Chimerica

I miss China.
I first realized this when I went out to San Francisco’s most lavish dim sum restaurant with my family. The food was delicious, but the whole time I had to struggle not to think about how the green beans were cooked at Dongbei, my favorite nearby eatery, or how the shrimp dumplings measured up to the ones on offer at the Dumpling Restaurant.
It only got worse from there. Once again I found myself mystified by the strange practice of “tipping.” My friends wondered aloud why I looked both ways about ten times before finally getting up the nerve to cross the street. I use the horn a lot more than I used to when I drive. I informed my parents that they are buying the wrong brand of gin. I can’t for the life of me understand why everything always costs so much.
The whole thing came to a head a few days back, when I explored San Francisco’s Chinatown with a couple friends. The restaurant we settled on had food that I would have liked before I’d gone over there, but after eating dollar-a-plate heaps of fresh, spicy, warm food, our eggplant, beef, and pepper squid didn’t do it for me. I didn’t eat that much.
Out on the street was better; I almost automatically brushed off the proffered menus with a bu yao or a bu yong. When I bumped into someone, I automatically duibuqi’ed after them and xiexie’ed every car that stopped to let us cross the street. The souvenir stores that litter most of the street contained the same fake lighters and counterfeit perfumes I’d seen (and bought) on the other side of the Pacific, and for similar prices. I tried to tell my friends about all the weird stuff I’d seen only to realize that the story really only made sense in my China friends’ and my weird patois of English and Chinese.
About a month ago, I couldn’t wait to leave China and come back to America, a land where people mostly speak the same language as me and where things make sense. Things don’t seem to make as much sense here as they did when I left. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I wish I was still there, but I know now that China has grabbed hold of me, probably for good. When I left I was ambivalent about whether or not I wanted to come back. Now I know I do.

...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.

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.

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.

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!!!)

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

Pack it up, pack it up...

A couple of my friends who have gone abroad have ostensibly (favorite word) taken days to pack. This is ridiculous. I just did it in two hours. The only things I still need to pack are pictures of my family and a bottle of our world-class wine, which I am bringing my hosts as a gift. Sadly, since I am that awkward age where the government deems me capable of dying for my country but not sufficiently responsible to buy a Mike's Hard Lemonade, the wine will have to wait until my mom gets back from the store. Otherwise, my life is in my suitcases, except my Reefs, which I am not bringing. I like to think I'm keeping them at home because they weren't on the Recommended Packing List, but really it's because I couldn't stand it if anything were to happen to them.
People keep asking me how I feel about going abroad for a semester.
Are you excited? ask the random acquaintances. Of course I am; I'm going to China for three and a half months. Come on.
Are you anxious? asks my mom. Not really. I'm a little worried that I'll have a hard time communicating with the locals at first, but it's post-Olympics Beijing, so they probably all speak English anyway. Besides, my Chinese is certainly good enough to get around, if not hold a conversation. The only thing I'm really worried about is the thirty to sixty new words we're required to memorize every day of class. Look, maybe in the Chinese schools this is normal, but I'm a product of the American education system. From the earliest ages, we eschew reading and math for naptime, playing in the dirt, making musical instruments out of shoeboxes, and self-actualization. Then we complain about our jobs getting outsourced. This tangent is over...now!
Are you scared about getting SARS? asks the kid who worked with me at the fair. Shut up, kid, you work at the fair. (Wait, crap!)
Mostly, I am curious. Curious as to who my host family will be, curious to come to know a city that's modern enough to build architectual wonders but backward enough to sentence political dissidents to "re-education" through labor, curious to find out what a scorpion tastes like, curious to set foot in all the places I've read about and seen on TV.
The next time I update this, I'll be in Beijing. If there's a fried scorpion stall in the airport I'll be able to answer one of those questions. If not...they will have to wait.

This is my town

A couple people from school have asked me what my miniature town is like. Here is their answer.
Sebastopol has about 7500 people in it, but a bunch more live outside the city limits, in the countryside. The countryside consists mostly of knee-high wild grasses that are always crisp and brown by the time I get home for the summer. I am violently allergic to these, even though they seem dead, and spend most of my time sneezing through mid-July. My dad keeps halfway thinking about considering maybe buying a house out in the country with a granny unit, which would be his recording studio.
Our current house has no granny unit. It is soundly inside the city limits and sits on the corner of two streets that are lined with similar-looking houses. At least one of the other houses on our street has the exact same floorplan as ours does. Our house is tan, but it has a red front door, which I think is pretty neat. A lot of kids under age ten or so live on our street, and sometimes they ride their bikes in the street, or skateboard, or whatever. It's a really quiet street - there's not much reason to be driving on it unless you live on it - but for some reason they feel the need to put up these little plastic signs up in the street that say "Caution: Children at Play" in the middle of the road so that you have to wait for them to move the signs out of the way (another Seb Fact: gas is now $4.60 a gallon). Once my friend's dad told me he wanted to run the signs over. He drove an SUV, so it'd probably be more effective if he did it, but I'm pretty sure someone needs to.
When I was in high school, I hated living here. I thought it was small and homogenous and boring, and I semi-frequently harrassed my poor mom about why we had chosen to move here (we migrated from Seattle when I was five, which I still miss a whole bunch and love dearly). One time she said it was a "nice place to raise children". I can see that; it's very safe, and tranquil, and there's a pretty strong sense of community. However, half the people who live here are crazy hippies.
Here is a thing that happened this past spring: a wireless company wanted to install free WiFi in the whole town. Everyone who lived in the city limits would get free wireless. People loved it. It would have been great for the schools, for businesses, for people who lived here, etc. Everyone won. Everyone, that is, except a tiny coalition led by this woman who was absolutely convinced that the "radiation" from the wireless would give everyone cancer. Some people, she claimed, were very sensitive to certain types of electromagnetic currents, and the free WiFi would cause her and her followers to become physically ill. People pointed out the inherent ridiculousness of this, including one guy who said that despite receiving fifteen different private wireless signals on the corner of Main Street, people did not seem to be dropping dead. Others cited articles from people like researchers and scientists. Crazy Tinfoil Hat Woman, however, skillfully deflected these arguments with a series of poorly designed and even more poorly researched GeoCities websites claiming that wireless internet would be the downfall of humankind. The city council eventually nixed the plan not because they agreed with CTHW, but because they didn't want to offend anyone. Also, our mayor drunkenly keyed someone's car out by the river (which is kind of like the setting of "Deliverance" but with more tie-dye). A trial started but eventually the whole thing settled out of court.
Sebastopol is the only town in the US to have a majority Green Party city government. This is neat in some ways, because it generally keeps the Republicans out, but annoying in others, because in a town this small having such a "fringe" political view in the mainstream makes for a very homogenous mindset. The main political challenge to the Greens is provided by the PTA Moderate Democrats, who are constantly striving for more parcel taxes that go towards education. The parcel taxes are sorely needed because when I was in AP American History, our textbooks listed Jimmy Carter as the current president. Fortunately, nothing post-Kennedy was on the AP test that year.
The liberal way of life manifests itself in our "downtown", which is a block long. (MAYBE two, if you're feeling generous.) It has two head shops and one Thai restaurant, which reeks of misplaced priorities, and at least five stores selling hemp clothes and those little Tibetan peace flags. There are also a couple of independent coffee shops, which hold their own against our three Starbucks, a restaurant that makes excellent Veggie Benedict, a record store, and at least three yoga studios. The undisputed jewel of the Downtown Block is this ice cream place called Screamin' Mimi's, which makes their own amazing flavors like lavender and coffee oreo and mojito sorbet. (I wrote about the mojito sorbet in my admissions short-answer section, so I like to think that it's good enough to get people into college.) The downtown is bordered on one side by a gas station that charges at least ten cents over the going rate and on the other by a local bank that has really cute baby bears in its advertisements.
The busiest street corner in town is the one that turns into the highway leading out of town.
Our high school served the whole town, the people outside it, and some people who defected from other towns around the county because it was a good school. Unlike schools depicted in teen movies, the football team and cheer squad went largely uncared about except for the people who were on them (our football teams were about good enough to beat the rival school but nobody else). However, most of the sportsball people did something else. Band was big, as was choir, and both of those were actually cool things to do because the teachers were rad and we got to do neat things like play in the San Francisco Symphony Hall and go to Disneyland. The drama people were the cool kids who had the best parties, and the debate team was probably the highest concentration of sarcastic, uppity, elitist, probably-a-little-too-smart-for-their-own-good group of people to be found in the county. I was on debate team. My coach was an amazing, warm, funny woman who was like my third mom (my aunt is my second mom), and although I don't debate much anymore, I still have some vestigial impulses from that point in my life, like when I see a really nice wool suit for sale and my jaw goes kind of slack. All the people I dated in high school were on debate team. Sometimes this was a problem: once I got blown off for lunch because the person I was with had to cut cards for Nat Quals the next weekend. If you don't know what that means, be happy; you probably escaped high school with your soul mostly intact. Most of my high school was spent going to tournaments, hanging out with other people on the team, or eating French bread in the Mariotts we'd invariably stay in at invitationals. It made me very happy, and I met some wonderful people.
The big business in Sebastopol is wine. We grow some of the best in the world in this county and the one to our east, Napa. Frequently, tour buses can be seen idling at the traffic lights, ready to disgorge yuppies from across the globe into the tasting rooms that dot the countryside. Whenever restaurants have wine lists, I can always recognize some of the wineries and tell my dining companions how to drive there, which probably is very annoying to them. A couple people I know here even have their own hobby vineyards. The region produces all kinds of wines - red, white, blush - and you're just as likely to find a $4 bottle from the area as a $400 one. Before the wine industry got here, Sebastopol was an apple town, and there are still a lot of orchards here. One of my best friends' parents are apple farmers; they own roughly a gajillion acres of land, and they always give me apples to snack on when I go over there, which are delicious.
Someone from school asked me what there was to do for fun in my town. There really isn't anything to do here except leave, although we do have a movie theater. The good times I've had here had nothing to do with the place and everything to do with the people I was with - the liberal atmosphere here breeds a very easygoing, open-minded variety of teenager that I've found surprisingly rare at Northwestern.
I can appreciate how someone would want to live here. It has a nice, small-town feel to it, and it's relatively undiscovered by the wine tourists so it still has its own definite character. It's also close enough to bigger cities - San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Sacramento - that you can day-trip to do cool things relatively easily. It is very safe, the schools are good, the people are mostly quite friendly, if a little weird, and the restaurants are nice. That said, it's small, homogenous, and without much of its own entertainment. I doubt I'll be back here that much after this summer. I feel like there's too much to do and explore in Chicago or Seattle or the other cities I could see myself living in, and I have pretty much exhausted what the Seb has to offer. Except the mojito sorbet, which I could eat until I collapsed from gross pancreatic failure.
I am also taking a hiatus from posting in Chinese. My computer at home doesn't have the text conversion program, and thanks to the Crazy WiFi Lady, there's no wireless so I can't use the laptop. It'll probably make a reappearance in the fall, assuming Bei Wai, my school in China, doesn't run me into the ground.