finally, a third cab talked to the hotel receptionist to find out where exactly the place was and cheerfully took us there for a fair and reasonable $3. The legendary sneaky Chinese people who consistently try to rip foreigners off seem to have eluded me thus far, but it was a frustrating experience; I don’t think anyone’s tried to overtly cheat me until the first cab driver (the Silk Market is different, as it’s their job to cheat you) and it was a frustrating experience.
The cab dropped us on the corner of a little lane branching off what looked like a fairly major road. Before we even checked in, though, something caught our eye. Baozi! A tiny stall was set up a mere twenty feet from our hotel, and a cluster of hungry Shanghainese, ranging from businessmen in suits to the quilted-pajama-wearing townsfolk* inexplicably found everywhere in China, was gathered around waiting for their fist-sized steamed bundles of joy. We joined the fray and eventually got some delicious pork and potato baozi. Full and relatively happy, we checked into the hotel and caught up on sleep until lunchtime, at which point we went back for more baozi, this time including a delicious veggie variety with mustard greens, all for only 15 cents each.
We braved Shanghai’s subway system (not actually hard; we only used one subway line the entire trip) to go to the Bund, the town’s equivalent of the Magnificent Mile. Situated along the Huangpu River, the Bund showcases some of China’s finest treaty-port architecture, including exclusive clubs that Chinese and women weren’t allowed into at the time, old stately bank buildings, and the still-functioning customs house. For the first time since arriving in China, I got the feeling that I could have been somewhere else. The style of the buildings reminded me of what I’d seen in Vienna or Prague, and they didn’t have even the faintest tinge of Chineseyness to them save for the small red flags fluttering at the top. For all their stateliness, though, the Bund didn’t make for super-interesting strolling. The buildings were all either offices or the occasional luxury retailer, and except for a luxury phone store called Vertu that Max wanted to look at, nothing caught our attention.
So what’s on the other side of the river? The exact opposite of the Bund’s buildings: ultramodern, sleek skyscrapers, the most ridiculous of which is the Oriental Pearl TV tower (pictured above – you’ll be able to tell which one it is because it’s ridiculous). This part of town, called Pudong, was visually arresting, but my Lonely Planet book told us that it lacked anything of real interest to visitors, so we didn’t venture over there. (Yet.)
After the Bund wore out its welcome, we made our way back to the main shopping street, Nanjing Lu. The eastern part of the street, closest to the Bund, was obviously overdeveloped for tourists and was crammed with neon-lit shops promising clueless white people knockoff jade statues, “Chinese” jewelery, ostensibly high-quality tea, and other such souvenirs. Even though the area was pedestrianized, it was a madhouse. The cars that would have been on the road were replaced by packs of Chinese people who seemed just as determined to disrupt the natural flow of foot traffic. We eventually struggled out of this section of the street and escaped into…a mall.
Shanghai has SO MANY MALLS. Most of the ones located on East Nanjing Lu were nice but not unreasonable, getting more and more expensive (and the items sold within getting less weirdly ugly and Chinese) as we headed farther west. This strip of street had seemingly endless malls, all of them huge; we actually got lost in one twelve-floor behemoth. By the time we got home, we were all mall-ed out, and we had seen two more Vertu stores (according to Max, Manhattan has a grand total of one). Their phones, which in China retail for upwards of $10,000, sold at about the rate of six per week, according to one of the workers, mostly to Chinese and Japanese people. This sort of summed up the atmosphere in Shanghai; the city proper is overflowing with more luxury than anyone could ever possibly need, or even support, in its rush to become cosmopolitan and “modern”. In a lot of ways, this was great: the city was cleaner (although the pollution was still pretty bad) and laid out in a much more familiar and Western way, but it was also very weird to feel distinctly poor in a developing country.
After returning to the hotel (and the dumpling stand) we decided on dinner at a Moroccan place called Barbarossa, in the middle of People’s Park in the city center. The recommendation in Lonely Planet** did nothing to prepare us for the restaurant/bar/lounge’s beautiful sitting. The building looked like a softly lit Moroccan palace and sat delicately aside a pond in the middle of the park. During the summertime, when the weather was warm and the curtains open, it must be nothing short of magical. We quickly ordered (the kitchen was about to close) and enjoyed some amazing food, the kind all too rare in Beijing: a delicious, lemony, flawlessly herbed chicken tagine and a salad with arugula, blue cheese, and pears. I was never a huge fan of salads of any sort, but this was the first one I’d really had since arriving in China, and it was delicious. We contemplated staying at the restaurant for drinks, but decided they were too expensive, at about $8 each (keep this number in mind for later, kids) and headed back instead for a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: The Gao Sheng Huo***
This was by far the most fun day. The previous day left a little bit of an odd taste in my mouth, between the lovely but empty Bund, the omnipresent flashing neon and squawking vendors of East Nanjing Lu, and the weird commercialism of the luxury stores. We woke up late, grabbed some dumplings on the way out, and headed on foot to the French Concession, described as an elegant, low-key area with shops and cafés.
Though most of the journey there showcased the same omnipresent construction and heavily trafficked streets I’d come to know and despise in Beijing, the French Concession itself was a treat. It’s not a clearly delineated area, and it sort of sneaks up on you, at least the way we approached it from the north. You notice that the buildings are statelier and better kept, and that the trees lining the roads don’t look like haphazard afterthoughts, like they do in Beijing; instead, they are healthy, leafy, and happily growing. The neighborhood reminded me of the nicer side streets of Belmont, Fremont, Ballard, or maybe a less-busy Rockridge (here I have successfully hit the Chicago, NorCal, and Seattle residents with a slew of comparisons so that all of you can hopefully imagine what this is like), in architecture, demeanor, and retail options. We stopped at a hipper-than-Ikea home boutique, a shop selling luxury herbal teas, and innumerable small, classy clothing stores. Unlike the little clothing shops ubiquitous in Beijing, these stores carried more than shoddily made, thin knit cardigans that would have looked at home on girls ten years younger than the actual intended consumer. Instead, these little places had the kind of effortless cool found in little boutiques in San Francisco, or other celebrated creative cities in the US. I was smitten until I saw the price tags, but eventually caved in at one particularly amazing store called Source. The bottom and top floors had men’s and women’s clothes, shoes, and accessories in the hip-hop tradition, but the top floor also had a large, empty section that was currently playing host to an independent art exhibition showcasing photos and printmaking. It also had a fully functional DJ deck and bar, and apparently hosted many excellent events throughout the year (including, to my great joy, the adidas Originals opening party in 2007). I couldn’t help but think how much fun it would be to party in there.
Speaking of adidas, this same store would play host to one of my happiest moments of the trip. The very astute among you may recall not only my joyful pilgrimage to the adidas megastore in Beijing but my taste for a specially produced shoe entitled the Flavors of the World Vin Qing Ming. As these wonders had been discontinued in 2007, I despaired of ever finding one and assumed they’d all been bought up by more affluent sneakerheads.
Enter Shanghai.
I moseyed over to the sneaker section and immediately saw a real live Vin Qing Ming ahead of me. I rushed to cradle it in my hands with the same care with which one would handle a baby panda (they’re about as common). One of the store workers, noticing my ongoing mystic experience, came over and informed me in English that the shoe was a limited edition run, etc, so forth. I responded in Chinese, “I know, they’re my favorite brand and I’ve been looking for this shoe for a year!” which prompted them to compliment me on my Chinese. I didn’t get the shoes because they were over $200, but I did get a shirt, and as the girl at the register rang me up in broken English, I heard the salesperson say “Don’t worry, she speaks Chinese well,” which made me feel really satisfied. Chinese people will readily tell you your Chinese is awesome, even if you can only say hello, when they’re trying to sell you something (always) but to overhear two coworkers talk like that was extremely flattering.
We shopped around for a while longer but returned to a Lonely Planet-recommended café for dinner, which for me was a delicious focaccia sandwich and a banana crepe. Back at the hotel, I decided to do something I’d had my heart set on for a while: take advantage of China’s lack of drinking age and a nice blouse I’d bought in Beijing to finally live the high life. Amy and her friend decided not to join me because my super-cool plan was too expensive, but Max and I put on our finest (for me, this was the aforementioned blouse, corduroy pants, and flats) and headed over to the Jinmao Tower, China’s tallest building and home to the world’s highest bar on the 87^th story.
Both Friday and Saturday, Shanghai had been overcast and drizzly, although the temperature was pleasant enough. By the time we went out, it was outright raining, although not very hard, and the city had a lovely, foggy, Seattlesque feel to it. The close fog obscured the tops of the tallest buildings, including ours, but lent the rest of Pudong an ethereal, floating feeling as the multicolored neon lights and logos shone faintly through the haze.
Once in the tower, we took our first of three elevators to the 53^rd floor, where we got a chance to look around. Already, the city looked impossibly small, and we were only a bit over halfway to our destination. The 53^rd floor and up belong to the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, and this, their “lowest” floor served as a lobby with its own bar, which we eschewed in favor of a second elevator to the 56^th floor, which had another bar and a couple restaurants, as well as the elevator to our final destination. (It’s also worth mentioning that an adult ticket to the observation deck on the 88^th floor is about $10.)
We were welcomed to the bar the minute we stepped off the elevator and ushered to a darkly lit table about ten feet from the window. The fog was so thick that it obscured the ground entirely from this point, which was sort of disappointing, but also amazing in that it gave the impression that the building has just sprung into the heavens from nowhere, and had no basis in the terrestrial world. Feeling emboldened by my settings and my temporary classy life, I ordered a $14 drink called a “Dragon” (ingredients: Courvoisier VSOP Exclusif, Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grey Goose, and milk) which, despite all the alcohol that was ostensibly in it, had a delicious coffee-milk taste. This pricing was average for the bar. In fact, the champagne cocktails on the list all sold for at least twice as much as my drink, and a number of premium whiskeys were offered that sold for about $500 per glass. Perhaps inspired by our fancy surroundings, Max and I spent most of our time at the bar talking about medical malpractice lawsuits before returning to the hotel.

Day 3: Follow Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Fight American Imperialism
or
I Love You, California Pizza Kitchen
We woke up at a similarly late time, ate a similar lunch (tasty dumplings!) and then went over to yet another place suggested by Lonely Planet, the Propaganda Poster Art Center. I was glad the book suggested it, because I never would have found it on my own. It was on a residential street, in a typically ugly Chinese apartment complex. Once we walked to the back building, we had to take the elevator down to the basement. It was the sketchiest, least museum-y museum I’ve ever seen.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, we were the only people there. The collection of posters was impressive, though, and the ones on display were just a fraction of what the curator, a kindly older man who spoke great English, owned (some were traveling, some were on sale). Since we were the only group there, he showed the four of us around and explained the political climate that led to the creation of these posters, all of which glorified Mao, communism, and peasants and denouncing all forms of capitalism and imperialism. “The Americans always really like the anti-American ones,” he said, showing us a stretch of posters in which square-jawed, hearty laborers destroyed tanks piloted by fat American businessmen. “They were very common in China, too, until 1972. That was when Nixon came, and all the artists were told to stop making them.” I love Communist kitsch, an affinity installed by my visit to the Czech Republic a couple summers ago, and I had a great time at the museum. In my mind, though, the most interesting posters were the ones with only characters scrawled on them, kept in a small side room. I went in alone and was looking at the when the curator stepped in and started to explain what was going on. These posters, called “big character posters,” were common during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, when intellectuals and capitalists of all stripes were denounced. At universities and in city centers across China, people were forced to write these posters denouncing their family, friends, teachers, and even themselves to avoid severe political persecution at the hands of the Communist Party. Some parts of the posters were written and underlined in red; these were quotes from Mao’s works. My favorite posters were the ones that had had the original characters written over, usually broadly with a big brush. These were the works of vandals, people who had dared to disagree with the poster’s original contents and risked who-knows-what to voice their disagreement, no matter how silently. The posters were huge, written on butcher-paper sized rolls, and one of them lasted five sheets of paper, an illegible (to me, anyway) forced screed against something the Chinese government probably supported now anyway.
We then went over to the west section of Nanjing Lu for more shopping. Unlike the eastern section, this part of the street was blanketed with only luxury malls selling only luxury Western brands (Dior, Prada, Bulgari, etc.) The stores were all weirdly empty, as their merchandise was well out of range of even upper-middle-class Shanghainese, but we spent an enjoyable hour strolling and coveting before we decided that our love for the West should not start and end with window shopping. Instead, we decided, the time was ripe for some delicious American chain restaurant food, so we went into a California Pizza Kitchen, an establishment I abhor in the States,**** and ate a delicious meal of pizza, Coke (with free refills!) and salad. I was having too much fun being American to give up my temporary Western lifestyle when the meal ended, so afterward, at my behest, we popped into Starbucks and sat in the lobby of a nearby luxury hotel to drink them. Other than the occasional Asian person crossing our field of vision in these places, we truly might as well have never been in China.
Shanghai doesn’t have Beijing’s ancient history by a long shot. (It wasn’t much of anything until the Europeans made it into a treaty port in the mid-19^th century.) However, it is infinitely more Western, and more civilized (I’m going to use that word despite all the baggage it carries with it) than anywhere else I’ve been in China. If you’re visiting the country, stay in Beijing, and get a feel for what “real” China is like. That being said, if I had to live here in the long term, I’d move to Shanghai, no question. As long as I was being paid on an American salary, that is.

Dumpling tally: 240

*For some reason, grown adults think it’s acceptable to wear quilted pajama sets, which more often than not have cartoon characters on them, out in public. I thought that in cosmopolitan Shanghai this would not happen, but I was wrong.

**I am deeply in love with Lonely Planet, even after reading the excellent confessional Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm, which everyone should read. At any rate, every place they’ve recommended has been amazing.

*** High life.

****Max, a New Yorker, and I got into a huge argument about thin crust vs. deep dish pizza. Everyone who is at all smart knows that deep dish is infinitely better, and so I will not discuss this matter any further.

Yonghegong Picture Post + Lamarama Pt. 2

Some time ago, Zhang Ran asked me to make her and a friend some American food. After trying very hard to think of things that didn’t involve ovens, pasta, or cheese (none of which are readily accessible) I ended up asking my parents, who recommended a Cajun dish with shrimp and spices sautéed in about a stick of butter. They sent me the spices from the US, and last Tuesday I finally ended up cooking for the two of them, plus Jackie and Dan. The dinner went over wonderfully and was finished off with a pot of Dan’s precious American coffee, brought to China by his visiting parents (the Chinese kids hated it, and I got to explain that this was what actual coffee tasted like). You can never go wrong with too much butter.
The rest of the week was pretty dull until Saturday night, when I went with Max, Michael, Jackie, Dan, and a couple others to the Dumpling Restaurant. (I don’t even know the name of it; it’s just called the Dumpling Restaurant as far as I’m concerned.) Max had figured out previously that ordering the dumplings with colored wrappers did not cost extra, so our dumplings were not only delicious but easy on the eyes. They all got eaten promptly, and everyone loved them. After that Max and I headed out to Sanlitun [obligatory comment about how I’m over Sanlitun] and met up with Amy, Becca, Cody, and some others for excellent dancing. One of the bars we went to also had 300 playing on a TV screen on the terrace, which was the awesomest thing I’ve ever seen.
The sky was relatively clear today (this means that the brown haze wasn’t quite as noticeable as it usually is) so Max wanted to go back to the Yonghegong Lama Temple. We made our way over there but decided to buy some incense to burn at the altars, which I hadn’t done before. It was incredibly cheap – 70 cents for about twenty sticks, which didn’t smell like anything in particular but had Chinese and Tibetan writing stamped onto their sides in shiny, foiled letters. The store where we stopped (bordered by ten other stores just like it) had all sizes, colors, and packages of the stuff imaginable, from the tiny, thin sticks people use in their burners at home in the US to meter-long sticks the width of sausages.
Upon going in, I was again surprised not only by how many people were there to worship but by their diversity. There were the kind of older people you’d expect, but also a lot of young adults, especially young women who couldn’t have been more than five years older than me, dressed in jeans and heels. My history professor once made an offhand comment about how all the temples in Beijing were packed the week before the gaokao (like the SAT in China, but more important and more stressful, as it’s the sole determining factor in whether you get into college) by students praying for good scores. I wonder if these people were really Tibetan Buddhists or if they just wanted something; I guess when I think of devout Buddhists I don’t envision girls in Gucci sunglasses and gold jewelry, and I think the use-religion-when-you-need-it strategy is kind of shallow and insulting. However, I burned my incense and bowed three times at the altars right alongside them, even though I’m not Buddhist, so I’m certainly not any better. It was a crisp, late-fall afternoon, and my layers of jackets kept me nice and warm as I trundled through the temple complex, sunglasses on. Afterward we went to Nanluogu Hutong, and although there was a temporary setback when I discovered my pudding place to be closed, we found a beautiful, cozy coffee shop and took shelter from the cold around a pot of tangy lemongrass tea. I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see in Beijing, pretty much, and so I’ve been going out exploring a little less. The weather is also getting rapidly colder, so screwing around in the city parks is much less appealing than it was a couple months ago. I find myself missing Yunnan and its tropical climate a lot.
I’ve been getting sort of fed up with a lot of the smaller quirks of Chinese life lately, which I’m sort of embarrassed about, because I feel like I’ve been here long enough that I should have adapted to them by now. I don’t think it’s culture shock; I feel like that would have kicked in long before, and these things aren’t surprising me so much as wearing down my patience a tiny bit each time I see them, like (appropriately) Chinese water torture. The food at the small restaurants where I eat, although delicious, is beginning to run together, and I’m getting a little tired of the fairly limited options available for $1. As a result, I’ve been eating out at nicer places more and more frequently, which makes my tummy very happy but is causing me to burn through money fairly quickly. I probably need to start having noodle soup more often; it’d be good in this weather and I haven’t familiarized myself with it yet. The uniquely Chinese habit of hawking and spitting giant wads of phlegm on the ground (or the bus, or the floor in a couple particularly appalling instances) has always grossed me out, but it’s starting to bother me a lot of late, as has the tendency to let toddlers relieve themselves in the street. Beijing’s awful drivers are annoying (but, as Max pointed out, that’s not a cultural thing but a straightforward safety concern) and honk too much. To top it off, every time I leave the room to go out for the afternoon or the evening, my roommate gives me a reproachful look and comments that every weekend, I “disappear.” I always invite her out with me, but she declines, saying either that she doesn’t like bars or she has too much work to do. I’d like to get a sense of what she does in her free time, but she never seems to leave. I’m sure the “too much work” line is true – Chinese universities have infamously strenuous curricula – but if I have no work to do I don’t see why it’s not okay for me to go have fun. It’s not as though I’m blowing off my scholarly duties, either; she sees me studying quite frequently, and when she didn’t believe that I got such good grades while leaving the dorm so often, I showed her a couple of my recent quizzes. We are starting to talk more, though, which is good. Recently we have confided in one another about our boy problems. Her advice was probably much better than mine was.
On the plus side, I am going to Shanghai! I will be accompanied by Max, Amy, and Elise. The IES kids get Friday off and have the weekend for independent travel. I wish we had longer (when you have class Thursday afternoon and Monday morning and plane tickets are a little much for a student budget, your options are limited) but I probably would have chosen to go to Shanghai anyway, as I am a city person and Shanghai is China’s biggest city, with 20 million people. Shanghai is not only warmer than Beijing, but is known for its own special variety of dumplings, which I look forward to ingesting in their natural habitat. We’re taking an overnight train in Thursday night and coming back the same way Sunday night, which is nice because it cuts down on hotel costs (although our hotel is only $40 a night and has a private bathroom). I’m sort of proud of myself; I went to the travel agency and got the train tickets all by my lonesome in Chinese, even having a conversation with the ticket guy about my options (hard-sleeper on the way in wasn’t available, so I got soft-seat instead). I can’t believe that after all the time I’ve spent here, I still get nervous about using my Chinese in public like this, but I was probably happier than I should be to have pulled it off. The hotel, however, was booked online and in English. It is fairly central and close to a subway station, which is really all I need.
I also got surprisingly homesick for the first time this week. Recently, Beijing has been vacillating between sort-of-tolerably cold and frigid, and the weather was leaning toward the latter on Monday afternoon, when I found myself in Sanlitun with some time to kill. While I was wandering around their giant outdoor mall I was offered a free sample of either hot cocoa or apple cider outside of a juice bar. I took the cider, proffered happily in a tiny Dixie cup, and drank the sip’s worth slowly. It wasn’t fake, like I’d expected it to be; as it turned out, all the juices were fresh-squeezed, and every cup of cider came with its own cinnamon stick. It tasted just like the cider my mom makes every Halloween night, and as I squeezed into one of the tiny room’s three chairs and watched the wind blowing the pedestrians around outside, I was reminded of the Christmas season in Seattle, or Chicago, or even little Sebastopol. For a brief moment, I missed the wreaths hanging from the light poles, the festive holiday lattes at Starbucks that I’d never order because I didn’t like coffee, or the patterns the frost makes on the windows in the morning when you wake up. I ordered the biggest cup of cider they had and spent a pleasant twenty minutes chatting with the girl at the register in Chinese about where I was from and what we did for the holidays in the US. Midway through our conversation she asked me nervously, “I heard Americans really like apple cider. Does ours taste like it does in America?” I assured her that yes, theirs was as good as any I’d ever had on the other side of the Pacific, and watched as a huge smile spread across her face.

Dumpling Tally: 200 (double centennial!!!)

No, REALLY?

This just in from the New York Times: Beijing is polluted! It's a pretty interesting article, but I posted it mostly for the picture - I have seen countless days like this. The smog is worse than the fog in San Francisco on its worst days, and although I think I've adjusted to it in the sense that I no longer physically feel it when I go outside, I'm pretty sure it's responsible for the nagging cough I've had for the last month and a half or so. Also, on the Wednesday they mention in the article about a third of the way down, I specifically remember saying that the pollution was particularly bad. The sun was orange the entire day, and the last time I remember seeing a star I was in Yunnan.

Eggs and Incense

One of the weird things I’ve noticed about Beijing is that in many ways it seems Westernized on the outside, but the modern trappings are just for looks. For example, several times I’ve seen stores advertise that they accept credit and debit cards (rare in China, where almost all purchases are made in cash), and then waited in a giant line because there’s no credit card machine, and all the purchases have to be phoned through to the credit card company.
I thought about this again a couple nights ago, when Max and I went to a concert at the brand-spanking-new National Center for the Performing Arts, colloquially known as “The Egg”. Right across from Tiananmen Square, the Egg has been open for less than a year and is surrounded by an artificial lake under which you walk through a hallway to enter the building. There are three theaters inside: one for symphonic music, one for plays and Beijing opera, and one for opera and dance. (I was in the symphonic hall watching a Dutch ensemble of maybe fifteen musicians playing international, modern pieces.) The interior of the building was built at a huge cost; with the construction and maintenance costs averaged out, each seat is worth $70,000 (yes, dollars, not yuan). The lobby is gorgeous and wood-paneled, and there’s not a straight line in sight – everything is gently curved, matching the egg-shaped exterior. Everything was beautifully and softly lit, and what wasn’t made from dark, flawlessly polished wood was granite or crisply frosted metal. It was an absolutely gorgeous place, nicer than any performance center of its type that I’d ever been in. If it had been located in the US or Europe, it would have been the type of place where even the cheapest tickets set you back $40 or so, and if you went in wearing anything less than a nicer dress or a suit you’d be noticeably underdressed.
I wore a dressy pair of jeans, blouse, and a sweater, but was still worried that I would be the Ugly Informally Clothed American watching a nice concert in this beautiful building. Once I sat down and looked around, though, I realized that I was at least in the upper third, clothes-wise. We got the cheapest seats available – about $14 (although after intermission we moved to better seats) – but the people sitting in the front row, which cost at least $60, were dressed much more casually than either of us. Jeans of all types were by far the most common article of clothing, and the guy occupying one of the nicest seats was wearing a hoodie and track pants. It obviously wasn’t an issue of being able to afford nicer clothes. Instead, it was more like it had never occurred to the audience to dress up (or sit up straight, or not sleep through the concert, or not read a book during the performance). I enjoyed the music, but it was sort of a weird experience. I felt like I was seeing all these people from China’s new middle class who had money but didn’t really know how to operate within the lifestyle this money could buy them. Then we went back to the Dumpling Restaurant. I love you, Dumpling Restaurant.
Then, the next day, we decided to brave a particularly frigid November afternoon to see the changing of the leaves at Fragrant Hills Park, which is located roughly nowhere.* Fragrant Hills is known for its many hills, which are covered in maple trees that ostensibly change colors beautifully in the fall. Although it seemed like the right time to go and see them, the trees were still mostly green, which surprised me given how late in the year it was. Although the park was huge, filled with pagodas, ponds, and small gardens, it was clear that all roads led to Incense-Burner Peak, on top of a GIANT hill (Wikipedia says it’s 1,827 feet up, but the ache in my hamstrings says it’s twice that high) overlooking the rest of the park and all of Beijing. Unfortunately, the day was both overcast and particularly polluted, but if you stared through the hazy atmosphere you could see the Summer Palace across the way.
Anyway, the Thing To Do was clearly to get to the top of the peak somehow. We were presented with two options:
1. Pay about $9 and take the chairlift to the top.
2. Walk for free.
Noticing all the old people and small children going up and down the steps at the foot of the hill, I figured that it couldn’t be that bad, decided I didn’t want to spend that much money, and set up off the stairs. This was an absolutely horrible decision. Ten minutes in, my legs hurt and I was out of breath, because the path up literally consisted of nothing but steps. Several times, we were fooled into thinking the climb was over by inconvenient crests of the hill. (This picture was taken at one such place just over halfway up.) Just as the light was starting to dim, we finally reached the top, which I celebrated by sitting down. I am actually glad that I climbed up, because it was good for me, and I apologize to the much faster and nimbler Max for whining so much. Nonetheless, I happily paid my $9 to take the chairlift back down, plus an additional fifty cents for hot chocolate. Taking the lift down offered a perfect view of the northwestern part of the city, and as the sky darkened, I could see the lights and roads spread out in front of me, the headlights of the cars flowing through traffic. It was absolutely stunning, although I regret to say that my thighs are not looking as good as I thought they would, given how uncomfortable walking is. Afterward we went for hotpot with a couple of Max’s friends** and then I met up with Dan, Pei Rei, and Dan’s parents, who were visiting from out of town, at, of all places, Pyro,*** where they graciously bought us a pitcher of beer and a pizza. Today was spent working, because when you use up your weekend on a culture/disgruntled exercise binge, you are left with little time for memorizing vocabulary words.

Dumpling Tally: 182

*I thought the Summer Palace was sort of out of the way, but I had no idea. Fragrant Hills is only five or six miles outside of Beijing proper, and there are buses that run there, but it seems weirdly rural and out of the way.

**The colder the weather gets, the better hotpot is. Even the spicy section, which I usually shy away from, tasted delicious.

***I feel like this sentence has too many commas. I know it’s grammatically correct, but it just seems like a lot of commas, is all.

Electioneering

I spent about six hours yesterday, from seven A.M. to 1:30 P.M., watching the election returns in the IES library streamed from the CNN website. IES put on a “party,” which I was reluctant to attend because they’re usually crammed with awkward host families and Language Pledge activities* but since they were offering free coffee I figured I’d stop in for a short while, stock up, and then go somewhere else. However, no host families showed up, and all the Chinese students had class at 8, so it soon became an American, English-speaking enclave. Jackie and Michael were there as well, so we claimed the sofa and kicked back to watch.
From the outset, things looked good for Obama. I had expected him to win ever since McCain chose Palin as a running mate, and the polls leading up to Election Day only bolstered my confidence. The election was by no means a nail-biter, but I got surprisingly into it anyway, cheering at every state Obama picked up. The overwhelming majority of the people in the library with us were also Obama supporters, so it was easy to get swept up in the spirit and the joy of the whole thing.
{I support Obama for a variety of reasons: his support for gay rights and women’s rights, his promise to provide healthcare to all Americans, his willingness to negotiate with leaders of “enemy states,” and the fact that he’s not inches from death, with a chump who thinks Africa is a country (and this was from Fox News) as his second-in-command. Despite McCain’s previous departures from the Republican party line, and Palin’s constant claims that he’s a “maverick” (a big word, coming from someone who thought Africa was a country), he struck me as more of the same, awful administration that I’ve hated for the last eight years. So that’s my rationale.}
When the results finally came in, we all jumped up and cheered, watched his acceptance speech, and then dispersed for various victory lunches. Walking outside, I expected to see the throngs of people taking to the streets that would have been found at any university in America, but life continued as usual; the pirated DVD guy was still peddling his wares outside, the taxi drivers were still leaning on their horns, and the middle-aged men were still taking their Pekingeses out for fresh air and exercise. At least in part due to how its own political system is set up, China is a fairly apathetic country in terms of US politics. Although Obama’s victory earned a couple minutes of airtime on the evening news that night and a front-page mention on this morning’s paper, there wasn’t the kind of jubilance among the Chinese populace that there was in Europe, for instance. To the Chinese people who follow politics (it’s easy not to when you’re the jianbing guy who’s lived under one-party rule all his life) the economy is the most important issue, since the yuan, the Chinese currency, is partially pegged to the dollar. With the US economy in such bad shape, it’s impossible to tell whose economic policies will be better in the long run, so I think the mood in China was sort of unsure (although Zhang Ran told me that younger voters prefer Obama). His election also poses a couple fairly delicate questions to the Chinese Communist Party: why are the American people so happy that their relatively authoritarian government has been overthrown, and how could they elect an ethnic minority to a national office? (It’ll be a long time before you see a Tibetan as a CCP higher-up…)
Anyway, that was pretty much it in terms of the Chinese response, although I caught Zhang Ran on YouTube watching Obama’s acceptance speech because she thought he was handsome. For a country with so much political weirdness going on, so far I’ve found China to be incredibly…apolitical. Nobody seems to care that much, and they all just accept that their lives are the way they are, never wondering if an administrative change would make anything different.

*The next time I see or hear the words “Language Pledge” I will kick the responsible party in the teeth. I am so. Tired. Of. It.

Temple of Heaven Picture Post/Vital Statistics

These are all pictures of the Temple of Heaven, built* during the Ming dynasty at the behest of one Emperor Yongle, who is Max’s favorite for some reason, and used for the emperor to come and pray for future harvests. Since then it’s been restored three times, most recently in 2006. The temple’s most notable building, the round Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, is a very famous Beijing landmark and was, as expected, mobbed with tour groups, but the surrounding park was very peaceful, and we had a fun time wandering around and getting about a bajillion free tea refills at the coffee shop in the park. Afterward we went to the dumpling restaurant I’ve mentioned before, upping the Dumpling Tally admirably.
It has come to my attention that now people are reading this who have not met me. Hello, you! Since this post is not sufficiently meaty, I will provide you with a quick rundown of my fascinating** life and times: I was born in Seattle and still call it home, as all my relatives live up there. At age five I was forcibly located to a small town in Northern California. Although I’ve spent the majority of my life there, I don’t think of it as the place I’m from; it’s more of a holding tank, although it was a nice enough place to grow up. Now I go to college in Chicagoland. How I feel about this depends on the time of year – if you ask me in October through April I’ll probably roll my eyes and say something about how I could have done no work in high school and gotten into the University of Hawaii, but ask during the summertime and you will hear me gush effervescently about it until I’m blue in the face. The real truth is that the winters suck beyond what the English language can convey, but the first two weeks of June make up for every pile of snow you accidentally step in several times over. I like my actual university a whole bunch, though. I am co-president of College Feminists with my excellent friend Arianne, who is both the brains and the beauty of the operation (I am probably the muscle, whatever that means) and on Model Congress team, which I am quite good at due to having done it for four years in high school. I work part-time at a mom-and-pop shoe store, which I love. I really hope they hire me back when I return; I was great at selling shoes, but with the economy the way it is I have no idea if they’ll need me back there. In my spare time, which I have a surprising amount of given that I’ve taken course overload for the past year while working 20 to 25 hours a week, I knit (I have been doing this for ten years and am really good at it), read, eat food, and attend fifteen-person iPod ragers, where I dance until the wee hours of the morning. I also go out to coffee a lot, which is weird considering that before coming to China I hated coffee. I’m of Norwegian descent and am immensely proud of this (in fact, this piece ran in the NYT recently and made me homesick almost to the point of tears, but this is where I’m from and where I’m going back to someday). In an ideal, pipe-dream world, I would have gone to culinary school instead of college and started a really nice, authentic Chinese, prix-fixe Michelin-star type of restaurant on the shore of Puget Sound. I do not consider myself particularly materialistic, but have an inexplicable passion for adidas sneakers. I drive a 1992 Volvo 240 sedan (or at least I do when my little brother isn’t busy absconding with it and filling the CD case up with his CDs). I am bad at every sport ever invented, with the possible exception of skiing. Before coming to China, I ran for exercise, not because it was good for me but because all the runners I knew had really nice legs. I love corduroy and the song “The Seed” by the Roots. I hate limp handshakes, insincerity, cauliflower, being cold, and whoever decided to cancel The OC. My favorite food is Tibetan food, I think Adam Brody is the most gorgeous human being ever to walk the earth, and I am currently trying to nominate Girl Talk for a Nobel prize. That’s pretty much it.

Dumpling Tally: 167

*Fun Temple of Heaven fact: the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is built without cement or nails, which is impressive given that it’s hella tall (scientific term).

**HA

Yakity Yak, Delicious Snack

This past week hasn’t been that interesting.* Since returning from Pingyao my life has been filled with the usual process of learning characters, retaining them long enough to get about a 97% on the next day’s quiz, and then forgetting them to make room for the next day’s 60 characters. However, some notable things have happened, including – yay! – new and exciting developments in the world of food.
On Tuesday night I went out with Max intending to go to some documentary screening he’d found out about. However, when we got there we were informed that it’d be over $20 to watch, as we were not members of the British expatriate club that was holding the screening. The room was filled with things like tapas, wine, and black-clad thirtysomethings, and I felt a little out of my element, so I suggested dinner instead.
The screening was by the Silk Market (I resisted) so I pulled out my guidebook to check and see what was in the area. It was a cold night out and I wanted something hearty, and when I discovered a Tibetan place was on the list I almost immediately started walking.
Unlike the café-style place I’d been before with Pei Rei, this restaurant, Makye Ame, was not messing around. Their menu was huge and the entire place was festooned with Tibetan masks, textiles, and the like (except the bar, which had Yellowstone-style lanterns with pine trees and moose hanging over it). I perused the menu carefully, as this was my first real foray into Tibetan food, and we selected yak meat dumplings, beef stew, and vegetable curry. I also got butter tea, a traditional Tibetan drink, to wash it down. As I found out when this beverage arrived, the Tibetans take great liberties with the word “tea” – I might as well have been drinking melted butter, and I could feel my arteries clogging with every sip. However, it was just light enough to warm me up sufficiently.
When the food got to our table, I knew I was in way over my head. Any one of the three things we’d ordered would have been enough to send us home happy and full. I pride myself on having an iron stomach, but this was way too much food. It was delicious, though – as Max said, “If I had food like this, I’d want independence too.”
While we were eating, the house band set up and started playing a mix of Tibetan and Chinese songs, while the seating hostess, who was without a doubt the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen, gave a brief introduction in Chinese, English, and Tibetan. The band went roving around from table to table singing and dancing, and while I usually don’t like being directly serenaded while I’m eating, the music was so good that my chopsticks never left my placemat the whole time, and I only resumed once the band started its set on stage. There was a lot of variance in the musical selections; most of the Tibetan songs were upbeat and hearty and probably meant to be sung after several beers. (I caught the words for “beer” and “drinking” several times in the introductions.) However, Hottie the Hostess took the stage for a Chinese song about halfway through, backed by the Tibetan instruments. It was incredibly, heartbreakingly beautiful. Max listened to the lyrics and told me it was about writing a letter to someone you love, but for once I didn’t try and understand the Chinese,** and chose just to sit back and let this amazing music and this warm restaurant and this amazingly delicious food envelop me. I left in a ridiculously good mood. Whenever Beijing starts getting on my nerves (it’s been the air pollution lately) I always seem to find places like this that make me fall in love again. If you’re ever in town, I highly recommend Makye Ame Tibetan restaurant, a couple blocks northwest of the Silk Market. Be warned: one dish feeds two people.
I woke up on Wednesday with an awful cold and the worst episode yet of a nagging sore throat that had been bothering me for a couple weeks. At first I blamed this on Beijing’s horrible air, but while I’m sure that was a contributing factor, I think I also just got something that was going around. By the end of the day, I was sniffling constantly and going through Kleenex like Elizabeth Taylor through husbands.*** After consulting with various people, I decided I would go to the hospital**** on Saturday, the first day I had time (the hospital that IES contracts with, which provides Westerners with English-speaking doctors and incredibly high standards of care, is on the other side of town, so unless you want to spend $15 on cab fare it’s a 90-minute bus voyage each way). In the meantime, though, I was miserable and unable to fall asleep. After asking all the Anglophones and the RA on my floor if they had any decongestant/Robitussin/Nyquil/morphine and getting a resounding “no, but I have Advil” each time, I decided, in a last-ditch effort to get some sleep, to ask Zhang Ran. She came through admirably with nine pills (three each of orange, yellow, and green) and something I was supposed to mix into my coffee in the morning. All of these were to be taken three times a day, she told me sternly, and then warned me that Chinese medicine worked gradually.
I think she and I have a really different definition of “gradually.” Within ten minutes I was feeling markedly better and was finally able to get to bed. By Thursday night, I was in almost complete remission, although it’d be hard not to get better when you’ve taken 35 pills in 24 hours. I would also like to note here that Zhang Ran has severe Mom Tendencies; when I got back from class on Thursday there was a Post-It on my computer reminding me to take all my pills. Cutest thing ever. I also bought all four seasons of The OC on DVD for a whopping $3 on Thursday, and now have noticeably less free time.
Then last night was Halloween. My costume never really happened – since Halloween isn’t widely celebrated in China, even among young people, there was nowhere to get anything, and none of the clothes I had really lent themselves to dressing up as something. (I ended up telling people I was a pink dress.) I was grumbling about this when I was invited by Dan, whose parents were in town, to go out for dinner. I agreed immediately and only found out later that dinner would be Peking Duck.
Surprisingly, I hadn’t had Peking Duck since arriving in China, since it requires a decent-sized group of people and is kind of expensive. The restaurant we went to was lovely and had a large glass window in the lobby where you could watch the ducks being prepared. The setup of the kitchen was interesting: instead of the Western style, where you have someone responsible for the sauces, the pastries, etc., at this restaurant each member of the small battalion of chefs (pictured) was responsible for one duck, from roasting to cleaning to carving it in front of your table.
The duck was delicious. Peking Duck is ideally mostly skin, and the skin was delicious. Not at all stringy or greasy, it was crisp, fatty, and crunchy, with a sweet syrupy taste to it, and it was especially good dipped in the raw sugar the waitress gave us. The meat was great too, neither dry nor oily. We all ate away happily, although I think Dan’s parents got sort of freaked out when they found out that I’d eaten dog.
After that we ran back home and headed for the IES “party,” which I did not plan to attend for a long time because any party with sixty-year-old Chinese host parents and innumerable fun Language Pledge activities is no kind of party at all. I did, however, want to see the costume contest and was pleasantly surprised at how many of my peers had come through, especially the four Cool Runnings guys (“Jamaica” jackets were $8 each at the Silk Market) who snaked through the entire party in perfect unison the whole time. Other standouts included a pair of WASPs clad in sweater vests with nametags reading “Hunter” and “Tucker” who, when greeted, would say things like “I don’t remember you from Exeter!” and then harrumph, Cody and Pei Rei as “a Mac” and “a PC” (it wouldn’t have been as good if Pei Rei didn’t look exactly like the Mac guy), and Michael, who had memorized the entire “why so serious?” speech as the Joker.
After the party got out, my strict I’ll-only-go-out-if-there’s-dancing policy led me to a dance party at 798, the modern art district. A couple of the expat magazines had built this event up as one of the parties to go to, so I thought it’d be filled with beautiful older people, but it was pretty much all foreign students. The music was repetitive, but the dancing was fun, and I stayed quite late.
Today I have resolved to finally go to the Temple of Heaven. Nothing will stop me.

*Then why am I writing this? What a crappy opening line.

**I eavesdrop on people’s Mandarin conversations all the time. It’s not spying if it’s homework!

***This is me throwing a bone to the people over 25 who read this. I know it can’t possibly make up for my constant ramblings about Girl Talk, but it’s a start. It’s time to begin the healing process, you guys.

****“Going to the hospital” is not a super-serious thing in China like it is in the US. One day, my tutor told me she’d have to cancel our daily hour of conversation because she was taking her roommate to the hospital. I walked in the next day and asked what had happened, expecting gory tales of broken bones, severed arteries, or projectile vomiting. It turns out the roommate had…a nosebleed.