Brown Bagging It

BEIJING — Oh, 差不多！

This phrase — in letters "chabuduo" —  "means almost the same as," and it's used liberally here in Beijing. Five minutes late to class? 差不多. Screw up someone's name? 差不多. Get drunk and pass out in your neighbor's dorm room?差不多.

This week I discovered what can happen when what you is say is 差不多 from what you mean.

It was Tuesday, and I was hanging out in the hallway with Brown and a couple friends after class, aimlessly talking after four hours in the classroom.

"I'm so hungry."

"Me too."

"We should get some food now."

"Yeah."

"Like right now."

At least that what I thought we were saying. We spoke in Chinese, more out of habit than wanting to practice the language. Brown entered the conversation.

"Sure," she said. "I'd love to eat. Let me go get my bag out of the office and then I'll be right back."

I turned to my friends, and they turned to me. We'd accidentally invited Brown, our squarest teacher, out to lunch.

We decided to take Brown to Qing Qing Ecstasy, the best of Tsinghua's three "western" eateries. Qing Qing actually serves mostly Taiwanese and Thai dishes, but the food is a notch up from the greasy cafeteria fare served elsewhere. We took a table for four near the back corner of the restaurant, next to a two-foot plastic version of Michelangelo's David.

I handled most of the conversation with Brown, treating our forced lunch as an interview. I'd been seeing Brown two hours a day, three days a week for three weeks now, and I knew next to nothing about her. It seem appropriate to found out the basics.

Brown, actual name Lin is from Tianjin, a large city a couple hour's east of Beijing. She's 25, with a master's degree in teaching Chinese at a foreign language from Beijing Language and Culture University. She lives well to the east of Tsinghua, and she commutes 25 minutes every day by electric bicycle. In the winter it's pretty cold, but this time of year things are pretty good. Someday she wants to own a car.

She surprised me with her knowledge of our lives out of class. She knew that a couple of Korean students were now dating, and claimed that she thought they'd been admirers for some time. She wanted to know if my college was near Cornell (no) and Boston University (yes).

The lunch humanized Brown. She became more of a person, less of a robot who dictated when to use 就 or what medication I should take during my next bout of diarrhea. I'd consider doing it again sometime.

(This is going to be the last entry to mention Brown for a while. I don't want this to turn into a blog chronicling every move of my reading teacher, no matter how interesting she may be.)

Friendship is Radioactive

XIHAI, China - I'm warming up to this industrial outpost on the far end of China. My first impressions, that this might be a sneak peek at the world during a nuclear winter, are slowly changing, and it's not because of a sudden love for Soviet block-housing. A Mongolian, Tibetan and Muslim changed my mind.

The Mongolian prefers to be called Xiao Tian. He lives in a guesthouse near Xihai's main outdoor market, an works as an independent truck driver. Because he's self employed he works everyday, hauling supplies and food around town. He started talking to me as I was registering at the hotel, and looked at my Tsinghua student card with interest.

"You're from Tsinghua?" he said. "Then I'll have to take you out to a bar tonight, my treat."

We left the guesthouse around 9:30. Xiao Tian wore a crisp button down shirt with brown vertical stripes. His shoulder length hair was freshly comed. We walked through the center of the market, now deserted.

"Don't worry," he said. "Xihai is a safe place." This made me more nervous, as I was trying to forget that I was in the middle of the Tibetan Plateau, 100 miles from the nearest foreigner in a strange town. The only people who knew I'd come here were Rebecca, now back in Changsha, and my father back in New York. I hoped Xiao Tian was right, and this was a safe town.

We went to a small club, a multi-purpose place setup to handle all of the town's entertainment needs. On the back wall was a small bar, covered in Christmas lights. At the front was a stage and a microphone for crooning karaoke songs. The middle served as a dancefloor, and it was ringed by tables and chairs.

"There's not too many people here!" my host said, apologetically. It didn't matter, I wanted to watch the town have fun, and there were enough people to do that. The DJ played mostly slow Chinese pop songs, occasionally letting a person in the bar sing the vocals live. At a song's beginning, the dancefloor would be clear. Slowly four or five couples would come dance, each holding hands and doing some that resembled a waltz. Many of the couples were single sex, men who I had seen carrying wood through the market were now dancing with a colleague, slowly moving to the beat.

A Tibetan woman came over to our table, a high school student celebrating the final night of her May Break. Tomorrow she'd go back to school, and there could be no more trip to the bar for some time. Her friend went to the stage and sung a song in Tibetan. People seemed excited, and Chinese and Tibetan couples took the dancefloor.

The Tibetan girl wasn't terribly happy about living in Xihai, things were boring here, she said, but it seemed like not a bad place to be. The different ethnic groups seemed to mix relatively well, sharing public spaces and enjoying songs of different cultures.

Toward the end of the evening, after several bottles of Yellow River Beer, the DJ switched the hard Chinese trance music. The couples on the dance floor broke up, and finally Xiao Tian, the Tibetan and I stood up and started handbanging.

The next morning I took my still ringing head to a small Muslim restaurant several blocks from the hotel. The restaurant occupied an enclosed patio off a four-story block-house, and was run by a young Muslim man with a small son, who watched him make my noodles and fried dough. When serving the meal, the Muslim brought over a small bowl with a thick white liquid in it. He told me to try some of his yogurt, which I did, at first with small spoonfuls but then with bigger bites.

"It's horse milk," he said, and I had fight not to spit out the piece in mouth.

"What?" I said.

"This yogurt. It's made from yak milk."

I'd heard incorrectly.

When I finished, the owner refused payment.

It was a great final meal in Nuclear City. While the physical city remained ugly, my encounters with the town's people meant it's a place I might come back to even before the next nuclear holocaust.

Tree in a Box

BEIJING - This campus operates on a peculiar rhythm. Things happen in ways that seem illogical, but somehow they always seem to get done. At times my life is a constant kabuki performance, with no one around to explain the meaning behind the elaborate rituals.

Take the mystery of the scaffold tree. Three weeks ago, a dozen or so laborers appeared in the courtyard between my dormitory and its immediate neighbor. They wore matching yellow hats and dirty jeans. Probably migrants, these men spent two long days erecting a structure around a tree in the middle of the courtyard. A frame of thick metal poles boxed in the tree, whose thin upper branches looked pithy in comparsion.

After finishing, the workers wrapped large pieces of translucent plastic around the outside of the lattice work and headed home. Whatever they had come to do was now finished.

In my bike rides and walks around campus, I came across a few other trees covered in the same manner. The dressed trees were all middle-aged, neither new saplings planted to stave off erosion nor the thick trunks that date from the Qing Dyansty. They all appeared healthy, although it's hard to tell the health of a plant in winter on the other side of a plastic sheet.

I can't figure out why the university spent money on constructing these tree fences. At first I thought they were created as a precursor to removal, but no trees have fallen. It occured to me that these might be some type of protection against Beijing's spring sand storms. But today the city had its fiercest winds yet, and I saw the group of workers reappear. They weren't at my tree, but one a couple dorms to the north. They wore the same yellow hats and old clothes. This time they came not to build, but dismantle. So far my tree is untouched, but I'm sure they will come for it soon.

When they do, I hope they'll be in a mood to answer a couple questions. Neither the building staff nor my classmates seem to have any idea about these plastic towers. Hopefully with a little conversation I can tap into this campus' strange rhythm.

Colorful Instructors

BEIJING - The Chinese don't have very many last names, which means in the short time I've been here I've already met three Lins, two Wangs and a fair number of Lis. And since everyone in the university insists on being called "laoshi" whether they're an instructor or merely an officer worker, confusion has erupted.

 

Is the short older man who works in the Foreign Students Office during afternoon Lin or Liu Laoshi? What was the name of the crazy van driver who couldn't get to Tian'anmen Square last week? I can't remember names in English, so Chinese requires some extra assistance. I've turned to nicknames.

 

My listening teacher -- Zhang Laoshi -- frequently wears a pink sweater. Her nickname is now Pink. When the class discovered that our speaking teacher -- Huang Laoshi -- uses the Huang character that means "Yellow," we had our theme. The third teacher, our reading instructor, had no particularly obvious color traits, so we christened her "Brown," after her most popular outfit.

 

Giving my teachers nicknames allowed me to easily remember their Chinese names. Pink? That's Zhang Laoshi. And if the first class is taught by Pink, Lin Laoshi -- Brown -- must be teaching next.

 

Friday afternoon the bell rang with no sign of our speaking teacher.

 

"Where's Yellow?" I said to a couple classmates.

 

Suddenly he appeared at the back of the class.

 

"不是'Yellow' ，我姓黄," he said. Which means something like, I'm not "Yellow," I'm Yellow.

 

Time for a new nickname.

Wait, this is Chinese class?

BEIJING - Maybe I don't have the worst Chinese in China after all.

 

Yesterday I walked into my listening class to find a Korean student sitting in my usual seat. I knew he was Korean by his bowl haircut and big, square glasses, and also because Koreans make up more than 60% of students at my level. I took the seat next to him -- it's still the first week of classes and seats are still quite flexible.

 

At exactly 1:00 p.m., the teacher strolled through the door and started the lesson. She played an incomprehensible tape a couple times, asked questions about the short sentences played, as if it was possible to understand between the tape fuzz and strange southern accents on the cassette tape. We students looked on puzzled for the next hour and a half, randomly shouting words that seemed related to the dialogue. Sometimes these were correct, and our teacher seemed satisfied.

 

The next class was reading. Here at Tsinghua, the teachers change between subjects, but the student's don't. This is the same setup we had in the sixth grade, complete with an electric bell that marks the exact end of class. Our reading teacher arrived right on time and dived into a lesson on banking. We talked about depositing money, withdrawal forms and remittances, about which I know rather little. Then our teacher announced it was time for a "对话" or dialogue. She told us to make a few phrases on the topic we our neighbor.

 

I turned to my Korean desk mate, who had said very little the past three hours.

 

"Do you want to be the teller or the person withdrawing the money," I said, in Chinese.

 

No response.

 

"So we have to make a dialogue. You can be person A or B. What do you like better?"

 

Again, no response.

 

"Right now we are at a bank. You have some money. You want to give it to me. What do you say?"

 

The student continued to just stare at me. Finally, he said, in English, "Chinese, no. Use English."

 

I was dumbfounded. This student didn't know any Chinese. Why wasn't he in this level, and how was I supposed to write a dialogue? I waved my hand and got the attention of our teacher.

 

"Laoshi," I said in Chinese, "I don't think this person knows how to speak Chinese."

 

The teacher looked surprised. "Who?" she said.

 

"This guy right here," I said, referring to the Korean, who seemed oblivious to us talking about him.

 

"Oh," she said, and then used English to encourage our new friend to switch to the introductory class.

To Catch a Book Thief

ALBANY, N.Y. - It's official. I will be attending Beijing's Tsinghua University this spring for language classes.

In preparation for attending the "MIT of China," I've been spending time acquainting myself with the library's rules of operation.

The library closes six days a week promptly at 9:50 p.m. The library has only seven rules, but the Web site sternly reminders users, that "offenders are subject to criticism, admonition and even punishment."

Policies are further explained in a question-and-answer section of the Web site.My favorite is the response to the question, "What happens to a book thief?":

"Book theft will be reported to the university, and be seriously punished with corresponding disciplines. Taking books out of circulation desks or reading rooms without checking out will be regarded as attempted theft."

Sounds serious. I'll be sure to check out any books I take from the library.