Down and out in Guangzhou

Last week was not what you would describe as having a great week. Certainly not catastrophic or anything like that – I have at this moment no sense that the universe is actually plotting against me, in spite of my fleeting suspicions – but in the grand scheme of things, not the best.

Well. After a year of hearing stories of rampant thievery and lawlessness from friends long resident in China (not to mention Taiwan), I finally got a taste of it myself. This weekend I was hit by an extraordinarily adept pickpocket, who managed to unzip my purse and remove my wallet without my knowledge, and all in the space of a few minutes (i.e. from when I knew I had it to when I discovered my purse open and the wallet gone).

I want you all to know that I take great comfort in the fact that this person was that good. It would be rather disheartening to lose one’s belongings to a thief who is merely mediocre. A stolen wallet is unpleasant under any circumstances, but China being China means that I’m faced with a few extra, bonus complexities. I lost:

1. The Citibank ATM card that after all the blood, sweat, and tears finally showed up here to replace my expired card. The irony is almost overwhelming. Fortunately for me, and proof, in my mind, that things happen for a reason, the ridiculous confusion surrounding the replacement ATM card operation that led them to mail not one but three new cards to China meant that I actually had a spare one – the stolen one was the second, and the third could still be activated to replace it. So at least I don’t have to live on instant noodles while I deal with all this. Whew.
2. My Bank of China ATM card, which, of course, was for a Nanjing account- which means that if I want to replace it or ever see the money in the account again, I have to come up with a way to get myself bodily back to Nanjing. Fabulous. I have less than a week left in Guangzhou now, and then three days in Beijing in August before I fly home. This is like being in Washington for three days and needing to run over to Chicago to go to the bank. Sure. If I can’t make it back, I’ll have to take comfort in the fact that some day I will go back to Nanjing, and when I do, there’s about $200 waiting for me there.
3. My Citibank Mastercard, which by itself would not be a huge loss, except for the fact that I bought an e-ticket for Taipei on Eva Airlines, and they have this unique regulation that when you check in you must present the exact card that you used to book the flight. I remember thinking when I booked the ticket, “Gee, what happens if you lose the card?” Serves me right for thinking.
Apparently, without this card I have to purchase a new ticket at the airport, and then apply for one of the tickets to be refunded once I get to Taipei… or something like that. I’m still not clear on the details and the first time I tried to call, they reacted as if there has never been a lost or stolen credit card in all of history.
4. My driver’s license, which of course I can replace once I’m back in the US, but this is complicated by the fact that I moved out of the DC address on the card in April, 2004 and don’t have a new address and on’t for some time, and of course, there are no guarantees the new address once I have one, it will be n DC and not Virginia or Maryland.
5. My Nanjing University and National Library library cards. The latter I’ll need to replace if I want to check back on materials when I return to Beijing. Not a big deal, really, but I’m padding the list a bit to play up the sympathy angle.
6. My kimchi store frequent customer card. Hands down the most irreplaceable item on this list, and most definitely not list-padding. Now I’m going to have to buy all kinds of kimchi before I can start getting the sexy 10% discount again. There’s just not time. Talk about adding insult to injury.
7. About 350 RMB (divide by 8, about US $40) which is, frankly, the least of my concerns. Of course, that is what the thief was most likely after; it is quite possible that after taking the cash, the rest of the belongings that mean so much more to me found their way into a roadside trash can.
8. My wallet. As much as this pains me, the fact that I had purchased it for about US $2 on the street in Hong Kong probably means this does not qualify as having anything but sentimental value. But it was the perfect size, with a strong zipper and a handy ID window on the outside. I mourn.

The really frustrating thing is that aside from the cash, there is no real reason to have any of these things in my wallet at all, other than force of habit. But we will dwell no further on that point. Grrrrr.

Dealing with the fallout from the stolen wallet was complicated by the fact that I have no international phone line. I have no way of setting one up, either. The best solution I had was to try a phone card and a phone booth, but the first few times I tried this the phone card didn’t work; I ended up going back to where

I bought the phone card and got one of the proprietors, a college student, to accompany me to the phone booth to work it out. The two of us tried 5 phone booths before we found one that could connect internationally, and then all of the Citibank international toll-free numbers did not work.

There was only one thing left to do, and that was to appear before my dear friend Louis of Citibank Guangzhou first thing the next morning and ask to use the phone there to call the US Citibank line.

I just want to say, I love Louis. Good thing, too, because I’ll be seeing him next week when I head in to pick up the UPS’ed replacement card. Perhaps I should bring flowers.

At the end of the day, there are worse things in the world than losing your wallet. For example:

1. Losing your passport with its residence permit and absolutely vital reentry visas
2. Losing your computer (though I am fastidious about backups and mail CDs of information home to Minnesota periodically)
3. Losing a limb or an eye (I actually put myself in some minor danger of losing an eye last month in Yangshuo, when I was putting on some bug spray. I held the bottle right up to my upper arm and pushed down on the nozzle. It was not until the spray hit my face that I realized I was holding the bottle backwards. As uncomfortable as flushing out ones eye is generally, it is even worse with bad unfiltered, undrinkable water. That hurt more than the bug spray going in, but I felt a little Chinese water torture was worth enduring for the sake of the greater good of preserving my sight.)

Of course, I’m being slowly driven mad by the number of people around here (mostly archives staff, actually) who hear the wallet story and come up with the brilliant advice that, “you should really be more careful.”

Ya think? Granted it’s me, but there is just the slightest chance that I might have managed to reach that conclusion all on my own without having it pointed out to me. Noting that having my wallet stolen is really more my own fault than anything is so remarkably NOT helpful. It may be true, mind you, but that does not make it helpful. The two are at times mutually exclusive, and I must insist – INSIST – that this is one of those times. Outrage and condemnation for the world of petty thievery would be so much better.

Two days after the wallet’s disappearance, and long before I’d managed to handle all the fallout, I had another adventure thrust upon me. (You know, as in, “some choose adventures, others have adventures thrust upon them.” I have always fallen squarely into the latter category.)

When I came home from the archives for lunch the other day, my power was out. At first I didn’t think much of it; I wondered if burn-outs aren’t common with all the air-con blasting in Guangzhou this time of year. Then, of course, it occurred to me (as you knew it would eventually), that I had taken the elevator up to my 16th floor abode, so the power outage might not be general, but might instead be just me.

I went down to the doorman, and he explained that the building cut off the power to apartments with long overdue power bills. Having moved in last month, I wondered if the “long overdue” bill didn’t predate me.

In fact, I have no control over any of the utilities – I’m supposed to settle with my landlady when I leave, and before that she’s supposed to take care of it. My hunch proved correct, however, and it was eventually revealed that the bill hadn’t been paid in almost a year – the entire time the last tenant lived here.

(The question here is, how does it not occur to anyone that a long period of time has passed without that particular bill coming through? Does one live a happy-go-lucky existence in which power is free? Just how out of touch with reality do you have to be to be financially solvent and still not pay the power bill for a year at a time??)

My landlady called late in the day to say that she’d gone and paid the bill, but that power would not be restored until the next day. She felt bad, though, so she offered to take me to dinner, and then had arranged for me to sleep in the spare bedroom of one of her other tenants’ apartments, just two blocks away (the key being the air-con – its hot and muggy and still this week, so trying to sleep in my oven-like apartment would likely not do me much good in the long run).

We met down in a Hunan style restaurant, where she and a friend had already ordered an array of delicacies for my dining pleasure. She ordered two of the house specialties just for me: fish head and shredded beef stomach (I know, I know, hadn’t I suffered enough? Apparently not).
After dinner I went back upstairs to take a quick shower in the dark. All the light I had was what was floating up from the street, again, 16 sories below. In the light of the next day, I glanced over my bathroom shelf and was struck with a deep suspicion that I had mistakenly washed my hair with sunscreen, but that is no longer important now. (And, to be honest, that might have no connection to the darkness. Just today I absently doused all of my dirty dishes with olive oil before I realized that the dish soap is in the *other* green bottle. Whoops.)

The girl whose guest room was offered me did not get home until after 11. She had no bedding, just a spare bed and an air conditioner, but that was enough for me. I wrapped up a sheet and stuffed it down my pillow case, and headed out. The bewildered look on the night watchman’s face when I trudged out the door at 11:30 in comfortable clothes and clutching my pillow to my chest could be matched only by the one on the face of the morning guard who stared as I padded back in at 7 am.

It took until around 9 the following night to get my power back on, and then only after I had lost my temper and yelled at my landlord over the phone (the problem here was not that it was all her fault-although it was- but rather that she said she’d been “too busy” to follow up on getting my power restored like she promised, and was now out to dinner and pretending I didn’t exist. This annoyed me) and spent some quality time with the night guard (he seemed to figure out what I was doing with the pillow the night before when I told him my power was still out, though perhaps not where exactly I went) while he searched for a maintenance man.

When the lights finally blinked on and my refrigerator began to buzz once more (not before absolutely everything inside had spoiled, but at least I had an opportunity to defrost my freezer), I was filled with that greatest and purest of joys, the one that comes from the restoration of something important often taken for granted until it is lost.

Even with the power back on, the apartment continues to astound and impress. The kitchen faucet came off in my hand the other day, leaving a small geyser of water shooting up from a hole in the countertop. It would have taken much less time for me to get it screwed back on had I:

a) remembered to turn the water off first or
b) not been laughing almost hysterically at the sight.

Every time I plug something (most often my computer) into the same outlet the TV is plugged into, there is a bright spark and the TV spontaneously turns off or on. The air conditioner will only change temperature in groups of two or three degrees at a time. This place is, in a word, quirky. I suspect it suits me.

This is, once again, not about Yangshuo. But I wanted to share while the events were still recent, and with Yangshuo it is already much too late for that. So I promise, this week – as in, in the next six days before I head off to Taipei – there will be an email with my tree story. I swear it.

Everything is more complicated than it really needs to be

I have a cold. A dreaded, seemingly never-ending summer cold. This, of course, has no bearing on the rest of this post, except as a blatant and shameless sympathy ploy.

Ah, life in Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton). When I got into Guangzhou, I went straight for the cheap hotel I had booked over the internet. It was, well, it was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed in my life and travels, that award goes to a certain Kaohsiung crack house, er, I mean hostel, but let’s just say I had a strong motivation to get out first thing the next morning and find someplace to live on a more permanent basis.

After commuting around an hour each way to get to the archives in both Nanjing and Beijing, I was determined to live as close to the Guangzhou archives as possible. My plan was simple: I went to the archives, and then walking away from the building walked into the first real estate office I found and asked about renting apartments. The first few I tried told me to forget it – no one would rent for only two months. I have a friend who rented an apartment in Nanjing for only two months, though, and she gave me a few pointers.

First, she said, do not accept the “that’s impossible” line. It’s China. Anything is possible for enough money. There is always a landlord who sees a two month lease (at a rate slightly elevated over the standard) as better than an empty apartment waiting for a tenant. Then, she said, be prepared to make a snap decision. No thinking, mulling, weighing options.

This is difficult for me. I am a champion muller. I mull so well I rarely reach actual conclusions. So this advice was, essentially, to go against everything that is intrinsic to my nature.

Okay then.

As I walked out of my third “not a chance, but we’ll call you,” a woman who’d been lurking in the doorway of the rental office followed me out. She asked about my requirements in an apartment, heard my request for a two month lease, and then told me to follow her to her office. She guided me to a storefront a few blocks away. As we walked, she called the office and spoke in Cantonese, presumably to prevent me from understanding when she reported that she’s bringing in a live one. Once there, they sat me in a chair and put a cup of water in my hand, while the whole office chattered over my head. After a lively argument, the women who caught me and, presumably, her boss, pulled out two keys and told me to follow.

A tall apartment building towered over their office, and they took me into this very building to look at apartments. The two they showed me were essentially the same – they had an entrance with a full kitchen and a table, a hallway with the bathroom on one side leading back to the main room, which had a bed, a desk, a couch, and (of course) a big TV. The whole place was quite small – like a studio, but with the kitchen divided out – but there was a small balcony with a view – it was up on the 16th floor), air conditioner, and a washing machine. The building was only a few years old, though, so everything was in good shape.

We looked at both places, and I after a truly minimal amount of hedging on my part, I told them to see if I could take the first one.

When they first showed me the place, the rent was 2000 RMB a month. After the landlord learned about the two month time limit, she raised it to 2400. I refused and countered with 2200, which she accepted. All of this, of course, was through the rental agency, which means that each stage was a separate conversation with me, followed by a phone call to her, and so forth. The rental agency also had its fee, and in spite of the fact that I was only staying for two months, I had to provide a two month security deposit. This meant, of course, that if I wanted to continue being Ms. Fabulous Snap Decision Maker, I had to go to the bank and pull out a fat wad of cash to make everything official and get the paperwork signed.

Being the full service real estate agents that they are, they offered to drive me to Citibank. I demurred, but ultimately found them to be more determined than I, and was soon strapped into their company car and heading for the bank. Just before we got there, a problem occurred to me. If I handed the landlord 4400 RMB as a security deposit, I’d get back 4400 RMB just as I was leaving China.

The problem is that Chinese currency is non-transferable – you can’t simply change it for dollars and head home. If you have a large wad of RMB when you leave China, you are stuck with a large wad of RMB until you can get back to China to spend it. And 4400 RMB (about $530) is somewhat more money than I’m willing to spend on last minute souvenirs.

Actually, I think it is also more money than I could spend on last minute souvenirs. How many stuffed pandas equal $530? I’d have to buy an extra seat for my flight home. I explained the problem to my real estate agents, and they called the landlord again, who agreed to take my security deposit in US dollars. Problem solved, right?

Nope. Now I had to figure out how to get $530. Even though my Citibank account is a US dollar account, it’s not a local Citibank account but an American account, so the only way for me to get cash is through the ATM, which only gives RMB. My Bank of China ATM account also only handles RMB. The real estate agent, a very nice Citibank employee, and I sat in the lobby of the bank for twenty minutes brainstorming possible solutions. The Citibank guy (“Call me Louis,” he said, congenially) finally had the winning idea: I’d give the security deposit in RMB, then open a bank account that could accept US dollar wire transfers (“But not here,” he said, “Citibank charges fees for this kind of account. You’ll go to Bank of China where it’s free”).

Technically, I already have a Bank of China Savings account that could accept a US dollar wire transfer, but it’s in Nanjing, and I can only access it from Nanjing. So instead, I’d need to open a Guangzhou account, which is, incidentally, my third Bank of China account of the year. Finally, when the money arrived, I’d call my landlord and trade the dollars for the original 4400 RMB. That way when I left, she would give me back my dollars, which as we all know, can be traded freely anywhere in the world. Whew.

My only concern was that this plan would leave me with 4400 RMB to spend in 6 weeks, but then the bright minds at Citibank pointed out that I still needed to buy plane tickets, which in China is strictly a cash transaction. It wasn’t simple, but it was a solution.

It took a few transactions to get all the cash I needed, but soon we were off. Or so we thought.

Somewhere between the door of the bank and the car door, it dawned on me that I no longer had my ATM card. I apologized to the real estate agents and ran back to the ATM to get it, but there was no card there. I asked Louis if anyone had come to the machine in the five minutes or so I was gone, but he said no, and that if I didn’t take my card at all, it was likely taken into the machine. That began a rather lengthy process that began with them taking the back off the machine with a screwdriver to retrieve my card, and included copies of my passport and signing multiple notarized documents so they could affirm that I was, in fact, me, with me blushing beet red and stammering apologies to the real estate agents and the Citibank personnel all the while.

As we were waiting for this long process to be completed, we chatted about the apartment and the paperwork that needed to be done. Over the course of the conversation, I realized I had miscalculated and still needed to pull out another 2000 RMB. Along the way, however, it dawned on me that I was wrong to be taking all this money out of my Citibank account, when I still had a Bank of China account with RMB. So I continued to apologize and told them once I had my Citibank ATM back in hand, I’d walk up two blocks to a Chinese bank where I could use the ATM (it’s an internal network, so I couldn’t use my Bank of China ATM card on a Citibank ATM machine), and then really, I’d be ready. They said they’d drive up to meet me. I took longer than they did, so they ended up trailing me slowly in the car as I walked, shouting out the occasional commentary on my progress.

Poor Louis, incidentally, has not yet heard the last from me – he is a part of another rather involved process of getting my Citibank ATM card replaced. For some unfathomable reason, it has an expiration date of July 31. If I was staying in China until I return home in August, this would be no problem – I’d just budget out what I need and put it in one of my Bank of China accounts.

The problem is that I can’t use my domestic RMB Bank of China ATM in Taipei or Singapore, so I either need to apply for a fourth, international account (a very involved process), or get a new Citibank card. I don’t have a legal permanent address (I’m, er, not registered in the new apartment either, and have no mailbox), so I can’t have my parents send me the card. The Citibank in Beijing had the bright idea to have Citibank USA send my card to the Guangzhou branch, where I could simply pick it up.

Easier said than done: my poor mom, whom I now owe at least one, perhaps two very large pitchers of margaritas for her suffering, has spent literally hours on the phone with half the Citibank “customer service” people in the US (or more likely, based on her descriptions of the conversations, Bombay) trying to get this done. She has power of attorney and can call directly; I could call collect, but I don’t have a phone in the apartment and my cell phone is not registered for international calls (and I’m not paying the 2000 RMB to get access. My Nanjing number could call internationally – it was set up before China Mobile set up that fee – but it is out of money and I can only recharge it in Nanjing, so I’d have to go out to find a street phone with international access…. It should be abundantly clear by now that the moral of this email is: Nothing, but nothing, is simple in China.)

The problems began at the most basic level: Citibank USA claims it doesn’t have a branch in Guangzhou. Poor Louis would be heartbroken.

From that inauspicious start, there have been a total of four mailed replacements (three to China, one to my parents), about 20 phone calls, many requests for supervisors, three trips on my end to see Louis and discuss progress, and finally, one phone call yesterday from Louis to say my card has arrived. This at the same time that Citibank USA was telling my mom that in fact they’ve realized that they can’t send it at all without talking to me first.

Ahem.

Citibank is marvelous everywhere I’ve been outside the US, but it is a beast to deal with at home.

Anyway, back to our tale of intrigue and adventure in the Guangzhou real estate world. When we finally returned to the real estate office with all that cash in hand, the landlord had come and gone – she’d be back after lunch. So I returned to my chair and a fresh cup of water to wait. She came back and we worked on the rest of the formalities: signing the lease, handing over the money, getting the key, and so forth. Then someone from the office took me up to the apartment to do the standard inventory. That’s when the Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House sensation first kicked in, and it has not yet really worn off. If only my fixer-upper came equipped with Cary Grant….

Right off the bat, I realized something I hadn’t noticed before: the place was filthy. Covering every flat surface was a thin layer of grime. Clearly it had been a while since anyone had lived there. Then, we realized as we flipped all the switches on that the air conditioner, hot water heater, and washing machine weren’t working. The man from the real estate office told me not to worry – he’d have it all fixed within 24 hours. In the meantime, he asked if I wanted to hire someone to scrub the place down. We agreed this was a good plan, and for 30 kuai, a woman came and spent most of the evening making the place sparkle.

The boss from the real estate office – the same evidently multi-talented guy who chauffeured me around town on my bank adventures – came up and fixed the appliances. By the end of the day I was starting to feel like the service fee I paid them – which at first, I balked at – in actuality wasn’t nearly enough.

I left for a few hours to check out of my hotel, have dinner, open the new Bank of China account, and gather my belongings – I felt that the sooner I could get into the place and settle in, the better. When the cleaning woman finally left at 9:30 p.m., I grabbed my wallet and keys and dashed off to the neighborhood department store to buy towels, sheets, and assorted other necessary items for the night. I admit, though, I was feeling triumphant: I inquired about, rented, and moved into an apartment in a single day. It only took 12 hours.

Over the course of the weekend, I took four more trips out to various local shops to get the basics (one bowl, one cup, one plate, one set of chopsticks… bit sad, really). I also had a rather catastrophic plumbing emergency (turns out something else was broken when I moved in), which I will refrain from describing in any detail.

Soon, however, I settled into an easy routine in the place. Granted, it is still a bit quirky. The overhead bar for drying clothes on the porch came swinging down on my head and collapsed against the wall of the porch one afternoon, never to rise again (at least it didn’t tumble down 16 stories to the street below). And then last night, when I was making dinner, I ran into another little glitch. I had my vegetables and tofu all chopped up and ready to go, I reached for the knob to turn on the burner, and… nothing. It had worked the day before. What’s more, I could hear and smell the gas coming from the burner. There was just suddenly and spontaneously no fire. I went down to the 5th floor maintenance office, but I found it dark and empty. From there I went to the entrance guard, and explained my problem. He got on his walkie talkie and sent a guy up to fix my stove.

When the man came into the apartment, he spent about 30 seconds examining my stove before giving me his exasperated conclusion: “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said, “it’s just a dead battery.” Right. The stove battery. I wonder why I didn’t think of that. He reached into my hot water heater (which apparently also runs on batteries), pulled out one D battery and replaced the one in the cabinet under the stove. He turned on the burner and voila! Blue flames.

I tried to save face. “American stoves don’t have batteries,” I explained desperately. “I really didn’t know.” He gave me a look and muttered a bit. I think it was something along the lines of, “Oh yeah? So what do they run on then? No batteries. Humph. You just don’t know where the batteries are…” I suspect I have failed us all, and the Fulbright program in general, in that rather than creating a positive view of America and Americans wherever I go, I have instead convinced one more industrious Chinese worker that Americans are so rich and spoiled, they don’t even replace their own stove batteries. I’m truly sorry.

My fabulous apartment is a mere two blocks from the Guangdong Provincial Archive, which means that not only is commuting a snap, but I have the joy of spending the forced two hour break at lunch time at home, instead of loitering in some neighborhood coffee shop watching the minutes tick by. It also means I have fewer excuses for skipping a morning session. In Nanjing, where it would be a full hour from my door to actually sitting down in the archives, I wouldn’t bother going if I was leaving my house anytime after 9. They’d close for lunch at 11:30, and so if I arrived much later than 10, the trek wasn’t really worth it. Here, I have no such excuse. If I leave home at 9:30, I get to the archives at 9:35.

The Provincial Archive is beautiful – a new building with some of the nicest reading facilities I’ve ever seen. Of course, the trade off is that they don’t have much for me in terms of records: everything before 1945 burned in the war, and everything after 1949 is not open or somehow unavailable (I’m working on this. They have some 1950s records, they just don’t seem to want to give them to me. Perhaps they think I’m a spy instead of a scholar. Or, better yet, a CIA agent disguised as a scholar. That must be it. The first class of Fulbright scholars to come to China in the late 40s were either sent home in a hurry in 1949 or stayed to be arrested as imperialist spies, and there could be some lingering suspicion about the program).

Hmmm, I know I promised tales of sunburn and violent forestry, but I had not counted on being so verbose (you’d think I don’t know myself at all). So stay tuned for the next installment, Guilin and Yangshuo.

Facing my terra cotta demons

I confess: I was very happy to leave Beijing. For a while I thought I just preferred Taiwan to China, but I really fell in love with Nanjing. Then I thought I had a weakness for Nationalist Chinese strongholds, but I adore Shanghai, Guangzhou and Suzhou. Then I thought perhaps it was a North/South thing, and I just prefer the ‘nanfang’ (South) – but I delighted in everything about Xi’an. Now I’ve finally realized that elaborate explanations are totally unnecessary: I just hate Beijing.

I hate the broad streets that can only be crossed with tunnels and bridges that are clogged with chaotic traffic and totally anti-pedestrian. I hate that no matter if you’re going 6 blocks or 6 miles by bus, cab, subway, bike or foot, it takes at least an hour to get there. At least. I hate that it must have one of the only subway systems in the world where there is no automatic ticketing system – every time you ride, you have to queue in front of a window for a ticket, then hand it seconds later to a young woman in a smart uniform and pillbox hat. That’s fine at off-hours, but at rush hour it is chaotic and time-consuming.

The Beijing subway, incidentally, has three lines, named Line 1, Line 2, and Line 13. (No word yet on lines 3 through 12, though I’ve heard rumors that there is a master plan and some of them will be open by the 2008 Olympics, but the ones that open will also be random, such as lines 4, 8 and 11.)

I hate the fact that downtown Beijing ‘night markets’ are neat and orderly rows of identically decorated stalls with official registration numbers and two wandering policemen for each stall. Actually, I just hate the sheer number of policemen or military guys you see on patrol in general – generally one for every three people walking the streets (my distaste for the police might have been related to residual guilt for being unregistered, but still).

I hate the fact that any time you walk down the street in Beijing, an art student tries to sell you a painting because you’re a foreigner. I totally grant that my bad experience there could be related to the fact that I lived so close to the tourist areas, so I couldn’t walk out the door without having an extended conversation with someone on why I didn’t want to buy postcards. Not just that I don’t want to, but why. They always required reasons. Once I was almost talked into a watch because I had trouble making a case for why I didn’t need one. Leaving Beijing did not hurt me, not at all.

The day I left, I got into a cab first thing in the morning and spent the next hour stuck in fabulous Beijing traffic. When we’d finally gotten out of the mess of the ring roads and out onto the Airport Expressway, I had an experience that I defy anyone who’s ever been to China to try to match – something so unexpected and unbelievable that I doubt that many of you will really have much faith in my account. But I will swear on anything you put before me that it did, in fact, occur.

What happened was this: on an open road with light traffic, my cab was the slowest vehicle on the road. What’s more, we did not change lanes once. Not once! I almost don’t believe it myself, and I lived it.

Beijing cab drivers, well, really any cab drivers in China, but especially in Beijing, are notorious road racers. They swing from the right ditch to the lanes intended for opposing traffic (minor detail) and back again, dodging trucks, buses and bicycles at neck-breaking speeds, covering at least twice the distance that they would if they had merely traveled in a straight line. They speed even when they can see the red light and traffic stopped ahead, causing passengers in the seatbelt-less back seats frequent whiplash. I don’t care how fast you’re going or what you’re driving – and that includes any vehicle currently on the NASCAR circuit – a Beijing cabbie will pass you, and without breaking a sweat or missing a word of his blasting talk radio show. Failing to pass everyone between you and your destination at least once is, it seems, a colossal loss of face. I have no idea what was wrong with my driver on Tuesday, but clearly it must have been catastrophic, because even the airport bus managed to lumber past us and leave us in the dust. Even I, as passenger, felt the shame of it all (only shame, thankfully, as I was in no danger of missing my flight).

On to my two day ‘vacation’ in Xi’an. For the curious, the name of the city is spelled with an apostrophe to indicate that it is made up of two characters, Xi and An, a two syllable word, as opposed to being one character with the pinyin Xian, which is pronounced as a single syllable. Apostrophes are used when there are multiple options presented by the pinyin. Another example is the ancient name of the city, Chang’an, in which case the apostrophe indicates that the name is made up of Chang and An, not Chan and Gan, which are also possibilities if all you see are the letters.

Pinyin is not a perfect – or even great – system for writing Chinese because it repeats too much – even with tone marks, there are often a wealth of possible characters with different meanings to choose from. Even as a stand-in for the characters it presents problems: Xi’an is in Shaanxi province. The proper romanization for Shaanxi is actually Shanxi, but there already is a Shanxi province – the names are different in characters, but the romanization doesn’t reflect that, so the “a” had to be added to distinguish between them. Some foreigners misunderstand this, and amusingly try to say the two names to reflect what they think is a pronunciation difference, talking about Shanxi and Shaaaaaaaaaaaanxi provinces.

Xi’an is where the emperor that united China in the Qin dynasty (think “Hero,” if anyone saw the Jet Li flick last year) is entombed, and it is the site of the famous terra cotta army. In addition to these 2000-plus year old relics, Xi’an (as Chang’an) was the capital of China under the Tang dynasty, and in this era, was the eastern terminus of the famous Silk Road connecting the Middle East with China and opening up a flourishing trade between the two.

As a result of this history, Xi’an still has a large Muslim population, and houses the largest and oldest mosque in China. It’s also one of very few major Chinese cities that has a standing city wall; once, most large Chinese cities had outer walls as fortifications, but these were declared rightist, decadent, and counter-revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution and many were destroyed (as were many priceless and now nonexistent relics of China’s past). Some, admittedly, particularly those more than a thousand years old, were in fact crumbling before the Cultural Revolution swept in to deal the death blows. But those that survived the Taiping, the Opium Wars, the Boxers, the Japanese, and the Communist Revolution were doing all right, largely because the brick makers (like those involved in the building of the Great Wall) had to put their names on their bricks, so if problems developed they, or perhaps one of their descendents, could be executed in punishment. Say what you will, the system led to excellent construction standards.

In Xi’an the walls contain so much history even the Red Guards didn’t care to bring them down, and in fact, they have been under pretty much constant restoration in the last decade or two. The combination of these things also means that the economy of Xi’an is quite dependent on its flourishing tourist trade – I think 90% of the people on my plane were foreign tour groups.

I arrived in Xi’an at midday, found my hotel, and after a cup of tea, took off for the Shaanxi Province History Museum. The museum is quite famous, or so they told me at the door when I paid for my ticket, as one of the finest collections of ancient Chinese relics in the world (for those who’ve followed my Chinese museum adventures from the very beginning, yes, this is code for “a bunch of pots”) (but they were awfully nice pots). The weather in Xi’an was just a bit warmer than Beijing, around 103, so the museum seemed like a good plan.

After the museum, however, I looked over the map and realized that the Big Goose Pagoda (I’m actually still not sure why it is named that, other than to distinguish it from the Small Goose Pagoda a few blocks away) was nearby, so I wandered over there. Never one to reach a pagoda and not climb it, I trekked up the seven stories almost all alone (climbing pagodas apparently not being a popular pastime on stiflingly hot afternoons). By the time I got to the top, I wondered if the Cooked Goose Pagoda wouldn’t be a better name for it (sorry, couldn’t resist).

The pagoda was originally built in 684 AD, which is a new personal best for ancient pagoda climbing (my previous record being the 1005-year-old one in Suzhou). Sweaty and wilting, I returned to my hotel. I’d been back in my room for about ten minutes when my friend’s brother-in-law and his wife came for me.

This is standard Chinese etiquette – I know someone who knows someone who’s in the city I’m in, so they take charge of showing me a good time while I’m there. I’ve never actually met my friend’s wife, but her brother spent two days taking me around and buying me dinners. They were the nicest people ever and they made my trip to their city perfect.

First, they brought me to the Muslim quarter for some proper night market snacks and a “light” dinner (it was important to keep it light, they noted, because we would eat again later; overfeeding foreigners in my experience is also a very Chinese thing – they ordered us three dishes apiece which did not exactly fit my own definition of light). From there we went back down to the Big Goose Pagoda to wander around and wait for the fountain and light show at the plaza near there. As we were walking toward the pagoda, my friend asked if I knew its significance. I confessed my ignorance. He then asked if I was familiar with the story of Sun Wu Kong, a.k.a. the Monkey King.

In the story (written in the Tang Dynasty and officially titled Journey to the West), a monk is joined by the monkey king, who has god-like powers but is somewhat mischievous and uncontrollable; Ba Jie, who was once punished by the gods for being overly lascivious by being made into a half-man, half-pig; and Wu Jing, once a sea god. Together, the four travel to the West, or India, to collect the Buddhist scriptures and bring them back to the Chinese emperor. It’s a famous adventure story, and it is filled with battles and obstacles and general trauma before the ultimate triumph. Every few years, someone makes it into a serial drama for Chinese TV (even NBC did a mini-series in the US a few years back), and last year Mayday wrote a song about it.

I told my friend that I, too, knew the story (I cheated – I read it in English. I have an abridged Chinese version but I haven’t gotten to it yet). He replied, “Oh good. Well, this is where they translated the texts brought back from India.”

I was momentarily flabbergasted. As soon as I recovered, I realized that I had to tread lightly. After all, I’d known him for all of an hour; perhaps his entire belief system is founded on an absolute faith in the evident truth of the Journey to the West, but I had always thought that the story was accepted as that, and had no place of its own in Buddhist mythology.

I nodded, and hoped I sounded simply ignorant rather than doubting or defiant as I asked, “But there, ah, wasn’t really a monkey king, right?” He stared hard at me, and for a moment I thought I’d offended him. I’m sure in actuality he spent that moment trying to decide how to address my question without mocking my apparent faith in monkey adventurers, but he finally started to laugh. He explained that he only mentioned the story as a reference; of course the texts were retrieved by real live monks, not through any great monkey/pig heroics.

After the pagoda, we got some ice cream and sat down to wait for the fountain performance. The ice cream was inexplicably in the shape of an ear of corn on a stick, and was vaguely corn flavored, but still sweet and, most importantly, cold. The fountain performance was, er, everything I’d hoped it would be, and somewhat inexplicably to the tune of the “Blue Danube Waltz,” which, incidentally, I’m still singing. From there we took motorcycle taxis – a three wheeler with two back seats for me and my friend’s wife and a regular motorcycle for my friend – across town to a restaurant (the idea behind the private motorcycle offering lifts to wayward travelers is that the driver gets a little extra cash, and the rider gets a ride that costs less than a taxi – my friends say they often take them if they only have a few kuai on them and need to get somewhere, but that night they took them for my benefit).

We spent the rest of the evening toasting to friends, the wonder that is terra cotta, Sun Wu Kong, the fountain and so on with beer served in bowls, which is apparently local custom in keeping with the ancient China theme (and eating, of course).

My second day in Xi’an I took care of an important bit of business. Many of you are aware of my past concerns that the terra cotta warriors have been stalking me. To date, they have tracked me to Washington, San Francisco, Paris, and Hong Kong; they just missed me in Seoul (I outwitted them). I once presented all of the evidence I had in favor of this to a friend of mine here, who listened quite seriously and ultimately wondered if perhaps it wasn’t that it was the terra cotta warriors themselves behind it all, but in fact the ghost of the emperor of Qin.

Either way, being stalked, even by inanimate objects, is somewhat unsettling (perhaps all the more so because they are, or at least ought to be, inanimate). I felt that the best way to put the whole thing to rest would be to confront them, en masse, in their place of residence. The soldiers are in their excavation pits about 40 kilometers outside of Xi’an. Fed up with organized tours that involve more shopping than sightseeing, I decided to go the Chinese way, on the public bus. 8 kuai (US $1) for the roundtrip, with a stop at Huaqing Chi (the imperial baths – a retreat for the emperor in the Tang dynasty, like the summer palace in Beijing was for emperors in the Ming and Qing Dynasties).

The gardens around the baths were very pretty (the baths themselves were decidedly not, as the hot spring source that supplied them with water in the Tang era have long since dried up), but the place has an additional claim to fame: it was the site of the Xi’an Incident during World War II, when two of Chiang Kai’shek’s officers placed him under house arrest to try to get him to adjust his policies of ending internal strife (read: hunting communists) over fighting the Japanese. Naturally, these two were lauded as heroes by the Communist government and there’s a rather lovely, if somewhat heavy handed, display complete with original preserved bullet holes, devoted to the affair.

Once at the site of the terra cotta soldiers, I wove through a tent city of souvenir stands and finally reached the entrance, where I hired a guide to show me around at the site. At first I wasn’t going to just because he stood right in front of a sign in Chinese that said that guides cost 30 kuai for groups of five people or fewer and asked for 100 kuai to show me around. When I pointed to the sign, he told me that price was only for Chinese people. I told him that if I could pay the Chinese price, he could give the tour in Chinese, but otherwise to forget it.

He must have decided this was better than nothing, because he came running up as I stalked away and started in on the history of the terra cotta soldiers (I did not reveal that I have a personal history with them. This is not a story I generally share with strangers). He did not tell me anything that was not on one of the handy bilingual signs posted around the area, but because I was visiting alone, he was at least useful as a photographer and occasionally, for holding my water bottle (had to get my 30 kuai’s worth somehow, right?).

He tried so hard to get me to buy a personal scaled down set of warriors in the gift shop that I assume the usual Chinese deal where the guide gets a cut of the profits was in play, but I expressed no interest in spite of his earnest claims that having at least one, but ideally, a group of five displayed in my home would ward off evil spirits. Having at present no evil spirits (other than that insidious sprite, dissertation procrastination) needing fending off, I politely declined.

In fact, I bought a set for a fraction of the price from one of the touts outside (using the classic bargaining trick of walking away, yelling ever lower prices over my shoulder until the peddler caved and ran after me to complete the sale). My logic is this: although I do not require them to help me ward off evil spirits, I would be eternally grateful if they will serve to ward off other terra cotta soldiers. It’s the same principle, for example, as having a small, portable ninja on hand to ward off its life-size (and infinitely more dangerous) counterparts. You understand. (Some of you actually do. The others, I trust, are well accustomed to humoring me by now.)

When I returned to the city that afternoon, I met up with my new friends and trekked up to the top of the city wall. There we rented bicycles and cycled the whole loop, stopping at each of the large city gates for rest, shade (107 that afternoon, and a cloudless sky), water, and, naturally, pictures of us wilting in the sun. It was easy biking, being flat and wide with nice tall walls on either side once used to conceal archers but now necessary to keep bikers with sub-standard steering capabilities like myself from careening over the edge.

Still, by the end of that long day in the sun, I was exhausted and starting to feel a bit sick from the sun. From there, however, we went straight for dinner at a Latin American barbeque place (which they chose because the restaurant brews its own beer, and they thought I’d appreciate some ‘good’ stuff. Of course, the beer showed up bright green and turned out to be seaweed flavored. Words fail me).

The concept behind the restaurant is that young men in soccer uniforms come around with big slabs of different kinds of meat – more than 20 in all – and cut off a bit for each diner before bringing the next kind. I knew I couldn’t refuse them all, as much as I would have liked to, so my plan was to work slowly on the first few kinds they brought and then claim I was too full to continue past there. This plan, I discovered, was somewhat flawed. If the first few things had been squid and roast beef (which I can choke down past my vegetarian esophagus pretty convincingly), I might have managed it.

Sadly, the first thing that showed up on my plate were two little sort of round, sort of oblong things that I couldn’t identify. I heard something about chicken, so I bravely doused them in ketchup and popped one in my mouth. As I was chewing, my friends asked how it compared to other chicken hearts I’d eaten. After a brief internal battle, I managed to swallow and look more closely at the other piece on my plate. Pushing the ketchup aside, I could see the little blood vessels pieces sticking up and recognize the shape for what it was. That was pretty much it for me. I managed some watermelon and most of an ear of corn, but I was resorting to some of my childhood antics with napkins to clear the meat from my plate, even as it kept magically reappearing in new and ever more frightening forms as the scary soccer guys attacked from all angles.

After dinner I said goodbye to my new friends, as they’d be working the next day when I took off for Guangzhou. Before my flight, I went and toured the mosque and had a snack in the Muslim quarter, and then finally tore myself away from a city I loved at first sight. The flight from Xi’an to Guangzhou was quite turbulent, which caused the flight attendant to come on the intercom and make the standard announcement in Chinese about encountering light turbulence, returning to seats and fastening seatbelts. A few moments later, and almost as an afterthought, the same woman reappeared and announced in English, “The plane has run into some problems. Fasten seatbelts.” While absolutely true, I suspect this phraseology did not quite accomplish the same task of calming and informing that the Chinese version managed.

Da da da dum duuummm, dim dim, dum dum….. (you ripple and gleam….) sorry.

Okay, next time, and quite soon for that matter: Guangzhou apartment hunting (complete with a ravenous Citibank ATM), overseas visitors, bizarre sunburns and a run-in with a vicious attack tree.

Beijing life- traumatized by basic tasks

Nothing is ever simple, it seems. And as much as I would like to blame China for this, I suspect that it is only part China, and that the other factor making my life somewhat, uh, interesting, is just me. But I have to say, lately accomplishing even the most basic tasks feels like a major production.

Recently, I wanted to call the water company and have them send over a new bottle of water for the water cooler (a fabulously convenient way to make drinkable water accessible in places like China where water has to be boiled before it can be ingested). Johanna, whose apartment I’m staying in, has a company that she goes through for this. They way she explained it, the process was very simple: leave the empty bottle outside the door with a ticket in it good for one new bottle, and then call and tell them to come exchange the empty bottle for a full one. She said that she had checked with the company on which number they prefer we use for ordering water the day before, and had noted it on the order slip.

Brimming with confidence, I called the phone number and explained that I wanted to order water. The women asked me what I was talking about, and I explained that I was out of water, and wanted them to deliver a new bottle. She hung up on me. After a few huffy thoughts about the quality of the company’s customer service representatives, I called back. A different person answered, which made me glad. This one just might have a bit more patience; my water-ordering-Chinese is fine, really, but as always, my pronunciation is a bit, er, accented, so over the phone, at least, I do best with patient people. “I’d like to order water,” I told the young women grandly. “What?” She replied. “I’d like to order…” “Where are you?” She cut me off. “I live in the Denglongku hutong. One bottle, please.” Without as much as a “excuse me,” or “just one moment,” she hung up.

Growling, I tried once more. This time, at the automated answering service, I selected 0 for an operator rather than staying on the line for customer service. When someone answered, I explained that I have an account with their company, that I’d like to order some water, and asked when they thought they might be able to deliver. The operator responded with a curt, “what?” “WAAATER,” I emoted. “I would like to order water.” She seemed to pause for a moment, filling me with hope, and then she hung up.

At this, I gave up. I was chagrined. My confidence in my phone Chinese was gone. Clearly, my tones were all wrong, my vocabulary limited, and my listening comprehension, as usual, abysmal. It was a flashback to Taipei when I’d always blow the dictation on our unit tests. But also, it was partly their fault: what lousy service. They apparently couldn’t be bothered with me, so finally I decided I’d ask the ayi who comes twice a week to clean the apartment to call for me (this, by the way, is Johanna’s set up – this women has been cleaning for her for months. I am, I admit, a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing, to the point that I always find myself frantically scrubbing counters and wiping tiles just before she comes over. After all, I don’t want her to think I’m messy. But given the dust in Beijing and how quickly it builds up, it is quite common to hire someone to stay on top of it. She also does laundry and helps me buy vegetables, because the vendors around here – especially, I’m told, a rather nefarious egg man – always try to cheat foreigners).

When the ayi came, I explained the situation and she was very understanding. She marched straight to the phone, and called. She talked to the person on the other end for a few minutes, and then hung up, satisfied. “Are they bringing water then?” I asked with interest. “Nope,” she replied. “Why not?” I asked. “Because they,” she explained, “are not the water company.” Three times they hung up on me, and it never once occurred to me to ask if I had the right number.

Embarrassed as I was, I ended up being quite glad that I asked her for help. In addition to the wrong number that Johanna had written down for me, we had a second number for the company. The ayi called that one, and they gave her another number to call. At the other number, they were uncertain about whether they or the original number was closer for a deliver to this location, and wanted the ayi to call the first one back. She suggested that they discuss the matter among themselves and then call us back, which they ultimately agreed to. They called back twice asking for more information. The second time, it was a bicycle delivery man asking for directions (Johanna has used this company since last September, so I have no idea why they didn’t know how to get here, but we guessed this guy was new). I sat alongside her and listened to just this end of the conversations. I heard the ayi tell him first to head to Tiananmen Square, and then she’d direct him from there. Then there was a long pause, and she repeated, ‘Tiananmen.” A few seconds later, she sounded exasperated as she said forcefully, “TIANANMEN. Look, if you don’t know, just go out on the street and ask absolutely anyone where it is.” What followed, I assume, must be the Chinese for “sheesh.”

When she left, we thought we had it all in hand, but about a half an hour later the water company called back and asked me to call yet another office, and have them take care of it. Thankfully, calling this number was more like what I had originally envisioned for the ordering water task: I said I wanted water and where I am, then how many bottles, and then they said “Ok!” and an hour later, there it was. I think, though, that I’ll go back to boiling water before I willingly go through that process again.

The day after the getting the runaround from the water company, I received a phone call from
Federal Express. They had a package for me, but it was hung up at customs and they wanted me to fax a copy of the identification page of my passport to their service at the airport right away. I looked around my apartment. Nope, no fax machine. I asked about the alternatives. The women I talked to was flustered: apparently everyone who receives FedEx packages in Beijing has instant access to a fax machine. She gave me a different number to call, telling me that they will send someone to my house to pick up a copy of my passport. Er, okay. I called the number.

They told me the best thought they had was for me to FedEx a copy of my passport to the Beijing Airport. Let’s all just pause for a moment and let sink in just how asinine that idea is.
We went back and forth for a few moments on possible solutions to the problem. I finally suggested that since there is, as she noted with the FedEx-ed passport idea, a FedEx office near here, why don’t I just run over there and ask them to fax my passport to their airport branch? She put me on hold for a bit while she, apparently, located a quorum of unhelpful customer service representatives to mull over and ultimately agree that my suggestion “might work.”

This was my fault, really, I shouldn’t have asked. I should have simply gone directly to the FedEx office and demanded that they help me. When I got there, I found one very bored young man who snapped to and faxed my papers with such alacrity, I suspected I was the first customer he’d seen in days, if not weeks.

It took a full day for my package to be cleared by customs (the Hostess cupcakes and birthday cards inside sent by my parents being particularly suspicious). The next morning, I received another call from FedEx. This time it was the delivery guy, and he couldn’t find my hutong. After a few failed attempts at directions (he, at least, was on the right street and did not need to be informed of the existence of Tiananmen Square), I told him to wait out on the street and I’d come find him. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I slipped on my flip-flops and grabbed a sweater, and rushed out to the street. I looked in either direction, and finally saw the van about a block south from the entrance to my hutong. I started walking to it, but I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when it started to drive away, and turn left into an ally. This is how I came to be running down Nanchizi Street, arms waving, flip-flops thwacking the sidewalk noisily with each step after a disappearing van. It was a picture I daresay few people on the crowded street that morning will soon forget. Fortunately for me, the van got stopped up by a three-wheeled bicycle trying to pass him in the narrow ally, and I managed to close in and demand my package.

Speaking of cupcakes and cards, a few of you have asked how I spent my birthday. I was tempted to spend the entire day in bed with a new Korean soap opera, but was ultimately lured outside by gorgeous Spring weather and a desire for fresh air. I thought for a bit about what, ideally, I’d like to do, and then the proper course of action for the day came to me in a flash: I went to see the dinosaurs.

The Beijing Museum of Natural History is not on the level of the Museum of Natural History in London or the American Museum of Natural History in New York (which has the best dinosaurs I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen dinosaurs in six countries and around the US – but loses points for being too expensive. If you have to pay $13 or more to get in, you cannot justify simply going to see the dinosaurs and then leaving again; you feel somewhat obligated to go look at boring gemstones and dull anthropological dioramas to justify the expense. It saps some of the joy from the experience, really), though Beijing is miles ahead of Shanghai. (I remember when I showed up at the ticket window in Shanghai and asked to go in, the women at the window just stared back at me, with an incredulous look that plainly said, “Really? Why?”) (To demonstrate the contrast between the two museums, I’ve included photos of a typical exhibit hallway outside the dinosaur area in Beijing and in Shanghai.)

Seeing dinosaurs in different parts of the world often means seeing very different fossils. Dinosaurs found in China date mostly to the Jurassic Period, whereas North America is known for its wealth of Cretaceous Period fossils, and they also developed quite separately; it is fascinating to see that, for example, a North American stegosaur (like the Stegosaurus) has rounded plates, but the Chinese stegosaur (most famously, Tuojiangosaurus) has pointed ones… I could go on, of course, but I think I’ll just say that in short, I had a lovely time at the museum. Everyone, I think, needs something (like the dinosaurs for me) that makes them inexplicably happy just because.

Aside from the dinosaurs, I also got myself some ice cream for a near-perfect afternoon. I stopped short of buying myself a balloon, largely because they were not dinosaur shaped, but also because the sad memory of my last balloon had not yet faded. (One day a few months ago, I was standing on the side of the road in Shanghai. A man walked up to me and handed me a balloon. “For you,” he said. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve never just gotten a balloon from a stranger for no particular reason before. It made me quite happy. Then, as I was walking into the way into the Shanghai Railway Station that afternoon, I heard a sudden, loud BANG! I jumped about a foot, let out a little shriek, and then stared down sadly at the little bits of blue rubber at my feet. And that was the end of my balloon.)

After the Labor Day holiday (celebrated May 1 here, as in most of the world outside the United States), which provided for most of the first week of May off, a sort of anti-research, anti-translation, anti-dissertation lethargy set it. This, I believe, is also known as spring fever. Many days went by when I could not force myself to open the Word files on my computer, much less work on them. Those of you who are in grad school, if you have never had this experience, please don’t tell me. I won’t believe you anyway. But I’m trying now to fight my way back into making progress. I have just a little over a month left in Beijing, and much to do before I depart, so cheer for me, will you? In the meantime, another trip to the dinosaurs might be called for.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

In the past week, I have:
- Broken my toe by tripping on my way down a steep flight of stairs. I take comfort in the fact that I did not actually fall down the stairs. It’s the little things that count.

- Spent over 24 hours on trains on a quick jaunt from Beijing to Shanghai, then Nanjing and back to Beijing, and discovered that overnight train tickets are quite easy to change if you miscalculate the amount of time it will take you to complete your business in Nanjing and have to extend your stay a couple days.

- Rode on the all co-ed car for my overnight train down to Shanghai, sandwiched between study tours from the University of Michigan at Flint and the University of Pittsburg. Drinking games on my right (20 is legal in China! Dinning car beer run!!) and angst on my left (sounded like a love triangle, but I’m not certain). Flash back to dorm life.

- Had a jammed door opened by a drunk locksmith (At my friend Caitrin’s place. And how do I know he was drunk? I submit the following evidence: 1. He introduced himself to me – he already knew Caitrin – three times 2. He kept pushing too hard on his tools while crouched in front of the doorknob and then falling over, all the while giggling hysterically 3. He propositioned Caitrin, me, and the 40-year-old (male) building superintendent 4. He said he was.)

- Sliced open my thumb rather catastrophically (or so it seemed by the amount of blood loss) at midnight (cutting up an apple) and was forced to attempt one-handed Creative First Aid with toilet paper and packing tape.

- Gotten my residence permit exchanged for a multiple re-entry visa (necessary now that I am contemplating heading out of China through Hong Kong and on to Taipei and Singapore when my grant ends in August. My return ticket is out of Shanghai, but I’m leaving my suitcase in Beijing, so I’ll have to race through these cities as well after the swing through Southeast Asia before heading back home. It’s all research related, and these are all destinations I visited for research sometime in the last year, but instead of sullenly thinking of how disorganized I am to require return visits, I’m calling the trip my East Asia Victory Lap.)

- Helped translate for two French tourists who wanted to extend their visitor visas, but spoke no Chinese and whose English the man at the Public Affairs Office couldn’t understand (though listening to him try was rather amusing), thus earning me bonus points with this same man, who therefore agreed to get my visa done a day early so I could get back to Beijing.

- Closed my blasted Bank of China account that I learned, too late, was only valid in Nanjing (my bank account was only accessible from Jiangsu Province. At the same time, my cell phone can only be recharged in Nanjing. Coincidence? Nope, try annoying little ways to control unauthorized migration).

- Got into a fight (no, no fists) with a librarian about what constitutes a ‘fragile’ book that should not be subjected to the stress of copying (I’m all for historical preservation and care of materials until it’s something I want to copy, and then I find myself in the ridiculous position of claiming that even if all the pages do fall out from damaging the book’s spine, they’re still there and readable, really.)

- Set off the security alarm at the library. Whoops. (No worries, I’ve done this the world over).

- Copied 700 pages of articles and book chapters on my dissertation, all in Chinese. Maybe I’ll have it all read by the time I’m 50. That will, incidentally, likely be right around when I’ll be ready to graduate.

- Caused a minor gas leak in my apartment, which resulted in the gas being shut off and led to a parade of helpful neighbors tramping in and out trying everything they could think of to adjust in my hot water heater and gas line to fix it, mostly in the realm of adjusting the water pressure, before we collectively decided that all we needed to do was hit the gas line’s reset button. Then it only took another 24 hours to find it.

- Discovered that the Natural History Museum in Beijing is NOT the home of the best dinosaurs in Beijing.

That was, in fact, merely a red herring. The good stuff is way over by the zoo in the bottom two floors of the Chinese Academy for Sciences subsection for the study of Ancient Animals. I literally ran into a large plastic dinosaur on the lawn on my walk from the National library to the subway. Being both uninjured and inordinately fond of dinosaurs, especially in unexpected places, this made my day. There was, I’d like to add, only one English sign in the entire museum. It read: “Roaming about, you will unconsciously savor the profound sense of the evolution in biology. Retrospecting, you will certainly be astonished by to comnipotent creativity of nature.” I suspect I’ll run back for more roaming and retrospecting before I leave Beijing.

As you can see, I’m managing to keep myself busy, and if not entirely out of trouble, at least out of jail. Only two weeks left in Beijing, then I’m on the move again as I head south for fun with Guangzhou (Canton) in the summertime. It’s not necessarily the single hottest city in China in the summer, but it is close. This is remarkably bad planning on my part, but such is life.

In Praise of Globalization

Let me begin by saying a few words in praise of globalization. I’m talking about the factors in the international economic system that cause there to be a Pizza Hut on every corner in Beijing and a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. The process that allows Carrefour to open up a branch in Hangzhou so that weary foreign travelers have a rare opportunity to buy a wide selection of organic vegetables and create a basic garden salad (as opposed to standard Chinese grown vegetables that contain such a wide variety of pesticides and other chemicals that one can eat them uncooked only at the risk of becoming deathly ill or growing an extra limb).

Or, for that matter, the means by which there is a line out the door to eat at P.F. Chang’s in Maple Grove, Minnesota. (I imagine, of course, that for every western chain restaurant open in China, there are twenty Chinese restaurants open in the West. But we Americans are oddly fond of engaging in a sort of cultural elitism that insists that thousands of years of Chinese culture with its vast experience in integrating invading barbarians and their ideas will somehow buckle under the weight of Kentucky Fried Chicken et. al. and cease to be China, instead turning every ancient Asian capital into a lesser Kansas City.)

What started all this? Well, April has been a month on the move for me, and when one is in constant motion, there is nothing more comforting than the occasional taste of something familiar and reliable, like decent coffee, the ability to purchase cheese and the occasionally guaranteed-to-be-MSG-free meal. I began my travels, appropriately enough, on the first of the month, when I got up early and took off on a five hour train ride to Hangzhou, a city south of Shanghai that boasts the most famous West Lake in China (there are many by that name, but this one inspired key passages of classical Chinese texts and therefore gets to be the Number One West Lake). I went for the sole purpose of hanging out on the lake – there are other attractions, like temples and pagodas, but I skipped them in favor of island-hopping.

Hangzhou (like Suzhou) is a major destination for domestic tourism, but only attracts foreigners with time to spare in East Central China, which meant that, since I was a lone foreigner-with-time-to-spare on that day, a lot of staring; but such is the life of a foreigner off the beaten track in China. It also means being the number one target for people begging for money – and in this case, I met up with some terribly persistent people. In general, I’ll give away my mao (a tenth of a kuai) at random as I wander the city, but being compelled into it by trickery always annoys me. Before this, my most uncomfortable encounter was with a women in Nanjing who actually wrapped her arms around my leg to stop me until I gave her money; in Hangzhou I met a woman who pushed me in front of an approaching bus and then pulled me out of the way, only to demand a kuai for ‘saving’ me.

The challenge of either facing or ignoring the demands of the severely impoverished made a stark contrast to the newly opened lakeside shopping centers, which naturally include Armani, Prada, and other luxury names because, after all, “to get rich is glorious,” at least, according to Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party. Hangzhou is, if nothing else, a pleasant place to sip some Longjing tea and contemplate the irony that is New China.

On April 2nd I took a late train from Hangzhou up to Shanghai to meet my parents and cousin Kristian at the airport. For the next 9 days, the four of us gallivanted about China (well, there was perhaps more Wizard-of-Oz-style skipping than actual gallivanting – and exactly one full chorus of ‘We’re off to see the Wizard’ at the Beijing Zoo – but let’s not split hairs here, the principle is the same). We got to a lot of places I’d never been before; for example, the Shanghai Bund ‘tourist light tunnel’, which promises to whisk (well, whisk slowly) passengers across the Huangpu River through a tunnel filled with psychedelic neon lights and indecipherable multilingual commentary. Lest anyone get to jealous of us for having had this great adventure, I’d like to point out that it could be replicated quite easily with a dark hallway, some blinking Christmas lights with tinsel garlands, and a wagon. Have fun.

We also took a day trip out from Shanghai to Zhouzhuang, fondly nicknamed ‘the Venice of the East’ by the local tourist board. Zhouzhuang is a water town – a city that relied on an elaborate canal system to move goods around the city and, via a connection with the old Grand Canal that connected Beijing and central China, goods could move elsewhere as well. Now, of course, it relies on a network of tourists to move cash in and goods out.

The city is about 900 years old, and its many bridges have been the subject of a great deal of very famous art we’d never heard of (ah, well, such is the art world). It is also the site of many new art galleries where works center on the town’s more famous vistas, and we were subjected to the hard sell by a man who was perhaps a bit overconfident in his English (he went on at length about how Chinese art is famous for being delicious, whereas Chinese cooking is famous for its aesthetics). (On second thought, maybe he’s right.)

Midweek we took off for my longstanding residence (six whole months!) of Nanjing, where we discarded our casual observer attitude in favor of supertourist status. This was done not entirely willingly – my neighbors (Liwei’s- the young girl I had been helping to prepare for her Wnglish exam- parents) had rented a van (the Chinese for which, by the way, I really love: it’s ‘mianbaoche’ or bread car, so named because vans are shaped sort of like a loaf of bread) and made a plan to make the most of our one day in their city.

I talked them out of the suggested 7 a.m. start time all the way down to 8:30, and although I could tell they were a bit concerned about us wasting half the day like that, they were forced, by my insistence, to accept it. In the morning we visited the Purple Mountain Astronomical Observatory (someplace I had not only never seen, but actually never heard of), the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, and the Presidential Palace/Residence of Chiang Kai-shek while in Nanjing (and also the residence of the leader of the Taiping Rebellion when they briefly ruled over the city in the mid-19th century). Then off to lunch in a private room of a hotel restaurant, where my neighbors had ordered more than a dozen dishes for us and seemed to think we’d manage to eat them all.

I do not think that, until that point, my mom and Kristian (Dad went back to my apartment early, a bit under the weather) really appreciated what I’d been suffering at the hand of my neighbor’s many attempts to force-feed me. We ate until we were bursting and then were helped to more, all the while being implored to drink more Budweiser, of all things, which they bought for our sake, though not because it’s American, but because it’s ‘the best.’ (Sadly, they’re not wrong. Qingdao has some better quality products, but for a basic table beer – which often takes the place of a table wine in big Chinese meals – the local brands are a bit lacking) (of course, if your mind wanders to the memory of a Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout while drinking an insipid Chinese beer, it is enough to bring tears to your eyes and put a catch in your voice).

Of course, nothing lasts forever, and we were ultimately released from the table and allowed to stumble out of the restaurant and back into the van for more sights of Nanjing (the goal seeming to be, as Kristian noted, to get us drunk and then lead us around museums). The afternoon took us to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Fuzi Temple (Confucian), where I was kept busy talking them out of taking us to dinner, it having been, of course, only two hours since we’d finished lunch. We ultimately managed to negotiate our release and were returned to my apartment with a bag of food for the train and a promise to pick us up to take us to the station that night.

We took the overnight train from Nanjing to Beijing, which takes a mere 9 ½ hours and, in the soft sleeper cars at least, is marvelously comfortable. Each cabin has four bunks, and each bunk boasts of its own little TV and headphones broadcasting a selection of Chinese and American movies. Mom, Kristian and I hit the on-board bar for a nightcap and then settled in for a relaxing trip. I was dead tired from the challenges of codeswitching – by the end of the day I was inevitably speaking to my neighbors in English and my family in Chinese with the anticipated effect of enlightening no one and instead creating mass confusion – but I never sleep on trains (or planes or automobiles; I don’t know why), so that first afternoon in Beijing, I was a little bleary-eyed and, hence, so excited about the Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. Do not argue cultural heritage with the caffeine-deprived (really, it’s in an inconspicuous side building; it’s not like they’ve turned the emperor’s receiving room into a McCafe).

Our time in Beijing featured the discovery of a much-beloved bakery chain, climbing the Great Wall in the rain (hey, fewer tourists that way, which means you can form a can-can line without hurting anyone) (we have pictures- write and ask), and led a tourist group rebellion against a forced visit to a state-run silk factory.

I’ve actually written about the factory system in China before, but for the uninitiated, every time you join a tour group to go do something hard to do without one (like go to a relatively distant, less populated section of the Great Wall), you get forced to visit some sort of official factory which consists of a quick demonstration of how they make the goods contained within and then a long march through the showroom where they try to ply you, the rich American tourist, with three of everything; the tour leader, of course, gets some sort of kickback on whatever you buy. So far, I’ve been to jade, pearl, silk, and cloisonné factories, and my experiences with them led me to turn revolutionary to prevent yet another trip (the other weary tourists, having been to their fair share of these factories themselves, stepped into line quite easily, so it is not quite the feat of mass mobilization that it might sound. There were also only 7 of us total, including the four Oyens. Just short of a mass).

I was, of course, terribly sad to see everyone go. But the week after they left, I almost didn’t have time to think about it (almost). I saw them off in Shanghai, took the groovy new mag-lev train from the airport into the city (430 km/hr and only 7 minutes from Pudong International Airport to the Shanghai subway system, a trip that normally takes 45 minutes to an hour), then the subway to the train, and the train back to Nanjing. In Nanjing, I had four days to pack up my apartment, ship back excess books and clothes that I won’t need between now and August, and get back on the Beijing overnight train.

My neighbor came to see me off at the train station, which was lucky because otherwise I might have gotten stuck, pathetically, in the train station tunnels, unable to reach the platform. Basically, I had a suitcase, a duffel bag, a backpack, and a small shopping bag, the cumulative weight of which was roughly 2-3 times my own weight. Combine that 250 pounds of baggage (why so heavy? Mostly books, really: the life of a dissertator) with the chaos of doubletime construction at the Nanjing train station (which burned down last year but must be made pretty – not to mention functional – again for the Asian games to be hosted there in October, resulting in a not-so-passenger-friendly work zone), and you have a genuine ‘it takes a village’ moment. I missed my neighbor’s help in Beijing, where it took me close to an hour to travel the 200 or so yards from the train platform to the taxi stand, with frequent rests.

So here I am in Beijing. I’ll be here until mid-June, when I head south to spend my last two months here archive-hopping across Southern China. I’m staying in a fellow Fulbrighter’s apartment while she’s in Nanjing (we also, conveniently, arranged a bicycle swap), and I have to say, it is the nicest apartment I’ve ever lived in. I have a cappuccino maker. And a neighborhood Starbucks – well two, if you count the Forbidden Starbucks – that sells the beans. No wait, three: there’re two on Wangfujing Avenue.

I only mention it because I nearly cried when I made my first cup of real, fresh coffee, not from instant granulated particles, in the privacy of my own home and while wearing my pajamas (i.e. good coffee without having to go out and fetch it). Three cheers for the oppressive forces of western cultural and economic imperialism that make my morning lattes possible! Hip, hip… yeah, okay. Anyway, the apartment is in a renovated hutong (traditional Beijing-style housing that consists of a collection of family homes centered around a garden with a gate), and it’s just off the East Gate of the Forbidden City, a location that cannot be beat. Except when I’m trying to get to the National Library, which is on roughly the other side of the world.

Actually, just getting around the library itself is something of a trip. The library takes up a full Chinese city block (each of which generally equals about 6 New York City blocks), and has, just for fun, apparently, no signs inside directing you anywhere. The first time I went, I was looking for 1950s era People’s Daily articles (I had collected a bunch of these off a really cool searchable CD-ROM in Hong Kong, not realizing that when I printed them out, each line was missing the last 5-6 characters, which is too much to guess at). I entered, as directed, at the far South entrance. At the first information desk I saw, I presented my query. The helpful people told me to find the first hallway I could that leads north, and take it as far as I possibly could, because the newspapers are located at the farthest point from the entrance.

Off I trekked, and about 10 minutes later walked into the newspaper room. But wait, that was the contemporary newspaper room; the kindly staff there sent me upstairs. Upstairs there were papers from the 1990s, to be sure, but nothing so far back as the 1950s. That is on microfilm, and microfilm is in the far west of the building, so find a hallway leading west and take it to the end. Once, finally, in the microfilm room, I ordered up a few sample microfilm reels from the late 1940s and put them through the manual machine. It was clear to me in minutes that this was not going to work: the machines had no function to enlarge, the characters were absolutely miniscule on the screen, and smudgy to boot.

I returned the reels to the desk and asked if the library didn’t, per chance, have the computerized edition. Miraculously, they did – but it is in the computer reading room. Where’s the computer reading room? Well, that was at the far east of the building – the southeast (i.e. right next to the entrance).

After my Grand Tour, I couldn’t help but wonder why they wouldn’t automatically send anyone looking for People’s Daily back issues to the fabulous, easy to use, low-maintenance, and searchable CD-ROM, but hey, it’s China. Don’t ask too many questions. Tomorrow, however, I have to go find statistical yearbooks, which are supposedly located in the sub-basement labyrinth. I plan on bringing snacks just in case I get lost down there and don’t make it out by closing time.

In fact, if you don’t hear from me for a while, assume that’s what happened. Maybe I’ll invest in a compass.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

The Doorbell Rang

Last week it was 70 and sunny for four days, Monday through Thursday. Then, after a massive thunderstorm, the temperature plummeted and it was back to turning blue in the archives. I was biking home Friday alongside another grad student, Cathy, who’s from England. She commented that she’s never seen weather this bizarre. I told her that it was just like spring in Minnesota, except that in my home state, the temperature drop would be accompanied by gratuitous snowfall. As soon as the word ‘snow’ escaped my lips, I regretted it. One should never tempt fate in this way in the springtime, and sure enough, seconds later something small, wet and chilly hit my nose. The light flurries soon turned into quite the snowy mess (though admittedly, it didn’t really accumulate much, falling as it was on the sun-warmed pavement), and I discovered that if there is anything worse than driving home through a Friday rush-hour snowstorm, it’s biking through one.

When not slaving away on the dissertation (er, right) over the last few weeks, I’ve been tutoring my neighbor’s daughter, Liwei. I met her after her mom showed up on my doorstep one night, explaining that she’d heard there was an American in the neighborhood and thought she’d come by to see if the rumors proved true. Liwei is 15 and, true to the pressure-cooker mentality that underlies most Asian educational systems, she has two important, life-determining exams coming up. I’m helping her prepare for an English exam on April 2.

She’s currently a student at Nanjing’s foreign language middle school, and in order to get into the foreign language high school, she needs to test in the top half of this exam. In other words, 600 of the best English students in this city take the exam, but only 300 of them pass. Then in June, she takes the high school entrance exam. Her mom tells me that only a third of all middle school graduates get into a regular high school (with attending hopes to someday go to college) – the rest end up in trade school, all academic dreams over at age 15.

As a result, being a Chinese student, whether in elementary, middle, or high school, is a rough existence. Most families only have one child (that’s, er, due to the infamous “one child policy”), and everything depends on how he or she does in school, with college being the ultimate goal. Each step along the way, however, narrows the field considerably. As anyone from your friends, to cab drivers, to average guy on the street will tell you if you stand still long enough to listen, China has too many people. There are too few places in universities, so the 12 years leading up to college turn into a cut-throat competition for academic success. Add to this the fact that some of the precious few open slots are taken by people who have the money or connections to get into any given school through back channels, and you have a miserable existence for the rest of the test-takers.

Liwei goes to school every day from 7 to 5, then comes home to a few hours of tutoring, and then studies until midnight or one. Her mom works all day and keeps her company at night – as she says, if her daughter had to stay up all alone and study while the rest of the family slept, she’d become bitter. Her mom is quite worried about the exams, but also wants to avoid giving her daughter too much pressure – one night she regaled me with horror stories of young students being overcome by the stress and attempting suicide – it happens around test time every year.

Liwei’s family situation – not to mention her stress level – are complicated by the fact that her dad has leukemia. He was diagnosed four years ago, but it has been slow to develop. His white count is quite high now, however, and this spring he’ll undergo a bone marrow transplant. He was lucky in that first, his brother was a match for his bone marrow, and second, that he has a government job that can pick up the cost of the procedure – otherwise, he’d never be able to do it. That Liwei and her mom show up on my doorstop cheerful and chattering every night – and asking what they can do to help me – is an extraordinarily humbling thing to witness.

Being a cream-of-the-crop foreign language student, Liwei speaks extraordinarily good English already, though her studies thus far have been a bit too focused on rote memorization and not enough on organic conversation. (I help make up for this by demonstrating a pre-teen level of interest in soap operas and Mandopop stars and having her fill in the gaps in my knowledge.) The one complication in what would be a perfect student-tutor relationship is that I won’t let them pay me, and this causes angst. There are a few reasons for this – one is that while I’m on fellowship I’m not supposed to take paid employment (and yes, no one would ever know, but I would), another is that I’m not a trained tutor – I just explain things the best that I can and sometimes that’s not all that well. Her mom finally accepted the situation with the suggestion that perhaps there are things they can do for me instead of just handing me cash.

When we first agreed on the tutoring arrangement, they presented me with an economy size box of cookies: the logic being, I gather, that if they can’t pay me, they can at least feed me. The cookies were advertised as being milk flavored, the perfect accompaniment for afternoon tea. There was nothing on the packaging to prepare me for the fact that each individual cookie was stamped over and over again with “Beijing! 2008!!! Beijing! 2008!!!” It seems they’re pro-Olympics, patriotic cookies. Sadly, they’re also terrible: like eating compressed sand, only sweeter. On the other had, I can’t help but think that they might not be half bad if accompanied by ice cream – Chinese nationalism, a la mode.

It did not stop with the cookies, however. Although I came up with a few things related to my research that they could do to help me out (mostly in the realm of deciphering difficult-to-read characters from my archives copies), they clearly decided that the best course of action was to bring more and more food my way. While tutoring Yitei at her house one afternoon, I was kept busy by not only the constant stream of questions from my student (“Why is New York called the Big Apple?” “Why are college students called freshmen and sophomores?” “What’s the difference between blond and blonde?” I spent some quality time with Google that night, working out some of the answers), but by the constant supply of snacks from her mom. Every time I took a sip of tea, I’d set it back on the table and her mom would sweep in, grab the cup, and refill my mouthful’s worth of hot water. She handed me an apple, but before I could finish it, she took it out of my hand and replaced it with a mango, which was in turn replaced with yogurt. Protests were futile, and I became slightly concerned about opening my mouth too wide lest she stick something in it.

A few nights later, my doorbell rang. I had just finished dinner – a little tired of Chinese food, I had found some Italian rotini and olive oil at the import store, and cooked up broccoli, eggplant and tomatoes in oil, garlic and basil and combined it with the noodles. I fully acknowledge that it was not a gourmet creation, but I enjoyed it. When the doorbell rang, I was just heading into the kitchen to clean up and store the leftovers. I let in my neighbor, who came bearing a few bags of vegetables. She asked me if I’d eaten dinner yet, and I indicated I had, pointing at my leftovers. She asked if she could taste my creation, and I gladly handed over a clean pair of chopsticks. She took one bite and made a face. “It’s awful!” she exclaimed. I tried to explain that it was Italian style, and therefore might not suit her tastes, but really I was quite satisfied. She did not accept this, and immediately went to work making me soup. I protested: I was quite full from dinner. She gave my leftovers a disdainful look. “You’re full from eating that?” “Yes,” I answered, almost apologetically, “Really.”

She thought about this while the soup was simmering, during which I earned further incredulous looks for not having any MSG on hand to add flavor to the soup. I’m sure she thought that was one reason my pasta was so terrible. Fortunately, she told me, she had anticipated that I might not know to buy MSG and keep it on hand, so she brought some along, which she kindly left with me for my future cooking efforts. By the time the soup was done, she had apparently decided that she did not accept my claims of being full. My previous dinner, she declared, did not count because it was so bad, so clearly I must eat dinner all over again. With this established, she sat me down at my table with a giant bowl of soup and the command to eat it all. Then she sat down next to me to watch.

While I slowly worked my way through the soup, we talked history and politics. I had noticed that any mention she made of the Japanese, in any context, came in the form of “those Japanese devils.” This being Nanjing, that sentiment is not all that unusual; the Japanese army’s infamous sweep through this city and the surrounding countryside is a veritable A to Z catalog of war crimes. The depth of feeling over World War II and even longer-standing historical resentments between China, Korea, and Japan are often somewhat enigmatic in the West; after all, we were in the same war, fought Germany and Japan, and if it is not forgotten, it is all at least forgiven. But anyone with an eye on, for example, the present dispute between Korean and Japan over the Dokdo/Takeshima mess can see the depth of feeling that continues to exist between the two countries.

Likewise with some Chinese – particularly Nanjingers – and the Japanese. That’s not to say that people don’t get along on an individual level, because of course they do; but liking a few Japanese people who live down the street and wholesale acceptance of their homeland and its past is pretty different. In the case of my neighbor, her anti-Japanese attitude is rooted in the fact that her mother spent four days hiding in a cupboard when the Japanese army came through her hometown (outside of Nanjing) in 1937.

From the war, we moved forward in time to the communist liberation and the Mao era, which my neighbor described as a time when one had to very careful about what they said and to whom they said it – now is much better, of course, though that didn’t stop my neighbor from asking that if I ever told anyone about our conversations, I please not mention her name. Still, she spoke both freely and disdainfully of Mao’s early policies that made cultivating even a small plot of vegetables for one’s own family an anti-revolutionary act, and then blasted the extremism that led to the Cultural Revolution, which ended her own high school education a few years early. “My generation has no culture,” she told me, “No schooling, no culture. Most never had a chance to do or be anything.” She was lucky, because she was young enough and smart enough to test into college when the schools reopened in the 1970s, and now she’s an accountant with a good job and a decent life. Understandably, she thinks of Deng Xiao-ping, that great transformer of China, as the greatest man who ever lived, never mind Tiananmen.

Saturday mid-morning, the doorbell rang. She must think I’m starving to death, honestly, for the amount of food she brought over. (Well, given her opinion of my cooking, she’s likely convinced that I am starving to death, not for lack of eating, but for lack of eating anything good.) She spent an hour and a half cooking up a storm in my kitchen (the warning bells went off in my head when she looked at my jug of vegetable oil and worried that the cup and a half left inside might not be enough), and in the end I had a huge pot of rice, three vegetable dishes, a large fish, nine hard boiled quail eggs, and one vat of turtle and tofu soup. She kindly walked me through that last one, perhaps thinking that this week I could pick up a turtle and whip up a batch myself.

I am not, however, so wild about turtle (which does not taste like chicken) that I want to run right out and do that, but it was kind of her anyway. What was amusing, however, was her determination that we couldn’t possibly have turtles in the US, because – wait for it – they live on the banks of rivers and we don’t have rivers in America. Huh. I assured her that we, too, have rivers and turtles galore, but the last time I was in close contact with a turtle, it was a friend’s pet, not the base of a soup.

I actually get these kinds of questions a lot – do we have bean sprouts in the US? Yogurt? Do we all eat hamburgers or pizza three meals a day? (Some of us would if we could, eh, dad?) Had I eaten rice before I came to China? What about tofu? Sometimes answering these questions requires diplomacy: does the coffee-flavored milk tea in China taste like it does in the US? Does the Kentucky Fried Chicken in the US serve cancer-causing toxins to American customers? (Er, no, the barbeque chicken with Sudan I sauce was apparently just for the Chinese market….)

When she was done cooking and this feast was laid out on the table, she took off her apron and said her goodbyes. I was confused; wasn’t she going to join me? Nope – she had to go home and cook for her family. How embarrassing. So there I was with enough food for a family of ten, all by myself at the table. Her parting words to me were to eat it all – or worst case, heat up the leftovers for dinner – but they won’t keep after Saturday, so eat up (and without stopping, apparently, for the rest of the day). I ignored her and ate the last of the leftovers just today (not to mention working on the candy and dried plums they brought over in between cooking adventures).

The sudden presence of a refrigerator full of leftovers was complicated by the fact that I left town for two days early Sunday morning. I had an appointment in Shanghai on Monday, so I decided to leave a day early and explore Suzhou, a city between Nanjing and Shanghai. A famous proverb once declared that there is paradise in heaven, and Suzhou and Hangzhou on earth (I’m not sure where exactly the proverb is from, other than every guidebook ever written in Chinese or English on either of the two cities). Suzhou is an ancient city, and its main attractions are its gardens – there are dozens of major gardens, and countless minor ones. A classical Chinese garden is not about flowers so much as a mixture of architecture, handcrafted rock, and carefully sculpted nature. The effect is beautiful, though for anyone going Chinese garden hopping in the near future, let me offer this bit of sage advice: four in one afternoon is too many.

After the first few, you start to look around and think, “rocks and water, bamboo and goldfish, yup, all here,” take a few (by this point) gratuitous photos, and then leave, with the gate people wondering why you just spent 20 kuai for a gallop through their garden. This sort of attitude must necessarily detract from the wonder one would otherwise feel at the realization that these rocks and water, not to mention bamboo and plants (but not the goldfish)(at least, not the same goldfish), have been thus arranged for hundreds of years, in spite of dynastic collapse, Western imperialism, the Taiping rebellion, the Japanese invasion, the communist take-over and the cultural revolution. Which is more than one can say for your average American rocks and water.

Some structures have been replaced, of course, but the oldest garden dates back 1200 years, and I climbed to the top of a 1005-year-old pagoda. Actually, this was almost the story of how I got wedged in a 1005-year-old pagoda – the staircase was so narrow, deteriorating to a sort of slightly angled ladder for the last two stories, that I got a bit stuck before it occurred to me to back down, take off my backpack, and try it again pushing the overly-stuffed bag ahead of me. Thank goodness I got myself out of that one quietly, though, because I do not want to know what kind of attention a foreigner wedged in a pagoda would attract in Suzhou. In some things, we are better off remaining ignorant.

I had such beautiful weather for my outing that late in the day I decided not to rush back to the train station, but to take my time and walk part of it, and then just grab a cab when the time started to get tight. This would have been a great plan if it were not for the fact that there were no empty cabs to be had on a Sunday evening (and flagging one down was further complicated by the bike lane separating the road with the taxis from the sidewalk with their would-be passengers). As it happened, I just kept walking. And walking. And walking. Finally, I started getting nervous – my train was leaving in 25 minutes, I had no idea how far I still had to go, and I’ve never been in a Chinese train station that was not complete and utter chaos (and therefore requiring some time to navigate). I caught sight of a bus number L4, which I thought I remembered seeing when I left the train station that morning. I waved it down, confirmed with the bus driver that his destination was, indeed, the station, and jumped aboard. I deposited my 1 kuai (I love that you can ride the bus for 12 cents here), lurched forward to an empty seat (the bus was turning a corner), sat, and looked out the window… at the train station. I had boarded the bus maybe 50 yards away from the station entrance. I take comfort in the fact that at least I caught my train. With, uh, time to spare.

I’d attach a few photos of Suzhou, but – alas – my camera ate them. I apparently give off some sort of bizarre anti-electronics vibe. We’ve long known this. I’ve had trouble with watches (including one with a new battery that would spontaneously reverse time and start to tick backwards), phones, stereos, and computers (well, on that last one, who hasn’t). At one point last fall every single piece of electronics in my apartment, from my electronic Chinese-English dictionary down to my toaster oven, was in some way inoperable. For no apparent reason, my digital camera decided to crash and take the flash memory card with it (so much for my back up), so I have nothing but fond memories and gate tickets to show for my day in Suzhou. Ah well, someday I’ll go back. On the bright side, somewhere in China there is a couple that has photographic evidence that I was there – I refer, of course, to the classic “take a picture with a foreigner” phenomenon.

I can’t say I really understand the impulse behind it. Pictures with celebrities or people in anthropomorphic animal suits, sure, who doesn’t enjoy that? But just a random person of the street who – gasp! – is not Chinese? Nope, don’t get it. And the thing is, the natural tendency to explain this away as being in a part of China with less exposure to foreigners doesn’t really work.

When Lancelot was in town, he and I posed with two military guys down at the Confucian temple and with two couples (taking turns, so everyone could be in a shot) in a restaurant. Granted, Nanjing is not exactly down in the countryside, far from the reaches of civilization, but there are not so many foreigners here that they aren’t a little unusual outside the universities, and there were two of us out at once. But the first time this ever happened to me was in Taiwan, and in January, it even happened in Hong Kong (while mountain climbing – we got to the top of the mountain and were surprised to see cows, some guys behind us got there and were surprised to see foreigners. When they asked for a picture, I reached for their camera to take one of them, but before I got there one of the guys had bounded to my side and slung an arm around my shoulders while the other snapped the picture). I guess this – like the shouts of “hello!!” from strangers when I bicycle by and marriage proposals in whatever form they take – is just my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a taste of celebrity.

On a side note, I’m currently reading the worst book on the overseas Chinese ever written. I grant that I have not read everything ever written on the Chinese diaspora, but this book is so bad that I’m still willing to make this claim. Naturally, it was an international best-seller, which is what happens when people other than historians write history books (though that is, perhaps, a topic for another time). So, what makes it so bad? Writing about the campaign that drove the Dutch from the isle of Formosa : “Victory on Taiwan was sweet and sour.” No, dearheart, victory on Taiwan may be bittersweet, but it is not sweet and sour, as if it was so much battered and deep-fried pork. What concerns me is that I’m sure he specifically selected this phrase for its “Chinese flair.”

Other bizarre examples of overly-vivid and astoundingly out-of-place imagery include the line, “virtue was kicked off like tight ballet shoes” (the context of that one is immaterial, as there should be no ballet shoes making appearances in this book for any reason) and perhaps my favorite, “Indonesians are like tiny plankton in a warm sea where the great whales bathe. They find it reassuring that the biggest whales – President Suharto’s family and friends – swallow nearly everything, after running it through their krill strainers.” Bonus points if you can determine what the “krill strainers” represent in that overly ambitious simile. It starts a chapter (suitably titled, “Where the Whales Play”), and nothing seems to follow it by way of explanation. Of course, what the book lacks in literary merit and historical accuracy (the author has annoying tendency to make some sort of broad generalization about life in ancient China and then state, “and the overseas Chinese are still like that today” at least twice a chapter) it more than makes up for in unintended laughs, so I continue to read on.

Best to all, Merry

Epilogue: Uff da. I was just about to send this when, you guessed it, the doorbell rang. My neighbor asked me what I had for dinner, and sensing her dissatisfaction as I started to explain the fried rice I’d made, I just kept talking until she was satisfied. Being satisfied, however, did not stop her from making me a bowl of sweet black sesame soup, cutting up a pineapple, and boiling a chopped lotus root for me to munch. She also brought candied dried plums, tea eggs, pea pods, and put a package of frozen won tons in my freezer. Lunch for tomorrow, she said. And for a few days after that, I daresay.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

The Korean soap opera theory of everything

Korean soap operas… er, make that “Mandarin Pronunciation Listening Comprehension Exercises”.

I’m beginning to think that what there really needs to be is a “Korean soap opera theory of everything.”

Granted, infiltration of South Korean soap operas into North Korean VCRs (by way of China) is only part of the information revolution that shows that in the brave new world of high technology, it is no longer possible to control what news and images of the outside world get into a closed state like North Korea. But Korean soap operas mean so much more than that.
The combination of complicated and angst-ridden story lines; good-looking, kind and appropriately filial young men; and (in the ones I watch anyway) sticky-sweet happy endings have made Korean prime-time soaps the rage across East Asia.

When living in Taiwan, it was debates over Kim Jae Won versus Kim Rae Won in “In Love with Red Bean Girl”: each faction had its own arguments, its own sense of the merits (Kim Rae Won, the poor seal trainer, was a fiercely loyal friend whose devotion, and highlighted hair, earned rightful praise. Kim Jae Won was the amusement park boss’s son, rich but unspoiled, and debonair in his western-style suits). Before I came to China, a friend in the US told me that whatever else I do when I’m here, I need to pick up a copy of “Winter Sonata” and watch it (he made, interestingly enough, no recommendations for Chinese soaps at all). I’ve seen parts of ROK soaps, broadcasted with English subtitles, in Singapore. I’ve heard of them sweeping through the Philippines and Thailand. Soon there will be no place in Asia yet untouched by the colorful productions.

Divided states, one side developed and democratic, the other communist and closed, have a history of tipping under the weight of cultural onslaught. There is Germany, of course. In China, anything Taiwanese is popular – music, movies, and soap operas, of course, but everything from coffee shops to hot dogs advertise as being “Taiwanese style” and pull in better business as a result. This sparks interest in the free society – freedom makes for more creativity, which in turn makes better television. The news that South Korean soaps are now reaching homes in North Korea should come as no surprise – no one can escape the tide of history forever.

The key now, of course, is to ensure that they continue to be a force for good. Beyond their great revolutionary potential in the DPRK, reports have hit the AP wires of middle-aged Japanese women swooning over Winter Sonata star Bae Yong-joon (who is, incidentally, also prominently featured in my 2005 Dynamic Korea calendar issued by the Korean Embassy in Washington), and of the rise of dating services that promise to introduce Japanese women to eligible Korean men. Think, if you will, about the deep historical wounds that always kept Korea and Japan at odds. With cultural exchange, and soap-opera-driven widespread intermarriage, we could be seeing a whole new era of positive Northeast Asian relations.

Last year marked a new era in Chinese television production when the state-run CCTV collaborated with KBS to create the first ever joint Chinese-Korean soap opera, set mostly in Beijing (but, as is always the case with the soaps set outside of Korea, with a few gratuitous trips back to Korea to add conflict and confusion) and centering on the Korean diaspora. Conveniently, most characters were bi-lingual for one reason or another, and the free-wheeling codeswitching only added to the delight of seeing Chinese and Korean young people work so closely together for mutual good.

The one place where the Korean soap operas threaten the peace and harmony in the region is in the area of trade – Korea is exporting such great volumes of its cultural products that Taiwan and China are starting to protest and call for parity. The problem, of course, is that unless it is a Taiwanese soap staring F4, no one in Korea is particularly interested in the Chinese productions. But even this can have a positive effect on the region. The Chinese people will not stand for a cut-off of their beloved soaps – every population has its breaking point, and sometimes one suspects that this is it — so dialogue and compromise are necessary.

Perhaps “Romance,” or “Sweet 18,” or yes, even “Lovers in Paris” might not conquer the world. Asia is enough. To be a force for good in a region this complex and divided is enough. A unifying factor, a source of agreement, a movement we can each, in our own way, get behind. An example of the power of pop culture to infiltrate where governments and high politics cannot. That is what the Korean soap opera is to the world. We can only hope that this important work will continue.

Fortunately, I’m Easily Amused

Last fall when the exigencies of typhoon season caused me to spend the better part of a night and a day in the Tokyo airport Terminal Two transit lounge, I met an American businessman who’d been living in China for more than 20 years. I asked him if he had any handy tips for successful living in China. He replied that in order to live in this land and like it, you need two things, equally important: a) some command of Mandarin Chinese, and b) a sense of humor.

I think he’s right: if all you’ve got is the former, prepare to be miserable, and if all you’ve got is the latter, prepare to be hysterical.

I’ve written before about the importance of speaking Chinese in facilitating just about every aspect of life here. So now I’d like to point out a few key moments when the sense of humor is of greater – even paramount – importance. In no particular order, times in which I feel it is vital to choose to be amused:

1. The first time (and, for that matter, all subsequent times) you are accidentally spat on. This is almost never intentional, at least in my experience, which I base on the fact that when I’ve been spat on it has never once been preceded by a cry of “big-nosed foreign devil!” or “running-dog capitalist!” or any other similar epithet. The spitter was also not even aware that he’d hit someone.
I don’t think I’ve ever even been spit on as a pedestrian: this is strictly a biking issue. The problem is simple: Chinese people spit a lot. Sometimes they look where they are spitting. Sometimes they do not. When they are on bicycles and you are in the midst of the pack in rush hour, sooner or later someone will be loosing some saliva at the exact moment you are trying to pass them. It is an inevitable fact of life, and the sooner one accepts this with grace and good humor, the happier one will be. But I suspect it will become tougher to take when we enter short-sleeves season.

2. When the archives presents you with the “finding aid” (a list) for ordering files from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it consists of a list of 3,594 files dating between 1912 and 1949 from all geographic regions, and (this is the kicker) in no particular order. That is a “you know you’re in China when…” moment. File 564 is a map of India, 565 contains the expense reports for the Chinese Embassy in Portugal, 566 is about World War II displaced persons, 567 is about the US army’s use of the Burma Road… and so on. I don’t care how many thousands of years of culture, philosophy and invention China has under its belt. No civilization can truly be called great that cannot grasp the concept and utility of an index.

3. When you trip over a monkey on your way into the grocery store. Perhaps you wonder how I could possibly trip over a monkey while entering my local supermarket. The answer is simple: I didn’t see him. Thanks to the magic of laser technology I now have better than 20/20 vision, so this just might require more explanation. If not, humor me.

I went to the grocery store to pick up a few pre-Chinese New Year provisions (specifically, frozen dumplings for New Year’s Eve and frozen tangyuan for New Year’s morning). Outside the grocery store was the usual chaos of independent sellers – people who bring a few selections of vegetables in baskets or some fresh chicken (which is to say, alive and walking around) and sell them for prices that undercut the chain store. The combination of tubs of swimming fish and eel, clucking birds, and chatting merchants all crowding the sidewalks in front of the store entrance makes for a bit of an obstacle course for a shopper intent on making her purchases from among things reassuringly packed in plastic and Styrofoam and stacked under neon lights rather than on the ground. (Actually, I’m not against the market-style selling – but I am loyal to my own vegetable seller, who operates her stand closer to my house, so my grocery store purchases involve only important items like frozen foods and Cheerios.) The commotion is distracting, and it takes some effort to pick a path through the hubbub to get to the entrance. Just as I approached the door, I tripped over a large dog on a chain. As I righted myself, I looked into its eyes only to discover that it wasn’t a dog, it was a monkey. Sitting, he came up past my knees. He was wearing a little hat and a vest, and chained to an elderly, toothless man who lacked only an organ to grind to complete the look. The monkey did, however, have a tiny little bicycle. Perhaps all Chinese monkeys bicycle.
The man must have thought it was his lucky day, being stumbled over (or, more accurately, being tripped over by) a foreigner on this random Saturday, because he immediately grabbed the little bike and prodded the monkey into action. As far as action goes, however, I’ve been more impressed. The monkey didn’t even move when I hit it as I tripped – Complacency, thy name is Supermarket Entertainment Monkey.
I went into the store, and I got the impression that the man had spent the whole time I was shopping trying to work up a Monkey Extravaganza for my exit. When I came out, however, the monkey was on the other side of the door. I gave him a few kuai for getting the monkey to move, as I was beginning to suspect that to be a feat that resembled a force of nature. Within a few days, the monkey and his handler had moved on – perhaps to more Monkey-friendly audiences in other parts of the province. I was sorry not to have gotten a picture of him, but when was the last time you took your camera to the grocery store, just in case there was a live animal performance? Thought so.

4. When faced with a squat toilet on a moving train. I refuse to elaborate, other than to say, “tricky.” Actually, the public facilities in China are full of interesting challenges for foreigners – not least of which is getting over personal hang-ups about having doors on stalls and little things like that — but these are not the sort of things that, I daresay, you want me to elaborate on. Just trust me on this.

5. When buying designer clothes in a street market. Last weekend, I accompanied Lancelot and some of his friends to a huge clothing market in Shanghai to buy some new shirts (apparently, he has a hard time finding shirts in Korea that are big enough). The market we went to was a multi-building, multi-story affair packed tight with merchant stalls selling every kind of clothing from sparkly socks to pin-stripe suits. It had absolutely everything you could possibly want, except for shirts with sleeves long enough for a (really) tall foreigner. The problem with these markets, really, is that the merchants can take one look at you and know that they don’t have your size. You can pick up a shirt and know for certain that they aren’t going to have your size. Everyone is completely and totally aware that there is no chance of you buying something there that will ever, ever fit you. But they will always try to sell it to you anyway. So you will find yourself the victim of mile-a-minute descriptions of price, color and quality, ending with you finding yourself energetically debating the merits of the shirt that, if actually tried on, would leave your wrists uncomfortably exposed to the elements and your shoulders caged into a rather limited range of motion.
I’ve done it over a variety of items, ranging from clothing to imitation antique Mao propaganda posters – and I’m always deep into the discussion before I start to wonder how it all started when I have absolutely no intention of buying anything. Worse yet, sometimes I end up making the purchase, because having spent twenty minutes haggling with the seller in a marvelous exercise in Chinese conversation and brought the already-low price down a sliver more, I feel bad walking away. I then trudge home, slightly disgruntled, with my totally extraneous new purple plastic Winnie-the-Pooh key case or magazine about the science of space travel filled with the knowledge that I will never see that 83 cents again and will likely not even bother bringing my new purchase home from China. I don’t have any retro Chinese Communist Party posters yet, but I had a very, very narrow escape with an English version of Mao’s Little Red Book. And it is an absolute miracle that I managed to emerge from Chinese New Year chicken-free. I’d ship all my “guilt purchases” home, but they are never, frankly, worth the price of postage; their only value is the slightly bitter laugh I get at my own expense for being so easily taken.
Ahem. Back to the matter at hand: Lancelot did not find any shirts of appropriate size at said market. He’s done his shopping in Shanghai before, however, so we split up so I could go get lost in the bookstores and he could head off to a longer-sleeved market. Later we sat down and compared purchases. I had hit the classic movie DVD section hard, finding such treasures as To Be or Not To Be and His Girl Friday, which sell all over China for anywhere from $1 to $1.50. Lancelot, on the other hand, scored really big. He had purchased a dozen button-down shirts in a veritable rainbow of colors and patterns, each sporting an A-list brand name and a rock-bottom price. As he was removing the packaging and refolding the shirts, however, he started reading the tag off his $5 Armani shirt. I had the privilege to see Lancelot doubled over in a fit of what I am afraid can only be described as the giggles. Having read it myself, I think the tag opens the door to the possibility, however remote, that the shirt in question was not actually a genuine Armani product. At least, I’ve never heard of that great Armani slogan, “The Best High Fashionable.” (But then, Giorgio Aramani would have been a non-native speaker of English….) The tag goes on to explain just what makes an Armani shirt so special:

“This garment has been manufsctued with dye tissue, withindaco’ colorants and/or with dewashable colorans.It has undergone a specific process of industrial washing which gives the garm ent a washed out or ‘owrn’ look, with worm out patches and decoloration on seevral pieces of the garment, this process of making the tabric appear worn out.continues with the nex washing without olwering the original quality of the garment.” This informative treatise is followed by the rather flamboyantly titled, “Wash away dirt: the elucidation,” which instructs the owner, “Do not bleach. Do not wrench. Do not channeling machine dry.” I suspect these precautions are necessary to protect the “owrn” look of the garment.

Amusing Chinglish aside, there are some ways in which just traveling together requires both Lancelot and me to sharpen our senses of humor. We have very, very different styles of doing things, rooted in that fundamental difference between human beings who are planners and those who are, let’s be frank, headstrong and disorganized (gee, which one am I?). Originally, I had planed to take the train on Sunday to Shanghai to meet up with Lancelot, who’d already been there a few days. He called Friday and explained that we’d being going on an outing with some friends of his on Sunday, so in order to get an early start, do I think I could come on Saturday evening?

My response: silence.

Lancelot: Um, Saturday? Okay?

Me: But I was planning on coming on Sunday.

Lancelot: Yeah, I know, but tomorrow would be better.

Me: But Sunday…

Lancelot: Did you already buy a train ticket for Sunday?

Me: No.

Lancelot: Do you have something going on that you can’t come until Sunday?

Me: No.

Lancelot: Is it a problem to come on Sunday?

Me: No.

Lancelot: So…

Me: That wasn’t the plan. Now I have to buy a ticket tomorrow morning.

Lancelot: Can you buy a ticket tomorrow morning?

Me: Yes. But that wasn’t the plan.

I got over it, of course, and bought a train ticket on Saturday morning and took a train Saturday afternoon and it was all fine. But a similar issue came up a few days later when we tried to split up and meet back later after I had an appointment. The problem was that I didn’t know when the appointment would end. But how we each suggested alternatives to deal with the issue of meeting up reveals much about each of our personalities. Lancelot’s plan: After the appointment, head over to the subway stop at I think it’s called Shanxi or something like that anyway just a stop past the one you’re at and there on the main road there I think it’s called Wa-hai Road there is a Starbucks a block or two in one direction or the other from the subway stop and I’ll see you there around then. My plan: I don’t do “somewhere there is a Starbucks.” There must be a definite time and a definite place. I will meet you at 7:30 p.m., which is safely after the longest my appointment could take, at the number one exit from the Shanxi subway station.
The problem with this kind of argument is that we were each convinced that the other was being completely and utterly unreasonable, and that can make it hard to communicate. Just imagine how irked I was when I went over the Shanxi road that night and found that the Starbucks he had referred to really was as easy to find as advertised. What’s more, it would have been a nicer place to wait than the number one exit of the subway (my plan had won the day, just because I’m more ornery about these things – part of being the easygoing one is that Lancelot more easily surrenders). At the same time, I will maintain forever that it is quite reasonable to want to be specific when in a city neither person knows all that well. So there.

6. Queuing, anytime, anywhere in China. If you don’t choose to find it funny that no one around you seems to understand the purpose and principle of lining up, you will very likely deck someone, and then you’ll end up in the police station as the foreigner who started an altercation over what is simply a cultural difference. This is one area of life in China in which you absolutely must adapt – otherwise you will simply wait forever, because there will never, ever be no one else in line. Basically, there is someone in front helping everyone at his or her leisure. Everyone else is in a terrible hurry. This means that waiting in a line is actually a contact sport. There is a little shoving, some careful maneuvering, snap assessments of other waiting customers’ personalities, and implementation of strategy. A personal favorite tactic is the feint, where you look to all the world like you are not paying attention, but then when someone else starts to make their move, snap to and cut them off at the pass. This can be accompanied by a triumphant look and an exclamation of, “Aha!” which, I assure you, is readily understood even if not easily translated. This took some time to learn. At first, when I was cut in front of in lines I suspected that I just wasn’t queuing convincingly – I failed to look like I wanted to reach the front. More recently, however, I’ve learned that I have to actively protect my place in line, or it will be taken from me.
Incidentally, the queuing problem also manifests itself in traffic, leading one to suspect that although they drive on the right in Taiwan and on the left in Hong Kong, in China they drive on whatever side is most convenient at the moment. This can be a bit disconcerting, however, and I’ve at times stopped dead on my bike to watch in horror at what, until the very last minute, has all the makings of a head-on collision.

A Final Comment on a Recurring Theme: Cows in Daily Life

So I was working through a stack of documents the other day, listening to an older Jay Chou album that I picked up at random one afternoon. There are a few songs on it I really like, one of which, “Rice Fields,” I couldn’t understand at all. Not a single word – well, frequently I can’t understand dear Jay when he sings, as it seems to be against the grain in the international world of R&B to enunciate – but this one had a sort of soaring, chanted chorus that I found rather intriguing. I got out the Chinese lyrics, and after about 10 minutes, was left thinking, “what the….” I ultimately went to the Fundamental Source From Which All Knowledge Flows, or Google, in search of English lyrics. (I could write a sonnet on the many uses of Google in daily life, and perhaps one of these days I will. It saved me on a research question the other day by spitting up the circa 1940 exchange rates for British pounds and Hong Kong dollars. In 30 seconds.). Anyway, I pulled up the lyrics and realized it’s not just me, the chorus of this song is, in fact, genuinely, objectively bizarre:

Hoi Ya E Ya, Oh, that Lu Wan
Na E Na Ya Hei wo~ Ah, my dear cows!
Hoi Ya E Ya, Oh, that Lu Wan
Na E Na Ya Hei wo~ Where did they run off to…

Bizarre, but fun. How much do you have to love a song that repeats, over and over, “ah, my dear cows”? How hard is it to take a song seriously as a “protect the environment from human destruction” plea when it stops periodically to say, “ah, my dear cows”? Questions for the ages, I guess. By the way, though, that is the new Official Theme Song of all future Hong Kong hiking excursions and cross-Wisconsin road-trips. Just so everyone knows.

Best to all (and doubly so to Lancelot, who is heavily imposed-upon in this installment).

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

Dr. Suny and I

There are large booms and great flashes of light going off just outside my window at irregular intervals. I jump a foot each time one starts up, thinking “air raid!!!”, though having never lived through an air raid, how would I know? They are, of course, just fireworks. Lots, and lots, and lots of fireworks. Which in turn, keep setting off car alarms. As soon as the cars finally give up on the notion that they are being stolen, broken into, or otherwise abused, another round starts up and there it all goes again. Yes, it’s a laugh-a-minute here in the lunar new year.

I hope that everyone is living up the two-week spectacle that is Chinese New Year… the occasion is marked most noticeably here – beyond the endless fireworks late into the night every night – by empty streets and closed shops, TV variety shows with bad music and astoundingly complex choreography performed by a few thousand dancers in elaborate feathery costumes (this is the year of the chicken/rooster). The streets are crowded with vendors hawking good fortune for the coming months, often in the form of cuddly stuffed chickens (with, in one case, frightening light-up red eyes that gave one the impression that this plaything might actually be demon-possessed) (why stuffed demonic attack birds are considered auspicious is beyond me, aside from the fact that the color red, when not signaling spirit possession, is lucky).

My goal for the week was to get a lot more work done than I actually ended up doing, which is very often the case on vacations and school breaks (a difficulty to which I’m sure many of you can relate). Well, technically, I still have two days to get it all done before the archives reopen on Wednesday, but may I just take a moment to say, HAH! Part of the problem was a new Korean soap opera (“Sweet 18,” for anyone who keeps up on these things).

Why these are so addictive is hard to explain to anyone who has never watched one, but they really, really are. It doesn’t matter that you are confident from the outset that two leads will get together in the end, or that before they do there will be a few car accidents; a fire; a fight; a case of amnesia; a few drunken antics; a chase sequence involving a few characters, a Matter of Life and Death, and an (often exotic) animal; maybe a death; and certainly several tear-filled confrontations in posh Seoul coffee shops. The question becomes specific to the plot at hand: but who exactly will the gangsters kidnap? How will the male lead be saved from the bribery frame-up? At least this one did not pose the incest conundrum, where the male and female lead are suspected erroneously of being half-siblings (which I’ve now seen several times and never fails to disturb me) and has a few rather amusing sequences involving an elderly man in traditional Korean dress and a karaoke bar.

The much better distraction was the visit of my friend Lancelot (down from Korea, though not himself much of a Korean soap opera fan) (hard to say why, really, given the above). Upon his arrival in Nanjing last week, this was officially the fourth country we have met up in — the others being the US, Korea and Taiwan — without traveling together to any of them. We celebrated this unique accomplishment with dinner on Hunan Road (a popular shopping/dining district). I was unimpressed with much of the restaurant we chose, but I have to say, I was even more unimpressed with my Chinese when I accidentally misled us into ordering snake meat instead of shellfish (er, whoops). When the serving plate arrived, it was obvious from the first glance at the scaly black and white skin what manner of beast had been sectioned and roasted for our dining pleasure, and let me just say, no meat should ever arrive at your table looking that much like the original animal. At that moment, I remembered what character I had misread (too late, too late).

Chalking it up to one of those “what doesn’t kill you will make a good story” life experiences, we each took a large piece of snake in hand (cheers!) and bit down. In case anyone is harboring a life-long dream of sampling this delicacy, let me tell you that snake is one of those things like snails, sunflower seeds, and whole artichokes that is not worth the kind of effort that goes into eating it. After twenty minutes struggling with leathery skin and a truly astounding number of tiny, sliver-like bones, I’m not even sure I ever got enough of the meat to tell you what it tasted like, other than “creepy.” Fortunately, we later washed down the snake taste (and, to be honest, almost all of the memory) with a bottle of Korean ginseng wine (and along the way, learned something: when sampling exotic Asian “wines” for the first time, check the proof first. If it happens to be, say, 35% alcohol by volume, do not finish the bottle. Good lesson).

Lancelot, much to our dismay, arrived in Nanjing just in time to experience some of the worst weather we’ve had all winter. When it’s not cold and rainy, it’s freezing and snowy. We made an almost half-hearted trek down to the city’s Confucian temple on (Chinese) New Year’s Day, where we browsed the large rooster-themed lanterns and found a nice, heated restaurant for dinner, but I think our interest in wandering the city and looking at fireworks was somewhat offset by our general desire not to die of exposure on the first day of the New Year. So when Friday turned out to be miraculously sunny and around 40, we took advantage and headed off to the most famous tourist attraction in the City of Nanjing (and, likely, all of Jiangsu Province): the final resting place of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.

Well, first we went out for lunch to work up some energy for the mountain trek to the grand memorial. This time, I won the toss and we went for Korean food. It is the great irony of our lives and our friendship that although Lancelot lives in Seoul, he far prefers Chinese food to any Korean culinary creation, whereas I live in Nanjing and would take Korean food over Chinese any day of the week. I ordered my winter soul-food favorite (no, no Seoul-food puns here, not me, nope, wouldn’t think of it), bibimbap without meat, while Lancelot got some manner of fowl, defeathered and disembowled and floating in soup (ok, so I’m not equally enthralled with all varieties of Korean cooking), with a side order of kimchi pancake for both of us. When the food came, my stone-pot covered rice had meat on it, which I pointed out to the waitress. She admitted she forgot about the meat.

What followed was like one of those commercials demonstrating the opposite of good customer service. The girl grabbed my spoon, pushed the egg to the side, and started scraping the meat off the top of the rice. I tried to protest, claiming total vegetarianism (a lie; after all, I was picking snake meat out of a web of skin and bones just days before. But, of course, as most of you realize, I am generally a hometown vegetarian and, of necessity, a flexible traveler). (On this issue, by the way, what kind of “meat” is snake, or, for that matter any kind of lizard, turtle, snail or frog? Are any of these partly aquatic animals considered “seafood?” Is there a special term for meat derived from cold-blooded creatures or insects? Perhaps I am a lacto-ovo-pesco-serpo vegetarian….) She ignored me, continuing to scrape off the meat and dump it into the spicy sauce (she did bring me a new dish of sauce), and when it was down to just little crumbles, she pushed the pot across to me and told me to enjoy.

Out of revenge, I went to the women’s restroom after lunch and tore the door to the stall off its hinges in a fit of temper. “That’ll show them,” I thought maliciously. I suppose one could argue that the door – precariously attached to the wall with well-rusted fastenings – simply fell off of its hinges after I spent too long confusedly pushing on it with complete and total disregard for the fact that it opened by pulling. I prefer the previous version. Having completed my property destruction and eaten all of the free watermelon they had provided as an apology for the confusion, we took off for the mountain park and Fun with Dead National Figures.

The approach to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen is a majestic, tree-lined avenue that ends in a large gateway in white marble with blue tiles that bears a striking resemblance to the gateway marking the entrance to the Chiang Kai-shek memorial in Taipei (unsurprising, as the white and blue motif is supposed to represent the colors of the Nationalist Party flag). There is a small room with an engraved slab noting the greatness of the first Republican (this term has a, er, different meaning in China than it does in the US, mind you) president, and from there it is up a massive marble staircase to the hilltop mausoleum. Inside, there is first a seated statue of Sun surrounded by engravings of the texts of some of his most famous writings, and two signs for the visitors that command: “Silence!” and “Salute!” We adhered to the former (mostly), but noticing the failure of everyone around us to snap-to, disregarded the latter.

From there the crowd tightened up, and soon we were shuffling forward into the crypt, pressed hard into the people around us. There was nowhere to go but forward, so forward we went. All of the mosh-pit-like pushing and shoving led us into a circular room that held the coffin, which was covered with a marble statue of a prostrate Dr. Sun (no waxy dead bodies lying in state in perpetuity, a treatment apparently reserved exclusively for communist dictators). The whole thing was a remarkably grand and imperial way to bury a Republican president: so exactly and precisely the opposite of everything that Dr. Sun, when alive, would have requested.

Back out in the fresh mountain air, we strolled past an array of souvenir stands that were hawking everything from vacuum-packed pressed duck to Minnie Mouse parasols. The latter really speaks volumes about New China, I think. East meets west in new and bizarre ways… you half expect to see classic images of the Chairman in his Mao suit and a pair of Disney mouse ears (It’s Communist Revolutionary Mickey!). Now that I’d pay to have on an umbrella.

Oh, and in the spirit of Communist Revolutionary Mickey, East-Meets-West, and Bourgeois Capitalist Excess meets Proletarian Socialist Utilitarianism, I recently picked up a new music album, the marvelous 2 disc “China’s Rock and Roll Vanguard.” 32 total tracks of hard rock renditions of old classics, like “Beijing that Good Night” and “The Internationale” along with new favorites like “The Long March newly on the road to rock and roll” and “In the end the guitar rises like a tommy gun.” My personal favorite is “Socialism is Good” – head-banger edition!! If anyone is interested, I’ll send the music file on request (takes about 3 MB, which I won’t do to your email accounts unsolicited but would be happy to provide to the curious). Be prepared to dance.

It was late afternoon when we left the Dr. Suny Af-sen Marsoleum (the English spelling of which we learned from the side of the mountaintop “sightseeing coach”). I think this one is number one on my favorite list of English spelling mistakes I’ve seen here, in part because whether or not one can spell “mausoleum” – I’m sure some Americans can’t either – one should be able to come up with a more accurate Romanization of the father of one’s country. Of course, the problem doesn’t end with spelling mistakes; there is a also the problem of misused English. I smile every time I pass a restaurant that advertises “spicy chafing dish” as among its specialties. I had a small, private chuckle on the plane down to Shenzen when I noticed that my noodles were served with a package of “Aviation Pickles.” For weeks I only read the English on the sign on Beijing West Road that reads “Take Care of Chest Vocational Industry” and assumed it was some sort of heart-and-lungs medical clinic. When I paused long enough to look at the Chinese, however, it proved to house safety-deposit boxes. But Dr. Suny Af-sen will always hold a dear place in my heart.

With what was left of the day, we went on to the Linggu pagoda and climbed up the long circular staircase to the eighth level and panoramic view of the countryside (this struck me as bad planning on the part of the Linggu Temple Buddhists. Surely in the past some young monk has rushed up that tightly-wound staircase only to reach the top and in his dizziness fall over the side and plummet to his death in the forest below). From there we started the walk down the mountain, and lacking the time to visit the Ming tombs, hopped on a random bus with no sense of where it was going (other than down) and returned to the city. It took us a long time to find a restaurant that night, as Lancelot was insisting on finding a place with pictures of everything on the menu (I suspect he was put off by my snake-ordering skills earlier and in no mood to trust me even when I swear I know what’s coming).

Hmm, I still have a monkey story to tell (and who doesn’t enjoy a good monkey story), but I think I’ll put that off for the next email given the length of this one already. When writing in the serial style, it is always important to leave your audience with a cliff-hanger, right?

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen