Babushka With a Side of Fries

MOSCOW — I wanted my dozen or so meals here to be representative of the cuisines and tastes of the Russian Federation. As the capital and largest city, Moscow is in the best position to showcase Russian cooking as more than just smelly borscht. I wanted to go low, high, and find some tasty treats.

Me and my plans. The reality has been that I've been so busy running from one side of the metro station to the other reading Cyrillic and quizzing people on scholarships that food is an afterthought. Moscow on 800 rubles a day leaves no room in the budget for a splurge at a fancy, elitny restaurant. The only oligarchs I spotted on this visit were zooming by in their Black Bentleys as I stumbled around to the nearest subway station. Thankfully I've not gotten so lost in Moscow to run into a place where it's possible to eat out of a tent, although I hear that these "refugee restaurants" exist in some outer ring roads.

No, I've been sticking to meals on demand, and during the day that means blinki (a savory crepe) joints near museums and monuments, and at night, restaurants along the Arbat. I've made it twice to Mu-Mu, the canteen where I had an interesting meal with Helen, once to a Turkish place with a great Donner kebab, and another time to the ultimate Russian restaurant. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called McDonald's.

I dine at the Golden Arches once in every country visit without apology. There's so much to learn about a culture by seeing how they've refined the ultimate American tradition to suit local conditions. The brutal Russian winter prevented me from visiting the most historically important McDonald's outlet – Pushkin Square – where thousands of Soviets camped out overnight on January 31, 1990, for their first taste of an American made meal. This massive facility, which seats 900 people at once, is a shrine to capitalism's arrival in Russia.

The Arbat outlet is little different. It has recently been remodeled, much like the one in Pushkin Square. The sleek steel counter tops and faux-mahogany wall panels resemble the bridge of the Enterprise more than my McDonald's down the street. There are 17 cash registers, all open during dinner hour visit.

Some McDonald's innovate with different cuisine offerings, spinach curry puffs in India and lobster rolls in Maine, but McDonald's Russia offers a straightforward American burger and fries. While the decor is fancy, it is standard-issue McDonald's Europe, and soon will be found in restaurants from Reykjavik to Istanbul. Uniquely Russian is the attention to the queue management and the flow of people. On entering the restaurant, an attractive young woman assigns diners to a line. On my visit, the line is quite long for a fast food restaurant, and it takes about 15 minutes before I get to the front.

(There's an even crazier feature to this restaurant, which I unfortunately did use: a walk-through window. I know some restaurants in cities have an ice-cream machine on the street, but this is a full-service, two-window affair that resembles the drive-through, except its for people wearing fur coats, not behind the wheel.)

I order, but get only my fries and then am sent to a stool near a window. There are few private tables at this McDonalds. The main door is at the middle of the restaurant, and besides the kitchen and line space the rest is reserved for four eating areas. Most parties mix together, pensioners and young couples, tourists and locals at the large tables and stools without backs. My situation does not seem to be unique: most people seem to be given only part of their meals and pointed to a certain table. I hate to draw an analogy too far, but it seems very centrally-planned. Why can't I sit where I want? Is the number of hamburgers deliberately kept low in order to control where people sit?

At least there's been no attempt to mess with the food. Or maybe there has. The fries are crispy and perfectly salted. The hamburger, when it arrives, seems bigger than normal, and has just the right amount of ketchup and mustard.

McDonald's has an incentive to get it right. As recently as eight years ago, the average Russian ate out just once a year. Thanks to rising oil prices, things are a little better now, but people don't eat out all that often. A meal at a restaurant is special, and McDonald's still counts as a special expierence. So there's extra attention put into the food – and where people sit.

Monika

MOSCOW – Monika is quarrelsome; I say three things and she finds fault with two.

She's Polish, and winces when I say that I've only visited Warsaw. The capital, she says, echoing a common Polish lament, is so ugly, why didn't you go to the coast, or to Krakow? She doesn't care for all the drinking in the hostel, which spills over nightly from the tiny gathering room into the bedroom she shares with five other guests. It's infurirating that she finds so much to criticise, especially since I'm her roommate.

But if I didn't have Monika at arm's length to complain, I wouldn't be close enough to see the contents of her suitcase, laid across the lumpy top bunk in neat stacks. On top is the Intermediate Mandarian Chinese Reader, and below, several thick grammar texts.

Monika is here en route to Tianjin, a large Chinese city on the coast not far from Beijing. She studied last year at Tianjin University, and received a fellowship from the government to return for another six months. When she uses the common phone to contact a Chinese acquaintance here in Moscow I hear the crispnessness of her tones and instantly know her language level is far above mine.

I compliment her language.

"I speak quite poorly!" she replies, sharply.

I believe her language standards are a little too exacting. Monika will only travel to countries where she knows the languages. Granted, she is a bit of a polyglot, with some knoweldge six languages, but this seems to be a crazy standard. Why must a person spend years in a classroom before they are allowed to step foot in a foreign land?

Too frequently I am fooled by Monika's appearance, which nails every librarian stereotype effortlessly: a big, bunchy earth-toned sweater; dark, round glasses; sensible shoes; an ochre-toned face with little exposure to the sun. This is true, but Monika has no pressed-leaf collection, nor does she aspire to a secretarial job at a local paper facility.

Monika's parents believe that after Christmas, she went to Warsaw and boarded a plane toward China. This is true, but that plane stopped here in Moscow. She got off, and Monika is using funds the Chinese government gave her for a plane ticket to fianance this trip. That means living at the Sweet Moscow Hostel, eating meals from the supermarket, and travelling to Tianjin on the cheapest train, the dreaded platzkart class. Moscow alternative weekly the eXile describes platzkart as "long distance transportation hell," where 54 people are crammed into one train car. Monika gave up a free plane ticket to spend an entire week in this car, where she won't have any money to buy fresh food and will probably be crammed between chain smoking Chinese businessmen and vodka-downing Russian businessmen. Definitely not librarian style.

In tight spaces and cold climates, Monika and I have many opportunities each day for conversation. I find it hard to develop a routine with Monika. Maybe it is her foreigness – although I didn't have this problem with other people I met in Poland – but I keep bumping into sore spots in our relations.

One afternoon she's on the hostel computer. I ask when she will be finished – so I can blog – expecting a mean look. Instead I get an invitation to look at an e-mail she's sending to a friend in China. Monika types to her Chinese friends in pinyin, a romanizined version of Chinese, and claims it's easier to type than characters. I'm curious, so I start to read the message.

Zhe liang tian qian hen shao. These past few days qian is very little.

"What's qian?"

Monika's cheeks rouge. "Oh, it's -- it's personal," she says, and then I turn red when I realize that qian here means money, and this sentence is informing her friend that funds will be tight this semester. I pretend to keep skimming the e-mail, but after a minute forget about blogging.

Sweet Moscow is close to several tourist attractions but there are no obvious clubs on the street. With nighttime temperatures well below zero, most guests come back after dinner and spend the evenings indoors, venturing outdoors only to the small grocery across the street to grab a snack and bottles of Baltika beer. On Monika's final night there are only four people in our bedroom, the other two being a boisterious British pair, Tom and Sam. By the third bottle of beer – well after midnight – Sam is asleep and Tom and I are deep into an argument about whether Putin will step aside at the end of his term next year. Monika is above the conversation, as she sits on her top bunk and studies her Chinese books while we debate the future of the Russian state.

Tom tries to bring her into the conversation, asking her what she believes.

"I'm not sure I have an opinion about the political situation here," she says, her Eastern-European accent making a stronger than normal apperanence in this rebuff.

Feeling miscevious after a few drinks, I decided to press Monika further. What about the Chinese government, what do you think about the lack of elections there?

"I'm not sure I know enough about the situation to have an opinion," she says. Another dodge.

But surely, I ask, things are better in Poland now that there are elections? Monika can remember the first real elections, the rise of Solidarity and the collapse of an imperialist rule based in this very city.

She nods, and silently conceeds the point.

Emboldened, I keep going. I'm troubled by China, I say. I love China and I hate it. I am fascinated by Chinese culture, I have met many interesting Chinese people and inside the country had some of the best conversations of my life. The People's Republic of China has brought more people out of poverty than any government in history, in less time. It's a miracle, yet the state is still run by thugs, and every time I go inside the country, and have my passport stamped, I'm validating the rule of these thugs. So my question is, are you, as someone born into a repressive regime, worried about taking money and sponsorship from another one?

She's quiet for a minute, and then speaks up. "I want to learn the language. I like this university. They gave me the money, so I will go back."

Tom steps in with an ill-informed comment about Tibetan independence. It's not true, but Monika and I are both grateful for him to take the reigns of conversation and rail on about the Chinese for many minutes. I'm afraid that I squashed rather than merely stepped on Monika's toes this time, and make a point of waiting until after I hear her leave the flat for breakfast to get up late the next morning.

We see each other one last time, in the foyer as she is leaving for the train station. Unexpectedly it is Monika who speaks first.

"I think you will be a good journalist," she says. "You ask good questions. And you listen."

Again, I miscalculate Monika's emotions. Whereas I thought my questions came off as probing or meddlesome, to Monika we were exploring our different perspectives on life. We exchange e-mail addresses and phone numbers in China, and I find myself wishing as we hug goodbye that I was on her train to Beijing. I have so many more questions.

The Metro Code

MOSCOW – At the Sweet Moscow Hostel, one amenity that seems to come with check-in is a comfortable familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet. A Swedish couple staying on a queen mattress on the floor in the next floor said they figured out how to use Cyrillic in two days. A Brit on winter university holidays says he could do the basics in one. The hostel manager, also a Swede, who arrive three months ago from managing a property in Thailand, can read whole chunks of text. Perhaps someone will check in tomorrow will memorize it in the taxi from the airport or from a podcast they will listen to in REM sleep the first night in the six bedroom dorm.

Taking Cyrillic and turning it into normal letters is essentially a Cryptogram, those switching puzzles that some pale eight-year-old boys love to solve instead playing of contact sports, or at least they used to before World of Warcraft. The Cyrillic letter "р" – written the same as the Roman/English letter "p" – is actually the same as the letter "r." Their "c" is the same as our "s," our "n" the same their "h," and so on.

Using substitution, the mysterious and impossible Russian looking "ресторан," becomes something near and dear to every American: a R-E-S-T- O-R-A-N. In Russian, it doesn't even have the crazy French verb "au." Here it's simply "o," just the way it sounds.

It sounds so easy, but alas, I still don't have it down.

If only Cyrillic was just about taking the letters and mixing them up, some strange equation to memorize in 26 parts (If P = R then R = T and C = P). The reality – that it's much more complicated – arrives in three stages: б, я and Г. Here's a more detailed look at each individual stage:

Stage б: Apparently there are some characters in Cyrillic there aren't the same as English. But that one kinda looks the as a "b" so it's not too bad.
Stage я: Eh, not only is this character backward, which is pretty freaky, someone at the hostel told me that it's a vowel. Whoa.
Stage Г: Holy fuck! What is the hell is that? Put down the Russian dictionary and spend $7 on the International Herald Tribune at nearest Western supply store. Read about Paris Hilton over a Big Mac at nearest McDonald's.

Yes, Cyrillic has crazy bonus letters that don't correspond to a single English letter or sound. There's my personal least-favorite: Ж.

My restaurant example makes it sound like a simple substitution process, but a single letter can represent any number of sounds, depending on the letters grouped around. With my non-existent Russian, I have no way of knowing whether an "O" is an O or a U, for instance.

Oh, and even if I was able translate these words into Roman letters, they would still be in Russian, with its complicated grammar, unfamiliar verb forms and random diacritical marks in the middle of words. The only reason I want to convert is so that I can attempt to pronounce them to people on the street, or see if the word is a cognate. There's a fair number of English words in use, so there's always a chance that I can convert and figure it out. As a bonus, Russian, thanks to the Francophile Catherine the Great, uses tons of French. "Restaurant" isn't originally English, you know.

As a political scientist, I might be interested in the word "самиздат," if it appeared somewhere on the streets of Moscow. If by some miracle I could convert it to letters, I would get "samizdat," which doesn't help much. Wikipedia says this refers to "the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries," but again, how would I know that just by taking the Cyrillic letters and making them into Roman ones?

But I don't have time to find glasnost-era relics (or more appropriately I should say Гла́сность-era relics). I'm too busy trying to use the subway. Moscow isn't the most tourist friendly city in the world, especially if you're traveling on a budget that doesn't allow for a private helicopter rental. The metro system is labyrinthine, with more than a dozen lines snaking around the city in pixelated lines. Destinations are labeled only in Russian-Cyrillic.

The biggest problem for the Cyrillic-challenged on the metro is deciding which direction to go. After descending 15 or 20 stories underground (these stations were designed to serve as fallout shelters), I, the rider am faced with parallel tracks a couple of hundred meters apart. They are quite wide, as Russian metro stations are Baroque masterpieces, the most beautiful example of Soviet public art.

The distance makes even the tiniest, most insignificant outpost appear to rival New York's Grand Central Station, but also complicates choosing your destination, as the list of stops is listed only on the wall past where the train stops. The current station is shown as a large white circle, and then all the remaining stations are listed in order.

In order to make a decision, first I must pull out the name of my destination, which inevitably is one incredibly long word, something like, "Замоскворе́цкая." I have to look at this word slyly, as more than a glance will be a tip-off to police in the station that I'm a tourist and they should start concocting some sort off "offense" and issue me a "fine," and then I have to determine if that station is on this side of the track.

Замоскворе́цкая. There's that one that looks the backwards three, and then an "a" and then I forgot. Another glance, and a check to the left and right for police. So there's an "m" and about halfway through there's an apostrophe. I go back to the list of stations - there's so many of them. Moscow is huge, and some lines have over 40 stops, and over half of them appear to start with the backwards three.

Whoosh! A train arrives. Moscow is the opposite of every other metro system in the world in that trains come far too often. They arrive every 90 seconds at most stations, which between passengers embarking and disembarking, doesn't leave much time for scanning the wall for station names. So most of the time, I'm racing against the arrival of an oncoming train. If I don't see the station name, or what I think is the name, I start dashing (not running, that might attract the police) to the other side to catch the train.

All this trouble just because I'm not functional in Ж and those other strange letters. Since everybody at the hostel claims to be so good at using these stupid things, tomorrow I should bring someone along on the metro, as my personal decoder.

Falling Off the Map

PSKOV, Russia – I take my seat on the express bus to Moscow and already I'm nervous. My pre-assigned seat is next to a middle-aged man with several boils on his cheek (suspicious) who is wearing a long, gray overcoat despite already having taken his seat. From my high school days in the aftermath of the Columbine school shooting, I associate long coats with terrorists, and considering I'm about to enter Vladimir Putin's Russia alone, I don't need any suspicious seat mates.

The bus takes a circuitous route out of Vilnius, the prosperous capital of Lithuania: one last chance to admire the comfortable surrounds I am leaving. Here I made friends easily, and slept first in a comfortable country estate and then a cozy urban hostel. Now I must embark on the most uncertain part of my journey. Russia dwarfs the Eastern European countries where my journey to China begins. It sprawls around a globe, refusing to be taken in by just one glance, as if the territory of a much smaller country leaked out of the sides to the far eastern and western periphery of the globe. One man can't be found in all that space.

As the bus reaches the outskirts of the developed world, I know that if something goes wrong on this trip, there isn't a familiar face for eight thousand miles. I don't have a cell phone or the address of the American embassy. And I can't be comforted by the fact that I'm traveling somewhere particularly safe. Russia's international reputation is plunging, with plutonium assassinations and fuel lines shut-off at the slightest criticism of the Kremlin. Gangsters and oligarchs run amok and public services are extremely corrupt. I'm not sure if these things are true, but this is the Russia I have heard about in America, from friends and acquaintances, from people I ran into over the past few days in Eastern Europe, and from newspapers and magazines. This is all I have.

Tickets and passports are checked as we near the Latvian border. The vast majority of people on the bus are Russian, a few are Lithuanian, and there is exactly one non-Slav – me. When we arrive, my passport is passed around for special examination among the half-dozen assembled police and security forces outside the bus, I don't believe for security reasons. Rather it seems the young guards want a glimpse at a Chinese visa and the gold lettering Americans use on the front of their passports. Each time the small book is passed to another eager set of hands I imagine it slipping into their owner's pockets, never coming out. Somehow it makes it back to me, and I stuff it deep into my jeans.

We stop again sometime after dark. The men get out and smoke cigarettes. I urinate on the concrete wall of a shuttered convenience store. Just before the rest area I saw a sign for the border: 60 kilometers. Under an hour. There won't be another chance to leave. My iPod is on the bus, so is my passport. My bladder is empty. I retake my seat next to the man with the long overcoat.

I miss the signs that announce our exit from the European Union: they are obscured by the trucks. The line of trucks starts five miles before we exit Latvia. Commercial traffic must only be allowed to cross at certain hours, so these carriers of plastics and cheeses and consumer goods wait on the right side of the road for a few hours, with sleeping drivers, waiting for the checkpoint to open in the morning. The Latvian border guard stamps directly underneath my Latvian entry stamp; he must be used to foreign tourists using his country as a shortcut on the way to somewhere else. He is neat in his stamping.

The frontier is a disappointment. I am expecting rows and rows of razor wire, or perhaps high fences alternating with moats filled with acid. Instead it is just more "Latvia" – a field. Parked on the side of the road are a military truck or two, but these wouldn't stop the adjacent village from invading, let alone the forces of the European Union.

My nerves kick in again as I see the outpost come into view. It's a full-on Soviet establishment: bright fluorescent lights, slabs of concrete and depressing Modernist flourishes thrown together at the worst possible angles. Imagine the Jetsons as designed by a fax machine working in the mail room of a middling 1968 Detroit paper company. I don't know what that means: it looked ugly and imposing in the way Russian things built in the last half-century do. Across the top, in large, evenly spaced letters reads, "Russian Federation." That would be intimidating, but it actually says something much worse:

Росси́йская Федера́ция

The Cyrillic alphabet is a strange and frightening beast.

Now if I could separate into halves, the person experiencing this event a complete neutral, rational observer - the Vulcan - would point out that procedures at this border checkpoint are nearly identical to those at the Canadian checkpoint between Albany and Montreal, which I used to cross while riding on Greyhound Buses when I was in high school, going to visit friends at McGill University. We filed off the bus– in silence – and into the station. We passed through two queues. At each my passport was examined and at the second, it was also stamped. No one asked me any questions; in fact, no one said anything. I kept waiting for something to happen to break the tension, but nothing did.

Through immigration, I converted $50 into rubles and went back on the bus. By now it was almost midnight and there had been no dinner stop, so we pulled into a small store a few hundred meters into Russian space. The parking lot was filled with trucks waiting for morning and Latvia. I could see why we didn't stop before: gas and food is much cheaper in Russia. The store was overly lit and hours of being on edge left me with a headache and feeling drained, so I wandered the narrow aisles of the store in a dazed shuffle. I crossed the threshold, I went over the horizon.

After a few minutes inside the store, I settled on a pack of Skittles, a piece of sausage and a Gin and Tonic in a can. Two months ago in a Washington bar, I spoke with an English woman about her trip through Russia. She and her girlfriends just drank these mixers as they cruised around Moscow. As my coach headed deeper into the Russian night, I tried to think such comforting thoughts. But instead I could only nervously sip my slightly alcoholic beverage, which brought me toward restless dreams of me as a tiny green blip, fading from a view on a gigantic radar screen.

What's This?

ALBANY, N.Y. — Regular readers of the blog, or those following along in chronological order, will notice a large gap between the last China entry and this one with no explanation. I'm here, after a break, to provide one.

I had to leave China unexpectedly due to health reasons. My headaches started in Hong Kong last summer. They came and went through the fall, forcing me cut short my road trip back from Kansas. This meant no Mount Rushmore or car camping in Wyoming. I went on a medication early in the winter, and was still tapering up as I traveled through the Russian taiga. The pain seemed stable for several months, until it wasn't. By the summer I also had chest pain and a ball of worries. I wasn't sure what was wrong with me, and my scatter-shot visits to the doctor had been inconclusive. On vacation in South Asia, I went to a couple of dingy clinics and modern hospitals - experiences that one day I plan to share here - with little results. Back in Beijing, with a new semester looming and no pain relief, I made the decision to come home.

Examinations continued here at a steady clip. I had my blood drawn, spinal fluid examined and brain cut into tiny slices on an MRI. After several months of investigation, a bevy of specialists have concluded that I am quite healthy, and have no major system failures, neurological damage or cardiac problems. What's causing the consistent pain, tingling and dizziness apparently is a misaligned jaw, which has thrown other muscles off-balance. Correcting this is possible but it will take time. I'm getting physical therapy and will have strange things done to my jaw. The good news is that I can and probably will feel completely better someday.

In the meantime I will be home in Albany, resting up and being thankful I have a roof to come back to in times of crisis. I want to keep writing. I could blog about Albany, but I'm not sure if the entries I produced last fall at home were my strongest. This time, I'm going to start by doing something different. I'm going to blog about past experiences that didn't make it to my blog. In truth, I've been doing some of this all along. Occasionally I'll write an entry a couple of months after the fact, and then pre-date to the date that it actually happened. Sometimes I can't finish an entry on the day I started it and it will remain a draft for over a year before I finish it. For now I'm going to publish the new entries when they are finished, so they will appear on the main page as new material. Some day I might decide to put these in chronological order, but that's a decision for down the line. I also might eventually return to writing about Albany, as interesting things develop and my well of untapped stories begins to run dry.

Who knows? You'll just have to keep reading to find out.

The Driver Ms. Daisy

BEIJING — Call me sexist, but I always choose female taxi drivers.

I will cross a street, jump a fence or break the taxi line to give a female drive some business. I don't hate male drivers, but it's a rare day I see a woman behind the wheel in Asia, and on those days I want to talk.

I found my latest conversation in front of a noodle stand in Zhongguancun. I tapped on her window and waved; the driver sheepishly stuffed a bun between the seat and the window. All Beijing taxis have a list of regulations that patrons should expect in the cab, no eating is on the list.

I got in and started chowing a bowl of noodles and sesame sauce.

"You can't eat in the cabin," she said.

"I just saw you eat in here. Don't worry I'm a clean person." We both laughed at the joke, and from there the beats of our conversation proceeded regularly.

"When did you start driving?"

"A cab? In 2000."

"Seven years now. Nice. When did get this car?"

"About two years ago."

Beijing's taxi fleet changed from Xiali rust buckets to modern Chinese made cars in preparation for the Olympics. The cars were switched quickly; a few months after their introduction it was hard to find model that dominated the capital's streets for over a decade. I wonder what happened to the old car; had she or the cab company sold it?

"No," she said. "They used it for parts."

Perhaps this green-and-yellow automobile contained an old Xiali carburetor under the hood. Perhaps not.

What I can say is that this driver, Ms. Zhao, brought me to Tsinghua University with a minimum of fuss, in a clean cab with pleasant conversation. As a representative of the small but growing class of female drivers, she did well.

Just a Number

BEIJING — In Zijing Dormitory No. 20 I am friends with a fuyuan. Her name is No. 137.

This name did not come at birth, rather it was assigned when she decided to a take a job at China's best university. She cleaned dorm rooms, moped the hallway of the fifth floor and made sure foreign students did not sneak fireworks into the building. She did this for many months, working efficiently, impressing her bosses so much that they promoted her to desk worker. The job comes with a slight bump in pay and a significant reduction in the amount time spent bent over.

But her promotion did not come with a customed name tag. She remains, to the hundreds of students who walk by her desk each day, just a number. What a terrible metaphor for the dehumanizing elements of Chinese working life.

Nearly every service worker in China wears a uniform. The fuyuans here at Tsinghua wore blue when I first arrive, but switched to a pastel pink around the time the air conditioning turned on. They are expected to perform as a unit. Each morning at 8:05 a.m., all employees must line up outside each dormitory and march in a line. The building boss barks excercises and criticizes the previous day's performance. This is standard practice at a Chinese hotel, barber shop or department store.

People are expected to blend in, provide equal levels of service and work as a unit. This happens in America, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. This is the twenty-first century and we believe in homogenization. So I guess what really throws me over the line is the name tag. The name tag is the one element of the service worker uniform that is supposed to distingush the employee. To inform you that this is Ellen; the person that spilled the soda on your blouse yesterday was Linda. Please don't yell at me.

This evening Ryan served me an order of garlic breadsticks at Pyro Pizza. He brought the order out hot, removed it right after I finished my last stick and refilled my glass of water several times. A pretty fine server, especially for someone not working for tips.

I know his name is Ryan from the fight outside Propoganda a few nights back. He's a friendly guy, with pretty good English. I wouldn't mind grabbing a beer with him sometime after work. But here at Pyro (a business owned by an American) he's just "Trainee." At Pyro, they don't even get numbers.

When, I asked Ryan, does one graduate from trainee status?

"I'm not sure," Ryan said. "Maybe three months."

I hope that full-waiter status means a nametag, and while they're printing one of for him, make some for the fuyuan in Building No. 20.

Her name is Liu Meimei.

Searching for Wang Bing

BEIJING – The hunt for Wang Bing is in its second week.

True, search parties have only combed a small area near the Wudaokou Subway Station, and these searches usually occur on the way home from a late-night snack, but there is nevertheless a corps of troops looking for the missing chicken wing salesman. I am one of them.

Wang Bing usually works in front of 7-11 on Wudaokou's pathetic strip of bars. With the closure of Zub in May and its replacement with a pizza joint, there is really only one bar, Propaganda. The chicken wing sellers keep coming each day, drawn by the hundreds drawn to that underground dance floor and hoping their name recognition will mean a few students will stop by for a wing or two after a hard night out in a more happening district.

But upon returning from Laos I couldn't locate Wang Bing. There was no sign of him, nor him eager assistant, Calvin, from Zach's birthday party a few months back. Instead a man wearing a polyester black-and-white Polo shirt stood and Wang Bing's position.

He introduced himself as Wang Bing's younger brother. Wang Bing, he said, now sells wings in another place. All of his old costumers are now encouraged to patronize his sibling.

"If you're his sibling," I said. "Where was he born?"

No response. Wang Bing's from Chongqing. I learned that on my eighth wing. This man may have known Wang Bing, but he wasn't family.

I moved down the line of vendors, asking about Wang Bing's fate. I heard a couple different stories. Some confirmed that yes, Wang Bing had moved on. Others said no, Wang Bing's just home visiting relatives. He'd be back soon.

A week passed. I became a prostitute and waited for my new credit cards to arrive. I stayed at Dongshengyuan – East Rising Apartment Complex – in a friend's apartment. Each night I passed the line of roast wings, stopping frequently for a wing or two.
One night a group of shirtless Chinese spilled out of Propaganda, running after a Frenchman. They circled him, lunging forward, kicking and punching before retreating. A couple of the Frenchman's compatriots joined in, and the Chinese responded by breaking bottles. A waiter at the new pizza restaurant, Pyro Pizza, tried to break up the fight and wound up with a piece of glass in his left forearm. The police eventually had to be called, and with the sounds of sirens the shirtless Chinese scattered.

"Huai ren." Little Wang Bing said. Bad people.

And with the new semester about to begin, that's where the bone lies. Wang Bing, the great personality of last semester, is missing. Perhaps no one at Tsinghua will ever see him or his third thumb again. The story is frustratingly incomplete, and I should accept there is a good possibility that Wang Bang has disappeared into the vast ocean of Beijingers, and that he won’t surface near my life again.


Previous Mostly Red Entries about Wang Bing:

Celvin
Wang Bing’s Long Day
His Wings Still Flap
Birds of a Feather, Grill Together

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.

Dog Fights

CHANGSHA, China – Translating a Chinese name into Roman characters can obscure personality traits. Guo Sanjun, or Sanjun Guo, written in letters means little. But 郭三军 goes a long way towards explaining why this man seemed so happy to explain the advantages of Russian fighter jets at a quarter past midnight.

San or 三 means three, jun or 军 an all-purpose character for military things. Take together "三军" is Third Army. What a presumptuous name! Did his parents know that he would grow up to be a towering giant, over six feet tall with a wide frame? That he job would require him to participate in meetings with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and other members of China's crème de la crème?

I could have asked Mrs. Guo, but the timing seemed wrong. She appeared in the hallway of the soft sleeper train car in her pink nightgown. When her mouth opened to speak there were only four teeth, each one a solitary piece of enamel in an empty quadrant. Like many older Chinese women she seemed timeless: I would have accepted her age
being 55 or 90. She appeared annoyed.

"Why are you still awake?" she said to her son. "You talk too much. These people aren't interested. Come to bed."

Sanjun, the largest man in the compartment, bigger than a billion of his countryman, at first responded to the rebuke with sheepishness, his face pointed down at the floor. But then, perhaps realizing that he is 35-years-old and no longer 12, lashed out.

"I'm talking to these foreigners!" He gestured toward Zach and I. "We're discussing things!"

Mrs. Guo didn't looked impressed. Her son meekly ended his tirade by promising to come back to the sleeping cabin soon.

The pair was returning from a vacation in Yunnan, to see the Old Town in Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, by some measurements the deepest gorge in the world. When the T-62 finished its 38 hour journey from Kunming to Beijing, Mr. Guo would resume his job at the Ministry of Athletics. He introduced himself as a secretary, playing off the duel meanings of the word. He supervised Olympic preparations but served as a stenographer when high Communist Party officials held meetings.

He works, in his own words, like a dog. Six days is a short week, seven is a long one (the Chinese are striving, but have not yet succeeded in creating an eighth day). As the Olympics get closer there are more of the latter than the former.
"I am serving my country," he said. "This is my chance to be in the history."

That last quote featured a bit of Chinglish because this conversation took place mostly in English, the first since crossing the Laos border. At the hospital, on the bus, on the train, I used Chinese. I mention this because this man's education (at People's University, the third best school in Beijing) and language abilities ("I'd better know English," Sanjun said. "I paid a fucking lot of money to learn it.") set him apart from the ordinary Chinese I have been meeting on this trip. This is a man of some privilege, and his blunt opinions surprised me.

We met in the dining car. Zach and I played a card game called "500," a variation of Gin Rummy. At Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, six armed policemen escorted a pregnant woman with child off the train. Later in the evening, after the fuyuans pushed us out of the dining car to make way for overflow passengers and we went into the soft sleeper car's hallway to converse, Sanjun told us the woman had been caught smuggling drugs.

They found 470 grams of heroin hiding against her swollen belly. She would get 10 years, Sanjun said, and then told us about Chinese drug law. At the national level, getting caught with 500 grams – a little more than a pound – is a death sentence. Some municipalities are tougher. In Beijing 100 grams buys a free bullet, the same in
Shanghai. But Chinese are not without compassion; a pregnant woman is not killed.

Sanjun explained that drug traffickers take advantage of this loophole, luring hundreds of pregnant peasants as mules from the Burmese border of Yuannan Province toward the major shipping ports along the Southeastern coastline. The Third Army man had little sympathy.

"They're all dogs," he said. "Fucking bitches."

Then Sanjun brought out the military hardware, a thick pile of Chinese military magazines. He held me read through the latest issue, one with a line of Russian soldiers on the front. The F-18 is now outdated. There are mechanical problems with some Israeli equipment deployed in the West Bank. The magazine's longest article was a profile of three "Heroes of the Nation," a family of physicists. Readers are breathlessly told how California Institute of Technology staff said they would rather shoot the brilliant scientists than allow them to return home to the Motherland. But they did, and they proved key when China's hydrogen and nuclear bomb programs.
Sanjun helped me translate with relish, filling in words such as "advantage," "traitor," and "celebration," quickly. I liked this man, his clearly drawn sense of morality and crisp humor. If he believed I belonged to a class of American devils, he didn't let on.

“Third Army” isn’t a ridiculous name in the People’s Republic of China. The Third Army fought bravely in both the Chinese Civil War and Second World War (known here as The War to Resist Japanese Aggression. Edgar Snow’s classic Maoist account of the Revolution mentions a failed mutiny right here in Changsha. “However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army,” he writes.

With his name carrying such a history, Sanjun’s unfettering support of the state is not a surprise: it’s foretold in his characters. He justified his militarism to me with a joke: "Other people do drugs. Some people like pussy. I read this." I laughed and accepted this position. When we parted shortly after the appearance of his nightgown-clad mother and did the customary exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I thought this time I might actually hang out with this man and argue military tactics among the dogs of Beijing.

Working the Electronic Corner

KUNMING, China - Prostitutes aren't stupid.

One rang me up at the Golden Bridge Hotel just a couple hours ago. "I heard you're staying until six this evening," a female voice said. "What are you doing? Do you want a massage?"

I declined, not wanting the elicit the services of anyone working at this dive-y hotel next to the railway station. The shower didn't work, the sink held several years worth of mildew and my pillow had a yellow stain on the right corner. I'll take my foot rubs somewhere else.

But how did the prostitute (Let me clarify something here: When a woman calls a hotel room in China soliciting massages, she's always a prostitute, or at least a madam.) know I'd decided to spend a couple extra hours at the Golden Bridge?

Her call came only ten minutes after a furious argument at the front desk. After arriving at one in the morning, Zack and I made it out of the room at 12:40, over half an hour after the official check out time. Now I'm not a morning person, and I frequently make it out just after the official leaving time. I've always been able to cajole my way out of paying the extra fee. Not here.

"Foreigners and Chinese are the same!" the fuyuan at the counter said. "Everyone pays the fee!"

"You're cheating me!" I howled back. "We stayed here not even 11 hours."

"It's the all the same!"

This went on for several minutes, until I was forced to make a tactical retreat. I accepted paying the half-day charge, but swore to be in my room until 6 p.m., the maximum time alloted. I would get my revenge my disrupting the routine of the cleaning woman. It's a petty move, but sometimes I'm petty.

And the hotel staff had their revenge. While I stormed back up to the fifth floor with my backpack, they placed a call to the hotel's massage liaison. There's a couple of waiguoren in Room 526 looking for some action.

Crash Test Dummies

JINGHONG, China - The bulldozer turned sharply, rotating 90 degrees in two seconds to completely block our way forward. The operator lowered the bucket halfway to increase the meance of the construction vehicle. At the same time, a dump trunk drove behind and cut out off the rear. The highway gang had us trapped.

 

The bus driver should have known better than to try and shave an hour off the 200 kilometer trip between the Laotian border town of Mengla and the capital of Xishuangbanna, Jinghong. Instead of taking the winding road through minority villages and tropical mountains, he decided to take us over the unfinished four lane highway.

By unfinished, I mean the construction crews still deployed on every mile of this soon-to-be major aetary connecting Laos and Yunnan Province. Workers were still living on the road in old military tents, laundry was still drying on clothes lines hitched up on the shoulder. Mudslide barriers still needed cement to be poured. Some areas were paved, others weren't.

 

I especially enjoyed the tunnels. By going through mountains instead of around them, tractor trailers will be able to bring trade goods to Northern Laotian towns such as Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng like never before. But the trucks shouldn't leave the dock yet. As of yesterday these tunnels had no tile, no lights and piles of dirt at random intervals. Our bus driver turned on his brights and plowed through, narrowly missing a couple people driving the other way on motorbikes.

 

Chinese construction safety standards haven't quite reached Western levels. Our bus driver asked construction workers periodically if could enter a tunnel or bridge. "Mei sur," they all said. No problem. Never mind that hundreds of men were deployed along the road, along with heavy equipment or that the road hadn't been through safety inspection. The friendly men and women are pleased to have the 3:15 bus passengers from Mengla to Jinghong serve as test drivers.

 

Everyone except one pain-in-the-ass supervisor. He wore a straw hat with a red badge around his neck indicating his managerial status. He waved his hands and face furiously as soon as he saw the bus. No, no, no, no. We couldn't pass. The bus driver sent out his ticket collector to negotiate. No success. The bus driver tried again. No change. Then he decided to try and pass anyway, as not going through would mean a ten kilometer detour back to the last connecting path to the old road. That's when the man deployed his heavy machinery and created the standoff.

 

We won. After a couple minutes the bulldozer backed away and continued clearing a pile of dirt. The man in the straw hat continued to wave his hands, but by then we were headed toward the next tunnel. One hundred meters up the road we came to another dump truck. In passing, our driver asked if we could continue into the tunnel.

 

The dump truck driver smiled. "Mei shir."