This is probably my favorite photo of the whole trip, plus AQs

The last few days have been pleasant but uneventful, devoted mostly to studying for my midterm tomorrow (although last night we did go to the lovely Houhai Lake area to celebrate Pei Rei’s impending birthday, where I bought some cotton candy [pictured]). Tomorrow afternoon I leave for the historic but apparently ridiculously touristy and kitschy town of Pingyao. I get back on a sleeper train Monday morning. Ugh. Anyway, it’s time for another edition of the AQs.

Q: Why did the city change its name from Peking to Beijing?
A: Actually, they didn’t. It’s always been Beijing, but a different Romanization system was used back in the Old Times; hence, Peking. I believe the current method, called pinyin, was first used in the 1940s or so.

Q: Are there any weird, random differences between China and the US?
A: Heavens, yes. The ones that immediately jump out are the lack of certain personal hygiene products (for example, deodorant) and the homicidal tendencies of the Beijing drivers, who put crazy cabbies everywhere to shame. Another weird thing is that nobody here has a dryer. Instead, we all let our clothes line-dry. It’s not an issue of people not being able to afford dryers, it’s just that nobody has them.

Q: So we’ve heard about the street food. What about the rest of the food?
A: I’m actually a touch burned out on street food now (it’ll be back by the time I get back from Pingyao, though). Instead, I’ve taken to self-catering a bit more; I’ve gotten acquainted with the local supermarkets, my favorite of which is the giant Chaoshifa a couple bus stops away (Chaoshifa is an ubiquitous chain of supermarkets, not unlike Safeway or Dominick’s or what have you). My favorite thing for snacking is yogurt. Ever since fresh milk products have been pronounced safe to eat, I’ve had at least one carton every day. It’s delicious, and comes with delicious little chunks or jelly and fruit in it. My favorite thus far has been coconut grapefruit, but there are so many flavors it will take me a while to work through them. When my friends and I go out to eat, we go to places called xiaochi (“little eating”), which serve things like meat and vegetables over rice, fried noodles, soup, etc. for around $1 to $1.50 a plate. The Western food here is expensive ($6 or so a plate) but usually okay, and the Chinese “fine-dining” restaurants, of which I have only been to two, are maybe $10 a plate on average but delicious. At the end of the semester I’m going to blow $20 on a prix-fixe menu. This is exorbitant in China, but I love how cheap it is to eat here if you stick to Chinese food, which I have no problem with.

Q: What do you miss from home?
A: Oh man. A lot of things, but they’re mostly really small. A partial listing: my source of income, readily accessible hot chocolate, a dryer so that my jeans don’t get all stiff when I air-dry them, pants that fit me, Mexican food, reading the newspaper every morning, not having to remember to bring toilet paper with me every time I go to the bathroom, Chinese classes with 25 words a week, other classes, driving places, Honey Bunches of Oats, scones, granola, Comedy Central, dance ragers (although Propaganda mostly makes up for this), Clarke’s, my piercing place in Wicker Park, cooking, my philosophical conversations over Cold Stone with Miller, not having to divide everything by seven to figure out how much it costs. And there are also the bigger things: Miller herself, Arianne, Chelsea, Abby, the Fems exec board, everyone else who I’m too [thoughtless/forgetful/lazy] to mention, the knowledge that, in the same state, there are people I can spill my entire soul to, and my family. And my dog, who I will not eat.

Q: What’s Chinglish?
A: Chinglish is what happens when Chinese people try to speak English. In China, it’s most commonly found on clothes, which will look normal at first glance, but then you’ll read them and realize that the words don’t make sense, or even that the words consist of random Roman letters, which I guess is enough to fool Chinese people. It’s also quite prevalent on menus; Michael and I got dinner a couple nights ago at a porridge place, and their picture menu was a gold mine (our favorite was “bean curd with the American law”). So far, though, the best one has been on a t-shirt I found while shopping in Wudaokou, which read in large letters across the front “Run for British Prime Minister – You Too.” I would have bought it if it were my size.

Q: You go a lot of places. How do you get around?
A: Public transit, baby. If you’re willing to get a little creative with the bus and subway transfers and walk for maybe twenty minutes, you can get anywhere in Beijing you want to go. The subway is fast and efficient, but there’s no branch near my school (I have to take the bus to the subway station and then switch) so that’s kind of annoying. The buses are fine, except when the traffic is particularly bad, but unless you know where you’re going the system is difficult to use, as there’s no trip planner or even route map available online. Both the buses and the subways are always crowded. The buses stop running around nine, and the subways stop at 11:30, so if you want to get anywhere after that you have to take a cab, which is cheap by US standards but comparatively expensive in Beijing. I usually only take the cabs when I’m returning from going out.

Q: What music do young people listen to? Do they all listen to Hedgehog?
A: Sadly, no. The female roommates listen to incredibly treacly Chinese pop songs, although one of them said she liked Death Cab (note to self: talk to this person more). They are also all under the impression that the Backstreet Boys are still cool, and have an odd selection of English-language pop songs with a lot of keyboards that I promise nobody in any Anglophone country has ever heard of. However, for a truly horrifying example of what America has done to the Mandarin world, go on YouTube and look up MC Hotdog. There's also a popular song called In Beijing. The lyrics mostly revolve around things like Beijing having pretty girls, hosting the 2008 Olympics, and how you can go to the Summer Palace.

Bag Fulla Puppies

I didn’t just make the title “Bag Fulla Puppies” to draw people in. There is actually a Bag Fulla Puppies in this installment, but it doesn’t come until later. Until then you’ll just have to look at how cute the picture is and wonder.
I’m pretty sure I did nothing on Monday, so I’ll use the allotted Monday space to talk about my roommate some more. She’s very good about correcting my Chinese and asking me for help with her English homework. I looked through the textbook she’s currently using and it’s ridiculous. They’re teaching her words and phrases like “attitudinal” and “takes the cake,” neither of which I can remember anyone saying in real life, ever. I feel bad telling her that they’re useless because she obviously has to learn them, but I wish I could politely get across to her that “terrific” is not something she needs to put a whole lot of effort into remembering after that chapter’s test. Then I realized how ridiculous the textbook I have must seem – I know the phrase for “to die of a massive hemorrhage” and “socialist canteen” but I’m still not entirely sure how the future tense works. I blame the teachers, who wrote the textbook we’re using.*
My first impression was right; Zhang Ran is indeed very busy. Although I am not always around to observe in person, I would estimate that she is busy with classes and extracurricular stuff for eight to ten hours every weekday. She doesn’t usually settle in for the night until about nine. Since I hate procrastinating, I have invariably finished all my work by then, so I think I’ve given her the impression that I never do anything. In fact, I know I have given her this impression, because when she stopped in yesterday afternoon and caught me going over my vocab words, she smiled and said “Not too common!” I got kind of pissed off about it, actually, and said something along the lines of “You can’t see me work when you have classes all the time.” We both laughed about it, and it wasn’t an argument or anything, but it pisses me off that I’m giving her the impression that Americans (and me specifically as well) are lazy. I see her watching Korean TV shows online, though, so the street goes both ways.
Another interesting fact about Chinese college students: because of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square in which college students caused all sorts of problems for law enforcement, the Chinese government has decided to…teach all the college students to use firearms! This seems counterintuitive to me, but apparently all students must complete two weeks of military training at some point. One of Zhang Ran’s friends made a video of it, and, although I’m sure it wasn’t fun, he made it look kind of like summer camp, albeit a summer camp where you woke up at 5:30 every morning and then ate crappy steamed buns for breakfast. Some of the things depicted in the video were standing still for half an hour to test one’s discipline, a “long march” (the actual Long March before the Communists came into power took months, while this one was roughly four miles – I have Marched Longer around the giant malls in Wangfujing) and the gun training, which only lasted a couple hours. Although they were very good at marching in unison, suffice it to say that I am no more terrified of Chinese undergrads than I was before viewing the video, although the production values were excellent.
On Tuesday, I went to this…thing…that Max invited me to. Called “Green Drinks,” its purpose was ostensibly to allow members of environment-related NGOs in Beijing to network with each other, but it ended up being a bunch of white people of all stripes, at least 75% of whom were native English speakers. In fact, I did not meet one environmentalist the whole night. Max traded a lot of business cards with people, but networking and mingling in general make me horribly uncomfortable, as I am very shy and ill at ease among new people and in new situations. I did meet a couple really sweet French students near the end of the night, though, and made tentative plans to meet with one of them to practice my French, which has gone the way of [choose one: the Backstreet Boys, anyone on VH1, the American economy]. Something I have heard about the expat community here is how small it is, and it often sounds like everyone knows everyone. This should be comforting to me, as a potential Beijing expat, but I feel like if, in a city of 17 million, you either know everyone or know someone who does, something is wrong and you’re a little too insulated. As much as I dislike changes in my broad life circumstances, I also get bored really easily, and if you stay in the Foreigner Hotspots you’re missing out on a bunch of other rad places where you could be talking to real people and doing real things instead of staying in pretend America with stores containing merchandise priced in dollars (seen it in Sanlitun, got so annoyed that I left) and other people you can speak English to. You don’t grow that way.
Anyway, after leaving the Green Drinks thing we wandered around looking for TGI Friday’s until we found a Western supermarket named Jenny Lou’s.** It had the most wonderful things inside (Pop Tarts, juice, normal bread, Italian pasta), none more wonderful than the Drinks Aisle, which not only had non-Nescafe coffee, but also nine kinds of Swiss Miss, including “Marshmallow Lover’s,” which is of course the best kind. I got some, and will undoubtedly be back for more next time I’m in the area, which is right by the Silk Market.
Wednesday was a day without class, but I spent most of it catching up on work. However, in the afternoon I went exploring with Pei Rei to a large bookstore and then to Tibetan food on Nanluogu Hutong. The cheap, $1.25-per-plate Chinese food sold at the restaurants I usually eat at had started to get a little old, so I dropped $6 on potato samosas, tomato soup, and lamb curry. ($6 is a huge amount to drop for dinner.) It was delicious and completely worth it. I love Tibetan food, and am excited to try more of it here, as the places in the US usually serve it in an Indian and Nepalese context.
While on our way to the bookstore, Pei Rei and I got off one bus stop too early and had to walk past a place he told me was called the Zoo Market (thus called because it’s across the street from the Beijing Zoo). The Zoo Market, I was told, was similar to the Silk Market, but with no white people, vastly lower prices, and less bargaining. I had some free time after class today, so I decided to go check it out.
If anything, the place is more hectic than the Silk Market – I was the only white person I saw in there the whole time, and there are more stores with less room to maneuver, which makes it kind of a hassle to get around. That said, the prices are amazing. I wanted to get a pair of tights, so I found some I liked and asked the vendor how much they were. She quoted me $4.50, I asked for $1.50, and she gave me $2. I was so dumbstruck that I just bought them. (However, bargaining is not always okay here. I got a palette of about ten eyeshadow colors for about $2, which was the price the vendor gave me and refused to bargain down from. But dude, $2.) The Zoo Market also seems much more authentic than the Silk Market; the clothes they sell there look like the clothes that actual Chinese people wear, with the Chinglish pasted on the front*** or the reckless copyright infringement. The variety, and the number of things that I would want to wear, definitely doesn’t measure up to the Silk Market, but I’m already planning a trip back there.
On the way out, I saw a group of girls clustered around a woman with a big bag on the ground. I couldn’t see what was in the bag, but I assumed it was probably pirated DVDs, so I went in for a quick look. It was not DVDs. Rather, it was puppies. Three puppies, to be exact, about five weeks old and cuter than the dickens. I cooed over them for a couple eons and then bent down to pet one, because they were the fuzziest little fellows I have ever seen. The woman selling them immediately shouted “No money, no touch!” at me in Chinese and then snapped the bag shut, causing one of the puppies to bark a couple times before she opened it back up, patted the offending puppy on the head, and fed them a little bit. Nobody, not even the Mean Zoo Market Lady, is immune to puppies.
Last thing: I wrote a column in the Daily Northwestern, our campus’ official paper, about being a foreign student in Beijing. It’s a pretty cursory look at my whole deal, and it probably won’t be anything new if you’ve been keeping up with this, but I am putting it out here because it’s my baby. It is also worth noting that the managing editor of the Weekly section, who I imagine looking more or less like Kif from Futurama, completely enervated any sense of Emily from the piece, including what I thought was an excellent story about me saying “chest hair” instead of “panda” because I got the tones wrong, so it reads kind of bland. The worst part is, the guy I worked with on the story, who was very nice, encouraged me to add more examples, and they all ended up getting taken out. I knew it.

*The textbook, by the way, is hilarious. Roughly two-thirds of the lessons are normal, and the others are just cracked out beyond belief. The lessons usually take the form of a dialogue between two people, and the two most notable ones were an argument over whether or not people should give money to beggars (one person said “Encouraging people to reap without sowing is harmful to society. They could get jobs if they wanted. If you disagree, you are doubting Deng Xiaopeng’s Reform and Opening Policy.”) and a discussion on the American legal system, which, apparently, is ridiculous because you can sue someone who you feel has done you wrong. I will be the first to admit that our society’s litigiousness has gone too far, but the lesson made it sound like it was some awful offense to be able to sue your employer. Whatever, China.

**The only thing that would make this segue awesomer is if I knew the Chinese word for “hypocrite.”

***One sweatshirt said “Heineken: Stupid Division” on the front in big, Times New Roman letters

Mystery Beijing Superquest Funventure

Orientation is starting to wind down. I’m getting a little bored with meetings that essentially say “other cultures are weird, give yourself time to get used to it, be polite to Chinese people, they are different than us” but take an hour to do it. Fortunately, I think the last of the meetings are tomorrow. I meet my homestay family the day after tomorrow, probably. Some interesting things happened, though, like:

1. I started the intensive Chinese classes today. Damn straight they’re intensive – I had to learn forty words last night and forty tonight. This is ridiculous. I haven’t had a problem retaining them in the short term but I have no idea how many I can hold onto for any meaningful period of time. Oy gevalt. The format of the classes is nice, though; for the first hour and twenty minutes all the students on the same level (I tested into third year Chinese, right where I should be, with about 20 others) go over that day’s words and grammar. Then we split into classes of five or six, and spend the first hour of that class reviewing the grammar again, then the final time doing activities based on the theme of the words. All in all, it’s four hours of Chinese, starting at 8 a.m., which is actually ok for me because I’ve been waking up at about six since I got here so I don’t know the difference.

2. I am starting to notice that China has a lot of Chinese people, and Chinese writing, in it. I don’t mean this in a “stupid Emily” way (although, let’s face it, it probably is that way no matter how I mean it), but rather I mean that for such a big city so much on the world stage, there are surprisingly few foreigners here, and not a lot of effort has been made to cater to them. The restaurants I’ve seen rarely have English menus, people don’t know that much English, signs and businesses aren’t in English, etc. I don’t really have a problem with it, but I am pretty surprised, especially after traveling in the European Union where everyone speaks English better than I do. When there is English, it’s usually okay but sometimes not. Examples include a bubble tea place that sold “smoothles” (I thought this was so cute that I bought one), an excellent knockoff Puma bag that actually said “Fuma” on it instead (and the little puma silhouette was smoking a cigar, which you could only see if you looked really closely, but I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE CHINA), and, my favorite so far, a Chinese guy I saw wearing a shirt that said “I love Chna”. Awesome, dude, I’m sure you do.

3. As a corollary to 2, I’ve been the subject of a couple interesting experiences. A couple days ago on campus, a guy, maybe thirty years old, comes up to me and asks me if his English grammar is right on a couple sentences. No big deal, I help him and go to one of my stupid cultural awareness meetings. But today I went to Tiananmen Square (see below), and this guy asked if my white friends and I would have our picture taken with his little daughter. We obliged, and since she was super cute I got one of us with her too. Then later we were in a park and a toddler got visibly frightened of us and ran and hid behind his mom’s legs. It was funny at the time, but you sort of take it for granted in America that no matter what you look like, no matter what your ethnicity, you can go pretty much anywhere in the country, certainly in big cities, and people won’t think anything of it except “oh, an asian/black/latino/etc.” person and will probably assume you live there unless you reveal otherwise. My three white companions and I were the only Anglos in Tiananmen.

4. Why were we in Tiananmen square in the first place, you ask? In the only worthwhile activity we’ve done thus far, we were told to get into pairs and were then given a business card-sized piece of paper with the name of a Beijing landmark or sight on it (the Chinese name, not the English one). We had four hours to get there (it started at 2 p.m.), get something to prove we were there – an entrance ticket, a picture, whatever – and get back. We were assigned a park just north of the Forbidden City, which is just north of Tiananmen square, so we relished the chance to get out of our neighborhood (which, let’s face it, is not full of sightseeing) and see some famous things. I figured out how to take the bus to the subway to the other subway to the other bus using my handy Lonely Planet China guidebook and one of the 345029873254 maps of Beijing my mom gave me before I left, and we set off, getting there with only a minor hitch when we couldn’t find the subway station from the bus stop and had to ask an actual Chinese person, who we could not understand. Once on the subway, we ran into my friend Michael (from my school) and his partner, who were looking for the same park, and became a quartet of stupid Americans on the subway. We got off and walked around the Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese equivalent of the Senate is held, the Mao mausoleum (we didn’t go in), the new symphony hall/opera house, and then Tiananmen square. It wasn’t as busy as I’d expected – no mobs of people, but quite a few were out milling around and taking pictures. There’s not a whole bunch to do there, other than briefly look at some nice Olympic-themed topiaries and escape from people trying to sell you souvenir junk. We then hopped our fourth bus (meeting up with a group of three with the same destination on our way) and finally found the park with about an hour and fifteen minutes left. We paid 2 yuan to get in (I felt ripped off at having to pay to get in even though it was less than thirty cents), and then stepped through the gate. It became clear why I had paid to get in – this was nothing like an American city park, but more of a botanical garden, with a few pagodas up on a hill. We climbed up a dirt path on the side of the hill (there were perfectly nice steps, but we didn’t know that until we were up there) and were immediately treated to an awe-inspiring view of the Forbidden City sprawled out to our south. The pagoda had ostensibly held the remains of a Buddha until the British stole them around 1900, and had a plaque commemorating Anglo imperialism on the base where the remains used to be held. Farther up was another pagoda, this one bigger with an even better view and a Buddha and some incense inside. After looking around a bit, we climbed down and walked through a series of lovely gardens and brightly painted gates, stopping in a bamboo grove to do our best panda impressions (see the picture higher up). After wandering and being upset over the squat toilets, which were the only ones available, we parted ways and Michael and I headed back to campus for another thrilling meeting about being culturally sensitive.

5. While in Tiananmen square, I saw a police officer arresting a guy for selling unlicensed stuffed fuwa (the Olympic mascots). He had handcuffs and everything, and I couldn’t help but thinking, dude, he’s selling stuffed animals, there is no need for this kind of seriousness. But still, smackdown!

6. Unfortunately, I have to take a twelve-day journey to somewhere in remote China in mid-September. My choices are backpacking and camping in Tibet (obviously not, I’d actually sledgehammer my kneecaps to get out of that, and anyone who thinks I’m bluffing doesn’t know me well at all), hiking along the Silk Road (not as bad, would only use a regular hammer), and rafting down the Mekong river to the Burmese/Thai border. This involves NO backpacking and is the one I’ll try for, but unfortunately I’ll be stuck in an indigenous village for three days and it will almost certainly not have plumbing. These trips are ostensibly about experiential learning and self-discovery; I will doubtless learn that if allowed to go for four days without showering I will have even fewer boyfriends than I do now (0, for those of you playing along at home). It’s not all bad though: we get to visit the provincial capital of Kunming, which has six million people and a similar number of flushing toilets, and walk in a tea plantation! And go rafting! Yay! Regardless, I would like to propose another trip for the prissier among us:
SHANGHAI TRIP
Objectives: This trip emphasizes experiential learning in the area of China’s emergent economy. Participants will travel to Shanghai, China’s financial capital, and partake in a homestay with an obscenely wealthy nouveau-riche family, who will treat them right, serve them weird and possibly endangered seafood, and provide them with a valuable glimpse of life as one of China’s newest cultural groups. Activities include meeting with local businesspeople over dim sum and a visit to the Shanghai municipal water center, which is responsible for overseeing all of the awesome, readily accessible Western-style plumbing in the area.
Yeah, that sounds better.

7. I ate dumplings again for lunch today, so time to up the Dumpling Tally!

Dumpling tally: 14