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!!!)
From top: old-style apartment blocks, the new theater academy, Max two-fisting pure liquified America (it's flavored Starbucks lattes), the outside of a fancy private school, the inside of the Source store, trendy Xintiandi shopping area, garden in the French Concession, me and my new boyfriend, quiet residential street, Christmastime at one of the malls, Nanjing Lu at night, me with Haibao (Haibao is the omnipresent mascot of the 2010 Expo, whatever that is), excellent Chinglish, me narrowly escaping ingestion on the Bund, the old customs house, Bund buildings, and a typical downtown scene.
