The Gazelle

BEIJING - Meet The Gazelle.

 

She's faster, sleeker and more art-deco than her predecessor.

 

She comes with a new seat, basket and lock for 110 RMB. Her brakes are underneath the handlebars, which don't have any practical purpose but ensure she stands out in a crowd.

 

You can see The Gazelle around Northwestern Beijing all this spring, or until she swiped by a sneaky Chinese thief.

O.K. so there's supposed to be a picture here, but the Great Firewall of China isn't letting me upload one today. I'll try at a later date.

The Keystone Cops and the Return of the Catac

BEIJING - When my bike disappeared last week, I didn't report it to the police. My friends said it would be a waste of time. The police can't be bothered looking for stolen bike in a sea of them.

 

I took a couple days to mourn the loss and then bought the Gazelle. I did everything exactly the same as last time, except this time I bought a better lock, which I make sure to attach to an immobile object every evening.

 

This afternoon I chained The Gazelle to a staircase leading up to the lobby of my building, opposite a "Please Do Not Place Your Bike Here Sign." Underneath the sign was a bike. The bike's most obvious feature was a neon orange velour seat cover, but looking past that I saw the faded letters "Catac" scrawled across the frame. I went closer and gave it a thorough inspection. The same dented basket with a hole in one side, the same twisted right brake bar, the same broken stop. There was no question: This was the Catac.

 

I ran inside the building to the front counter.

 

"Fuyuan! Fuyuan!" I said, addressing the building staff. "Last week my bike was stolen but now it's outside! My bike is back!"

 

"Really?"

 

There were three fuyuans behind the lobby counter. The first fuyuan wanted to call the police, the second fuyuan said that wasn't a good idea because buying a used bike is illegal in China, and the third fuyuan said that he knew another type of police who could take care of the problem.

 

Five minutes later, a dark green van pulled up to the door. Four men came out, all dressed in cheap polyster jackets that I imagine they believe gives them an air of authority and came inside. They introduced themselves as supervisors of the dining hall and after hearing the story of the Catac, asked to see my student card.

 

In China, a student card is actually a small book that resembles a half-size passport. I took mine out of my pocket and the head suit man gave it a looking over. Satisfied, he handed it back.

 

"Do you need your bike back right now?" he asked me.

 

"No, why?"

 

The suit men had a plan. They wanted to put the bike back as bait, and perform a stakeout to catch the bike thief. That sounded fine with me, so I left the men to their own devices.

 

Fifteen minutes later, I left the building on an errand and found the four suit men standing on the lawn in front of the building. Beside them was the bike, lying 20 meters from where the thief left it. Some detective work.

 

An hour later, I returned to the building to see The Catac on the ground, knocked over by a strong wind. The fake police were gone, and the fuyuan said they caught no one.

 

I peeled the ugly orange seat cover off the old Catac. It was mine once again.

The Genuine Articles

BEIJING - When will China get real?

 

On the streets of Beijing, many middle-class accoutrement are on display: phones, movies, music, name brand pants and jackets. The problem is that many of these are knock-offs, expertly made and virtually identical to the real McCoy.

 

This isn't news; Chinese fakes stock black markets around the world. But will it ever change? If the country's economy continues to develop, it won't be long before large numbers of people make Western level incomes. One hundred million people making $10,000 a year in ten years doesn't seem far-fetched. The Chinese could replace fakes with the genuine article.

 

A shocking discovery I made last night causes me to think otherwise. A small newsstand on campus had several magazine racks on display just outside the store, one with comics, another with news articles and a third with English titles. They were mostly old issues of Time and the Economist, resealed in plastic and being sold for $1.75.

 

With the paucity of English language reading material in China, it looked like a good deal. I thumbed through the titles, but one stood out. It was an Economist, maize in color with a nine-photo montage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Meet Germany's New Leader," the main headline screamed, but something didn't seem quite right. Instead of the traditional Economist font, the text on the cover was written in Times New Roman. And the promised articles weren't from the issue with Merkel on the cover, they belonged to the week before. This was a fake Economist.

 

Why someone would go through the trouble of making knock-off copies of a two year old economic magazine I'm not sure. But someone did and presumably there is a market for this kind of thing.

 

Fakes are widely available on the Tsinghua campus, China's best science and technology research college. This is the place where China's future inventors are studying, people who should care about intellectual property law. Instead, here they sell knock off iPod headphones for $3 and fake Sony ones for $2. The bikes aren't real, and neither are the basketballs.

 

Rather than going away, I see the Chinese fake economy branching off into smaller and smaller niches: Economists and Salinger books for the intellectual, North Face jackets and Columbia packs for the backpacker, Hello Kitty dolls and Korean soaps for the teenager.

 

Sounds like a phenomenon that might interest The Economist.

Language Accessories

BEIJING - Under my right arm during each Chinese adventure is a Little Yellow Book.

 

This is the "Langenscheidt Pocket Dictionary: Chinese," a six by three inch guide to the country. The Langenscheidt gets me out of traffic jams, helps repair broken appliances, and led to my recent acquistion of Aghan currency. I consider it invaluable, which is why I found it particularly strange when a middle-aged Chinese man got off his bicycle in the middle of Tsinghua's busy pathways and asked me how much it cost.

 

"Eighty kuai," I said, which is about $10.

 

"Can I see it?" he said. The man wore an old windbreaker and khakis. He looked too old to be a student, but lacked the air of sophisticated and academic wisdom that inhabits most professors. Perhaps he worked at the library, or was a doctoral student. He spoke English quite well.

 

"Pock-et Dictionary," he said, reading the teal blue text on the cover.

 

He stared down at the book for a while more. "So this is about 14 American dollars?"

 

I let him know that his estimate was a little high. He handed me back the book, gave me a farewell wave and kept on biking.

 

Why he stopped me I'm not sure. Maybe he had a copy that he wanted to sell, or is in the market for an English-Chinese dictionary. Maybe he just thought it looked cool.

Beijing's Fancy Nordic Cafe

BEIJING - As a university student, I shouldn't feel out of place at Ikea. The Swedish furniture store carved out a small empire on reasonably priced, cosmopolitian but hard to assemble homeware. But wandering around the company's four story Beijing outlet, I felt like I should have worn better shoes.

 

At 8 p.m. on Friday night the store was packed with young families, many with a small child riding in the cart. Grandma and Grandpa also were along, offering advice as these middle-class professionals bought new furniture to go with their new downtown digs. Most shoppers looked thrilled to be there.

 

Ikea may be the furniture new graduates with loan payments can afford, but here in China it's a mark of luxury. The curved Swedish designs are a huge improvement from the drab Communist styles that decorate most Chinese flats.

 

I came for a pillow, since the dorms only provide one that usually falls on the floor in the middle of the night. I found that Ikea caters to a number of Chinese budgets: high and higher. Cheap pillows started at RMB 49, but these were useless. The first acceptable pillow cost RMB 99, and the store also sold RMB 199, 299 and 450 models. It's too rich for my taste, but the pillow racks were half-empty, meaning that someone is snatching up these pricy bed items.

 

Like so many other things in China, the center of the store was the food counter. At most Ikeas, the restaurant is hidden toward the end of the store, providing people with a rest after a relaxing afternoon of shopping. In Beijing it's accessible right from the entrance, and clearly is the only destination for some shoppers. The dining hall sat several hundred, and each table was full.

 

The wealth of the Ikea clientele was even more clear here. Most people used forks and spoons with ease, and came to dinner with fancy coats, suits and dresses. I even heard a smattering of English around the dinning hall -- even though very few ex-pats seemed to be in residence.

 

"Excuse me," a person said after bumping into me in English. Another young Chinese woman told me to get the Ikea Family card - this way on my next visit, I could get free coffee.

 

The line for food spilled out of the cafeteria area. Other diners stocked up on food as if they hadn't eaten in weeks: each one taking two or more heaping dishes plus salads, muffins and wine. It took more than 15 minutes for me to get my plate of Swedish meatballs and gravy, fries and a Coke for Y15.

 

The meal was delicious, and I'm glad to have had so much company. It appears I'll have a place to get Swedish meatballs in Beijing for some time to come.

Blondes Have It Better

BEIJING - For my first haircut as a Beijing resident, I walked over to a narrow alley near Tsinghua's West Gate. Vendors lined the street, selling cold noodles, grilled tofu and cheap phone cards so migrant workers can talk to family in Shangdong, Shanxi or Hubei.

 

My salon appeared to have no name. Instead two barber poles, each with a strip of neon pink in the middle, marked the entrance. Inside two red barber chairs were near center on the red wall. Both chairs were occupied by young Chinese women, hair half in curls, half flowing two feet towards the floor. Cutting their hair were two fashionably dressed men who looked related. One had his hair dyed platinum blonde, the other wore his in a mullet.

 

"I'd like a haircut," I said.

 

The blonde-haired man pointed me to a folding chair in the salon's back right corner. This was the salon's waiting room. I took out Chekov's "Uncle Vanya," and started to read about life on a nineteenth-century Russian estate. A portable boom-box blasted out Hong Kong techno; one of the customers sang along to most of the lyrics in impressive Cantonese.

 

I read halfway through Act Three before the blonde barber called me over to the table. "How do you want your hair?" he said.

 

My hair vocabulary hasn't improved in the last month. "Not too short," is still all I have.

 

The barber took off, trimming, cutting, snipping and clipping my hair for the next 45 minutes. After the second blow-dry, he allowed me to put my glasses back on. My hair had been thrown in two different directions - something I think maybe called a "weave" in salon terms. There just wasn't very much of it - perhaps a quarter of an inch on top. I thanked the barber and got out of the salon before he decided to take any more of my hair.

 

The next day I came to class with my newly scalped top to find that the only two other white men in the class with the same 'do. All three of us sought out small salons around the West Gate, and all were left with little hair to show for it.

 

"Haircuts" is an infrequent series about haircuts, the people who give them and the styles they dish out.

Character Swap

BEIJING - It appears that Blogger has been inserting random errors into some of my recent entries. Chinese characters in e-mail entries (and this being China, many entries have at least a couple) have been scrambled.

I thought e-mail would be a panacea to the problem of posting from remote places. But over the past two months entries have been sent and not posted, posted on the wrong day, and now have completely different meanings.

I'm going to try to post directly to Blogger whenever possible, but with the Chinese government blocking and unblocking the site at random, it won't be all the time.

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.

Mourning the Catac

BEIJING - Thursday night, I stopped by the Foreign Language Center's supermarket shortly before closing. I bought jasmine tea, a bowl of spicy pork ramen noodles and an orange Fanta. I threw the purchase into my bike basket and pedalled the three minutes home.

I didn't know at the time it would be last time I would ride my precious bike. This morning, I went down to the lobby of my dormitory, Building 23, and ducked into the bike storage catacombs on the left side of the building. I soon reached the place where I keep my bike, the third storage area on the right-side.

I looked for the familiar piece of brown and black checkered velor that covered the cracked leather seat. For the bright red lock, a giant piece of metal licorice with see-through crimson plastic on top. I went to the adjacent bike area, and then to the ones on the other side of the hallway. It was nowhere to be found.

The receptionists didn't even know I owned a bike. Describe it to us, they asked. Struggling for words, I managed a few appropriate adjectives. It was old, with a red lock and a seat that wasn't all black. The head receptionist took notes as I was talking, and they promised a search.

Twelve hours later, I hold out little hope of ever seeing the bike again. As I've mentioned before, bikes get stolen all the time in China, and what are the odds of locating one stray set of wheels in a sea of them?

With the loss of my bike and the lock, I lose Y100, about $12.50. This presumes that I can find a new one at the same cost, not a guarantee considering the amount of time it took to get the first one. I'm also out my main mode of transport, a rusty set of wheels that quickly became my favorite possession.

The bike had no name. I wanted to give it one, assigning something to claim it as my own. "Suzi" was the closest I came, but somehow it seemed slightly vulgar to christen a bike with a human name. I thought what I  might call another vehicle, but failed to get past the "Red Rocket," a Toyota Tercel I once drove around Albany. Then there were Chinese names, which might have been appropriate considering the surroundings. Considering how long it took me to decide on my own Chinese name, I couldn't see going down that path again, only to end up with something silly like 小车 (xiaoche, little car) or vulgar 拉肚子 (laduzi, diaherra).

The only thing I knew about the bike's origins was a faded decal under the seat that said "Catac." The man who sold it to me claimed it was German, although he later modified that and said it was German and Chinese. Perhaps that meant a Chinese bike with a borrowed German name. Or maybe long ago it arrived by ship from China; I'm not sure, and it never really mattered.

Most afternoons I'd take the bike somewhere, going an adventure masked as an errand. Every trip to the Internet Café I'd take a different route. Sometimes I would ride on the side of the main highway, blasting French techno on iPod, cars honking their horns as they passed. Other times I'd wind through campus, watching in awe as Chinese students rode two or three to a bike,

One time I crossed the railroad tracks -- the Trans-Siberian runs not 100 meters behind my dorm -- and went to the Korean part of Wudaokou. Here dishes are garnished with kimchi, not soy sauce, and some people speak worse Putonghua than I do. I wandered into a back alley, passed a club named R&B and waved to a couple old men on the street. It all seemed natural when pedalling by.

The Tsinghua campus makes sense on a bike. The large red slogan banners, announcing events and major government initiatives, are draped across the roads at a bike rider's eye level. Major campus services - the library, canteens, and administrative offices - are scattered over a couple of kilometers. By foot, it can take 20 or 30 minutes to walk between parts. Only by taking a bike are things located within reasonable distances.

This is why my period of mourning will be brief. Soon enough I will again have wheels, will again be pedalling around the flat, wide streets of Wudaokou, dodging traffic and running errands long after the Catac is melted for scrap metal.

We'll Always Have Facebook

BEIJING - Wednesday night at Propaganda, a student bar in Wudaokou, the basement dance floor is packed full of Chinese and foreign students, making and losing friends every song. They're here for open bar night, where $6 buys all the Manhattans, Mai Tais, Tsingdaos and Whiskey Sours one can drink before four in the morning.

 

Stopping by the bar in the middle of this week's event, I started chatting with a woman standing next to me, waiting for a Blue Hawaii. She studied Chinese at Capital Normal University, she explained in Chinese. Switching to English, she explained that she was on exchange for one semester from Wesleyan, in Boston. I mentioned that I went to Tufts, not five miles away.

 

"I went to Tufts once," she said, reaching over to get her cocktail. "It was a lecture about adoptees."

 

I paused, thinking back about a year ago, when a friend took me to a lecture about a Korean women adopted by an American family. "Wait," I said, "Was it about Korean adoptees?"

 

"Yes," she said, getting excited now. We doubled checked the size of the room (large), wall decorations (periodic tables, it was held in the chemistry building) and after lecture refreshments (cupcakes). They were the same. We had met before, in a manner of speaking.

 

She grabbed my arm -- thankfully not the one with the whiskey sour in it -- and walked toward the staircase.

 

"You must meet my roommate," she said.

 

We went into the middle of the dance floor, elbowing our way past its mostly drunk occupants. There we found the roommate, a Korean-American who also went to Wesleyan.

 

"I'm from here," she said, pointing near the elbow of her left hand, which was bent in a 90-degree angle. This was the location of her town on Cape Cod. We exchanged memories from that one shared lecture, chatted briefly about Beijing, and then danced to "Buttons" by Pussycat Dolls and Snoop Dogg, "The Next Episode," also from Snoop Dogg, this time with Dr. Dre, and Chingy's "Holiday Inn."

 

After the third song, the roommate disappeared out onto the dance floor.

 

"I have to go," she said.

 

But as she was leaving, she shouted out a final good bye.

 

"Facebook me!"

 

And I did. If our first encounter went unnoticed, and our second was by chance, why not have the third be on the Internet?