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

Roommate Musings

As of today, I have exactly two weeks left in the Beezh. I have loved my time here, but by this point the weather/ pollution/ complete lack of organizational skills on IES’ part (I still don’t know when my finals are! Nor do I have regular internet access!) have made me ready to head back home and eat Mexican food with my loved ones. Nonetheless, I still have two weekends left and I am determined to squeeze as much out of them as I can while still having tests sometime in the next couple weeks.
Nothing noteworthy has happened since I got back from Shanghai, so I’m going to use this space to expound upon an aspect of my time here that I haven’t talked much about: my roommate. People keep asking about her, and I feel lucky that I get to live with her. In my experience, Chinese people are hard to meet. Even when we’re sent out into the Bei Wai neighborhood to talk to the locals for class, they’re often hesitant; we’ll ask them if we can ask them a couple questions about [Spring Festival, family dinners, their hobbies] and often anyone over thirty won’t even verbally respond to us. Instead, they’ll shake their heads and wave us away. Before I arrived here, I read all about the Chinese notion of politeness and conflict avoidance, but if I were to judge by the rude drivers and closed-off Beijingers I’ve met, I would think Chinese people were incredibly impolite.
Thankfully, there’s Zhang Ran. Although not a native Beijinger, she is adorable and super sweet (and her native Beijinger friends are too). Although our overlapping time in the dorm is short (she has classes until about the time I head out for the night), we talk quite a lot, and we’re fairly close; she’s given me advice on various issues related to the Unfair Sex, which probably would have been great if I’d ever had the chutzpah to use it, and we talk about the general stresses of collegiate life, and deciding our futures, a lot.
The one thing that stands out specifically, though, is the vast difference in maturity level between us (and, I would venture to say, between most of the other Chinese roommates in general). Example: Zhang Ran, within the past week, has acquired her first boyfriend. I probably have no right whatsoever to be talking about this, as I’m in the middle of an 18-month dry spell with the gentlemen, but I was fourteen the first time I dated; without exception, everyone I know had their first actual relationships in high school, usually toward the earlier end of it. According to Zhang Ran, though, most Chinese students don’t date until college, or sometimes later (this is applicable to young people in general, as about 90% of Chinese young’uns go to some type of college/tech school/etc.) Her boyfriend, who I have only met once, seems particularly inexperienced in the ways of romantic etiquette. Zhang Ran reports that upon seeing a picture of me for the first time, he commented that I was “prettier than her.” Fortunately, I wasn’t present at the time; if I had, I probably would have chewed him out as best I could in Chinese.
Last night, she told me she was going over to his building “to study overnight.” I bid her goodnight with what was hopefully a knowing look on my face and returned to studying. She returned fifteen minutes later saying that the guard in the boyfriend’s building wouldn’t let her in (I guess they’re equally obnoxious about curfew on the other side of campus), and when I asked her where she would have slept, she wrinkled her nose and said that she had actually planned to pull an all-nighter with him. With the workload she and the other Chinese students seem to have, I’m not surprised this qualifies as a date. The Chinese students rarely, if ever, go out – the most I’ve heard of this is a couple of the guys’ roommates getting some beers after dinner.
At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if this – the school-sponsored team jump rope competitions, the popular (among college students) brand of t-shirts with school-uniform-clad teddy bears on them, which would have gotten anyone laughed out of the fifth grade in the US – is evidence of actual immaturity, or if I’ve just become sort of numb to what’s “normal” for people my age after having spent two years immersed in promiscuous alcoholic scantily-clad* party-hearty American School (not that Northwestern is a particularly egregious example of any of these). At any rate, it’s been sort of an interesting thing to reflect on, and I’ve had to adjust my worldview to realize that the Chinese students’ lifestyle doesn’t mean they’re weird or “behind” like it would in the US; instead, it just means they’re Chinese.

Dumpling Tally: 267

*Overheard in the Northwestern student union: “Your North Face is so sexy!”

Yonghegong Picture Post + Lamarama Pt. 2

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

Dumpling Tally: 200 (double centennial!!!)

Electioneering

I spent about six hours yesterday, from seven A.M. to 1:30 P.M., watching the election returns in the IES library streamed from the CNN website. IES put on a “party,” which I was reluctant to attend because they’re usually crammed with awkward host families and Language Pledge activities* but since they were offering free coffee I figured I’d stop in for a short while, stock up, and then go somewhere else. However, no host families showed up, and all the Chinese students had class at 8, so it soon became an American, English-speaking enclave. Jackie and Michael were there as well, so we claimed the sofa and kicked back to watch.
From the outset, things looked good for Obama. I had expected him to win ever since McCain chose Palin as a running mate, and the polls leading up to Election Day only bolstered my confidence. The election was by no means a nail-biter, but I got surprisingly into it anyway, cheering at every state Obama picked up. The overwhelming majority of the people in the library with us were also Obama supporters, so it was easy to get swept up in the spirit and the joy of the whole thing.
{I support Obama for a variety of reasons: his support for gay rights and women’s rights, his promise to provide healthcare to all Americans, his willingness to negotiate with leaders of “enemy states,” and the fact that he’s not inches from death, with a chump who thinks Africa is a country (and this was from Fox News) as his second-in-command. Despite McCain’s previous departures from the Republican party line, and Palin’s constant claims that he’s a “maverick” (a big word, coming from someone who thought Africa was a country), he struck me as more of the same, awful administration that I’ve hated for the last eight years. So that’s my rationale.}
When the results finally came in, we all jumped up and cheered, watched his acceptance speech, and then dispersed for various victory lunches. Walking outside, I expected to see the throngs of people taking to the streets that would have been found at any university in America, but life continued as usual; the pirated DVD guy was still peddling his wares outside, the taxi drivers were still leaning on their horns, and the middle-aged men were still taking their Pekingeses out for fresh air and exercise. At least in part due to how its own political system is set up, China is a fairly apathetic country in terms of US politics. Although Obama’s victory earned a couple minutes of airtime on the evening news that night and a front-page mention on this morning’s paper, there wasn’t the kind of jubilance among the Chinese populace that there was in Europe, for instance. To the Chinese people who follow politics (it’s easy not to when you’re the jianbing guy who’s lived under one-party rule all his life) the economy is the most important issue, since the yuan, the Chinese currency, is partially pegged to the dollar. With the US economy in such bad shape, it’s impossible to tell whose economic policies will be better in the long run, so I think the mood in China was sort of unsure (although Zhang Ran told me that younger voters prefer Obama). His election also poses a couple fairly delicate questions to the Chinese Communist Party: why are the American people so happy that their relatively authoritarian government has been overthrown, and how could they elect an ethnic minority to a national office? (It’ll be a long time before you see a Tibetan as a CCP higher-up…)
Anyway, that was pretty much it in terms of the Chinese response, although I caught Zhang Ran on YouTube watching Obama’s acceptance speech because she thought he was handsome. For a country with so much political weirdness going on, so far I’ve found China to be incredibly…apolitical. Nobody seems to care that much, and they all just accept that their lives are the way they are, never wondering if an administrative change would make anything different.

*The next time I see or hear the words “Language Pledge” I will kick the responsible party in the teeth. I am so. Tired. Of. It.

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.

Bag Fulla Puppies

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

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

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

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

Cultural Learnings of My Roommate for Make Benefit Glorious Person of Myself

My roommate is awesome.
Ever since I got her the hot drink on Tuesday night to help her sore throat, we’ve been engaged in a no-holds barred game of Generosity Chicken: we keep getting each other stuff, each thing slightly nicer than the last, and due to the Chinese laws of politeness and my desire to not look like a Foreign Devil, we know that sooner rather than later the other person will pop up with a gift. On Wednesday night when she got back from her meeting, she brought me back a huge chocolate bar. I reciprocated Thursday morning by giving her the jar of jam my mom made. Unlike my host family, she enthusiastically dove right in and pronounced it delicious, better than any she’d had in China. Then when I woke up on Friday, she had a bowl of oatmeal with seaweed and dried shrimp waiting, and informed me as I groggily sat down to eat that jianbings were bad for me, and she had therefore found me a different breakfast. I got her some scones Friday afternoon, and she gave me a bag of tea from Sichuan. This will probably only stop when one of us gets the other person a car. At the same time, she is not above giving me a hard time, and is gently but constantly teasing me about getting progressively fatter. (She kept feeding me Milk Duds tonight and then saying “oops, my fault” whenever I ate one.)
There are some weird cultural differences, though. The first time I wore my towel wrapped around me to go take a shower, she freaked out, and I quickly reassured her that everyone else on the floor did it, too. Then today I came back from a shower and she had a couple guy friends in the room, and they flipped. It was like I’d walked into the room naked. They promptly skedaddled outside while apologizing profusely, and then apologized some more when they came back in. I kept assuring them that I really didn’t care (which I didn’t – I’m of the belief that if you can see it in a swimsuit it’s not a big deal) and not to worry about it, but it was sort of odd how strongly they reacted to me showing relatively little skin.
Another interesting conversation went down a couple days ago. As we were getting ready for bed, she asked me why Americans changed their clothes every day, and if we washed them after wearing them once. I told her that unless the clothes got dirty, we wore them more than once before washing them, and she asked again why we wore something different every day. The best answer I could come up with was “because if you don’t, people will wonder why you’re wearing the same clothes as yesterday,” which is no kind of answer at all. I really never thought about it much; maybe someday I’ll figure out why this is such a cultural norm.*
Thursday was a bust, filled with classes, but Friday afternoon I had time to take a break and ended up going to Nanluogu Hutong with one of Pei Rei and Cody’s friends, a chill kid from Northeastern named Daniel. He seems to like wandering around aimlessly as much as I do, so I am happy to report that I may have found a new exploring buddy. I finally got my pudding, too, which was just as delicious as ever. Then that night I went out for hotpot with Max and Zhang Ran, which was fun because by the end of it we were all just good-naturedly trashing on each other and Max got all his grammar questions answered.
Saturday consisted of homework until the evening, when I met Max and some of his friends for dinner at the same dumpling place we went on Monday night. This time was even better, because there were more people, so we could get more kinds of dumplings (my favorite had cilantro, glass noodles, tofu, and peanuts) for less money per person. In the middle, I realized that I’d just eaten my hundredth dumpling of the trip, and celebrated by eating more dumplings.
We then went out to Sanlitun by ourselves, since everyone else seemed to have something else to do at nine pm on a Saturday night (this would become a theme for the night). After wandering around the area and being accosted by doormen at every awful, generic bar on the street, we finally found a couple chill places, got a beer, went to Bookworm and read for a short while (it’s free to read all their books while you’re in there, so we worked our way through a couple chapters each of various Chinese fiction novels), and then went to meet up with some more of Max’s friends. For reasons not clear to me, they all needed to head back around midnight, and Cody, who was supposed to meet us, bailed, so we wandered around some more looking for something to do before heading over to a place called Bar Blu, where some of Max’s friends ostensibly were. We never found them, but that soon became irrelevant because Bar Blu had a dance floor with many people on it. Although sufficiently fun, it was not Propaganda; the crowd seemed less into it, the music lacked a certain je ne sais quoi** (although they did play Flo Rida’s “Low,” which has been notably absent from Propaganda’s oeuvre thus far), and there were no awesome Koreans who were tearing it up while the rest of the crowd stood back in quiet, awed reverence. Nevertheless, it was a good way to kill some time.
And why did we need to kill time, you ask? We were planning to visit Beijing’s famed Panjiayuan Antique Market, which was only open on weekends. It’s essentially a giant flea market, and although pretty much all of its “antiques” are fakes, there are still plenty of knickknacks to be found from all over China. However, word on the street (by “the street” I mean “Lonely Planet Encounters: Beijing”) was that in order to get the good stuff, you had to arrive with the professional buyers at opening time, which was listed in my guidebooks and Wikipedia as 4:30 am. We got some food, sat around on the streets of Sanlitun watching the drunken, expatriate world go by, and when it came time to go we hailed a cab and headed for the building.
When we got there, it was clear that something was off. According to my watch, the market was scheduled to open in five minutes, but the area looked completely dead, and there was not another person to be seen. We went inside and checked, and the woman at the desk told us the market actually opened at six. Neither of us wanted to wait another hour and a half – I was already exhausted and whining for coffee – so we just headed home. Even this proved difficult. I quickly hailed a cab outside, but upon telling the driver where I wanted to go, I was told that it was “too far”. We argued with the driver for a while about this, especially since it was too early for public transit to run so I had no other way of getting back. Eventually he agreed to take me and I paid the highest cab fare I’ve seen yet in Beijing, then returned and somehow got a severely disgruntled (not that I blame her) fuwuyuan to let me back in. Really, though, isn’t that the point of being a cab driver, taking people places? I wasn’t even going outside the Third Ring Road and he still kept saying it was “too far”. Before arriving here, and even after arriving here, I had heard all sorts of things about how friendly and wise the cab drivers were, but thus far I have found them only impossible to understand and unhelpful – often they don’t even know where my school is.
Jackie woke me up with a phone call at about 11:30 this morning wanting a shopping buddy. I was not one to turn this down, especially since she wanted to go to the Silk Market, so I met up with her and we set off in search of a leather jacket. She eventually found one that suited her, and along the way I got my bargaining freak on with a hat, some Uggs,*** and a sweater. I have definitely improved since I first started there: whereas I got overcharged on my first few visits (and kind of on the Uggs, even), I knocked the price of the sweater down from about $95 to $12, and the hat from $25 to $8. Even my Asian friends are impressed (it’s well known that vendors will knock the price up hugely if you’re white because they think you don’t know what’s up). Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is a picture, which I did not take, of acceptable/unacceptable phrases for vendors to use at the Silk Market. The #9 unacceptable phrase, which for some reason wasn’t translated, means “you’re a man,” which I think is funny.

Dumpling tally: 124

*And maybe I’ll figure out who Mike Jones is. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he seems to have faded from the scene before anyone found the answer.

**I actually do sais quoi. Quoi is insipid lyrics about getting with chicks in your limo backed with the simplest synth and bass riffs known to humankind.

***I have promised to uphold the Responsible Ugg Users’ Code: I will only wear Uggs in natural shades (no pink, blue, purple, etc.), I will never wear Uggs with external fur on them, I will never wear Uggs with a skirt that has a hemline above the knee, and I will never wear Uggs when it is above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Northwestern sorority girls, take note.

'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.