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.)

A Russian Master

ALBANY, N.Y. - I'll cop to putting some unusual things on the blog this week. Poems, old articles and weird pictures. That's just the way it's going to be sometimes on here.

This morning I had tea with a Russian woman, Irina. Irina is in her middle 40s and came to our meeting in a full-length formal coat and black slacks. Her wavy hair was recently highlighted.

I wore a mint colored button down shirt with a yellow and blue band near the shoulders that said "RedEx: Redhot Express" across the front. It cost $5 at an export shop in Hong Kong.

We met at Border's Books and Music in the Albany suburb of Colonie. My father was there, and so was Irina's daughter, Tonya. Tonya, 15, is a ranked chess player, future AP student and anime fan. By coming to Albany today, she missed anime festival in New Hampshire. She made an elaborate costume for Halloween this year, a hooded warrior that took more than 20 hours of sewing between Irina and Tonya, and plans to wear it at future anime gatherings. I told her about my recent trip to an anime festival, where I saw a number of people walking the hotel event room floor with eight-foot keys from the game Kingdom Hearts.

"That's a very popular game," Tonya said. Apparently anime tastes in the Northeast aren't terribly different than in the Heartland.

Tonya and Irina live in Montpelier, the tiny capital of Vermont. (Tonya said it only has 8,000 people, Wikipedia says 8,035, which is pretty damn close.) They're originally from Moscow. I'm not sure why they came over here: I was too busy talking about anime to ask.

Irina and I met because I've recently begun planning a trip to Russia. I tentatively thinking about flying to Moscow from New York in early February, and making my way to language school in Beijing by rail. Paul Theroux, the chronicler of train journeys, has convinced me to take this long trip. Irina's never been on the long train, but she had some advice on the Moscow leg of the trip.



"The plane food was O.K.," she said. The best part about Aeroflot - the Russian airline - was the free rubber duck provided in coach.

Moscow has terrible traffic. It always moves, just at a slow pace. Obviously Irina does not travel with the blue light buying sect in the city.

I shouldn't travel places at night, it's not good. What will happene, I'm not sure, but Irina didn't get into I didn't want to ask.

There's a cool chocolate factory near the riverside monument to Peter the Great. Sounds yummy.



And best of all, Irina agreed to hook me up with an American friend living in Moscow to be a companion, guide, friend and possible host while in the city. For the price of a cup of Pomegranate Green Icea Tea, I learned quite a bit.