I can't believe I forgot this!

Final Dumpling Tally: 326

...Coming Home

I am currently in the midst of my seventh hour back in Sebastopol. I went to my favorite ice cream store with a friend this afternoon, therefore exhausting all of the town's fun activities in one bowl of calorie-laden goodness.
I won't be writing in here very much anymore, if at all, since the point of this was to keep my family and friends informed of my misadventures and exploits. If you're still interested in knowing what's going on over in Beijing, I recommend that you read Max's blog, since he'll be there until February.
Goodbye, all.

Going Away...

Study abroad brochures are filled with the smiling faces of clean-cut, acne-less students testifying that studying abroad “changed them forever.” I don’t think Beijing changed me forever. My political, philosophical, and religious views have remained more or less the same since I got here. I have not altered my career aspirations or other life plans as a result of what I have done here. I am pretty much the same Emily I was when I left, albeit with a taste for fine gin.
What studying abroad did do for me, though, was show me who this Emily really was. When you are entirely on your own in a foreign country, you have the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want – hell, I don’t even have to answer to the Constitution anymore! – and the more freedom you have, the more you test that freedom, and that’s how you know what you’re made of.
I liked some of the things I found and disliked others. I was proud that I had the tenacity to finish a grueling bike ride that I never thought I could have completed, and the motivation to finish an academic program I expected to burn me out. I learned about my relationships with people, and what was important in them.
I also became noticeably more materialistic on my trip here, in part due to how cheap things are and in part due to my exposure to more blatant new luxury than can probably be found anywhere else in the world (thanks, Shanghai). This isn’t something I’m proud of, and the lifestyle I live here (a night out, with dinner, a cab ride back, and a couple drinks will set me back maybe $15) will not be sustainable in the US, so I’ll have to wean myself off that one by default, or possibly marry a Rockefeller. And when I look back on the number of school nights I went dancing, or eating, or exploring…oh dear. (However, let the record show that I kept my Chinese grade at a solid A the whole time, and if I hadn’t I would have changed my modus operandi.) I guess I have a little too much of the hedonist in me; Beijing is a great place to be as a college student, and I found it a little too hard to eschew fun for homework.
I will be very happy to get back. I miss my family: my loving mom, my funny, smart-ass dad, my amazing and talented baby brother, who probably will have found out if he was accepted into Brown by the time this goes out, and my favorite puppy, Edison, to say nothing of the extended family I’ll see for the holidays. I miss my friends. I miss Northwestern. I miss learning things that aren’t Chinese. I miss clean air.
But I know that once I step off that plane into the San Francisco airport, the first thing I want won’t really be Starbucks or Chipotle. It’ll be a dumpling.

Q: What's the easiest way to deal with political dissidents?

A: Put them in mental institutions! The part that really creeps me out is at the end, when the hospital employee who initially talked to the press was called away for a mysterious meeting. The Chinese government will never cease to disturb me, but I am impressed that the Chinese press has allowed this to be published and pleased that it's attracting the outrage from the Chinese people that it deserves.

List Post 4 - The Finer Things in China

After this afternoon, I’ll only have two more days in Beijing before heading home. I’ve enjoyed it here, but I’ll be really happy to head back and sink my teeth into some Chipotle. I finished my Chinese final today, which was an awful slog through endless squiggly lines that apparently represent words. Inspired and renewed by my completion of all of IES’ silly requirements, your lists today will be joyful ones, in celebration of the country that has graciously hosted me for the past three and a half months.

THE GOOD LIFE
Top Five Things I’ll Miss Back in the US
5. Yogurt. American yogurt is really gross-tasting and weird. Chinese yogurt, however filled with industrial chemicals it may be, is delicious. It comes in great flavors like “fig and golden raisin,” “kiwi and aloe,” and my favorite, “raspberry and black tea.” It also comes in pints.
4. The libations. Once I get back to the States, I only have about six months until I can drink legally, but I’ll miss going out to bars with my friends during that time. Beijing has a ton of great bars (see the entry a couple days prior) and when I’m back in Sebastopol watching South Park at night, I’m sure I’ll think back fondly to the Pimm’s Cups I drank at Q Bar into the wee hours of the morning.
3. The good life. Even on my relatively modest spring/summer job savings, I managed to live very well in Beijing; I ate out at restaurants (albeit super cheap ones) for all my meals, took cab rides across town regularly, did a ton of shopping, and went out to bars a lot, and I still have almost half my checking account left. Other than gas, I think getting back will be a bit of a sticker shock for me.
2. The food. See previous entry; I may well cry during my last supper at the Dumpling Restaurant.
1. The culture. Beijing is very old (surprise!) and is imbued with a kind of ancient history that doesn’t exist in the US. Even just walking around, you’ll happen on buildings that are older than my entire home country. Although Beijing seems to be doing its best to get rid of this culture at times, it’s still remarkably integrated into the city, and it’s been very interesting to live in a city where girls my age walk past 400-year-old buildings talking on mobile phones that cost more than my car and old men playing dominoes accompanied by their pet birds. As every crappy, opening-line-starved journalist covering Beijing has written, this is indeed a city of contrasts.

Top Five China Experiences
5. Climbing the Great Wall. It’s SO OLD, and going to such an undeveloped section of it really drove this home. In addition, I’m pretty sure I climbed it on the last sunny day in Beijing, so the weather and the view were stunning.
4. Living the high life in Shanghai. All I did was eat dumplings, go to nice restaurants and bars, and shop. It was super relaxing, and a sorely needed rest between midterms and finals.
3. Learning to bargain at the Silk and Zoo Markets. Although many people would justifiably find this annoying, I think it’s super fun, and haggling is such a key part of shopping in China that I feel it deserves a place on here.
2. Yunnan Trip! Between the Aini Village homestay, the delicious food, and the Mekong River trip resulting in the ultimate destruction of the insidious Umbrella Lady, Yunnan Trip was one of those things I didn’t really appreciate until I got back from it, and also until the weather in Beijing dipped below freezing.
1. Exploring. Many of my favorite places in Beijing were found randomly on foot – Nanluogu Hutong, the Niujie Mosque, even the dog restaurant. My habit of getting off at random subway stops and looking around ended with Beijing’s good weather, but it was infinitely rewarding and fun, and the best way to get to know a city.

Top Five (non-restaurant) Places in Beijing
5. The Summer Palace. The Chinese version of Versailles, this was built in the 1800s as pleasure quarters for the imperial family, and is remarkably well-preserved (I guess it’s not technically that old, though). It sits beautifully on a lake, and the day I went was sunny and clear, so it was about as idyllic as you can get.
4. Yonghegong. I’ve been here a couple times, and I always leave feeling a little more peaceful than when I came (although with me there’s nowhere to go but up). It’s also an interesting look at how Tibetan religion functions within “mainstream” China.
3. Propaganda. I love the dancing. I love, love, love it, and Propaganda has the best of it, and I have nothing but fond feelings for the nights I spent there dancing in front of the DJ tables. Also noteworthy is the middle-aged "sweater man," who frequents Propaganda despite literally everyone else there being half his age. He looks kind of like a fatter, mulletier version of Tobias Funke. You will know him when you see him, from his sweater. The sad thing is, he’s always dancing with college-aged girls, and I am just…me.
2. Jingshan Park. I went here on my second day in town and haven’t been back since, and now it’s too cold to go again. This park, though, has lovely temples, beautiful gardens, and a killer view over the Forbidden City, and it’s filled with traditional Chinese people doing traditional Chinese things.
1. Nanluogu Hutong. Yes, it’s gentrified and for hipsters. But with bars, restaurants, cozy coffee shops, and boutiques this good, it won a place in my heart nonetheless, and it makes for a beautiful stroll on an uncrowded summer weekday afternoon. I do regret to inform my readership that the pudding place I loved so dearly on this street has gone out of business. I will never forgive the responsible parties.

I’ll probably write a vaguely introspective post about my time here before I leave, but other than that, you won’t be hearing from me until I’m back in the USSA. I also wish to direct you to a superb one-act play written by Max, based on a true story. I believe it is at least of Arthur Miller quality, and am currently trying to get Zooey Deschanel to play myself in the off-Broadway debut.

List Post 3 - You Probably Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Hungry Either

My Chinese final is tomorrow. Heavens to Betsy, I need a study break, and what better study break than thinking about…

FOOD
Top Five Best Restaurants
5. The 24-hour porridge place in Wudaokou, which actually has branches all over town. The food is great, but what edges it into the top five is the hilarious English menu. All the porridges’ health benefits are listed (“protecting of moisture”?) as are the hilariously flowery translations of some of the dishes, my favorite of which is “bean curd fried with the American law.”
4. “Chengdu Xiaochi”. About 40% of restaurants in Beijing are named this, and they all serve the same standards – red-cooked eggplant, kung pao chicken, fish-flavored pork, fried noodles – for about $1 a plate. They’re delicious, cheap, and have impossibly low hygiene standards, and are therefore meant for college students.
3. Three Guizhou Men. Lonely Planet told me about this place, which sounded quite nice, and I had some friends of my parents take me to dinner there when they were in town. It’s a really classy place but ends up only costing $10 or so a plate. Guizhou (a province in the southwest) has great food, really spicy and sour.
2. Makye Ame. This Tibetan place charges you a lot of money but gets you a lot of food. Tibetan food is so delicious and hearty (it’s more like Indian food than Chinese food) and wonderfully spiced. The inside is one of the most comfortable settings I’ve ever seen (if you get a table by the window, you can look over the quiet lane below) and they have killer live music.
1. The Dumpling Restaurant. I have no idea what its name was, but at this point I could find it in my sleep. I do not care about its weird interior décor (as Max said, “If there was a Dumpling University, these would be the dorm notice boards”), lack of toilet (you have to go next door, and it’s gross) and waitresses who have very skewed conceptions of how many dumplings are enough. I only care about their dumplings – beautiful, endlessly creative in the fillings, cheap, hot, and delicious. The variety is such that I doubt I could ever get tired of eating here, not that I haven’t tried. Probably my favorite restaurant in the entire world, ever.

Top Five Dishes To Order At Said Restaurants
5. Chao Hefen (fried wide rice noodles). Chewy, oily, meaty, undergraduate goodness.
4. Tibetan curry. Warming, filling, and good for the soul, it differs from Indian curry in that its flavor is more simple and less creamy, but equally delicious. Bonus points if it contains yak.
3. Pomelo salad. Served at the Dumpling Restaurant, this salad has chunks of fresh pomelo served on a bed of lettuce, accompanied only by the occasional spring of cilantro and the sweet-spicy chili dressing that comes with it. Always makes me nostalgic for Yunnan.*
2. The shrimp jiaozi at the Dumpling Restaurant. They come wrapped in little orange wrappers, and when you bite into them, they have the most succulent, juicy whole shrimp inside. My mouth literally just watered writing that sentence.
1. The crispy rice jiaozi at the Dumpling Restaurant. To nobody’s surprise, the Dumpling Restaurant closes out the top three. One of my complaints about Chinese food is that it doesn’t have enough crunch, but these veggie dumplings are crispy and delicious, and they’re purple!

Top Five Street Foods
5. Taiwan Handwork Cake. Called “Taiwan Handwork Crack” by its devotees, these consist of scrambled eggs, lettuce, chili sauce, and duck meat in a fluffy, light wrap. They’re delicious and addictive and the perfect hand-sized, portable food.
4. Jiaozi. Excluding the ones at the Dumpling Restaurant, these are usually mono-flavor and mono-texture, which hurt them in the standings. However, they are dumplings, which are delicious by default.
3. Candy Apple Skewers. These are skewers of six or seven golf ball-sized sour apples dipped in sugar syrup and allowed to harden. The apples are super sour and pretty soft by the time you eat them, and the whole combo tastes AMAZING.
2. Baozi. They also suffer from the one-flavor problem, but the steamed, soft bread and juicy, oily meat filling more than compensate.
1. Jianbings. In a Dewey-Defeats-Truman style upset, they overtake baozi for the lead. Oily yet crispy, salty yet refreshing (thanks to the cilantro and green onions), jianbings are perhaps the ultimate street food. They are equally welcome in my tummy for breakfast, a mid-afternoon repast, or a post-bar snack. And they’re fifty cents. And I love, love, love them.

*Every time I eat it, I say something along the lines of “In Yunnan, we’d eat like five of these because they just grew wild on the trees, and when we got full we’d throw them at each other!” I’m sure this is annoying to the people I eat with, but I can’t help it. I feel like that “this one time at band camp” girl in American Pie.

List Post 2 - You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

Inspired by a particularly obnoxious bus commute today (crowded, slow, had to wait forever for the bus, which is probably why it was so crowded in the first place), today you get the…

IRRITATED LISTS
Top Five Worst Places to be in Beijing in a Motor Vehicle
5. The Sitongqiaodong bus intersection. Thanks to a truly nonsensical understanding of when left turns should be allowed, it takes you forever to get anywhere if you don’t make the light here. This is where I waited in traffic for seven minutes (at 3 pm, no less) one time for a single light cycle. Woe betide you if you should have to experience this at rush hour.
4. Zhongguancun Street. This is Beijing’s high-tech corridor, and it intersects with about every bus route in the city ever, meaning that someone’s always pulling in front of you and then stopping for some reason. The awful part about it here is that you can’t blame the bad traffic or the lights for your problems. You can only wait. And wait. And wait. And move forward five feet every ninety seconds or so. People often say, when in bad traffic, that “it would be quicker to walk”. On Zhongguancun, it’s actually true.
3. The Second Ring Road, during evening rush hour. I only did this once. This is why the line 2 subway (which runs directly under the Second Ring Road) exists. TAKE IT.
2. Anywhere, really. The traffic here just sucks unequivocally.
1. The intersection of Chengfu Lu and Caidian Lu. Party people will recognize this as the Wudaokou intersection, with two KFCs, the subway stop, and the inebriatastic trifecta that is Lush, Pyro, and Propaganda. It is also, without a doubt, the worst place to be in a cab ever. This is because at all hours, it is mobbed with pedestrians* who have no regard for traffic lights and will walk in giant, clumpy streams whenever they feel like it. As a result, drivers here are always leaning on their horns and driving forward slowly but insistently in hopes that people will get out of the way, but nobody ever does. It kind of has to be seen to be believed, but it is truly ridiculous.

Top Five Generally Most Annoying Things about Beijing
5. The traffic. I usually travel by subway, which gets rid of this, but taking buses for any reasonable distance always ends in pain. I only use cabs late at night when the subway has stopped running, but on the few occasions I’ve used them during the daylight, they’re not much better.
4. The subway, sometimes. It’s annoying because there’s no stop within walking distance of my school, and lines 1 and 2 are slow and (in the case of line 1) super-crowded. Lines 5 and 10, however, are quite pleasant and expeditious. Also worthy of mention is the Xizhimen subway station, which has the worst, longest transfer ever.
3. My internet is so slow. Make Facebook work, please, someone.
2. The pollution. It is truly, truly awful. For instance, today I could not see the sun! I also couldn’t yesterday! If Beijing wanted to shut down the nearby factories and half the number of cars on the road (like they did during the Olympics) I would not be opposed; that got the pollution down to Los Angeles levels. What’s more, Cody (who has been to Beijing twice before) tells me that the pollution is usually much worse than this, because the effects of the Olympic reforms are still lingering. I cannot even imagine. I have the worst cough because of this.
1. The crowding. It’s on the roads, the subways, the buses…everywhere. Getting onto a subway at the transfer stations is a contact sport, pure and simple; you put your elbows in front of you and shove, hard, because if you don’t you’ll be swept away by the tide of people trying to get out. That is, if they even can – a couple times I’ve been forced to get off the subway a stop after where I wanted to and double back because the crowds were such that I could not get out of the car. Every time I get on a subway or bus, I inevitably think about the third-world transit fires and crashes that claim the lives of everyone on the horribly overcrowded bus or car. Then I think about how many people are on the vehicle in which I am currently traveling. This is never a favorable comparison.
The honorable mention here is the staring. Thankfully, this is very uncommon in Beijing, because most people see foreigners semi-frequently or at least recognize that their city is large and important enough to play host to them. However, outside of Beijing and Shanghai, the staring – the constant, overt staring at anyone who looks foreign, without apology or an attempt to hide it – is endemic and incredibly uncomfortable. In America, there are very, very few places (outside of certain golf courses in the Atlanta suburbs) where a person of a minority race would attract any specific attention whatsoever, and, I would venture to say, nowhere where they would meet with the scrutiny my classmates and I did. This, much more than the squat toilets, run-down houses, or lack of English spoken, is what made rural China seem “uncivilized” to me, and I don’t think it can be said that China is a country that is welcoming to the outside world until this is fixed. I initially got sort of a kick out of responding to this in various ways** but eventually it just became exhausting.

Top Five Things I am Most Anxious to Do Back in the US
This is after I spend time with my family and friends, of course.
5. Eat a steak. I want that steak very rare. I want it as rare as they can possibly cook it without having the Health Department get all up in their grill. I want that cow to hurt when they cut into it. I want it carpaccio. Mm, steak. I want it with a nice Pinot Noir, too.
4. Hug my dog, who is about three times bigger than all the other dogs in Beijing put together.
3. Be able to sit down on a subway or a bus.
2. Drive! I miss driving, and it will be even nicer to drive now that gas is so cheap ($1.90 a gallon, as opposed to $4.50 when I left).
1. Eat Mexican food. I’m not talking about “nachos” or “burritos” here, which Beijing does passably. I’m talking about chicken mole, or ceviche, or tortilla soup, or any of the other delicious Mexican foods originating in actual Mexico.

Top Five Reasons Why Actual College is Much, Much Better than IES
5. Actual College has most of the people who read this blog in it, whereas IES does not.
4. The breadth of courses in Actual College is much broader. I appreciate that this is indeed a language program, but the area studies classes seemed like an afterthought much of the time, which is too bad because some of them (my history class, for example) were really interesting.
3. In Actual College, you can miss class when you get sick. At IES, you had to go to the IES-approved hospital, conveniently located on the other side of town, wait in their waiting room, and get a note from a doctor stating that your ailment was sufficient to allow you to miss class that day. This was obnoxious because it meant you had to put up with an hour-and-a-half bus ride each way or an exorbitant (for Beijing) taxi fee. If we have food poisoning, we do not need a doctor to tell us this; instead, we need a day of bed rest and maybe some porridge from the nearest porridge place. Also, if we missed even one class, our home school got a Disciplinary Letter sent to them. I have no idea how seriously this policy was taken because I never had the nerve to test it, but there is something to be said for skipping class on a beautiful Evanston morning to get pancakes every once in a blue moon, and if you’re sick, you shouldn’t be forced to go to class because you’re poor and you don’t want to have to stand up on a crowded bus that probably passes through three of the Top Five Worst Places to be in Beijing in a Motor Vehicle.
2. Actual College has no curfew. Does IES know how many nights it has ruined by forcing us to be home by midnight on weekends? Also, the door is locked by chaining the door handles on the inside, meaning you can’t get out of the building past curfew either. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory incident is apparently unknown over in these parts.
1. Actual College has no language pledge. Teachers and roving IES staff members roam the halls, and when they hear English being spoken, they’ll admonish you with a sharp “Shuo zhongwen!” (“Speak Chinese!") and scuttle off to take points off your grade. This policy is reasonable up to a point, but most of us don’t know enough Chinese to hold a real conversation, so we end up covertly gossiping behind the fridge or in the bathrooms. The worst incident I saw of this was when my friend’s boyfriend of three years dumped her because he couldn’t handle the stress of her being in China for four months (what a moron, seriously). She tearfully recounted this to a small, concerned group during break, and a passing teacher overheard and told her (in Chinese), “I’m sorry your boyfriend left you, but you need to speak Chinese.” Four pairs of utterly mutinous eyes (mine included) turned upon the teacher, who apologized after a few seconds and backed off.
It is worth nothing, though, that Actual College is not in China, and IES is, which makes up for pretty much everything.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I don’t like Beijing, or China, or that I wish I hadn’t come. I like it here very much, but being away from the US for so long has made me realized how much I love and miss America, for all its weirdness. Tomorrow’s lists will be better, because they will be about FOOD!

*Confession time: I am usually one of these people, because I recognize that it is infinitely easier to cross Caidian Lu on foot than attempt it in cab or on a bus.

**Most effective methods: grabbing a white friend, pointing, and saying (in Chinese), “Oh my god, Chinese people,” taking pictures of people who tried to take pictures of us, attempting to charge money for the “wonderful souvenir foreigner pictures” that people tried to take of us, looking straight at people and asking why they were staring at us, and telling people to not stare at us because this was a city/train station/temple/restaurant, not a zoo.

List Post 1

I just finished my history final! I think it went pretty well and am very happy it’s over. The only thing I have left now is my Chinese final on Tuesday, which promises to be a beastly leviathan of an examination, but after which point I get to spend my last two days in Beijing free and unburdened by sentence structures, characters, or the Language Pledge. Other than that, there’s not much to report, other than that Zhang Ran and I made jiaozi last night and they were delicious.
As I only have about a week left here, and I feel like I’ve pretty much done everything I’m going to do at this point, I am going to start the part of the show where I make lists of things. These will be of no practical interest to anyone except possibly Arianne, but I am a type-A person at heart and enjoy inflicting my opinions on others. I need to recover from the history final, so we’ll start with…

NIGHTLIFE
Top Five Best Bars
5. Bar Blu
Sort of expensive, but the drinks are good, the music is good, the dancing is good if you come on a good night, and once I was sitting on their heated rooftop terrace and they put 300 on for us to watch. Stay classy, Bar Blu. (I’m Ron Burgundy?)
4. Lush
The student mainstay in Wudaokou, Lush not only has good hamburgers but a great, albeit early, happy hour. Their open mics are also a bundle of fun. Lush is what I’d always do before Propaganda…good times, but it gets marked down for being almost exclusively foreign students.
3. Drum and Bell Bar
I only went here once, but it was great. The rooftop terrace (I am a sucker for rooftop terraces) is beautifully positioned in a thicket of trees, the branches of which will brush you in the face if you’re kind of tall, and you have a great view of the Drum and Bell Towers, built during the Ming dynasty. Beijing’s best-kept secret, although I did find it in Lonely Planet.
2. Bookworm
I expounded on this place in great detail in the last entry, but it rules. It is also the only bar I’ve ever studied at.
1. Q Bar
Q Bar made me not hate Sanlitun anymore. It’s out of the way, has a rooftop terrace, expensive but tasty drinks, and gin & tonics with entire slices of cucumber in them. Mmm. It’s also not packed with obnoxious drunk college students, who are probably driven away by the prices. Good riddance, I say.

Top Five Best Places To Go After the Bars
5. Bar Blu
The dance floor counts as a club. I mostly just go here for dance purposes anyway, because it’s free.
4. The 24-Hour Porridge Place in Wudaokou
As can be expected, this restaurant serves delicious, hot rice porridge at all hours. It’s great.
3. Club China Doll
The best place to dance in Sanlitun, hands-down. No cover, but still stays classy, and I’ve seen a couple good DJs there, mostly playing electronic and hip-hop.
2. MAO Livehouse
This place has killer bands (Hedgehog, Regurgitator, Jens Lekman), good space, and interesting people. It’s sort of the Fillmore (or the Metro, for those of you in central time) of Beijing, where every respected alternative musician comes when they’re in town.
1. Propaganda
My heart overflows with love for Propaganda. There’s no cover, the music is awesomely bad, and it’s always SO MUCH FUN. When I die, I want to be cremated so that my ashes can be thrown over the crowd here at 2 a.m. on a Friday night. Propaganda is like rager grad school. I may never love again.

There will be more lists every day. Keep your eyes peeled.

Dumpling Tally: 293

No pictures for this one.

I imagine Beijing as being one of those cities that looks beautiful in the winter only in ads put out by the tourism board after a careful grooming. Sure, the Summer Palace looks great lightly dusted with snow on those posters you watch while you’re waiting for the subway, but I can’t imagine you’d get the same view if you actually went there. If I noticed it snowing, put my warm clothes on, grabbed my camera, and went outside, the snow would already be poisoned gray from car exhaust and trampled by hordes of Chinese people who had the same idea I did by the time I got there. Also, the traffic would be even worse, if possible.
Fortunately, it hasn’t snowed yet here, and I doubt it will before I leave; the temperature has hovered in the eminently livable forties in the past few days, and if there are clouds to be seen, they’re obscured as usual by the Beijing “haze.” In a country with only two legal Christian churches (a Catholic one and an all-encompassing Protestant one), it’s hard to get into the Christmas* spirit, which as far as I am concerned is the only redeeming part of a season that quite frankly ought to be hibernated through. The little festive touches I’ve noticed are all the worse because they exist in malls catering to expatriates and are there for no other reason than to promote sales. China really has no Christmas-for-the-sake-of-Christmas, where the city government hangs snowflakes from the streetlights, people string garlands up in their windows, and charity workers in Santa hats freeze, huddled by the doors of department stores waiting for the occasional waft of warm air, asking you to give a little to those less fortunate.**
The commercialism ran particularly rampant in Shanghai, which has a much larger Western expatriate population than Beijing. Each and every mall with Western stores, and even some of the Chineseier ones, had the giant fake snowmen inside and lights on the outside, bathing passersby in multicolored lights, almost daring them not to have a festive holiday season, dammit. Here in Beijing, the comparatively few bastions of Westernization have finally followed suit. The Starbucks outlets now located all around town have their special holiday lattes for sale, the pedestrianized shopping area on Wangfujing seems to have caught Shanghai’s craze for light-up nutcrackers, and the places where the Salvation Army volunteers would stand in the US are instead populated by undoubtedly frigid but bravely smiling Chinese people passing out flyers advertising various sales going on in Sanlitun Village that day. Even in America, where bemoaning the holidays’ tendency toward commoditization is as much a tradition as the holidays themselves, things are not this bad. Beijing knows how Christmas is, but it doesn’t yet know what it is.
At least, I thought they didn’t, and that I’d have to settle for frequent peppermint mochas to supply my recommended daily minimum of Festive. So I was extremely pleasantly surprised when I dropped in at the Bookworm Café in Sanlitun last night.
The Sanlitun bar scene is a weird, weird place. The city’s first real bar area (before SARS drove the wealthy into Houhai and the students into Wudaokou), Sanlitun’s main drag is bordered for three or four blocks solid on one side by completely identical bars with completely identical (high) prices touted by completely identical bartenders exhorting you to “come have a looka!” (The other side is the aforementioned Sanlitun Village, an admittedly excellent shopping center with the WORLD’S BIGGEST ADIDAS STORE, an Apple store, Uniqlo, American Apparel, and a bunch of other neat stuff.) If you head to the other side of the Sanlitun Village, parallel to actual Sanlitun Street, you get the sketchy*** cheap bar street, with the places that will sell you mixed drinks for less than $1.50, play filthy hip-hop songs, and exist only so people can pre-game before they head off to China Doll or the clubs by Workers’ Stadium. For a while, I thought this was what Sanlitun was, and therefore I hated it.
Then I discovered the part of Sanlitun Street south of the main intersection, which is where all the magic happens. Although the aforementioned cheap, creepy bars are still present in small numbers, you’ve also got places like Rickshaw, which hosted a election-return party with burgers for all, Q Bar, a classy place with a stunning rooftop view which makes the best gin & tonics I’ve ever had, and Beer Mania, which, despite the name, is a quiet and jovial place that has microbrews from over thirty countries on tap.
The Bookworm Café is sort of a bar. It’s also sort of a coffeehouse, lending library, and restaurant (they have this awesome sandwich called the Machiavelli). It’s run by Anglophones for Anglophones, and for a while I held that against it and insisted that since it was not Real China, it would get nothing out of me.
And then it started to get cold, and I just wanted a hot cocoa. Not one of the weird Chinese ones that tastes like water and has weird chunks of jello in it, but a normal, creamy hot cocoa, maybe with some vanilla, cream, and cinnamon in it if I was really lucky. From that day on, I was hooked. The interior is incredibly cozy and softly lit, paneled with glass on all sides of the main room, while two smaller rooms shoot off on either side of it. The chairs and couches are easy to sink into and their colors match. They play downtempo alternative music. The toilets are Western-style and come equipped with toilet paper. And each spare inch of wall space in each room is crammed with bookshelves, each groaning with books that you’re welcome to read for free while you’re there or take home if you’ve bought their lending card. They are organized by the author’s last name if they’re fiction, the subject matter – self-help, current events, history, how-to – or the audience (there’s a kids’ section). On its worst days, the Bookworm is the perfect sanctuary for the homesick Westerner, a place where you can order a glass of wine and attend an author reading. Last night, it was the most comfortable place in Beijing.
I had just gotten out of a screening of North Korean films (interesting in and of itself) and went over there fairly late, heart set on a hot cocoa. I walked up the steps leading to its second-story property, opened the set of airlock doors, and went back to America.
The table I settled into was right by a real, once-living Christmas tree, branches crowned with red and silver frosted glass ornaments and set with tiny, soft white tree lights wrapping a creamy glow around everything within ten feet. Taken aback by the spot-on, overt comfort that had been created in this place, like its own little terrarium within Beijing, I ordered my hot cocoa, grabbed a copy of Lake Wobegon Days (if you’re going to be folksy and American, you have to do it all the way) and listened to Christmas music: not weird Chinese versions, and not modern pop covers, but real Christmas music, sung by people like Natalie Cole and Harry Connick Jr, played by symphonies and performed by choirs the way the songs were intended. I heard my favorite Christmas song**** played twice, one an instrumental version, the other a traditionally elegant recording that undoubtedly came from the vocal ensemble of some American mid-sized city somewhere, like Minneapolis or Boston. What really tugged at my heart, persistently, was the Vince Guaraldi cover of “Oh, Christmas Tree,” the one from the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Charles Schulz, who drew Peanuts, lived and worked in my county, and the man is considered a local hero. Whenever my mom puts that CD in the van, it means Christmas has officially arrived, stealing its way into the world gradually, behind Black Friday and the lattes and the ridiculous array of glowing reindeer statues my neighbors put up without fail every winter.
I took my drink, and sat, and read contentedly. The only thing missing was the snow outside, pristine and untroubled by the marks that humanity makes on the world.

*Or Chrismukkah, or whatever. “Eight days of presents, followed by one day of many presents!”

**I can hear you now: “Shut up, Capra!” No, you shut up.

***As sketchy as you can get in Beijing, anyway. It’s impossible to feel unsafe when the street is always crowded with merry tipsy foreigners buying jianbings.

****God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. This is a weird choice for a favorite Christmas song; I am the only person I know who holds it in such high esteem.