A Nice, Fatty Slab of Man Meat

BEIJING – Here in China, I get what I want.

When I shout "fuyuan," the waitress comes running across the restaurant to see if I need more dumplings. Outside of Beijing's trendiest club districts, the owner of a bar will not only admit me at any time, but frequently take me to the Very Important Person room, complete with free drinks. People line up just to converse with me on the subway, train or even while eating a bowl cold noodles.

There's nothing special about me, I'm just a foreigner in China. People here treat me with a degree of deference that would be unheard of in America. It's outrageous, really, and I found how demeaning it can be to serve rather than be served; I became a prostitute.

Zack arranged the position. My travel mate through South Asia, not four days out of the hospital (and as it would turn out, only a day away from another visit) sat in the middle of Beijing Language and Culture University Bla Bla bar's courtyard, intoxicated. At his table sat Evan, our American friend, and two Asians. I sipped my first beer as our new friends explained why we needed to leave soon.

"Do you want to drink beer, sing song, meet beautiful women and make money?" the skinner one asked me. He claimed to be Kazakh-Chinese, or perhaps Chinese-Kazakh, and went to People's University here in Beijing.

Zack didn't believe him, but he couldn't say "what's the catch?" in Chinese: The four had been talking past each other for some time before I arrived. The Kazakh wanted us to go to a club in the Xizhimen district, about three miles away. We would earn money because few foreigners go this club, and they want us to talk to the women.

I agreed with Zack, it sounded too good to be true. I wanted to sip beer with my friends, share stories recent vacations, of Laotian drug dealers and Indian computer nerds, not blast off to some crazy club. But the more we sat there, and the more the two pleaded, the more Zack want to go. I said no to Zach and explained to the Kazakh
I just couldn’t take him up on his business opportunity tonight.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at the club. It was a massive structure, attached to the Tianfan Hotel off the Third Ring Road. The club – actually a karaoke bar – rose four feet and was covered with neon strips on three sides. There was a massive enclosed valet area, and our taxi was opened by a man dressed in a pressed, starched shirt.

The Kazakh convinced me to come, as he thought I had the best Chinese in the group, and would be needed to translate. Zack really, really, really wanted to go, and Evan seemed up for it, so reluctantly I agreed to go and look around.

"If things look bad," I warned the Kazakh. "We're leaving."

The first room resembled a hotel lobby, with a large arrangement of fake flowers and twisted branches, and a spiral staircase leading up to the second level. We went upstairs and were led into a room overlooking a dance floor. Standing in the room were several dozen Chinese, all male and young.

"These are all nanji," the Kazakh whispered in my ear. The word means roosters, but it’s also slang for male prostitutes. What? If everyone in the room is a prostitute, who were we?

One of the young men came up to Evan and me, wanting a picture. I obliged, sitting on a red couch with the young professional between us. After he finished another came over with his camera phone, and another. Some spoke to us while getting their snap. Where were we from? How did we get to China? Where did we learn Chinese? The usual spiel, but here I found myself talking about my sister in the strangest of circumstances. One broad-shouldered man, much larger than the others, asked if we'd been to Henan Province and said he had studied at the Shaolin Temple.

At 1:30 on the dot, all the men moved across the hall into a small room, some kind of staff lounge for the club. We couldn't get inside, but after a couple minutes the Kazakh tried to led us along with several of the young men into a nearby room. It was a karaoke booth, a small room with a long couch around one wall, an entertainment system opposite and a glass table in the middle. Gaudy brown and white wallpaper peeled on the high corners of the walls and dusty fake flower arrangements were placed at random locations in the room.

Inside I could see three women, all dressed in skimpy dressed and loads of makeup. Their permed haircuts reached the middle of their backs. They looked young and empowered, the men who stood in front of them just young.

The Kazakh explained more as I looked on from outside the door. The men are paraded in, six or eight at a time. The women ask questions, and then choose their entertainer. Soon the former Shaolin monk sat next to a customer with a black patent leather purse.

Our funhouse tour continued. Now we were led into an empty karaoke room. On the couch sat a man around 40, with a squared-off haircut and a black suit. This was the boss, and he began our meeting with a cigarette. "What exactly did these two tell you about this place?" he said, gesturing toward the Kazakh and his silent assistant.

I told him our story so far, how we'd been plucked from the foreign student university's bar and dragged out here just to take a look. The boss seemed pleased.

"You get here at 11," he said. "You can leave at 4, but if you still have a costumer if you have to stay until they leave. Each night you will make at least 500 RMB. You can start tomorrow, but wear nice pants and real shoes."

I looked down at my flip-flips and hairy feet covered in dried, crusty sweat and felt embarrassed. I promised to look better the next time we returned, and thanked the man for his time.

We left the room, and I told our hosts that it was time to go. But instead of taking us toward the exit, they led us into one final room. Now we were the ones on
display, put in front of three hungry women. They wanted man-meat.

"Where are you from?" One asked me. "How old are you?" said another.

"Can you dance?" asked the third.

I felt mortified. To these people I was an exotic monkey with a miniature symbol, a cute toy that would liven up a night on the town. These costumers probably spent years making a fortune in real estate or manufactured, now they wanted to be fawned over. Staring at these ravenous people, I knew that I couldn't never work here at the karaoke club, even if I never established whether or not I would be expected to "entertain" these people back at their hotel suites.

Prostitution is dehumanizing. Being any kind of servant, required to dance when someone says ‘dance’ and bark out an awful version of Aerosmith's "I Don't to Miss a Thing" on cue is terrible too. Even services that I take for granted are vaguely unsettling. Why should a woman run across the room just because I need a package of salt? Maybe I don't always need to get what I want.

With A Poster, It's Paris

BEIJING -- I asked the tiny noodle stall's lone occupant, a middle-aged woman wearing a blue apron, if I could see a menu.

"It's right there," she replied, and pointed to a series of hand-painted signs hanging on one wall. I squinted, trying to read the slightly messy handwriting before decided on an order of 肉丝炒饭, or sliced-pork fried rice.

I asked the woman if they had any cold drinks, and when she replied that no, they didn't, I went door and bought a cold ice red tea.

"Cold drinks are much better than warm drinks," I said as an explanation, and the woman smiled.

The restaurant wasn't the smallest I've seen in China. There were six tables, each with three or four stools, a small container of crushed red pepper and a napkin basket. On the walls of the restaurant were three massive posters, each one several feet wide and in a plastic frame. The one under my table showed the Eiffel Tower with few Parisian fountains in the foreground. I asked the woman why she'd put up the picture.

"Because it's a nice picture, very lively," she said.

My food arrived -- a huge mound of rice covered in soy sauce, with a fair amount of sweet pork mixed inside. As I chomped away, a man with brown pants and a funny mustache entered the restaurant. He carried a plate, which he stuck in a microwave sitting the table closest to the restaurant's rear, and then came over to talk with me.

"Why aren't you drinking beer?" he said.

"Because it's too early for beer. Tonight I'll have some beer."

He picked up my book that I'd placed on the table.

"What's this?" he said.

I'm reading Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize winning tale of love and tragedy during the years leading up to and during the Russian Revolution. I tried to explain the plot of the book in my limited Chinese.

"The story takes place 100 years ago. There's a Russian doctor. He falls in love with a very beautiful young woman. Then there's a--"

I had to pause here and go for my yellow dictionary and look up the word for war. When I read the dictionary's first entry zhanzheng, the man didn't understand. I tried again, but with no luck. It's probably best that I didn't have to continue my book summary, as I would have to look "revolution," "exile," "Communism" and "Siberia," before long.

The man then took my dictionary and started flipping through the pages. He giggled at a few entries, but I when I asked to see what he was laughing at, he showed me the word "swat." I don't think that's terribly funny.

The microwave timer went off and the man fetched his plate and walked out the door, leaving me to finish my rice.

This is nothing special -- a cheap meal, a couple of new conversation companions, and a pretty good time. It seems I can't duck into a back alley with meeting someone interesting; a person who throws up a picture of the Eiffel Tower to make sure quiet cafe seem busier, a man who thinks I should drink in the middle of the afternoon.

"Your food is very good," I told the restaurant owner before leaving. "I'll be back to look at your wall again soon."

Kitsch Kills

BEIJING -- One thing industrialization has brought to China is a standardization of tourist crap.The same assemblage of fat Buddha statues, cheap metal coins and chops are for sale at attractions from the Mongolian border to Vietnam.

That predictability meant I wasn't surprised that the tiny alley market off Wangfujing Street hadn't changed in the three years since my last visit. The only noticeable new product was a pair of shiny stones, which somehow boomeranged and whistled when thrown in the air.

I came with a couple friends, capping off a rare day of sightseeing in Central Beijing. I have a certain affinity for Chinese kitsch, but having already purchased a good chunk of this stuff in 2004 I only observed this time. It was the first time for everyone else, and they slowly examined the items on display.

"Are you going to buy a Little Red Book?" I asked one of them, idly making conversation.

"No, I don't think so," he said, with just a hint of disgust.

The conversation quickly moved from there, but I became concerned at my own suggestion. Was it appropriate to encourage people to buy copies of something associated with the Cultural Revolution?

My own copy of the Little Red Book is sitting in my closet in Albany, next to a plastic drum and a crumbled entrance ticket to the Xi'an terracotta warriors. It came from Hong Kong's Temple Street Night Market, a series of clothing stalls, porn booths, fortune tellers and tiny seafood shops that comes together after sunset in the middle of Kowloon. I found my copy at a small antique place, underneath a pile of new English, German and Cantonese translations.

The newer copies use cheap plastic, but the older ones use a higher-quality leather. The book was worn, with many passages inside underlined and Chinese notes in the margin. I talked down the price, pointing out these deficiencies to the shop owner. The book cost about $5.

The big draw is a supposed collection of quotes from Mao Zedong. In reality many of these quotes were heavily edited before appearing in the text, but these edited entries were used as a gospel in a religion that condemned hundreds of thousands of people to death. The words themselves are certainly not responsible -- just as in the Bible, many of the quotes are vague enough to be bent in any particular direction -- but the Book represents an awful era. (What exactly does "every Communist working in the mass movements should be a friend of the masses and not a boss over them, an indefatigable teacher and not a bureaucratic politician," from Chapter 28 mean?)

And I think the book is less a Pop Artifact than some of the other artifacts from this era sold in the country. The propaganda posters represent a separate and important style, and I have fewer problems with their presence in American college dorm rooms than with that book in my closet.

I know enough Chinese history that the words "Cultural Revolution" bring to mind images of suffering, torture and death, but it can be hard to rectify this with the excitement of a Beijing market, where vendors encourage you to take a piece of this era home. I can only hope next time I have the smarts to say, "no thanks."

The Day the Music Died

BEIJING - At the back of the Dongyue Temple in Beijing's Chaoyong District, there is a lovely courtyard. I wish I could give period dates or accurate descriptions of its features, but alas I never got around to studying imperial architecture in college.

Nevertheless I can say this is the Chinese courtyard as imagined by young Sinologists all over the world, with shiny blue curved roof tiles and large red lanterns hung every meter on the outside of the crimson-colored hallways.

The Dongyue Temple admission ticket includes entry to this courtyard, which is located behind the main Daoist statues and relics of the temple. My ticket - normally 30 RMB, but just 5 RMB with a student card - says this is the "Beijing Folk Museum," and is the only place in Beijing where large folk performances can be held.

Behind the final statue hall, roughly in the middle of the courtyard, is a large, tacky stage that is used for performances. It's brand-new, and designed in the Chinese "shiny red thing" category. All over China these tacky balloons and pixelated background montages are ruining historical sites and downtown shopping malls alike. The Dongyue Temple was no exception.

But despite the intrusion of the tacky, I still had a wonderful experience in the courtyard during my visit last summer. I visited the temple on a hot, sunny afternoon by myself, wanting to kill a couple hours before meeting an American friend in a language program. As I entered the courtyard, I heard music coming from a back corner. Three young musicians were playing Chinese instruments. One was the erhu, the other two I didn't recognize.

I went upstairs and stood next to where they were playing. The music was lovely, the perfect antidote to the broiling hot weather. I sat down and listened for over half an hour, nearly falling asleep to the sounds.

Yesterday I returned to the temple with a couple friends, and went back to that courtyard. There were no sounds, and no musicians in sight. A few workers played cards, uninterested in the few people at the temple. I again climbed the stairs to the second floor, and walked in the room where I heard people playing. There I saw a couple instruments, and three young Chinese, dressed in traditional but ill-fitting costumes.

I asked one with long curly black hair (recent perm?) when the music was going to start.

"Today's there's no music," she said.

I asked her if there was ever music. She said on Chinese New Year sometimes there were performers, other times no. I protested that I had heard music there nine months ago. She seemed confused, and called over a colleague. Yes, he said, there used to be musical performances, but now no longer. The music had died.

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.

Meeting Friends Can Pay

Beijing - My speaking teacher dismissed class last Friday with an unusual assignment. He wanted each student to meet two new Chinese friends and one foreign friend. His gave us a short list of questions to ask, including name, age, hometown and profession and said the data would be collected on Monday.

Groans echoed through the classroom. Students don't like additional work five minutes before the week's final bell.

"When you come to China, of course you want to meet Chinese people," our teacher said, and dismissed the class.

My first friend I met at a bar. Wang Winxin is 27, a computer programmer in central Beijing who lives out here in the city's northwest. He hates Zhang Yimou movies and most recent Chinese historical dramas, preferring to watch Tony Jaa action movies from Thailand. I saved his phone number in my address book and wrote down the rest of the information the next morning.

Saturday and Sunday passed, but I made no new friends. I passed thousands of possibilities on the streets of Beijing, but not once asked the necessary questions. "How much is this," slips easily out of my mouth; "What's your profession," less so.

After dinner on Sunday I became desperate. I remembered a couple additional instructions issued by my teacher two days earlier. "Don't meet taxi drivers. Don't meet fuyuans." He meant that the class should try to meet other students, not service workers. But I was low on options; I went downstairs to see the fuyuans.

A fuyuan (服员) is a general category of customer service worker. In my life here, they're the two dozen or so people who clean my room every day, guard the building against theft (not very well - where's my bike??), and constantly converse with the building's 100 or so residents.

Working downstairs on Sunday I found two ladies and a man, each dressed in crisp uniforms, a tan and red pant suit for the women, a dark navy jacket and slacks for the man. The man appeared to be in charge, as he sat confidently behind the desk while the women played cards in front. I approached the desk and soon found myself in conversation with Li Ke (李刻), 23, a native of Beijing. He is an only child, currently single and residing in on-campus service housing.

I asked Li Ke if he had any hobbies. He responded in unfamiliar Chinese words. We fumbled around a little, trying to establish meaning until Li Ke switched to English. "Collect money," he said. His coin collection included American, British, Italian, Australian pieces, and others from more exotic places including the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Iraq. This collection came from friends, Li Ke said.

Then I had an idea. "Wait a second," I said, and hopped on the elevator up to my room. I grabbed a few roubles from my desk. I have dozens of these rouble coins, they continue to fall out of strange corners of my luggage. I went downstairs and gave Li Ke one, two and five rouble coins. He looked thrilled.

The next day Li Ke called me over coming back from a class. "I have a little gift for you," he said, and pulled a small envelope with two bills inside. They were two multicolored bills from Afghanistan. One was 5,000 Afghanis, the other 10,000 Afghanis.

Back in my room, I looked up the current value of 15,000 Afghanis out of curosity. According to XE.com, the current mid-market trading rate is $306.21.

But before I booked a vacation to Afghanistan, I went to eBay where I discovered these multicolored notes were issued by the Taliban and are no longer legal currency and fairly common. Current asking price: $1.50.

Oh well. I finished my homework on time and made a new friend in the process, and my life's a little richer thanks to that.

The Georgian Order

BEIJING - "Here's the one thing you need to know," Shannon said, and then paused for dramatic effect. "Chinese is PTPA: Person, Time, Place and Action."

It's the best instructional advice anyone's ever give me in Chinese. Better than when I found out the second and third tones are not, in fact, the same, better than when I found out I'd been writing the character for I - 我 - incorrectly. No, this constitutes nothing less than a Chinese miracle.

Everyday at Tsinghua I learn new words. Inside the classroom there are endless vocabulary lists, pop quizzes and impromptu 生词 (shengci, new words) thrown up on the board. After class is over I find myself learning more practical words, such as shower, earphones and stolen, for more practical reasons. Many of these encounters have been detailed on this blog, and I am sure more will in the future.

I find myself increasingly reaching for and finding new words, helping me to describe my problem to teachers, salespeople and random onlookers. But pressed to create dialogues on the spot, I find it coming out in an ungrammatical puddle, verbs, nouns and adjectives tripping over each other in unacceptable ways. I'm glad to at least be understood, but also realize that I must make the transition to more proper speech. That's where this little acronym comes in.

At first I thought PTPA was some kind of Golden Rule of Chinese, something most people learn on their first day of instruction. But I looked on Google and the phrase came up with no hits, and a couple classmates from different parts of the world had never heard of it. It might be a creation of Shannon's former university, a small language institute in California where he holed up 12 hours a day for 18 months, practicing his tones.

Like all rules, Shannon's has plenty of exceptions. But as a quick way to construct sentences on the fly, it'll do quite nicely.

When You Gotta Go

BEIJING - I hate Communist showers.

To save energy, all dormitories here provide hot water eight hours a day. From 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. to midnight, the water flows. At other times, the taps provide only water straight from Beijing's underground reserves, which are hundreds of meters below the surface and glacial in temperature.

Once I tried to take a cold water shower, but uncontrollable shivering and heart palpitations convinced me this wasn't a good idea.

So I have to wait before cleaning myself, even if at times like now it can be torturous. It's around noon Beijing time, and I've just woken up from a night out. Here in Beijing, smoking's still legal, so my clothes and hair smell like the Marbolo Man. There's still three hours to wait before I can get rid of last night's gunk.

With some time to kill, I've been pondering the possible benefits of hot water 8 hours a day. Water conservation seems the obvious answer, but I don't think I'm using less water because of the time limit. Now that I know it's limited, I use plenty of water when it's available. Five minute showers sometimes continue for 15.

Previously satisfied with one shower a day, I sometimes sneak back to the shower room for a second round near midnight. I worry that the next day conflicts will arise during shower periods, leaving me rather smelly on day three.

Maybe it's just considered excessive to have hot water available all the time. Eight hours is better than the military, where it can be just 15 minutes. Recently in Lithuania, I went to an ex-KGB prison where inmates were allowed 10 minutes to shower every week. Guards turned the hot and cold water taps on at random, a sadistic game they used to pass long shifts. By comparison, my arrangement seems rather plush.

I've come down with a bit of Princess and the Pea syndrome. Living at Tsinghua is quite cheap and comfortable. There's daily maid service, weekly sheet changing, 24 hour electricity and a sparkling Western toilet. My roommate's friendly and so are the security guards. A bank, supermarket, restaurant, and hair salon all within a five-minute walk. Yes, I pretty much have everything I need here.

But that still doesn't change the fact that the next two hours and 30 minutes are going to suck.

The Worst Thing You Can Say To a Kazakh

BEIJING - One joy of studying in a Communist country is meeting students from different countries. In my travels, I've met plenty of Brits, Australians and Germans. Now I take classes alongside Georgians, Mongolians, Lebanese and even Kazakhs.

I'm not sure how big the Kazakh contingent is at Tsinghua. I've became chummy with Madi, a short man with frosted blond tips in his black hair and a vague hip-hop sense of style.

I met Madi on the first day of class, wandering in our dorm lobby. He didn't know his class name, Chinese name or a word of the language.

"I just got here from Kazakhstan," he said, explaining missing nearly a week of orientation events.

Madi works for computer company, specializing in Information Control and Management. He's been dispatched to China by his company, which is paying for 18 months of language training, because he's been told that he won't rise out of middle-management without Chinese. Unmarried, Madi was chosen to learn the language of most of the company's suppliers.

That's right. The first person I ever meet from Kazakhstan works in information control, has just been sent to a strange country to learn the culture and the language for a vaguely absurd reason. You might be wondering why I haven't made a joke about the world's most-famous non-Kazakh Kazakh, Borat. Let me tell you about the other Kazakh I know.

Nadam is 18 years old, and studying here for a year before heading back to Kazakhstan for university. He wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Moscow, with a modern, if Russian-influenced dressing style. He's nice but quiet, rarely saying anything unless called on by our Chinese teachers.

Borat is the elephant that is always in the Kazakh's room. I want to ask, or make a joke or at least say "Very Nice!" in their presence, but I'm afraid of the consequences.

One American classmate had less concern. She asked Nadam if he'd heard of Borat.

Nadam was indignant. "Everybody in Kazakhstan hates this man! Why did he make this movie? He has never even been to Kazakhstan."

Embarrassed, the American pretended to look over new vocabulary words before our next class began.

The next day the American changed class. Her nominal reason was that she couldn't understand our level, and wanted to change to an elementary class. While true enough, I wonder if she feared any further Kazakh wrath.

The moral here is even though it may be incredibly tempting, don't ask a Kazakh about Borat. Ever.

Deep Deep Deep in the Capital

BEIJING - Here's a character all visitors to China's capital should know: 拆. Pronouced "chai," it means destroy, and it's used to mark buildings that won't be around in a month or two.

As the country's preparations for the Olympic Games climax this spring and summer, more and more older buildings are being knocked down to make way for badminton arenas, five-star hotels and fancy Peking Duck restaurants. A BBC Radio documentary I listened to on the Trans-Siberian said that last year there was more construction in Beijing than in the last three combined for all of Western Europe.

Saturday I discovered that not all of Beijing's past is being demolished to make way for the Olympics. As with most things I find, I figured this out by getting lost.

I left comfortable Wudaokou for downtown Beijing to pick up a shoe. That's no typo - I meant shoe singular. Unpacking this week, I discovered not one of the five missing items described in a recent post, and only one Garmont hiking shoe. I also found a key without a key chain. Using Sherlock Holmes levels of reasoning, I realized I'd forgotten the shoe in my hostel locker. So it was back to Qianmen for the shoe and my Y100 locker deposit.

After picking them up unharmed, I decided to head to the Beijing Books Store, a block-long Mao-ist era relic. The crowds can be crazy, the staff surly, but the selection of reasonably priced English books can't be matched this side of Delhi. From a previous visit, a knew the store was not too far west of Tian'anmen Square and set off in that direction.

I walked three blocks, three monolithic blocks of Socialist deisgn, before realizing that I was on Qianmen Lu, and the bookstore was north on Chang'an Lu. I took the first right, and within 100 meters was plunged deep into the hutong world. Here the streets aren't paved, the only bathrooms are public, and spitting apparently is still legal. Old women sold dirt cheap apples, pears and the fruit best translated in English as "apple with a banana taste."

At the tiny Zhongmu Canteen, I ordered by pointing to the handwritten characters on the wall-mounted menu. Five minutes later, a huge bowl of heeping noodles arrived from a old woman with few teeth and nearly incomprehensible Beijing dialect. The food and a large Tsingdao predictably cost less than a dollar.

Across the street from the Canteen was a large fence. Behind it the Great Hall of the People, China's main legislative building, loomed not 200 meters in the distance. Tian'anmen Square was behind that. This neighborhood borders the center of the Chinese empire, and yet life continues as if one of the largest economic booms didn't exist.

Is China's economic boom a chimera? I'm sure the only reason this hutong district hasn't been raised is some historical significance, and that soon even if the buildings remain, they'll be renovated into luxury condos. Right now, though, there's still room in the heart of Beijing to step back in time, and get lost.

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.

Please Do Not Click for English

ALBANY, N.Y. - Spring language program deadlines are approaching, and I'm frantically trying to decide where to spend the next year or so of my life. The process is much like undergraduate admissions, with more Chinglish.

At Peking University's page for international students, prospective students are told the "Application Period is from November 1." Does this mean the school accepts applications beginning on the day? Or is that the deadline? What happens to application sent before then; are they thrown in the trash?

I sent an e-mail off to the school three weeks ago. I received my reply earlier this week: Nov. 1 was the deadline. I guess I won't be studying at Peking University.

(Prospective students can access this accurate information only when the site is working. Many parts of the school's English Web site seem to be frequently down.)

Beijing Normal University's Website features slick graphics and interface, but this element of sophistication is just a veneer on an application which must be printed and faxed to China. Yes, faxed.

After the application is received, the login part of the Web site stops working applicants can only "inquiry" their form. The inquiry section is blank.

Tsinghua University is the "M.I.T. of Asia," but their Web site is more the "Hudson Valley Community College of Northwest Beijing." Their incredibly slow Web site wins points for at least having clear information, but accessing the relevant parts for international students requires avoiding the two most obvious choices (both dead ends) and selecting a small menu on the bottom of the screen.

I want to be admitted to these schools, so I can learn about Beijing in-person, not through a Web site. But for now, this site is my portal to these institutions of higher learning. And what a dirty, foggy porthole it is.

Meeting you, I am very happy.

BOSTON - I’ve seen the light, and his name is Ma Dawei.

Ma Dawei is a fictional character with whom my Chinese classmates and I have become intimately familiar the past few months. Today I met him, and it was one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever attended.

A little background: I’ve been studying Mandarin for nearly a year now. The textbook my school uses for the first two years of study is the “New Practical Chinese Reader” Beijing Language & Culture University. The text consists of grammar lessons, reading passages, character maps and cultural notes, but the most important part is the dialogues. Here a set of six reoccurring characters who live in China interact in increasing sophisticated ways.

Overall the dialogues are pretty good, but there are some necessary concessions in order to introduce vocabulary and grammar at the right pace. An example, from the lesson we’re studying this week:


Lu Yuping: Where is the kitchen?
Wang Xiaoyun: The kitchen is to the north of the living room. The bedroom is to the east of the living room. There is a big balcony at the outside of bedroom.
Ding Libo: Mr. Reporter, you have already asked so many questions. You must also want to write an article to introduce Ma Dawei’s rented house.
Lu Yuping: Asking questions is a reporter’s professional habit.

Over the course of the year, these six people have almost become fellow classmates. I wanted to know what happened when Lin Na lost her bike, or why Wang Xiaoyun didn’t like the Chinese opera performance, and not just because it was homework.

Imagine my surprise when our teacher informed us two weeks ago that Ma Dawei – one of the main characters from the text - would be coming to our university. As a special bonus, the usually quite stingy-on-the-grades Chinese department would be offering a half-point on our final grade for attending. I was there.

Ma Dawei is really Brian Connors (a cartoon representation is at the top of this entry, which bears no resemble to the actual person), a slightly stocky Irish-American 28-year-old from Michigan. He’s not ugly or goofy or any of the stereotypes that sometimes are attached to foreigners in Asia, but he wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, either. He’s just an ordinary American dude, an ordinary American dude who speaks really, really good Chinese.

How good is Ma Dawei’s Chinese? Until three weeks ago, the entire Chinese department thought his voice was dubbed on our textbook’s audio and video cassette tapes (that’s a bit of misnomer, because all our materials are now online). When informed otherwise, my teachers promptly invited him for a pep talk.

“Chinese people often tell me that I speak better Mandarin than they do,” he said. “And most of the time, it’s true.”

Connors’ standard Mandarin accent is top-notch. In a three minute introduction, Connors managed to get the jaws of the vast majority of the Chinese department on the floor by speaking so quickly and fluently.

He gave tons of advice. I haven’t spent too much time in Mainland China – just two months – but it was just long enough to realize that what he was saying was absolutely true. Avoid hanging out with Americans while on your language program. Even if you’re speaking Chinese, talking with the locals will be much better. He also said to expect your relationships with Chinese people to be almost exclusively business-based at the beginning.

“Understand what you are both bringing to the table,” he said.

I dealt with this last point in Hong Kong. It felt like the locals who wanted to hang out with me only wanted to use me as a fountain of knowledge about the English language. Sometimes in order to make long lasting friendships, at the beginning they might have to be based on the tools and skills that each person brings to the table. For Connors, that was playing music with a local band (which brought in extra cash for having a white person frontman) and valuable conversation experience for him. I’m not sure what the comparable skill would be for me, but I’m certainly going to be thinking hard about it in the months to come.

Ma Dawei is a China success story. He completed the challenging John Hopkins in Nanjing program and is now enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He co-owns a café in Beijing with an attached English instruction program called Sculpting in Time. He plans to return to China after graduation and run the café full-time. It’s a long way from his upbringing.

“I’m just an ordinary dude from Michigan who likes Phish,” Connors said.

Was it worth it? I’m entirely sure from his talk. There were undercurrents, although mostly unspoken, that he wasn’t completely satisfied with his life in China. It seemed be a question of not if he would come back to America, but when.

As for the café, I hope to gather a little first-hand experience this June when I’m in Beijing. Connors set the bar pretty high in his description, so I am expecting the best.

One more thought from Mr. Connors was notable. “Living is China is incredibly strange experience,” he said. “Everyday there was a crazy event that I could have written a short story about.”

Considering my own planned future, I certainly hope that’s true.


(The title of this post is an overly literal translation from one of the New Practical Chinese Reader’s beginning lessons. I believe it was uttered by or to Ma Dawei, but I’m not really sure. The Chinese is： 认识您，我很高兴)

The Course of Things

BOSTON - Here's the plan: keep a regularly-updated blog that will document and try to find a common thread through my planned adventures in Hong Kong, Wichita, Kansas, New York and finally Beijing. I'm not sure if there's necessarily something to tease out here, but I figure the best way to find out is to force myself to regularly write about the events in the places around me, and how the larger events in the world are impacting the way we are now.

I'm going to try, but at this point I really can't make any promises, to focus on the locality that I am in at any given moment. That's why I'm throwing up the dateline on each entry, as part of a larger experiment to see how where I am effects the way I write. We'll see how that goes.

The real meat of the blog should begin from the date of my graduation in late May, but I admit that I will probably be posting things from time to time before then. Since I've never had a blog before, consider it a "soft opening" before things really get going.

One more structural point: I've decided not to share this blog with anyone for now. I think in the future, after it's been kept for a few weeks or month, I might mention it to friends and family, but for now, nothing. There seems to be so much baggage that comes with "writing a blog" these days, that I want to keep things on the down-low for the meantime, and give myself the opportunity to back out at anytime. But of course, this being the Internet and a public and searchable blog anything might happen.

And that is what I'm hoping will.