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.

List Post 4 - The Finer Things in China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

List Post 1

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

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

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

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

Dumpling Tally: 293

Shanghai'ed!

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

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

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

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

Dumpling tally: 240

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

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

*** High life.

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

Yonghegong Picture Post + Lamarama Pt. 2

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

Dumpling Tally: 200 (double centennial!!!)

Yakity Yak, Delicious Snack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'PLANGZ

Monday started out as a day like any other: with some Chinese. However, after the Chinese finished, things got a little more interesting. I’d met a woman during our Ladies’ Night who was trolling bars frequented by foreign students, trying to find native English speakers to come into her office and record phrases that would be used by a cell phone company. It was around $15 for forty-five minutes of work, so I gladly accepted, met her at the subway stop, and took a quick two-minute walk to her office, which turned out to be an apartment with a laptop, a copy of Adobe Audition, and a microphone. I spent about half the time reading numbers, dates and times (for example, “Friday, seven fifty-five in the morning”), but the other half she had me read random phrases, which ranged from the mundane and useful (for a cell phone company) to the weird and questionable. Examples:
I will text you on Sunday.
When should I call you?
He has returned home to the States.
Hey sweetie, what’s up?
I have no idea where the restaurant is.
I am thinking about you all the time. Love and love, Elizabeth.
If I pissed you off, my bad.
Judas Iscariot led Christ to his death.
I really miss having you in my bed.
And so on. I have no idea what half of those will be used for, but I got money, and you may hear my voice on your phone in a short while, as the phones will be sold in the US.
In the middle of the whole thing, Max asked if I wanted to go to a dumpling place he’d read about in a magazine a while back. [short pause while you infer what I did] After a short period of being lost, we found the place, which was reasonably full of Westerners and Chinese people alike. It looked like a pretty standard-issue Chinese place: wooden tables, waitresses wearing the same apron, pictures of the food on the wall, the works. But the similarities were only skin-deep. We were handed two picture menus, which reminded me of the board books I had as a baby. One was full of good-looking Chinese dishes. The other, over an inch thick, had only dumplings. While I sat back and let that sink in, Max dove in and picked out a few that sounded especially good. I soon joined in, and by the time the waitress came around with our tea we had a list of dumplings ready to go, accompanied by sautéed mustard greens with almonds and a chili-pomelo salad I’d had in Yunnan.
The first batch of dumplings (shown) came in about fifteen minutes, just after we’d finished the sides. They were delicious little things, steamed to perfection but not soggy, and crammed with meat, veggies, herbs, and spices. I quickly got out a pen so I could keep track on my napkin of how many I’d had as I shoveled them into my mouth with reckless abandon. After we finished the first plates (plateS!!!) we decided we were both still hungry and went back for round two. The next plate arrived laden with dumplings beautifully colored with vegetable juice, and we finished those off as well, although we both felt like we were going to blow up afterward (my four slices of pre-dinner pizza did not help). It was an excellent dinner, and I thought it fitting that I blew the first money I earned in Beijing on dumplings.
Fat and happy, we wandered over to Sanlitun to study (this is sort of like going to Oktoberfest to get a Coke, but it’s all true and I didn’t have a drop to drink) at a café called Bookworm which we’d dropped in on during one of our earlier bar nights. Although Bookworm does serve drinks, they also have food, coffee, and tea, and its own lending library geared toward Anglophones. It’s kind of a hub for the expat community springing up around the east side of Beijing, and it was packed with people listening to music, reading, studying, and just hanging out. Most of the time I was there, two guys were messing around on the free-to-use piano playing some lovely jazz duets. I worked on an article fairly successfully* until it was time to catch the subway back. I’d love to go back there more, but it’s about as out-of-the-way as you can get while still using public transit.
Tuesday was filled with more Chinese, but I did get to meet my roommate for the first time that evening. I am kind of in love with her. Her name is Zhang Ran (in China they use last names first, so Zhang is the surname, Ran is the given name) and she’s from Sichuan province, just north of Yunnan and home to the panda and China’s most famed spicy foods. When we first met, our conversation went something like this:
Her: How old are you? I’m twenty.
Me: I’m twenty too. What hobbies do you have?
Her: I like reading, watching movies, going to KTV (karaoke), traveling, and cooking. And eating. I really like eating.
Me [in English]: YESSSS
Nearby teacher [in Chinese]: Speak Chinese!
I lucked out. After my homestay-matching survey kind of backfired on me (and several other people I know), I had started to doubt the efficacy of IES’ ability to place people in situations that they liked. No longer. The girl is like the Chinese version of myself: sassy, constantly hungry, an efficient worker, attached at the hip to her cell phone, and straightforward. We could probably wear each other’s clothes if we wanted to, too. Then we discovered we both had sore throats and colds, so I went down to the campus convenience store and bought us some coconut powder to make hot drinks with. By the time we got back up, our “mixer” had ended, and I told her I’d see her the next day when she moved in. I’m so happy I got someone I share interests with – our only dissimilarities are that she doesn’t like to go out on the weekends (not an issue) and that she does not like eggplant, which threatens to nip our fledgling relationship in the bud.
By about 1 pm today, there was still no sign of her, so I decided to head out and explore. I’d intended to go to the Temple of Heaven today, but the walk was way longer than it looked on the map, so I ended up at…Nanluogu Hutong! I moseyed down the familiar street, excited for my red bean pudding, when disaster struck. On the whiteboard outside the pudding place, it was written that from October 6 through October 8, the store would be closed. I don’t remember much after that; it was all a blur of misery. I vaguely recall dropping to my knees and wailing in anguish, pounding my fists on the door in the vain hope that someone, somewhere, would answer my cries of distress and give me my pudding, but nobody answered my calls, and my screams faded out of consciousness as I lost the will to continue my travels, wishing only to escape from a world that suddenly seemed unbearably cruel.**
When the going gets tough, however, the tough go shopping, and I stepped into a randomly selected Nanluogu boutique and almost immediately found a tunic dress with pockets that I loved. While I was waiting for the lone dressing room to free up, I chatted with the woman at the counter, who, as it turns out, designed the store’s line of t-shirts (this is becoming pretty common in this part of town), which was interesting; she was just a couple years older than me, and already owned her own business. To my knowledge, this is standard for young Chinese people in big cities – there’s none of that go-backpacking-lay-around-at-your-parents’-maybe-think-about-grad-school gap year garbage that’s so prevalent in the US. In Beijing, everything is moving so fast that you just have to go out and do stuff, now, because if you don’t take that job or start that business, people will do it for you. The woman talked a lot about how her line of work was already really competitive in Beijing, and although she was doing well, quite a few of her friends, all college graduates, were having problems.
From Nanluogu I walked over to the anti-Nanluogu, Wangfujing Avenue. Wangfujing is a giant street that basically consists entirely of malls. This sounds really awesome at first, and it is really awesome at first, but after about forty-five minutes of the same types of stores, it gets tiring, especially at the “luxury” malls that cater to Westerners. (If Chinese people think I came to China to pay significant amounts of money for things, they are in for a rude awakening.) I was determined to find another pair of jeans, but this eluded me multiple times. At at least five stores, I tried on the biggest sizes available, only to be told by apologetic salespeople that no, they didn’t have anything larger. It was really frustrating; I’m definitely not used to that happening, and while I certainly don’t think I’m fat (I fit in average-sized Chinese shirts just fine) it’s weird to realize that your body type is completely outside the standards of the country you’re living in. I finally had some luck with a pair of corduroys at Uniqlo, an international chain that was more culturally equipped to deal with my fat American butt.
After getting carryout from a place near the bus stop, I headed home to the dorm and my new roommate, who has been in and out all night, moving in and going to meetings. She seems very busy. I’m not sure how hard Chinese universities work their students, but her workload looks intense. I hope she has time to hang out with me.

Dumpling Tally: 95

*Someone from the Daily asked me to write the weekly culture piece about being a foreign student in Beijing. I have writers’ block about 2/3 of the way through. What kinds of things are you curious to know about? Please advise; it’s due Saturday.

**None of this actually happened. I was really annoyed that they weren’t open though.