Politics and an Escape

Well, it's been an interesting few days.

Our lesson on Thursday, in addition to teaching us the word for human rights while completely skirting the issue ("Each country has its own idea of what human rights should be, and we shouldn't let this interfere with diplomatic relations."), gave us the vocabulary and opportunity to have even more political conversations with our Chinese friends. I came here thinking the American values of freedom of thought, speech, and leadership were universal, and that the fact that China hadn't yet implemented them was simply due to its backwardness and the complacency of its citizens. I asked one of my teachers during our one-on-one time whether he thought he should be able to choose his country's leaders, he said, surprisingly, "But I can!" I asked him how this was possible, and it turned out he was a member of the Communist Party and could vote on who its leaders were (who knows these elections are counted). I was surprised that this relatively laid-back Chinese guy was a Party member, and I asked him what the advantages of being one were. He couldn't really tell me, especially since he didn't seem that interested in being involved in the political process. When I said, "Well its fine that you can choose the CCP leaders, but what about the fact that there's only one party and you have to agree with them to become a member and vote?" he replied, "What do you think the most important thing for China is? It's economic development and stability. In such a poor country, you have to make sure people can't ruin the stability. Stability has raised the standard of living here for everyone."

Intrigued, I decided to ask my language partner the same questions. After a discussion of Nixon and Kissinger and a denunciation of Bush from me that she found particularly eloquent, I brought up the question of Party membership. She said she wasn't a member, but hoped to become one soon. She said it was a pretty difficult process, you had to go through interviews to make sure your opinion was the same as theirs. She said she agreed with the Party and there were many reasons why she wanted to be a member. She got strangely embarrassed when I pressed her for the most important one, citing membership in various Communist youth organizations. She echoed my teacher's comments about stability, and didn't really understand what I meant about the importance of free speech. It seems like every Chinese person has their own excuse for not thinking democracy and freedom of expression is a good thing. One of the stranger explanations was put forth by my friend's language partner, who, taking two of the objects in front of her on the desk, said, "Chinese people are used to freedom the size of this cell phone. If you gave them freedom the size of this piece of paper like you're used to in the U.S., we wouldn't know what to do with it. It would be chaotic." Thinking of the chaos of the past 200 years of Chinese history, I felt like I could understand, if not agree with, these ideas.

The weekend provided a much-needed escape from the pollution and crowds of Beijing, as well as the hassle of traveling in a group of seventy. I went with three of my friends in the Duke program to Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall (or at least a 1980s reconstruction of it) meets the ocean. We left on Friday afternoon on a three-and-a-half hour train ride in the hard seat class, the true Chinese way to travel. We were lucky enough to have reserved seats, but many people endured the entire sixteen hour journey of the train standing in the crowded aisles. When we got to Shanhaiguan, we set out in search of a place to spend the night. We stumbled upon a pretty run-down and simple place, but the price, about three dollars a person, was right, and the proprietors seemed friendly, so we decided to stay there. We, perhaps foolishly, let one of the people at the hotel take us to a place for dinner, and while we were eating he received a phone call from someone who was supposedly his friend in the local police. The friend informed us that she was concerned about our safety and that we couldn't stay at the hotel. Despite our insistence that we were fine and could look out for ourselves, it was clear that for whatever reason we were going to have to relocate. The guy from the hotel tried to arrange another place for us to stay, but by this point we were frustrated and suspicious of his motives. We collected our belongings and went to a more acceptable and expensive hotel. I'm still not exactly clear on what exactly happened with the first place. If it was unacceptable for foreigners to stay there, why were they so happy to accommodate us when we first arrived? And why would the guy who worked there alert the local authorities, even if he was looking for kickbacks from other places? I guess this was my introduction to the arbitrariness of bureaucracy, and a reminder of my helplessness when confronted by it in a foreign place.


The next morning we headed off to the Great Wall and the beach adjacent to it. The beach was not the nicest I've been to, but the water was cool and refreshing. We were the only ones swimming on that section of the beach, and we were met by stares and requests for photographs, probably in large part because of my two bikini-clad companions. A few jellyfish stings later, we headed to one of the overpriced restaurants on the beach for lunch, where I had my first experience using my Chinese to help out another traveler. I managed to get my mustachioed Ukrainian sailor friend (note the freighters in the hazy background of the photo below) a bottle of beer and a plate of squid, but the funniest part was when after I didn't understand something the waitress said, she said "A, ni tingbudong." (Oh, you don't understand). The sailor, recognizing one of the few Chinese phrases he knew, said, in a heavy eastern-European accent, "I also tingbudong."


After lunch, we relaxed on the beach until it started to rain and we went back to our hotel. We spent the evening watching (and in my friend Sadie's case participating in) a night of dancing in Shanhaiguan's small park, where everyone, young and old, seemed to congregate. The next morning, we woke up at 5:30 am to catch our train back to Beijing, on which we didn't have reserved seats. Although we feared having to stand up for the entirety of the trip, a few very friendly Chinese people shared their seats with us in exchange for us satisfying their curiosity about American culture. It turned out to be an enjoyable time, and we learned some useful phrases, and taught our new Chinese friends how to say "fuck you!" which they, needless to say, picked up very quickly, to our slight embarrassment. After the tiring trip, being back in Beijing was a relief, and it even felt a little like home.

Ziyo

Last Saturday evening, I went with a few of my friends to a bar called Dos Kollegas to see a Chinese indie band named Ziyo (www.myspace.com/ziyo) which my friends had been raving about. The venue felt like it could have been out in the boonies of Ohio. It was next to a drive-in movie theater and had a backyard with tables where people sat and talked. Ziyo was even better than I had expected, though they didn’t play for very long since there were a number of other acts on the program that night. In addition to Ziyo and other bands, there was a girl who did a fire-twirling routine, and a DJ who used some German software turned his Game Boy into a mixing board. After Ziyo played we sat down on the grass in the yard and talked to the guitarist and lead-singer. The guitarist told us that they had been playing for three years, and were frustrated by the fact that most Chinese people only liked to listen to the “shit music” (one of the few English phrases he knew) that was popular in China and didn’t appreciate their style. However, he seemed hopeful that in a few years Chinese taste would catch up to that of the U.S. He said they had been signed by Warner recently, which I was surprised and impressed to hear, but that they still hadn’t put out a CD. In addition to the pressure to change their music and sell out put on them by working with a big label, they said that the government was pretty strict about underground culture and that it wasn’t so easy for a relatively unknown band to release a CD. One of the guitarist’s friends joined us and said that he was in a metal band. He asked us what kind of music Americans were listening to these days, and when he hadn’t heard of the bands we mentioned, he kept making suggestions like, “What about Korn?”, “Isn’t Limp Bizkit pretty popular?”, “Do you guys like Linkin Park?” That night I also unexpectedly ran into one of my teachers. He’s always pretty shy and nervous in class, and it was fun to get a chance to talk to him when he didn’t feel pressured and wasn’t afraid that the head teacher would kill him if he spoke English. . After we left the bar, we headed to a pizza place that I’d heard was supposed to be the best in Beijing. It was delicious, made even more so by the fact that I hadn’t had cheese in seven weeks (The Chinese aren't big on cheese. One of my teachers didn't even know it was made from milk.).

Engrish!

China has turned out to be a paradise of poorly-translated English signs, or "Engrish" (see engrish.com). Chinese people also love to wear clothes with English on them, no matter what the meaning is. Some are just nonsense, but I once saw my language partner's friend wearing a shirt that said "Wench" in big letters across the front. I was tempted to say something, but I would have had no idea where to start on explaining that one. Anyway, I offer for your enjoyment some of my favorite examples of Engrish around Beijing:

This one was in a restaurant, far from any hillsides that look like they might give way...


This one was in a different restaurant. It's supposed to be an ad for LP gas.


This one was on a trash can at a Tang dynasty palace. Note the arrows.


This one was inside the CCTV tower.


And, finally, my absolute favorite, appearing outside a clothing store in one of the main bar districts.

Halfway done...

This weekend marked the midpoint of my eight week program in China, as well as our long-weekend trip to Xi'an, one of China's many former capital cities.. We left on Friday evening, taking a ten-hour overnight express train and arriving in Xi'an in the morning. The train ride was really comfortable and pleasant, since we were in a sleeping car. I talked a little bit with the Chinese student with whom I was sharing a room. He told me he came from a poor village, and he was now studying electrical engineering. When I asked him what he planned to do after college, he said that he was going into the military, making a gun with his hands so I would understand. Since his education had been free, he had to work in the military for ten years after graduation. He didn't seem too thrilled about the prospect, but I respected his desire to improve the life of his family back in their village.

Once we got to Xi'an, we toured around checking out the main tourist attractions, such as the old city wall, Wild Goose Pagoda, and of course the terra-cotta army built by China's first emperor Qin Shihuang. Most of the supposedly ancient tourist attractions in China have a strangely modern feel to them. Most buildings seem to have been originally made of wood, so the originals decayed and they have since been replaced by reconstructions. The fresh red paint and redecorated interiors make them feel more like an amusement park than a historical site. On the one hand, I suppose they are reconstructed in a pretty realistic way, but it's really frustrating to see a plaque that says "Tang dynasty temple built in 982 A.D." when the building was clearly built in the 1950s. My favorite of the things we saw were some Han dynasty tombs. They had little naked terra-cotta figures in them, including men, women, and animals. The open pits with figures strewn in them had the strange feel of a mass-burial pit.

The city of Xi'an was also a pretty strange place. The central downtown area felt like Las Vegas to me, with flashing lights advertising things like KFC and KTV (the inexplicable Chinese name for karaoke; I don't think it stands for anything). There are apparently 8 million people in Xi'an, but the city just felt touristy and isolated. I guess we only saw the parts of it that our tour guide thought appropriate for us to see.


The train ride back was as much fun as the one there (honestly I felt the trains were the best part of the trip, but maybe that's just my love of transportation; accordingly I include a photo of two of my teachers and one of my friends on the train), and I'm feeling pretty refreshed and relatively studious. Today was probably the clearest day we've had since I got here due to the thunderstorm last night, and I took advantage of the occasion to go up the CCTV tower, which provided an amazing view of Beijing. The city is so spread out that I didn't quite get a sense of how huge it is until today.

Palaces and Politics

This past weekend we took a trip to the Summer Palace outside Beijing. The complex of buildings built around a huge lake was impressive, but the most interesting part for me was seeing the marble boat that Cixi, the late-1800s empress dowager, had had built for herself . The money spent on the boat was supposed to have been spent on modernizing the navy. I guess she thought the future of naval technology was in marble, but this thing wasn't too seaworthy. We also went to the Yuemingyuan, or Old Summer Palace, which was mostly rubble, having been destroyed by the nefarious Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860. Restoration efforts, which according to plaques had happened in the early nineties, seemed only to have consisted of putting similar-looking blocks into piles.

I'm still having a good time here, and I think my Chinese is slowly progressing. The vocabulary we're learning is becoming more abstract, and much of it is immediately useful in conversations with my teachers and language partner. We tried to do karaoke with our teachers on Friday night, but despite the fact that the place is enormous, it's apparently quite hard to get in without booking weeks in advance. We ended eating at a restaurant and walking around for a while, which was a lot of fun. Our teachers are young and easy to get along with, and it was fun to get to know them outside of grammar drills, where we are instructed to answer questions like, "Do you have a girlfriend?" with, "I don't discuss my personal affairs with strangers. Let's change the topic of conversation."

I had a startling conversation today with my language partner, Wu Yue, on the topic of Tibet. I was surprised at how agitated she got, but I guess I was asking for it by bringing up such a politically charged subject. When I suggested that Tibet should be independent, she said (as one other Chinese person I talked to had) that it had first been part of China during the Tang dynasty (618 - 907 AD). She then launched into a condemnation of the Dalai Lama, who apparently had been supposed to co-rule Tibet with another leader (I’m not sure who this would be, does anyone know? I am, not surprisingly, having trouble getting to the Wikipedia page on Tibet.) but had tried to take power for himself, at which point the Chinese exiled him to India. She, unbelievably, compared him to Hitler. When I said that Hitler had been a terrible person who had killed millions of people, and that killing was against the principles of Buddhism, she scoffed and said that maybe the Dalai Lama didn't want to kill so many people, but that he had the same way of thinking and the same territorial ambitions as Hitler did. In any case, she was sure he was a huairen, or bad person. Citing the recently completed Beijing to Lhasa direct rail line, she said that recent Chinese development has been helping the people of Tibet, and that since the air is so thin they can’t grow enough food to sustain themselves and depend on imports from mainland China. And even if China wanted to let Tibet be independent, it wouldn’t be practical at this point, given the intermingling of people that has happened. Having “explained” the situation to me, she made me promise that we wouldn’t talk about the subject again. I apologized for upsetting her, and said that I was just interested to hear Chinese people’s views on the topic.

Needless to say, this conversation made me pretty upset. At first I was angry with Wu Yue for being so ignorant, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the government’s doing. I hadn’t realized the extent to which government propaganda still controlled people’s views about sensitive issues, even in universities. Just last week, when I asked about the huge famine during the Great Leap Forward, Wu Yue told me that China, unlike Japan, acknowledges the mistakes its government made in the past. When I pressed her further, she said that she had only learned about the famine after coming to college. I suppose this honesty about the past doesn’t extend to current political conflicts, but after years of learning about totalitarian propaganda in school, it is eye-opening and shocking to see such a sweet person so dogmatically attached to what the government has fed her.

On Smell

As some of you may know, I'm quite interested in smells. Smell is unlike our other senses, it's related to memory and language in a different way, and experiencing smell can be quite a visceral experience.

Since I've come to China, most of the odors have been pretty unpleasant. Cars and construction equipment create pollution that makes the air hazy and eliminate any possibility of smelling natural, clear summer air. Many street vendors sell a product that gives off an unbearable stench that resembles rotten fish. I can't see how anyone could possibly eat it (a rare thing for me to say), but one of my teachers said it's actually a kind of tofu. Walking down the street, it's not uncommon to be engulfed by the smell of sewage wafting up from the sewers. Of course the smells are not all bad, much of the food smells strongly of garlic, which I love.

This generally negative olfactory environment has, however, given me a new appreciation for perfumes. I recently read The Emperor of Scent, which is about a scientist working to create a new theory of how our olfactory sense works. It's quite a fascinating book, and the scientist who is the subject of the book, Luca Turin, loves perfume and has the uncommon gift of being able to describe it. After reading this book, I smelled some of the perfumes he liked, but I still preferred the smells of nature and really did not think that man-made scents had very much inherent value, apart from the associations formed between them and their wearers. Being in a bad-smelling environment, however, makes a whiff of perfume seem like a breath of fresh air. When someone wearing perfume steps into an elevator or train, it's refreshing and satisfying. This must have been what it was like to live in any city before the modernization of sewage and waste-collection systems, and the experience has given me a new perspective on the value of perfume and on smells in general.

China: Great Walls, Great Times?

Apologies for the recent hiatus in posting. I've been pretty busy for the past week and haven't had time to sit down and write an entry.

Last weekend we went on an overnight trip to the Great Wall. The section we went to see was not the most often visited by tourists, and after the intense hike of climbing it I can see why. We woke up at 2 a.m. and started climbing, hoping to reach the highest part around sunrise. After two and a half hours of strenuous climbing, we managed to get well past the "STOP! DANGEROUS AHEAD" sign. The view was worth it, even though the sunrise was covered by fog, and the huge wall built on the high, thin ridge was really impressive.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Silk Market, a huge eight-floor mall full of all sorts of clothes, bags, shoes, jewelry, tourist item, and many, many other things. I found the experience completely overwhelming and couldn't manage to pick one item out of the thousands that I wanted to spend ten minutes haggling over. The shopkeepers were unbelievably aggressive, teaming up to drag people by both arms into their stalls, or slapping those who walked away without buying or offered insultingly low prices. When I said to a shopkeeper that I didn't want whatever they had to offer, the typical response was, "why not?" as if it were the default to want to buy something, and if I wasn't interested there must be some problem with the product. The shopkeepers' English was, strangely, overall the best I've heard in China so far. Students tend to focus on reading and writing, and even those who have studied for ten years often speak with a thick accent. The shopkeepers, however, spoke clearly, though I'm not sure how much they knew past "Buy something for your girlfriend?" since I wanted to practice my Chinese. I even saw one of the shopkeepers bargaining in Spanish with some Spanish-speaking tourists. It's amazing what necessity will do for one's foreign language ability.

My relationship with my language partner is getting closer, and the topics we discuss have been getting steadily more interesting as my vocabulary expands. Today our reading passage was about the word "tongzhi," which under communism meant "comrade" and was a common form of address but has recently come to mean "homosexual". My language partner was surprisingly open-minded about gays, and said that she thought gay marriage should be legalized. She mentioned that many American and Japanese films (Brokeback Mountain was one) were banned in China. When I suggested that this was a violation of free speech rights and that perhaps there should be a protest, she said "That doesn't go over too well here. We can just download the banned movies from the internet." When I acted surprised she said, "Maybe it's just a difference between the Chinese and American ways of thinking." In my Chinese history course last semester, Professor Spence mentioned how surprised he was to see pro-democracy movements all but die out after the government's brutal response to the Tiananmen Square protests. This conversation with my language partner reveals a lack of indignation with strict government policy that hints at the reasons behind the end of large protests.

Blue Skies

After four days of guessing whether the thick haze around everything was smog or fog, the weather has finally cleared up. You can even see the sky, which is apparently a rare thing in Beijing. Classes started on Monday, and the language pledge took effect this afternoon, which means we're only supposed to speak Chinese with each other. Unfortunately our Chinese isn't too great yet, and what Chinese we do speak is punctuated by English words, lest communication become so arduous that we just stop speaking all together.

Classes are simultaneously fast-moving and tedious, but I'm really learning a lot. We have about thirty new words and characters to memorize per day, as well as homework and compositions, which makes studying at night pretty rapid fire. In class, on the other hand, we spend three and a half hours going over the same vocab, topics, and grammar points. The topics are relevant but not exactly engaging. For example, yesterday's involved complaining about getting up early, and the advantages of showering in the evening (the chief one, in the book, being that that's when there is hot water. Luckily we have hot water all the time). Although it's not always thrilling, the teachers here are good and friendly, which makes class enjoyable, and my Chinese is improving rapidly.















My language partner is proving to be a font of interesting information about China, as well as fun to hang out with. On Monday night, I went to see a show that she was in. During the show, there were all sorts of acts: one-act plays, Peking opera-style singing and costumes, a brass quintet, and a jazz band. During the show I kept an eye out for my language partner, but didn't see her. Later on, when I saw her, she showed me pictures of herself in her complex get-up, in which she was completely unrecognizable. She could be one of the singers in this picture, I'm still not sure.

That's it for now, since I still have to study for tomorrow's test and write a composition about the bizarre assignment we had at the post office today.


Oh, and for those who are interested (Bridget) and want to try their hand at copying characters, here's my address:

100089 中国北京首都师范大学
海淀区西三环北路83号，国际文化学院
杜克大学留华学习班
Samuel Steinbock

If mailing from the US, it's probably a good idea to write "CHINA" on there, too. Good luck.

Oh, and one more thing: I made it so you don't need an account to comment, so let nothing hold you back!

I've now been in China for four days, but it seems like quite a bit longer. I met my language partner yesterday. She's a student at the university I'm staying at, and is assigned to speak Chinese with me for an hour every day. I liked her a lot, and was amazed at how easy it was to have a conversation with her. We talked about all sorts of things, including the movie Titanic, the one-child policy, and religion. She's in some kind of Peking opera-style performance tonight, which I'm going try to see.


I've had a number of pretty interesting experiences just wandering around and getting meals. Here's a picture of an outdoor exercise park that I stumbled upon. They have all sorts of workout machines for public use, though I think most of them are geared towards old people.

Here's another experience that perplexed me: since we're advised not to drink the tap water, I went to the store to buy a big jug of water to drink. I found that the cheapest kind tasted strongly of plastic, so I decided to get a slightly more expensive bottle, which cost about $1.50 for four liters. After I bought it, a few of the store's employees came over to me and said "Wow, that's imported water. How much did that cost you?" After I told them, they continued to admire the bottle, trying to figure out where it came from. I'm still confused about why they were so impressed with this water. I understand that it's not the cheapest bottle, and that they probably think it unnecessary for me to be buying water at all, but I bought it at the store they work at! This wasn't anything I had brought from home. Anyway, I guess I'm just underestimating how extravagant my habits seem to the Chinese, but it was bizarre nonethelesss.

Good morning, Beijing

I arrived in Beijing yesterday afternoon, and it's now 6 am and I am uncharacteristically awake, thanks to all this time-changing business. Beijing is huge and overwhelming, but I'm excited to start exploring it. I did a little exploring yesterday, with a trip to Wu Mart, a grocery store a few blocks away to buy the essentials -- water and toilet paper -- which was pretty amusing. Grocery stores are always one of my favorite things to see in foreign countries since they are a window into people's daily lives. This one was set up almost like a bunch of separate stalls at a market, with people sitting in little booths to sell electronics and watches, in addition to all of the things you would expect a grocery store to have.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect about the pollution, but the air here seems pretty clear and breathable. It is, however, a little disconcerting to be able to stare directly at the sun, which looks like this at 7 in the evening, a couple of hours before sunset.

The program doesn't waste any time getting started; my placement test is at 8 this morning. I don't have too much to worry about, even if I have forgotten a lot of characters, since I'm only going to be doing second year no matter what.

Well, that's it for now. I'm sure there will be much more later!

Hello!

My name is Sam, and I have frequently been described as a 怪人 (guairen), or weirdo. This blog will chronicle my adventures as I struggle to learn Chinese and make my way around Beijing. Look for updates beginning June 14th, when I depart for China!