Picture post, mostly

I went back to Nanluogu Hutong today to try and fall in love with it again after my crappy experience on Saturday night. It worked. Here's proof.























The big news today is that as of tomorrow, I am no longer living at the Zhangs’ apartment. When I was taking the bus to Nanluogu today I got a call from the homestay RA, who I’d talked to last Friday about being unhappy here, and she just flat-out told me that I’d be moving out tomorrow. Well, then.
The Zhangs haven’t been awkward about it at all, thankfully; in fact, they hardly seem to have noticed, since they’ve thus far only mentioned it in passing once.* I’ll be living in the international student dorm starting tomorrow, and when I get back from my trip to Yunnan (I leave very early Thursday morning and get back sometime on the 24th) I’ll have a new Chinese roommate, fresh from Paralympic volunteerdom, and hopefully someone I can talk to and make friends with. I’m a little nervous, given that my first living situation sounded so cool but then didn’t work out, but I’m happy to have more freedom and live close to people I know. The Chinese students I’ve met here seem very cool, especially my student tutor, who is the most patient and friendly person in possibly the entire world. I swear my listening skills have doubled since I started talking to him last week. At any rate, I move out tomorrow afternoon after I finish classes, and hopefully will be moving on to a better living situation.

*Another odd quirk: last week I brought home this snack bag of delicious shrimp-flavored crackers and left it in my room about half-full to eat later. I went to my afternoon class and came back to find my host mom feeding the crackers to the dog. I must have had a really befuddled look on my face, because all she said was “He likes to eat them.” I have figured out why the dog is as pudgy and waddle-y as he is. It is because his diet consists half of various table scraps and half of Slim Jims. In the words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up. I’m not mad about it or anything, and I pretty much laughed it off and went to study, but it was definitely a bit out of the ordinary.

Beijing Huanying'ed Me

One of my favorite new phrases is huadelai/huabulai, which mean “worth it” and “not worth it,” respectively. For example, long-distance relationships, taking Beijing buses at rush hour, and trying to understand cab drivers are all huabulai. This past weekend, though, fell easily into the huadelai category – much fun was had on very little sleep at all.
Friday was a pretty average day to start with. I had Chinese in the morning and experienced our first weekly test, which wasn’t as bad as I had thought. The tests, unlike the daily dictations, focus much more on the grammar than on the vocabulary. The grammar isn’t my strong point, but I feel like I did a decent job nonetheless. There was a written section and a short oral presentation, which was delivered one-on-one to the excellent Yu Laoshi, who made me feel like I was the smartest darn six-year-old she’d ever met. Then later I had calligraphy again, with Fang Laoshi (who is confirmed Manchurian royalty). We didn’t get to write again, which was a bit disappointing, but he talked about a lot of the history and culture behind calligraphy and gave us our Chinese names written down in a couple different styles to examine, hopefully for next time (Tuesday). After that got out I headed back to the Zhangs’ for what I thought would be a quiet evening of studying until Max called asking if I wanted to go out* that night. I made plans to head over to his school with Michael, another Northwesterner on my program, in a couple hours and spent the rest of the early evening hanging out with Bin Bin and studying Monday’s list of vocabulary. As it turns out, Mrs. Zhang was gone for the weekend visiting family, and Mr. Zhang was out playing mahjong with some friends, so when it came time to leave I told Bin Bin to let her dad know that I’d gone out (but had my phone in case of emergency) and that he should not stay up and wait for me, as I’d be back quite late.
Michael and I met up at the bus stop, and after a couple snafus where the proper bus didn’t actually stop at our stop, got up to Max’s subway stop, where I promptly proceeded to almost get hit by a train.** We met up with Max and some other people from his school and walked over to his friend’s palatial, $350-a-month-per-roommate apartment on the ninth floor. This place was AMAZING: fully functional Western bathroom, 24-hour security staff at the door to each building, spacious bedrooms, and, in the living room overlooking the city, floor-to-ceiling glass windows. We hung out there for an hour and a half or so until Michael and I made an early exit to stop by at Pyro, a nearby bar where one of our fellow IESers was celebrating his 21st birthday (pointless in China, where a third-grader could walk into any store and buy a bottle of alcohol). Upon arriving, we were informed that the group had moved on to Propaganda, a club a couple doors down which happened to have no cover. Since it was free, we figured it couldn’t hurt to go in and take a look.
Happily, this club was mostly students, so we promptly got to dancing and finally gave the guy whose birthday it was our best wishes. About half an hour after arriving, Max called wanting to know where we were and came over (this was barely eleven, so the night was still young). Everyone went in and kept dancing, emerging periodically for fresh air and drinks for those who wanted them (they were also much cheaper here than at China Doll).
The club is set up with the DJ at the from of the (subterranean – the ground level is a bar with a lot of seating) room on a raised stand, a few small sofas and tables along the side, a littler bar in the back, and a giant dance floor in the middle. In front of the DJ stand, though, are a couple raised areas under spotlights where the exceptionally brave and superfly can go to dance in highlighted view of everyone in the room.
I used to hate dancing. I thought it was stupid, and that I was awkward and bad at it. At parties, I would hang out on the couch and make conversation with people instead. (Unfortunately, this conversation often ended up revolving around why I didn’t want to dance.) Then, sometime in February, Arianne, Matt, and Max ended up having one of their impromptu ten-person ragers, and sometime that night, I did a complete 180. I started the evening refusing to move in a non-ambulatory way, and ended it dancing to no music at all while I was waiting for Matt to put his shoes on so he could walk me home. Once at another dance party, Arianne, with a smile on her face, asked me “Remember when you used to hate dancing?” My response was something along the lines of “That Emily is dead to the world now, and she will not be missed.” The point I am trying to make here, though, is that if you’d told me six or seven months ago that I’d be voluntarily, even joyfully throwing it down in the spotlight in front of 300 or so of my peers, I’d have laughed at you and then refused to dance with you. Somehow, though, I found myself in the front of the room, in plain view, and I could not have been happier.
The high point of the night happened when the DJ, after a fairly pedestrian string of songs that were really cool six months ago, busted out the 2008 Olympic theme song, "Beijing Huanying Ni”***, put this huge hip-hop drumbeat behind it, and turned up the bass. Everyone lost it. I’ve never seen such excited people at a club before, and for the first minute or so you could barely hear the song over all the screaming and cheering. I was up by the DJ stand when it came on, and it got mobbed. Everyone put their drinks down, swarmed to the front, and started singing along as much as they could (it was a mix of Chinese and foreign students, so there was great variance here). What a killer time. I ended up staying until about three-thirty and then cabbing it back to the Zhangs’ apartment, where I was happy to see that Mr. Zhang had gone to sleep.
The next morning I started regretting my decision when I woke up at 7 to go on an IES-sponsored bicycle trip of Beijing’s hutongs, the traditional and rapidly-disappearing alleys with old courtyard houses. The entire trip kind of turned me off of giant organized events; somewhere between standing in front of the restaurant for 45 minutes waiting for lunch, 50 students on bikes filling up entire road lanes, and our guide’s oddly strict insistence on sticking to a particular route, it felt like more of the trip was spent waiting around so we could move on in a prescribed manner than it was actually moving. We also only rode through hutongs for about five minutes, which was probably good given that our giant crowd filled up a whole hutong at a time, and the denizens seemed a little peeved and inconvenienced by our presence. Also, I rented a Chinese bike for the ride, and although the Chinese are good at many things, making soft bike seats is absolutely not one of them. I went back to pick up a change of clothes for going out again that night (I had cleared my all-nighter with the Zhangs) and arranged to meet Max and one of his friends for a wander in a different section of hutongs, where he had previously gone exploring on his own and randomly met a kind family who had invited him into their home and given him tea and cigarettes. We got lunch and then the friend, who did not actually speak Chinese, decided that it would be best not to visit the hutong family and went off shopping on her own. Taking note of his directions from before, which read something like “turn left at mop on wall, go straight at pot past really narrow doorway, turn left then right then right again,” Max led me through a much tinier hutong than the one I’d seen earlier, a miniature cobbled corridor only wide enough for one person. When we arrived at the home he’d seen before, the retired father was outside. He immediately recognized Max and was thrilled that he had returned with another American friend in tow, and invited us in for tea. We sat in their tiny kitchen building, no bigger than six by fifteen, and watched the mom cook some delicious-looking corn while on the other “side” of the room, some friends played a game of mahjong under the persistent whine of a couple cheap, mounted fans. The father served us some green tea with goji berries, which was the best tea I’ve ever had (and I told him so in grammatically flawless Chinese, which made him very happy), and was soon joined by his 24-year-old daughter, Lin Na, who spoke some English and spent an hour or so chatting with Max and I in a mélange of English and Mandarin. When she found out that we both loved dumplings, she quickly told us that she and her mother would be happy to teach us how to make them. We eventually had to head out, but not before we were invited to stay for dinner and Max got Lin Na’s cell number to return for a dumpling lesson. I was struck so deeply by the warm-heartedness of these people. Everyone seemed so happy to meet us and so eager to see that, as guests, we were well taken care of. This family obviously didn’t have much at all, but they still offered everything they had – their tea, their dinner, their time – so that they could spend time with us. It didn’t seem like the kind of fake hospitality you might expect from the situation, either. They were truly happy we were there, and I was genuinely sad when they saw us out. I know I’ll see them again, though, and hopefully learn to make the best dumplings ever.
As part of my end of the deal, I took Max back to Nanluogu Hutong, which I was thrilled to show him. When I got there, though, I was dismayed. It was packed with people, mostly Chinese but some white, and taxis ceaselessly honked their way through the foot traffic. Any air of calm separation from the rest of the Beijing ruckus was gone, replaced with what appeared to be just another social street. In retrospect, I should have known better to go there at 6 on a Friday night, and I should have expected that this would happen, but its charm was completely ruined. I’ll probably go back tomorrow afternoon after I get out of classes and see if I can recover. I guess such a wonderful little place was too good to go undiscovered, but once the invading hordes arrived, it was no longer wonderful.
Disheartened by my lack of success at recapturing the magic I’d felt on my first visit, we headed off in pursuit of dinner and eventually ended up at a Muslim restaurant, where we ate cashew chicken, the heartiest naan I’ve ever had, and watched the Paralympic opening ceremonies projected on a giant screen in the front of the room, a little weirded out by the knowledge that this time they were taking place within five miles of us. We left the restaurant to go back to Max’s, where we dropped our things off and relaxed for half an hour before changing and heading back to Propaganda, which was maybe a ten-minute walk from his room. The crowd and music weren’t quite up to Friday’s standards, but we still had fun and met up with several of his friends from school, one of whom was a Scottish Hong Kong resident who introduced me to an excellent and quite mild beverage called a Pimm’s Cup (in case you cannot tell from the name, this is a massively British beverage made with something called Pimm’s, lemonade, and some citrus slices). We stayed until a little before and went out to a 24-hour place for some dumplings and chicken porridge, which were both amazing, and then left to crash in Max’s room, my tentative plans to see Tiananmen Square at sunrise laid to waste by my lack of sleep.
We woke up at eleven or so the next morning (freakishly late for me, as I wake up at about eight here if left to my own devices) and decided to visit the Factory 798 art district, a bit of a taxi ride out to the northeast side of town heading toward the airport.
This, too, was completely huadelai. The area consisted of ten or so enclosed city blocks, formerly a munitions factory (see picture of me at the top), that had been converted into tiny museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces, some featuring just one artist, some with quite large themed shows. The district contained only contemporary art, made within the last five years. This is probably my favorite type – I don’t know anything about art, so all the theory and symbolism is lost on me, and I just like looking at the interesting, weird things that people come up with. Some of it definitely didn’t make sense, but there were some things there that were very visually stunning: a fairly simple, realistic painting of a young woman on a beach, some photos of an abandoned steel factory, and models of cities sculpted from used clothes and put in suitcases. My favorite, though, was a photograph someone had taken in front of one of the Forbidden City buildings at night. The photo was super-long exposure, and someone had used a flashlight to write out the words “whoever is the luckiest” in the foreground, superimposed in light over the building wall. Could I tell you what it means? No, but I found myself unable to tear myself away from it. All in all, we had a lovely time. Today was pretty gray and drippy, so it was nice to have some indoor stuff to do, and we treated ourselves to $2 plates of golden curry for lunch (the ultimate comfort food for when it’s raining) and then, later, a pot of tea. We took a cab back, got some moon cakes at the local bakery, and parted ways, at which point I went home for dinner, intensive studying, and now, for the first time in way too long, actual sleep.

Dumpling tally: 26

*This is more of a rhetorical question. What people really mean when they ask me this is if I’m able to go out. Given that I’d probably ditch my own wedding if it meant I got to dance until four in the morning, the answer is invariably yes.

**One of the streets we were crossing had a major set of train tracks, with gates that close automatically to prevent people from getting into the track area when the train approaches. However, I’d never really looked and noticed the tracks, so when the siren went off signaling that the gates were moving, I figured it was just some driver with an obnoxious horn and kept going. The guard at the gates yelled at me in Chinese and pushed me forward. Then I realized what was happening and quickly leapt back behind the gate. There was about a minute between when the gate closed completely and then train actually came through, so Michael maintains that the guard was telling me to just go across really quickly (there were people obliviously crossing on the other side). I, however, view this as an appallingly transparent attempt on my life.

***I actually really like this song and think it’s pretty. However, the line about sharing the same air under the same sun always strikes me as funny, because the air is so horrible that frequently you can’t see the sun.

Exclusive Interview Inside

Today was pretty uneventful, which was actually sort of a nice break after wandering around a lot for the past few days. I woke up and went to Chinese and then spent my hour with my language tutor. He’s nice and very helpful when I ask him questions about some of the little grammar things we learn, but I feel like I generally have a decent grasp on the material so I’m usually hard-pressed to find things to talk to him about. What I’d really like to do is work on my listening skills, which are nothing short of atrocious, but I’m not really sure how to bring that up or even how to work on it, short of just listening to people speak Chinese. I’m picking up more and more of what people say the more I’m here, but people speak so quickly and kind of jumble up the four tones used in Chinese, so it can be a little difficult to tell what words they’re trying to use. Beijingers are also notorious throughout China for their accent: they tend heavily toward replacing the –n sounds on the ends of their words with –r sounds, and they don’t enunciate very clearly either. The cab drivers are particularly problematic in this area. Blessedly, my tutor is from a province in central China and speaks lovely Mandarin, the way the people in my textbook talk.
After that I headed off to history class. After adjusting to all the weirdness here - Chinese classes taught without a word of English, store signs and menus I can’t read, the weird fusion of old and new – it’s really comforting in a weird way to have a seminar-style class, taught in English, where you take notes off the board. We are starting at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, which began with the Manchus invading from the north and instituting a Confucian-style government based on ethnic sovereignty while integrating both Han Chinese (the majority) and other minorities. It’s relatively interesting, but I am most looking forward to learning about how things got messed up over there, because at this point it’s looking pretty solid.
I went back to the student lounge on our floor of the foreign students’ building, which is a wonderful place because you can speak English in it,* to study for my first weekly test tomorrow and then attended a brief informational meeting about the long trip we’re going on next week. I got my wish and am going to Yunnan province, a tropical place without malaria. We’re mostly staying in hotels and are doing fun things like touring a tea plantation, taking an 80-mile bike ride around a lake (the path is flat and paved and we’re breaking it up into two days, but the bike butt will still be very intense), and going whitewater rafting. Listening to the packing list and warnings for some of the other trips, I feel very confident in my decision to visit the south. (For example, on the Tibetan backpacking trip: “Every year at least one person passes out due to altitude sickness. If you feel like you’re going to be that person, talk to one of the trip leaders immediately.”) The worst I have to worry about, it seems, is a sunburn, and the temperature never drops below sixty. I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t moved down there yet, now that I think about it. Anyway, I’m kind of looking forward to it, because it means a respite from the 245290873 new Chinese words I have to learn every night.
Since today wasn’t that interesting or meaty, I’m going to field some questions people have asked me. These aren’t really frequently asked, since I’ve heard most of them from only one person, so instead of FAQs they’re just going to be AQs instead.

Q: How are you?
A: I’m fine. Like, if something happened, I’d definitely tell you about it.

Q: No, really. How’s Beijing?
A: Beijing (or, as a couple of people and I have started calling it, “the Beezh”) is an interesting place. You’ve no doubt seen all the pictures of people in shanties with new multimillion-dollar-a-unit condos going up in the background, but it’s still much, much weirder to see them out your window on the train ride into town. I also feel like my impression isn’t super accurate yet, because the city is still in full Olympics/Paralympics mode, so it’s extra clean, extra uncrowded, etc. Apparently there are a lot of street food vendors that will come back once we stop being under so much scrutiny, which I am looking forward to. Another weird thing I’ve noticed is that, at least around my part of town, there is a very, very faint smell of rotting fruit. I don’t notice it anymore except when I walk around certain areas where it’s particularly strong, but it took a few days to get used to. Also, most of the city doesn’t have much personality on face value. If you chose a random, major road, you’d probably find some restaurants and clothing stores on it, but nothing particularly culturally significant. What there is, though, is very well-preserved and seems quite well-integrated into the city (the constantly-being-demolished hutongs aside).

Q: How bad is the air quality? What is the weather like?
A: This is actually a Q A’ed with great F. I have a hard time commenting since I got here after the Olympics, but thus far it has been…middling. Most days are moderately “hazy” (to use the government’s line) but there have been great variations in both directions. For example, last Friday was awful. I couldn’t see the sun all day, the sky had literally no color in it, and the sunset wasn’t colors like it is in most places. Instead, it was just a faint orange circle that kept getting lower and lower until it disappeared. That Sunday, by contrast (the day I went to the Summer Palace) was as lovely and clear a day as you’d see in any major city in the US, with a brilliant blue sky and languidly drifting white clouds. So it comes and goes. The weather itself is mostly hot and humid this time of year; it actually reminds me a fair amount of Chicago.

Q: Have you met any cool people yet?
A: Yes! Most Beijingers are very friendly, albeit a touch incomprehensible. My favorite is the lady who runs a little kiosk across the street from my campus. The kiosk is open at seemingly all hours, selling bottled drinks and cigarettes, but until about ten or eleven in the morning she also has her husband there making jianbing,** the greatest breakfast ever. I come by there so often (for forty cents they’re hard to pass up) that she knows me, and greets me by my Chinese name (Lei Li) and knows how I like my jianbing – not too spicy, with extra cilantro – without having to ask, which is sort of the Beijing equivalent of your barista knowing how you want your latte made every morning. What a sweetie. A close second are the meek but super-sweet women who work at the bakery next door to campus, which is sadly closed for the next two days for remodeling. A closer third is one of my Chinese teachers, a chubby woman in her early twenties named Yu Laoshi*** who must have been a children’s TV show host in a previous life, because she uses this insanely high tone of voice and is very congratulatory. She kind of has to be seen to be believed, but she’s crazy happy and everyone I know loves her.

Q: What’s the best thing you’ve eaten?
A: I don’t know – I wish my host family went out to eat more, because I haven’t gone out to eat a lot (Chinese food is served family-style, so it’s no fun unless you’re with a group). I’ve had some excellent gong bao chicken, which is allegedly the basis for kung pao chicken in the US but tastes nothing like it – here, they use delicious fresh veggies, and the sauce is light and tangy instead of gloppy and overly sweet. I’ve also had delicious versions of pretty much everything I’ve eaten for Dim Sum. In fact, the only things I’ve had that I didn’t like were overly spicy things, which is a matter of personal taste. My host dad’s cooking is hit and miss: some things are really good, like the eggplant dish I love and this delicious thing he makes with bitter cucumbers and vinegar,**** but some of it’s really bland.

Q: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten?
A: Still the blueberry potato chips, but here’s a thing that happened to me last night: I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed when the light bulb went out. I explained it to my mom, who said that she didn’t have the right kind of bulb but would get one in the morning. I rooted around in my bag in the faint light coming from under the door, grabbed an appropriately-sized tube, squirted the blue paste onto my toothbrush, and started going for it. I was so tired I didn’t notice the taste was a little off, and it took me about a minute and a half to realize I’d been brushing my teeth with Lanacane. However, you’re only supposed to call Poison Control if you ingest it, and since I hadn’t swallowed any I just chalked it up to me not being super smart and brushed my teeth very carefully with real toothpaste for an extra long time.

Q: Wait, so if you don’t read the menus how do you feed yourself?
A: When you get street food, which is what I do most of the time, it’s all right there, so you just point at it if it looks good (it all looks good) and then pay about twenty cents for it. Out at restaurants, I’ve had the most success with identifying what the group wants (for example, a spicy dish, something with cold noodles, something with beef, and a soup) and then asking what the waitperson recommends in those various categories. This has never turned me wrong and it probably never will.

Q: What do you do for fun?
A: I eat street food, I explore places (such as the area behind the supermarket, or Nanluogu Hutong, to which I am already planning a return trip) (also the picture at the top is another NLGHT picture), and I go out some nights. If you go to a good place and stake out an outdoor table with a friend or two, grabbing a beer and watching the world go by is a killer way to spend some time. I’m also really excited because I can get into clubs now, which are ridiculously fun. I’m going to try and drag some people to a hip-hop one this weekend.

Q: How touristy is it?
A: Depends. The major sites – the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, etc. – have all their stuff in English as well, but I’m sure that was going on well before the Olympics. There are a few official “Olympic designated” restaurants which have menus in English, but for some reason these have never seemed that good. As a rule, any restaurant that advertises an “English menu” is going to suck, especially if it’s in a touristy area. A lot of the Nanluogu Hutong ones do this too, but they cater more to expats than foreigners, so it’s cool. That street can do no wrong, I swear.

Q: Do you feel like your Chinese is getting better?
A: Yes. Being around Chinese people (and, at home, Chinese television) does really help get your ears acclimated to the sounds of the language, which is what I was having the most trouble with. The great thing about Chinese TV, too, is that it has little subtitles at the bottom of the screen, because different dialects use the same characters to mean the same things but assign them different sounds, and this way people from all over China can tell what’s going on. Reading is often easier for me to understand than trying to listen to people’s Beijing accents, so with this way I’ve managed to pick up some of the major plot points of my host family’s favorite soap opera (the guy and the girl are engaged, but there’s this shadowy “other woman” in the background and the girl is freaking out over it).

Q: What’s the coolest word you’ve learned?
A: It’s actually a phrase: bu san, bu si, which literally means “not three, not four” but is used to describe sketchy or creepy people or things. Many things in Beijing are bu san, bu si, so I’ve had ample opportunity to use this one. Most of the Chinese swears are not that interesting, and the one that I particularly like I will not elaborate on as it is moderately appalling.

If you write and ask me more questions, I will answer them, at some point! Tomorrow will likely be pretty quiet too, but Saturday…yikes.

*Like many other language-intensive programs, IES instituted a pledge that requires students to speak Mandarin exclusively except if they’re talking to one of the program directors, it’s an emergency (“How do you say ‘my dorm is on fire?’ Wo de…um, wo de sushe…AAAAGHGHGH”), or you’re in the student lounge, which is heavily frequented for this reason. However, almost nobody I know takes the pledge seriously anywhere outside the building or after the initial thirty seconds of a conversation. Most of us just don’t have the vocabulary to keep it going.

**Jianbing are a very common breakfast food in the Beijing area. They start their (short, if I’m eating them) lives as crepes, but then a cracked egg is poured over the top and spread out thinly over the crepe, which is then sprinkled with green onions and cilantro and flipped over to cook the egg part. Meanwhile, the other side is brushed lightly with hoisin sauce, soy paste, and, if you want, some chili paste. Finally, this thing that looks like a really thin, crisp-fried wonton skin is put into the middle, and the jianbing is folded up and eaten. They are so good.

***In many cases, Chinese people are addressed not by Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. but by their job titles, so Yu Laoshi literally means Teacher Yu. Similarly, your doctor would be called Li Yisheng, or Doctor Li (but this signifies the profession, not the degree of higher learning), and your mechanic would be Chen Shifu, or Master Worker Chen. Of course, there are also instances when you would call someone Mr. Yang or Ms. Liu. I should have taken Spanish.

****Chinese cuisine has four main flavors: salty, spicy, sweet, and sour. It took me about a day and a half to discover that I love sour more than all the others put together.

Today was good, today was fun

Apparently a couple people got upset over my last update because I implied that I liked sneakers more than other Meaningful Aspects of Life. This is not actually true. I thought I had made that relatively clear through excessive use of hyperbole and the general knowledge that nobody could actually be that shallow, but I’m sorry if you were offended by it. (The hyperbole will continue, though, so I suggest that literalists look elsewhere.*)
Anyway, today I had no classes – there’s an option to do an internship with a Chinese company, which I think is pretty useless because most of the students here, myself included, don’t know enough to be useful in any significant capacity, and the internships all meet on Wednesday mornings. Neither of my area studies classes met this afternoon, so I had the entire free day to explore. I woke up later than usual (eight) and emerged into the living room to find both my host parents gone and my breakfast on the table. After consulting a guidebook over my favorite sesame seed cakes, I decided I could do with a little inner peace (who couldn’t?) and headed for the Yonghegong Lama Temple, Beijing’s biggest Tibetan Buddhist temple and monastery. Frankly, I’m a little surprised they still let the place exist; if it weren’t such a well-preserved and popular place, they probably would tear it down, because it is a hotbed of Tibetan culture and Tibetan stuff in general, and if there is one thing the Chinese government doesn’t like, it’s Tibetan things.** It didn’t seem to be particularly well-guarded or cracked-down-on, either. In fact, it was quite crowded, more so than I thought it would be on a Wednesday morning.
Unfortunately, the swarming crowds of worshippers and obnoxious people on package tours disrupted my quest for inner peace a bit, not that I would have gotten anywhere close anyway. But it was still a beautiful walk – the entire complex is enclosed with a tall wall, so you feel like you’ve escaped from the Beijing hustle and bustle, even though there are major streets within feet of the boundaries.
I had never been to an active Buddhist center before (the closest I’d been was the annual Enmanji Teriyaki BBQ) and was very surprised at the devoutness of many of the laypeople. I pictured lay Buddhism as a pretty chill religion, with most of the focus on action instead of orthodoxy and ritual. I still think that’s mostly accurate, but the latter definitely have their place too. You had to pay (about $3.50) to get into the temple, and from there you could wander the grounds for free as long as you liked. However, there was an unofficial rule that for each hall in which you wanted to worship, you had to burn three sticks of incense outside before entering. As a result, there was a huge metal basin, sort of like a BBQ pit, outside of each building, and they were all always crowded with people throwing their incense in and bowing and praying. This did little to nothing for the already iffy air quality today, but it did make everything smell really good. Inside each hall there were different altars depicting various aspects of the Buddha and some other bodhisattvas, the most impressive by far of which was a huge standing Buddha statue that was five stories high and carved out of a single piece of sandalwood. Yes, just one. I have no idea where they found a sandalwood tree that big – the statue was probably twenty feet wide and something like sixty feet tall – but the Guinness Book of Records certified it, so I will trust them. The statue was painted gold, and unfortunately I was not allowed to photograph it. The ground in front of this altar, obviously the crown jewel of the complex, was covered in all colors of incense, as the tray that had been provided for them had overflowed a long time ago.
Monks in chocolate-brown robes (which immediately endeared them to me, as chocolate brown is my favorite color and a universally flattering one) and brightly colored sashes strolled around the complex, doing things like cleaning up the altars and chanting, but also stuff like signing for FedEx packages, in an interesting modern twist. Overall, they seemed very happy and easygoing, as do Buddhist monks everywhere, and relatively unconcerned with the wackness surrounding their native home and their adopted (forcibly adopted) government.
I had planned to meet up with Max in the afternoon, but since he was still entrenched in classes I decided to strike out on my own a bit more until I heard from him. I got some shopping done on the streets surrounding Yonghegong (if you’re my little brother, Abby, or Arianne, I got your stuff today!) and headed for a place recommended in my indispensable Lonely Planet: Encounters Beijing guidebook called Plastered T-Shirts that sold its own original designs, on a small street called Nanluogu Hutong. It was a bit far from any subway stop, but I figured I didn’t mind a bit of a walk.
The stroll there was quite nice – I stayed on a major street most of the time, but it had several pretty restaurants, food stands (I had the most delicious sesame-paste bun and it was twelve cents) and, for some reason, shops selling musical instruments. When I finally had to make a turn onto Nanluogu Hutong, I wasn’t sure I was in the right place at first – it just seemed like a run-down alley – but headed forward anyway. About half a block in, I was greeted with the loveliest place I’ve seen here so far, bar none.
Hutongs are a uniquely Beijing design of courtyard houses along small back roads, and the government is demolishing them by the dozens to make room for high-rises and the like. Fortunately, though, Nanluogu was one of the first to be protected, so it will likely be around for a long time. The streets were verboten for cars and unevenly cobbled, and the buildings’ traditional stone walls had not only been preserved but reinforced. The steep, tiled roofs had kept their shape and unmistakable Chineseyness, and the sides of the streets were lined with leafy green trees. It was like I’d entered another world, entirely separate from the Beijing with the traffic jams and the tall Soviet buildings and the crappy air. Many, if not most, of the buildings had traditional hand-carved wooden signs or windows on them, cultivating a very languid, relaxing air throughout the whole street. Off to the sides, even smaller alleys led to people’s homes (despite the development put into this hutong, many of the homes surrounding it lack indoor plumbing, so easy access to the many public toilets is imperative) and into small garden courtyards, usually filled with potted plants and belonging to restaurants or bars that offered outdoor seating.
The vast majority of the spaces with doors actually facing Nanluogu Hutong, though, were stores – not chain stores, but unique tiny spaces selling fabric, hipster-y t-shirts and gifts, and in one case, an entire small gallery filled with little statues made of bent silverware, some of which lit up. The rest were bars and restaurants – some upscale, some cheap, all elegantly located and furnished (for a good example, check out the picture I posted along with this entry of a small café), and many of which had their own inner courtyard, rooftop terrace, or both. If I ever got a date over here, I would take him here to eat dinner; having a second-floor view of everything gently lit at night must be nothing short of magical.
After doing some extensive research on this hutong after getting back home, I’ve heard some internet grumbling that it’s too touristy. I’d beg to differ – there were relatively few people there at all, and there were maybe only three other Westerners that I noticed over the course of my wanderings. A lot of businesses are owned by expats, so the owners will speak English, or the restaurants will have English menus, but this isn’t done in a touristy way like it is in some other parts of town, where people will physically try to pull you into their restaurant or bar. Instead, the option is just there, but the lingua franca is definitely still Chinese. I am surprised that such a peaceful, beautiful street was so quiet, but I guess I’m happy about it too; it should be one of the city’s best-kept secrets instead of being overrun by people trampling on its plants, stubbing out their cigarettes on its walls, and generally wrecking its peacefulness by bringing all the things that large groups of tourists bring with them. This is just why I like exploring cities on my own; when you’re willing to go off the beaten path a little, you find the most wonderful parts all on your own.
I finally did meet up with Max and we headed for Wangfujing, Beijing’s best-known shopping street. I was actually pretty disappointed – the mall was just a mall with luxury brands I could have bought back in the States, and Max even joked that the owners probably had to pay Chinese people to walk around in it. Wangfujing Snack Street, touted as the street food capital of Beijing, had several promising-looking eateries if you wanted to sit down, but most of the street food (actually, most of the restaurants in general) was similar and touristy – stall after stall of weird things like scorpions and grasshoppers on skewers, none of which I saw actual Chinese people eating. Looking at them, I felt myself starting to renege on my promise to eat every weird thing set in front of me (although I still would be willing to try the seahorses), especially when one of the skewered pupae
PLEASE SIT DOWN BEFORE YOU READ THIS. THIS SHOULD NOT BE READ BY THOSE WITH HEART OR NERVOUS CONDITIONS, PREGNANT OR NURSING WOMEN, OR PEOPLE WITH BACK PROBLEMS. CONSULT A DOCTOR BEFORE READING.
started pulsating and moving around, and one of the scorpions, which really seemed to not want to be there anymore (not that I blame the little dude) followed suit, thrashing its legs around and waving its stinger furiously. It’s good to know that your food is fresh, but I don’t want it to see it still living before I eat it, especially when its movement would cause me to squish it under my foot in a slightly different set of circumstances. I ended up getting an octopus skewer instead (tentacles only, henceforth fully dead).
The rest of my shopping was pretty fruitless, so I headed home to the Zhangs’ after a successful and fully understood (on both sides!) phone call to tell them that I would be late due to being held up in Beijing’s awful rush-hour traffic. The traffic is still halved due to the Olympic/Paralympic policy of only allowing cars with even/odd numbered plates on the streets on alternating days, so that wasn’t the worst part of the traffic. The real reason it takes so long to get anywhere by car or bus here is that for some reason, the lights take FOREVER to change. My record time for waiting at one red light, wanting to go straight ahead, is seven minutes, and that was one cycle of the lights. Beijing must have access to traffic engineers somehow, so why this ridiculousness is allowed is beyond me. At any rate, if you’re stopped at a red light, you’d better hope you like the view out your window, because you’ll be looking at it for a long, long time.
So I arrived home to the family sitting down to dinner with Bin Bin. We chatted a little and I had more of Mr. Zhang’s tasty eggplant dish, which I will be learning how to make before I leave, whenever that may be. Things are going better with them; I can understand them a little more now, and when they sat down to watch TV tonight I was able to make some conversation by asking about what was on (what time period is this set in? Is Character A Character B’s girlfriend? What’s the prize if this person wins this game show?). Best of all, I got them to agree on my set of Epic Weekend Plans to stay out all night dancing and then catch the sun going up in Tiananmen Square. I think they liked that, as they seem like a very patriotic family. They’ve never mentioned it outright, but there are a ton of cultural knickknacks and little flags around their house, and even a couple hammer-and-sickle symbols. However, like everyone else in China, they are really, really into Kentucky Fried Chicken, which reigns supreme as the fast food establishment of choice – not McDonalds, not even street food.

*I promise you’ll be super sad if you don’t click that. Best first result from a Google search EVER.

**And traffic rules, and FDA-like oversight of consumer products, and efficiency, and basic food safety, and the environment, and…

Oy gevalt.

An interesting post, courtesy of another blog, about the...differences?...between the Chinese and American press.

I visit the REAL Temple of Heaven, and other stories

I have something to talk to you about.
Everyone has things that give their lives meaning. Some have religion. (Being a comparative religion major has made me as agnostic as one can possibly be.) Some have family. (I love my family, but I spend ¾ of the year away from them, and I don’t plan on having one of my own.) Still others have their jobs, their communities, their goals for the future, etc.
I have something different.
I have shoes.
I started working in Evanston’s mom-and-pop shoe store last fall. It’s a pretty nice store; they sell Keens, Clarks, Merrells, the works, so my commission is usually quite good. I am good at my job, and like it because I can get up to 75% off shoes that the store sells. However, there is something missing. My shoe store has no adidas. In my mind, this is like operating a package tour to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower, or making a pizza without the cheese. adidas are the pinnacle of footwear.Consider, for instance, the Samba: its clean lines, its bold contrasts, its gummy sole, perfect for indoor soccer, which I do not play. Or the ZX, which goes flawlessly from the track to the club, if you get it in a good color instead of the pedestrian white and gray ones that boring people wear. Or the Forum, essential for any 80s enthusiast/b-boy or girl/stylin’ person.
The greatest of all these is the Superstar. A true marvel of modern engineering, the possibilities of this flawless shoe are endless: get a sleek black pair and wear them to impress your date! Buy one of the tricolor editions and impress everyone with your laid-back, but still super cool, footwear style. Or be my hero, buy one of the (now sadly out of circulation) Flavors of the World Vin Qing Mings, spend obscene amounts of money on an outfit that goes with orange, burgundy, and pale purple, but damn, rock them with pride, because you know that you have the actual coolest pair of shoes in the entire world.
At least, that’s what I would do.
At any rate, the Superstar is possibly the most classy, versatile shoe on earth, and they are massively comfortable to boot. I am always in search of more adidas, especially since I gravitate towards brightly colored pairs that go with maybe two outfits, and I wanted something a little more matching-y, something I could wear around. I originally had my heart set on a pair of Sambas, but maintained an open mind last night as Max and I set off for…get ready…

THE BIGGEST ADIDAS STORE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD

Four brand-spanking-new floors of sportswear, accessories, designer goods, interactive exhibits, and, of course, the greatest shoes on the globe – all here in Beijing, in a recently built glassy tower that shines from the distance like a beacon of hope, style, and excellence, casting its light on the lesser stores in the shopping mall (Puma, Nike, Mizuno – I’m looking at you) as if to say, “Fear not, friends. There is a better way.”
I walked there from the subway stop and was immediately impressed when I stepped indoors and saw an entire concierge, with a sign to the left listing all the services the store offered: basketball court booking, exercise consultation, design customization. I felt like a pilgrim who had traveled by camel from untold miles away and finally arrived in Mecca. It was all I could do not to drop to my knees right on the spot.
I wandered around in slack-jawed amazement and eventually made my way up to the fourth floor, where, alas, there were no Sambas to be found (I still think this is a glaring omission). I did some seriously strategic, Sun-Tzu-like thinking and eventually decided on a black pair of Superstars with white trim, which were a bit more than I was planning on spending,* but I did really need sneakers, and I considered them my souvenir to myself (the first of many, indubitably). After a little more slack-jawed amazement and a couple vain attempts to explain to Max why “the brand with the three stripes” moved me with such cultish fervor, we left, shopped around briefly at some other places, and went to Sanlitun for a drink.
Sanlitun is one of the three main bar areas in Beijing (the others being Wudaokou, which I was severely unimpressed with, and Houhai, which I have not yet visited). It’s no longer considered the place to be, but there are some fairly legendary clubs nearby, and at night the entire street lights up with what look like neon, extra-strength Christmas lights – the trees and exteriors of the bars are strung with them, and the effect can be pretty magical if you allow yourself to be sort of soft-hearted and mushy about the whole affair. The people-watching is excellent, too; there’s a good mix of Chinese and foreigners, not just Anglophones, but people from all over the world. Max and I had barely ordered our beers when we were approached by two members of the Spanish Paralympic team, wheelchair-bound but definitely ripped enough to take me out without any trouble if need be (I probably do need to be taken out, in every sense of the word). We briefly chatted before they left, no doubt to another bar (on our side of the street there were literally three city blocks of nothing but bars all smashed together) and sat and watched the world go by. Unfortunately, I’d told my host parents I’d be back at eleven, so I finished my beer and hopped a cab home.
I’d told my host mom that I’d be back at eleven (the curfew set by my program for weeknights), and, knowing my new parents’ early sleep habits, assured them that I was comfortable coming home after they went to bed, because I had a key, and that it was really not necessary to wait for me to get back. However, when I opened the door, I was faced with a grumpy-looking host mom, who immediately and incomprehensibly bade me good night as she walked straight to her room.
This turn of events made me even more determined to find a way out of my living situation; I am an American college student, dammit, and I will not be made to feel like an anomaly because I like to stay out late and sometimes have fun. I’d discussed my problems with the program director before, and he encouraged me to “just wait it out,” adding that “the last student who lived there had a really good time.” Awesome for her, but people have different perceptions of fun; what is great for some people is boring for others (this is why the Golf Channel exists). I then vented to a couple more people in charge, who sympathized but told me not to give up just yet, and also talked to one of the RAs here who had lived in a similar situation. She gave me the best advice yet, which was to spend time with them during the afternoon and evening and then peace out at about nine or so, explaining that you’re a night owl, and assure them that they don’t need to wait up for you. She also promised that this would not get me kicked out of the homestay, which, although it would more or less solve my problem, might be a bit of a black mark on my record.
Today went better, though – I told them I was leaving to study, which was actually true this time, was back ten minutes before the promised arrival time (ten), and returned to see them watching TV (quelle surprise). They were watching something really insipid, kind of like the Chinese version of MXC, but they obviously hadn’t stayed up on my behalf, which made me feel better. We “talked” for about fifteen minutes (our “talking” consisted of me using the proper verbs for things that were going on, and my host mom telling me new verbs) and then I went to take a shower**. When I got out, they had gone to bed, but it was one of our better interactions, to be sure. I keep waffling on this, but right now I feel like I could make this a home if I’m not allowed to move out. They seem to let me do whatever I want, although it sometimes comes with caveats, and tonight my host dad made be this really good eggplant dish because I’d said a while back that eggplant was my favorite vegetable, which I thought was really nice***.
When I went out to study after dinner I got sidetracked by a game of badminton (which I am ordinarily mediocre at, and during the twilight when it was hard to see the birdie I was horrible). One of my fellow students, Andrew, was outside practicing his Chinese on a couple local kids who lived close to campus, periodically asking me what words meant or how to say things. After I got sick of swatting halfheartedly at the air with my badminton racket, I walked over to join him and met the kids he was with, who were clearly quite poor but super sweet. The ten-year-old girl was especially beautiful and spoke some English, so I talked to her a little while Andrew asked one of the boys some questions about kung fu and playfully pretended to use martial arts moves on the kids, to their great delight.
Some older people, presumably the kids’ parents or aunts or uncles or something, came over and starting talking to us as well. Their Mandarin was a little hard to understand (then again, everyone’s is because I’m white), but we got out of them that they were from Henan province, what their names were, how old the kids were, and some other basic information. Then they started asking Andrew if I was his girlfriend, at which point I laughed, he looked confused, and the men clarified by saying that I was “feichang piaoliang” (extremely pretty). I kept turning the compliment down, as Chinese culture dictates, but they insisted, so that was a nice boost for my self-esteem. We got some pictures with the girl and one of the men, which I will post once I receive them. All in all, several successful interactions with the locals today, AND I have a new pair of sneakers. Excellent.
I also experienced the other components of my learning schedule for the first time yesterday and today. Yesterday I met my language tutor, a sweet guy who’s studying for his masters at this university and has accepted a small salary from my program to help us speak Chinese. For one hour per student, four days a week, he has to hang out with me and at least one other girl and help us with our Chinese. Judging by the number of times I told him I didn’t understand, this is not a fun or easy job. Nonetheless, he keeps in high spirits and is very kind to me, and his Mandarin is also largely unaccented, which makes him much easier to understand than most of the Beijingers, who sound like they’re talking with a mouthful of really hot oatmeal that they can’t spit out.
Both of my area studies classes started today as well. They’re definitely the ugly stepsister to the language classes, meeting only twice a week for an hour or so, but both of mine will be fun, I think. I am taking one class on Chinese history during the Qing dynasty, the last before Chiang Kai-Shek, when Westerners started laying claim to China and doing whatever they wanted with it. That professor is an American who’s in Beijing working for his Ph.D. He’s probably in his early thirties and has a good sense of humor and a very enjoyable style of lecturing – lots of discussion, lots of helpful explaining. My second class is calligraphy, which I chose mostly because it had no homework, but that professor is one of the best people I’ve met here. He immediately gave off a lively impression – he looks pretty unexceptional, short and of average build, maybe sixty, with a pencil moustache, but his eyes always have a definite hint of sass in them. He speaks no English, so one of the higher-level students translates for him, but his Chinese is very clearly spoken and simple, so many of the people in the class can understand him anyway. As I understand, he’s a Manchurian, one of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China, and he comes from a very ancient lineage that may or may not have royal blood in it somewhere. He showed us all his calligraphy stuff (including a $160,000 inkstone, which we will not be using, obviously) and talked for a while about why he did what he did, the history of calligraphy, etc. There was a clear rapport between him and the returning students, and he seemed like the kindest, most caring man, encouraging all of us to come to him if we had questions about ancient or “authentic” Beijing. I am really looking forward to that.

*For some reason, all the stuff in the adidas store was more expensive than it was in the US. I have no idea why this is; the average Chinese person is much less likely than the average American to be able to afford such luxuries, and, as Max pointed out, all the stuff is made in China anyway, so if anything they’re saving on shipping costs. What a weird country.

**Even more pernicious than the Zhangs’ habit of staying in is their shower. They have a normal Western toilet and sink, and a tile floor, but the shower is one of those European-style jobs that just consists of a showerhead on a long, flexible hose that you move around and spray yourself with wherever you want. The weird thing here is that there’s nothing on their floor to keep the water in a contained area; the floor is just flat in the entire room, so if you get any water on the floor there’s nothing to keep it from spreading out over the entire room. The bathroom has several Rubbermaid bins, maybe a foot and a half in diameter, apparently used to collect the water and then pour it directly down the drain, but a) it’s really hard to get the water in the bin when you’re spraying it on yourself and b) the drain kind of sucks so when you pour the water out, it usually backs up a bit and then the floor gets all watery anyway and you have to whisk it into the drain with your foot. There’s probably a better way to do this but I have no idea what it is.

***A not-so-nice thing I ate today: blueberry potato chips. I thought it was a mistake or a joke at first, but the little campus convenience store had them right next to the other bags of Lay's in normal flavors. I figured I couldn't not buy them, so I got one and ate about half of it before I just couldn't handle it anymore and threw them out. They tasted exactly like blueberries and potato chips at the same time. Weirdest thing ever.

Meet the parents?

One of the 25098734 Chinese words I had to learn today meant “succeed at a test or trial”. How timely.
Friday was a fun day – we did another “mystery Beijing” trip, except this one was sort of modeled after The Amazing Race. In teams of four, we were given clues that led us to different places in Beijing, where IES staff would give us the next clue, etc. The first one to return from all the stops won. We lost despite having taken a cab everywhere. Fortunately, everything is super cheap. After that we had a fancy dinner to celebrate our last day of orientation (HUZZAH) and then I met up with my friend Max (those of you who don’t know him from school will recognize him as either my BFF Arianne’s boyfriend or the kid who’s obsessed with looking up islands on Google Earth) who is also spending the semester here but at a different school. After some fruitless walking around we decided to cab it over to a club in another part of town with some of his eight-hour-old British friends from school. The club was amazing – it was the archetypal fancy-bordering-on-ridiculous expatriate-ish club – not least because ladies did not have to pay a cover charge (although the ridiculous phenomenon of seven-dollar-drinks was alive and well – why places charge that much for something I could make is beyond me). I danced my little heart out until about 3 a.m. and then headed back for the last night in my hotel-dorm.
In the morning I packed, absconded with the hotel-dorm’s shampoo, body wash, toothbrush, comb, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, took a walk, and fairly promptly got lost along a back road. I’ve heard people (in my textbooks…) say that Beijing is laid out very practically, but I assure you that in my part of town nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve found it nearly impossible to do things like walk a block over – the streets aren’t laid out in a grid, and they frequently dead-end or turn or don’t intersect with the other streets like they should – which has led me to some interesting places. For example, yesterday I just wanted to buy a peach to eat, so I went to get one from my fruit-vending lady* and then decided to just walk south a block and go back to school down the next street over. However, this proved impossible, and I found myself wandering about two bus stops’ worth of distance farther than I’d intended to go. (Buses don’t stop every five feet here like they do in the US, so this is a pretty significant distance, probably a couple miles or so.) I finally found a street that led back the way I wanted to go, which to my pleasant surprise ran along between a canal and a pretty park area. However, on the same walk I saw probably the most severe poverty I’ve encountered here thus far: houses with plywood sides and tin roofs, ragpickers whose “yards” are filled with junk that they sell for however much is possible, etc. I know that it’s hugely clichéd to say that “Beijing is a city of contrasts” (special thanks to Gawker for calling out every stupid journalist who says that) so I won’t say it, but the gaps here between rich and poor are probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. As I walked past the ramshackle houses, I invariably thought back to the night before at the club, where people who wanted to sit at a table in the room with the dance floor had to order a minimum of RMB 2000 (about $300) worth of drinks. The tables were all in use, and about half of the occupants were Chinese. The reason I know this is because Max and the Brit Squad and I unceremoniously got kicked off of a table because we didn’t want to order the equivalent of a bottle of Special Stoli each just for the sake of resting our feet.
At any rate, I eventually did find my way back to school, headed to the supermarket** to buy a notebook, and made another excellent discovery, this time food-related. I’ve been eating street food with great frequency because I usually don’t have the time to sit down at a restaurant, and when I do I can’t read most of the menu. With street food, though, you just point and pay, and it’s always good. This time I stopped at a small stand that that sold chuanr (pronounced chu-ar, or churrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr if you’re in Beijing), skewers of mutton developed by the Uighur people, a minority group native to the westernmost part of China, north of Tibet. The Uighurs are ethnically Kazakh/Kyrgysz (OH SPELLING, CHECK IT)/Uzbek/etc, and they are Muslim so they don’t eat pork, which is the default meat for most Chinese. So instead, they take skewers of seasoned lamb and quickly cook them in hot oil, as the woman running my lunch stall did today. It was delicious – hot and greasy, and the pieces were pretty small, so it was easy to eat and all you got was flavor, instead of eating big chunks resulting in an uninteresting wad of meat in your mouth at the end. I got two normal chuanr (the skewers were pencil-length) and a chicken one that also looked really good. It had this white stuff in between the chicken pieces, which I thought was fat (the Chinese eat a lot of fat by itself – it’s in chunks on most of the chuanr I’ve seen and has even been the “meat” in one dish I ordered at a restaurant. Thing is, though, it’s always been really good. Yes, I am disgusting.) but I am now about 99% sure was cartilage. I ate it anyway, because the seasoning was superb and I didn’t want to waste my delicious chuanr, putting cartilage in first place for Weirdest Food Eaten Thus Far. I would not recommend it.
I hurried back to the hotel-dorm to pack my things and prepare to meet my host family. They ended up living in an apartment complex literally right next door to my school, which is super convenient. The Zhang family has two parents, probably about my parents’ age, but retired – the mother was a doctor, and the father owned his own company – and a 28-year-old daughter named Bin Bin, who is super cute and speaks English quite well. However, Bin Bin doesn’t live here, and only comes over a couple times a week at most. The Zhang parents are both very kind, but they don’t speak a word of English, and they don’t seem to understand my Chinese that well, which is probably because it’s not very good. I have trouble understanding them too, frequently, and without Bin Bin around to help out it’s been difficult making conversation; my confidence in my Chinese has gone down since I’ve started talking to them and realizing they didn’t understand a lot of what I was trying to say. However, they are obviously very caring (right off Mrs. Zhang offered to help me with my homework), sweet as pie, and Mr. Zhang is a good cook. (They also have this adorable Pekingesey-looking dog who they are constantly feeding meat to. As a result, the dog is massively fat and waddles around a lot, but he’s cute as the dickens and very friendly). I felt bad for these people and quite uncomfortable myself; I didn’t want to seem unfriendly, aloof, or ungrateful, but it’s hard to have a conversation when people don’t really understand each other.
This morning I woke up, had some of the worst pastries ever for breakfast with a warm bowl of powdered milk and felt sorry for myself until Max called and asked if I wanted to go to the Summer Palace that afternoon. I immediately took him up on it; the Zhangs were spending their day watching TV, and I wanted to get out and explore. After a subway/bus/cab ride there, we spent a few hours walking around the giant park, which was built as a playground for some of the last emperors (and Dowager Empress Cixi, who is pretty much the same person as Austria’s Empress Sisi and pronounced more or less the same too) during the very hot summers. It was a gorgeous day – the sky was clear and blue, with very little trace of the pollution that has plagued the city for the past couple of days – and we had an excellent time fooling around with three kinds of popsicles in our hands (including a corn-flavored one, which was far and away the best) and seeing the beautifully restored temples and halls, which all had names that followed the pattern of “Hall of [overly romanticized adjective] [prissy noun]”. The most impressive, though, was Cixi’s marble boat, ostensibly commissioned with the Chinese navy’s money and very lavishly painted. The boat is about as long as two semis and has a lower floor and a balcony, and was apparently the place to party if you were in the good graces of the Qing royalty.
We went back to the area around my campus and hunted for street food, which consisted of three kinds of dumplings, chuanr, little egg-custard tarts that were ridiculously flaky and delicious, and bottled rose-flavored tea, which is possibly the most delicious and refreshing beverage I’ve found for the hot days here. We took our haul and sat on the steps of a restaurant and talked about various things, including me telling him the Cheerio joke, which he did not find that funny. I had been asked to be home by five for dinner, which was served promptly at five. I wondered why it was so early, and after the second night in a row that the Zhangs went to bed at 8:30, I understood.
When I was trying to decide between staying with a family and living in a dorm with a Chinese roommate (my other option) my BFF Abby, who had stayed with a family during her tenure in Aix-en-Provence, told me that the most important thing was to be sure that I was happy with the family, and to speak up if I didn’t feel like it was a good environment for me. I feel bad because I had really wanted a homestay, and had told the director that, but I feel like it’s too much freedom to give up. The returning students I’ve talked to from this program all listed their favorite things – going out for karaoke with their Chinese friends, dancing on the weekends, taking nighttime walks in the parks and people-watching – as things that would be impossible for me to do when my host parents go to bed an hour after sunset. I want the freedom to live in a dorm on my schedule, study late at night if necessary (and it will be, since I have more words to learn than you can shake a stick at), and go out with friends if the situation calls for it. Since both the Zhangs are retired, they stay in most of the time, and I don’t want to spend my evenings watching Mr. Zhang change the channels in his boxers and then have the apartment to myself starting at 8:30. When I signed up to live with a host family, I envisioned a family who had the hobbies the program director assured me were common: going out to eat, making new friends, touring Beijing. I don’t like to be alone, and I’d like someone to go out to eat with, someone who could be a friend. Having a Chinese roommate, who is more flexible and possibly knows some English, is sounding better and better. I would love to make some Chinese friends who are around my age, and even Bin Bin is pretty well out of that age group. I came to Beijing to see how Chinese people lived, but I’d intended to live the life of a Chinese student, someone whose lifestyle I could identify with. The Zhangs don’t seem like they’re very well-off, either (host families get a stipend from the program for letting a student stay with them), so I feel weird asking them to go out for dinner or go sightseeing somewhere that’s within my reach, but may be financially difficult for them. I tried to break the ice by asking what their favorite places in Beijing were, to see if there was somewhere cheap or free that we could go, but after asking four or five times and not being understood I gave up.
This is by far the bigger problem - I am basically incommunicado with my family. The fault for this definitely mostly lies with me, but I’m a little confused since many of the other Chinese people I’ve talked to, be they at the supermarket showing me where the towels are, telling me what’s in the dish I just ate, or making conversation with me while they drove me to the club, have seemed to understand me pretty well. With my new family, though, I can count the number of sentences I’ve understood on one hand. A day and a half spent with them doesn’t sound like a lot, but imagine living in your own parents’ house and understanding three things they’ve said over the course of 36 hours. I have tried everything in my admittedly small arsenal: asking them to say things again, speak slower, use simpler words, etc. I’ve even resorted to writing things down on a couple of occasions, because we do not understand what the other person is saying. Most of the time I can tell if what they’re trying to say is a question or a statement; if it’s a statement I smile and nod, but if it’s a question I try to see if I can get by with the Chinese equivalent of “uh-huh”. When I ask them something, or try to talk to them, the same thing happens: they usually look confusedly at me, and I generally end up telling them that I’m sorry and not to worry about it. I feel trapped here. There is a waiting list for people who would like to live in homestays but whom the program director wasn’t able to fit in. I know a couple of those kids speak better Chinese than I do and don’t want to go out frequently, if at all, and I think they would fit in here better than me. The Zhangs are very kind, and from what I can deduce from their demeanor, very friendly. They are sweet people and they deserve to live with a student who can talk to them and who can fit into their lifestyle. I don’t want to live under a dusk-to-dawn house arrest for a semester, especially not when there are other students who would likely be a good fit for this homestay but aren’t able to live with any family. I think tomorrow I’ll ask the designated homestay RA if there’s still time to switch; when I moved out yesterday the students who weren’t in homestays were still in their dorm, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable or a lost cause. I hope not. I feel deeply embarrassed that I’m so unhappy here, in large part because I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those obnoxious American students who only cared about going out all the time, and I can see how someone might perceive me that way now. I absolutely didn’t come here to have that be my focus in any significant amount, but I’m not sure I can have a good experience here living the lifestyle of someone fifty years my senior, and spending time in China is too precious an experience to spend it being upset, bored, and unable to talk.
(I’m not actually as depressed as I sound; I had a great time at the Summer Palace eating the Cornsicle today, and I’ve met some friendly, funny, and kind people from my program as well. I’m just unsure and uncomfortable about the living situation.)

Dumpling tally: 23

*A uniquely Chinese quirk I’ve noticed is the fruit stand: my neighborhood has a TON (like, two or three on every small block) of fruit vendors, all selling more or less the same selection of fruit for almost identical prices. Most of these people have small storefronts, but quite a few operate out of their vans or even on a big blanket set out on a street corner. I am quite sure the latter two are illegal. By far the most omnipresent and popular fruit is watermelon, but I’m not entirely sure why this is; it’s not especially cheap compared to the other fruits for sale, but every vendor always has a ton in stock and most of the people I see shopping for fruit check out the watermelons.

**The supermarket is also sort of different from those in the US. The produce section is virtually nonexistent, as the overwhelming presence of fruit vendors like the ones mentioned above renders it unnecessary. At the supermarket nearest to me, the top floor is pretty normal-looking and has most of your standard-issue food,*** tweaked a bit for Chinese tastes (for example, live seafood). The bottom floor, though, has weird things like towels, shoes, and ready-to-hang art. The really cracked-out part is that despite the bottom floor being patrolled by no less than four police officers (not rent-a-cops, but actual police officers), the store sells a lot of obviously fake designer stuff, like the Fuma bag I saw the other day. After witnessing the Great Fake Fuwa Raid of ’08, I thought that knockoffs would have all but disappeared due to the Olympic-induced increased police presence, but none of the officers seemed to care.

***At the seafood counter, I saw a flat metal tray full of egg-sized live brown pupae. I was looking at them wriggling around in this really perturbing way AND THEN I SAW THIS LADY GIVE THE SEAFOOD GUY 2 RMB AND SHE JUST ATE IT, LIVE, LIKE YOU WOULD EAT A CARROT STICK OR PERHAPS A COOL RANCH DORITO. EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW!!!!!!!!!!! Unfortunately, I promised myself before I left that I’d tried every weird food offered to me except dog meat (which is apparently only served in Korean restaurants anyway), so if someone asks if I want a live pupa I’ll have to take them up on it. Evidently, though, the more common method of preparation is to stir-fry them, which kills them. I’m not sure which is worse: having that kind of blood on my hands, or eating a live pupa.