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.