Food and language

Those are the two big subjects that I feel I have yet to address since I started writing in my blog. I have no way to get pictures from my camera yet, so I'm not going to let you share my experience of scaling a segment of the great wall, which incidentally was awesome in the old sense of the word.

The single best thing I have tasted here is...nan. What? Seriously? That's not even Chinese! Well, I'm not going to let you in on the details until my computer gets fixed (which could potentially be as soon as the next couple of days, although don't count on it). But the single tastiest item, definitely reflective of my personal food tastes, might be a loaf of nan from the on-campus Muslim restaurant. You'll enjoy the details when I post them.

Using various averages from mathematics, I'll tell you that the mean of my meal prices is probably around 15, the median is probably around 10 or so and the mode is definitely 7 or 8. Kuai, that is. It might be a little confusing why I call them kuai when the official currency of China is the renminbi - you need to understand a little bit about the Chinese language first, but yeah, they're the same thing. Anyway, the exchange rate is about 7 to 1, which should tell you about everything you need to know. The food in this neighborhood is truly dirt cheap, and it's hardly anomalous - I'm sure that there are neighborhoods in beijing where you could eat expensive food, but I suspect that compared to, say, a town outside of beijing, I'm paying what would be considered a premium. Snack food is everywhere for cheap. An ice cream bar costs about 2 or 3 kuai, leading to a serious ice cream habit on my end (I try not to eat one every day). From there on there are baozi, jianbing, jiaozi, kababs, pretty much anything you can imagine. There are tons of street-side stands - I was worried that it wouldn't be the case, that beijing would be a little too xiandai (modernized) but for all that the new buildings are going up in droves, at least in this part of town folks are always out on the streets, hawking books, shady looking meat, rubik's cubes, clothing...at night the salesfolk swarm in and the sidewalk is swathed in towels loaded with junky merchandise, dresses, purses, boxers, shenme de (etc.).

In any case. I promised to talk about food, so back to the subject. There's a bunch of different restaurants on campus - it's much less of a, for want of a better term, potemkin campus like yale is. the word has significant negative connotations, so I'll clarify by saying that yale owns almost every building within a close distance of campus and leases them based on its needs and desires, trying to create a cohesive image. I've never been 100% comfortable about that being the case. Anyway, the tradeoff is beiyu's (BLCU's) campus, where a significant amount of buildings appear to be owned by other folks, and it's not clear if leasing goes on or not. There's at least one KTV (karaoke) place on campus, a few different restaurants, including the aforementioned muslim one, and so on. However, there is also at least one dirt cheap student cafeteria where I eat almost every day. A trek to the second floor reveals a bunch of tiny little places that are essentially fast food - go up to the window, order, two minutes later get your food and sit down at one of the 8-person tables with your cohort. Except that all the dishes are actually jiachang-style - family kitchen, your chinese golden oldies of sorts. you can get a mapodoufu, gongbaojiding, or just plain old noodles, throwing in a rice or a hard-boiled egg for one kuai each. And really, though the food is laden in grease, it is quite good, a lot better than other greasy cafeteria fare I've had in my life.

When going further afield, well, to be honest, I have yet to do so that much. But there's a lot to be had. You can go to further hole-in-the-wall type joints, as I did today, where a meal is unlikely to be much more than 15 kuai for a serious amount of food. Even these places are an upgrade over the cafeteria, though, because it's here that you start to be able to enjoy chinese food the way it's supposed to be - in a group, ordering a ton of dishes and splitting them all at once. I'm almost positive I like Asian-style eating better than the American equivalent. Rather than getting two or three courses, as well as the odd bite of a friend's food if they're feeling generous, if you go with like seven or eight people, you get to eat five or six different dishes, each with their own particular flavor! you can order things that complement each other, a soup, fish, one "ma" dish...

Right, I think I need to talk about ma. So, have you ever heard about Sichuanese food being particularly spicy? The trick is, yes, it absolutely is, but they also have a certain flavor completely missing from the west: ma. It is not an excess of spiciness, but rather a certain pepper that induces numbness in the tongue as you eat it - supposedly what fugu does, except that while you have to go to the most expensive place in new york city to try it in the states, every single self-respecting place in china has at least a mapodoufu - tofu drenched in spice and ma-inducing peppers, which sort of look like miniature twin cherries. It's essentially the craziest revelation ever to find out that there's a whole different world of flavor that you have never tried in the states that is, if not a staple of chinese food, then widely available.

So, beyond the world of mere chinese food, there are a lot of korean places around, as well as a fair number of muslim, japanese and american fast food places. KFC, mcdonalds and pizza hut are everywhere, though each actually has its own chinese name (kendeji, maidanglao and bishengke respectively...thank you, chinese class!) I had maybe the best expensive meal yet last night, at a korean place where we were served raw meat, which we put in a tilted metal slab so that the juices could drain off. the flavors were pretty astonishingly good, though at 35 kuai (5 bucks) it was one of the more expensive meals I've eaten here, maybe the most expensive.

I promise to start taking pictures of special meals once my laptop gets working.

Shoot, I don't have time to talk about the language. I am such a bad blogger. I'll get around to it, I promise. It will even be fun. But for now, the major update is that I'm pretty sure I'm going to be going to the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, distinct from the actual country. We have a social study project to complete halfway through the program, and that's one of the locations available.There are also chances to go to a chinese village, shanghai, qingdao, chinese schools, a shaolin temple and a couple of others. Any of them would be amazing, and I'm tempted to check out the village, but I suspect that going to inner mongolia will be the most irreplaceable of the bunch.As well as making for some pretty crazy pictures, I hope.

In the very distant future, plans are starting to form in my mind for great adventures...so I ask a question that I expect no answer to: what's the best way to get from china to india? bear in mind that, as I just found out, the border is closed...

Meandering through Beijing

I don't know if I'll get to all that I planned to, or even if I ever will, but here are a few thoughts on my mind.

The first is that I today expressed probably the most complex thought I've managed to express in Chinese so far during our afternoon one-on-one session, which is as follows: I think that the U.S. and China have fundamentally different attitudes to prices. By China, I might be referring more generally to Asia. I had a similar feeling in Vietnam, but I don't think I've been to enough places to know yet, so I'll refrain from saying so.

The fundamental difference is that I think as an American you accept money to have a fixed value. You talk about getting a deal when you buy something. If you go out to eat, 5 bucks is definitely cheap for lunch, 10 bucks for a sitdown dinner tends to be a pretty nice deal. Prices vary regionally. You expect to spend more downtown in a city than out in a town in the middle of nowhere. Something else you never think about is that prices are absolute. When's the last time you haggled, ever? Price implies quality - when you go out to eat a nice meal, you plan to spend more and go to a restaurant with a particular ambiance, and presumably better food.

China's pricing structure doesn't work the same way, and I think that it's something you seriously have to watch out for when you go to China. Assuming that a price you find in a given location is reasonable is a trap. Just about anything is negotiable, not at a restaurant, but besides that you can go to any stand or store, sometimes even in a mall, and try to cut a deal. And I think it's something that as an American we have trouble with, because prices are Prices. They are predetermined, inflexible, and you do things such as buying in bulk or buying a store-brand in order to economize. So the flexibility throws a wrench in things. There is no floor - I bet if you went to the right place you could buy anything you wanted for two bucks. I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you would think. Sure, name brand items command more respect, resulting in higher price tags. But basically, the way that pricing works in China seems haphazard, arbitrary. You do not know that a restaurant is better by it being more expensive. I'm almost a little bit suspicious whenever a restaurant is too expensive because I can almost guarantee that it will be no better than a restaurant that costs a third the price. Restaurants also don't value the same qualities as American ones do - I couldn't really imagine people paying twice as much money to eat somewhere where the lights are turned down to half-intensity and the ceilings match the walls. Then again, chains are almost consistently more expensive than smaller family-owned places, so brands do mean something. It's not that easy.

In short - quality does not work the same way as it does in the States. I think the best chance you have to find a good place for any given service is word of mouth. A dingy restaurant can have the best food you've ever tasted. Clean restaurants can serve laduzi-inducing meals (isn't it great that the chinese have three words for diarrhea?). It can be frustrating, but it's also exhilerating, because your ability to find a good price depends so much on your own perspicacity and tenacity.

As far as the language itself goes - I've had a lot of thoughts lately, but I don't know if I can gather them all right now now that I'm actually sitting in front of a computer. My apologies. I guess all I'll state is how beautiful and fluent and flat out fascinating putonghua has been. I wish I could teach you a few expressions, but for now...suan le ba (nevermind/whatever/forget about it).

as long as I can make it

I've been planning to update the blog for a long, long while, but each time something more important comes up, usually my academic well-being, that prevents me from doing so. I talked to mom for longer than I expected to and I don't really have much more time tonight to update, so I'm going to limit myself to the 20-some minutes that I have left at my usual, lovable internet bar, eternally replete with videogame addicts, cigarette smoke, and the oddly out of place pool tables at the back of the room. This place is massive - there might literally be three hundred computers, from the look of it.

 

Anyway. No time to be too methodical. I'll just say whatever comes to mind, working chronologically backwards.

 

Today was the first day of ultimate. It felt great to get out there and play again, and I definitely feel like I'm good enough to make a difference in the local scene - unfortunately, the place is extremely far away from the campus. I don't know if you have any idea how big beijing is, but one of my friends found a good measure today - your good-sized american city has a ring road, right? boston, DC, richmond...well, beijing has five ring roads. No joke. All concentric, just about evenly spaced, but it's deceptive how much distance there is between them, because you can look at a map and fathom it without realizing that they're a good 15 minutes apart from each other. And this is hardly china's biggest city - there are city with tens of millions of people you have never heard of. Can you find shenzhen on a map? how about chongqing? zhenyang? I have absolutely no idea where the last one is, but it evidently has ten million people living in it. you see my point.

 

Yesterday was pretty fantastic. During the day time, I happened to run into a whole bunch of people who were headed to tiananmen square (the word pengqiao in chinese is a lot more elegant, I think). So with them I went, and I saw for the first time mao's giant portrait and the sprawling expanse of tiananmen, along with the state flag, surprisingly not as big as you might expect. Unfortunately, we didn't really have time to go to the forbidden palace (gugong in chinese) but that'll clearly happen at some point, and it just costs 50 kuai. not too bad. so a few of us instead went to the beijing equivalent of times square, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten and do not have the time to look up. Anyway - the reason we didn't have time to go to gugong is...we went to see the beijing opera, or jingju! so, as with a lot of english terms for things chinese (for instance, dragon - the chinese one is actually fairly different from the european one) opera is a misnomer. because while there was a performance, and some singing, it was dominated by a much different aura. While there, we were all seated at tables, being served tea and small trinkets! There's definitely a light-hearted element - a tea server came around with a comically long-funneled pot, doing acrobatic stunts leading to us refilling our teacup. there ended up being two operas - one was a comic one featuring an old bargeman and a young damsel in distress - actually, a nun, which I found sort of interesting. I thought it was fascinating, though it's hard to imagine how much of the context I was missing. It's said that the opera is often incomprehensible even to chinese speakers, and after going I can see why! It was very stylized, but much more like a theatrical production than opera - a lot of their dialog was in plain speech, and the singing parts often involved movement. Anyway, no more time - the second was unbelievable. It was an opera about buddha and his eighteen henchmen attempting to quench a revolt by the "monkey king" - essentially, sort of a trickster figure a la loki in viking mythology, except that this guy was made up to look like, well, a monkey, and his mannerisms were all cleverly simian. So, there wasn't much talking in this one - really, it was the monkey god doing an unbelievable series of tricks - he had a staff, and the stuff he was doing with it was unheard of. There cannot be that many more skilled performers of his craft in the entire world. He basically confronted a series of buddha's henchmen all defined by specific, often ridiculous characteristcs - long arms, drunken one, the tiger, along with some extremely acrobatic swordsman. It was jaw-dropping, and it's the sort of cultural feature that I don't really have an american match for - what are you going to compare it to, cirque du soleil? also, can you imagine using jesus in a play in the states?!

 

I'm sort of crazy about this place. I don't know if you can tell from the description. According to our pre-orientation meeting for the light fellowship, my feelings about china are supposed to follow those of your traditional shakespearean comedy - start out being excited, start to miss the way things are back home, and then end up being really excited. I wish I could start to talk about it, but essentially - I don't know if I've ever been somewhere that reminds me so much of the states. oh, but it's completely different in so many details, sure - I don't know. have you ever been somewhere with a 3000 year history where life changes overnight?

 

scrabble - no time! but life is good. if time develops I'll use it, but right now things are good. I'm happy with the way I'm spending my time.

 

class. oh, class. It probably needs to be talked about, since I was goign to talk about that on wednesday and still haven't gotten around to it. aia. no time. but I will say. the teachers are unbelievable. The best I've ever had for a consistent stretch of time. anywhere. I can't get over how amazing every single one of them is. unfailingly enthusiastic when they really have to work just as hard as we do, maybe harder. while being grad students at the same time. after each class I try to decide which teacher is best, and I usually decide on that day's teacher before changing my mind the next day. my chinese has improved so dramatically that it's ridiculous.

 

mingtian jian! (don't get your hopes up) if I remember/have time I'll talk about the club I went to as well as some useful phrases.

trials and tribulations of the language pledge

I'm not planning on posting every day, but I'm at the internet cafe attempting to solve my computer programs, so here I am anyway. If my laptop ever gets fixed who knows how much I'll be posting, and maybe even with pictures! for now...

 

times change fast around here. The two biggest changes are pretty obvious: I can only speak chinese for the next nine weeks, barring emergencies and the present situation of heckling dell into giving me a new hard drive. The second is that classes started! I was planning to talk more about the former until I actually went to my first class today - and actually, I think I'm still going to do that, with a brief mention of how class went.

 

So, since I thought the language pledge was already in effect when I got here, it's not like all that much changed in my interactions with china, really. The difference is talking to other folks who I'd spent the last couple of days chatting to in english, suddenly only able to have stumbling conversations with each other. Yesterday when everyone signed the pledge, they all walked out and started giggling to each other and trying their first stumbling chinese sentences. and for some reason, I was frustrated. I'm not usually this grumpy, but the thing is that you're here to master chinese. you're supposed to be able to speak it - it shouldn't tickle you that you can say five words. I don't know why it bothered me - maybe I was the one taking it too seriously.

 

Most of the folks I've been hanging out with are better speakers than I am. A lot of them are people I already knew by some way or another - a high school buddy at harvard and a couple of friends from yale. I wouldn't say that it's a deliberate strategy, but I've really enjoyed talking to people who are better speakers than I am so far. They're not so much better that I can't keep up with them, but I feel like I learn a lot from them just in passing, even in the manner of discourse. You might wonder if it's the blind leading the blind, but a fourth year student is probably closing on fluency. It's remarkable how much everyday stuff I've learned, even as I start forgetting stuff. Think of a pot of water boiling over.

 

The most interesting thing I was planning to write about is what I'm planning to do about my Scrabbling. For those of you who don't know, I like Scrabble. A lot. And while I spent the last semester essentially Scrabbleless as I struggled to get my act together and graduate, when I got back to Boston the last couple of weeks before coming here I suddenly started playing a lot of Scrabble. It didn't take too long for the urge to get rekindled, to the point that I promised myself I was going to get serious and try to learn all the words over the course of this next year. My method - going through the dictionary page by page, crossing out the words I know and then going back through and making a flashcard for every two pages, one a day, and then putting them into a study program (zyzzyva, for those in the know). The thing is that with the language pledge, I wonder how kosher it is to be doing it - and more importantly, whether it ultimately hurts my Chinese to be doing such a thing. I'm inclined to say no, except that I'm learning so much every day that adding 25 new english words is a legitimate burden. I'm sort of trapped between my two interests. I feel similarly about ultimate - it's certainly less obvious, but in ultimate you're always talking on the field, and english is the lingua franca. is that violating the pledge? should I care?

 

I don't think I'll be happy negating scrabble and ultimate for a year, so I guess it's a matter of finding a balance. as always.

 

tutorial time! more later.

Quarantine

As far as I know, no one has exceeded the magic threshold yet. This seems impossible, given that there are 80 people here. The temperatures are self-reported to some degree, except for the inept folks like me who can't read their own thermometers. But even so, regardless of whether everyone remains permanently fever-free, we are effectively under quarantine. So say the program leaders, who left us a cautious note under our doors warning us not to stray too far from campus.

It's hard not to go out and feel like a disease carrier. When I started coughing while playing chinese chess outdoors, it was hard not to notice the locals around me looking at me warily. Walking into a restaurant it's hard not to feel the heads turn, whether they actually are or not. It enhances yet again the feeling of being a little bit like a lab rat - subject to tests, like the remarkably difficult one this morning to place us into the correct level of Chinese, with the goal of seeing whether our tiny brains can absorb the requisite amount of Chinese.

As far as the quarantine goes, it's obviously hard not to feel that this is an exaggerated response to a disease that has killed under 200 people in the entire world - no doubt less than a day's worth of lung cancer cases for Beijingren. The most natural reaction is to feel that this is a irrational response on the part of the Chinese government, with the inherent notion of Western medical superiority. And while I think that the swine flu has been exaggerated (in the states as well as here) and there is no question that Chinese medicine lacks the sophistication of its western counterpart, I think that reducing the quarantine to an illogical measure misses the picture. You have to realize that China is still recovering from its exposure to avian flu, which actually was a major problem and changed the way that the country reacts to viral disease. From what I understand, people didn't use to wear the facemasks that sick people often adopt until the outbreak of avian flu - and yet now they're all over the place, in hong kong especially where the swine flu was pretty bad, but also as a quotidian event here. And now consider the American response to illness - would anyone ever consider wearing one of those clinical looking facemasks to work, rather than sniffling and spreading their germs all over the place? It would be silly, right? Well, I don't think it's a bad idea.

I guess all I'm denouncing is the use of habit alone in reacting to illness, or any challenge really. Read Collapse for a better explanation of what I'm talking about. But though the quarantine may be a little bit absurd, it at least shows some signs of reactivity to injury. Now, for insanity, talk about how no one here wears helmets...

first and second and third impressions

This morning, as I will have to do every morning at 7AM for the rest of the summer, and possibly even for the rest of the year, I checked my temperature. I hadn't realize how insane the flu precautions were going to be until arriving at the hotel. Besides getting checked along with every other passenger before getting off the plane, a note from Abby (whose Chinese name I should probably learn in the very near future) explained that we were going to have our temperatures recorded EVERY DAY for the rest of the trip. If anyone's temperature ever climbs over 99 degrees, the entire program gets quarantined. I grew up thinking that 98.7 was standard. My temperature this morning was 36.7, or 98.1 degrees, which is a little low for me. In other words, this entire plan is completely insane.
 
Anyway, that's not exactly what I planned to talk about. My issue was that my thermometer (newly issued by the program) didn't work. I put in my mouth for a couple of minutes, then put it under my armpit for a while as a backup plan. When neither of these instructed methods of deriving my temperature worked, I tried to explain to the chinese woman who stopped by this morning. But instead she spent about five minutes trying to show me how to read the damn thing, with no success. I finally brought it back into my room, retook my temperature, stared at the thing for five more minutes, about to give up, until I finally noticed an incredibly thin white line. 

The previous paragraph might serve as a good metaphor for how china differs from the states - nothing seems to work until you look hard enough and realize that things just work a little differently. Unfortunately, it's actually a huge oversimplification.  Beijing matches and fails to match expectations, resembles the states in unexpected ways and then fails to in ways subtle and unsubtle.

This is the third day I've been in China. I would hardly say that I've gathered three days worth of impressions, given that I got here at 8 pm Thursday night, spent thirteen hours asleep yesterday and this morning combined, and, well, it's shy of 11 am here. Normally I think I like writing better about one particular topic rather than adopting the "dear diary" format, but there's just too much to talk about.

Water. I'm still not sure if I have it figured out or not. The kettle provided with the room is in constant use. Whenever I pour water out I boil a whole new jugful. Bottled water is one kuai if I need it, or in other words 15 cents (use a 7 to 1 ratio for yuan to dollars). Nonetheless, that's not a sustainable option. So far the best way of cooling it seems to be just leaving the water in the kettle, since the nalgene is actually fairly thermally insulating. For long term (overnight) I can stash a nalgene in the fridge and it will get cold. In the short run, lukewarm or slightly warmed than that seems the best I can do. My recent teadrinking habits have helped me stomach drinking warmish water, since it's pretty much just consuming very mediocre tea.

The city itself. I am very very pleasantly surprised by Beijing. I think my trip to Shanghai skewed my expectations some. And I don't think my view of shanghai was particularly fair - I saw a lot of the old town, which was fantastic, but also facing the prospects of destruction in the next decade and replacement by "new" china of tall high rises. Hard not to be a little sentimental. But whereas I remember Shanghai being pointy without the redeeming properties of hong kong, Beijing sprawls. These are the suburbs - wudaokou, essentially the student neighborhood of time. but they don't behave like american-style suburbs. If you walk the streets, you pass lots of little stands, selling scallion pancakes, baozhi, english books (I was pretty surprised to spot guns, germs and steel for sale) and anything else you can name. It's not that everything isn't built up, but there is definitely a human scale to life here as well. Whoever said there weren't trees around was lying. The campus's main thoroughfare is a pretty tree-lined walkway.

the smog. I don't know why. but I don't see it yet. Perhaps it hasn't reached its full force, but I remember getting to Hong Kong and noticing an immediate decline in air quality. Traveling to Shanghai was even worse - especially because I was going there to play ultimate. How was anyone supposed to go exercise?! But I really can't tell if the smog is here or if I am in the middle of a miraculous reprieve. There's blue sky to be seen. The moonset is beautiful and orangish, possibly the best indicator I have of air pollution. Yet I can even see some stars in the sky at night. I have no idea what's going on, really - but for now, the weather is quite nice. Very hot, probably close to 90ish. But I actually kind of like it, and it's not quite as overwhelmingly humid as hong kong was.

embarassing stories about the language pledge. I got off the plane thinking I was never getting to speak english again, except to my friends and folks. However, it looks like the pledge only takes effect sometime tomorrow when we sign a contract, which means that I spent a day fumbling around in broken chinese kind of in vain. But actually, that's not really true. My feeling here is that most people want to speak in Chinese if possible, and tend to be happy to try to communicate with you in putonghua rather than awkwardly switching to english. Upholding the language pledge is going to be easier than it seemed at very first glance. The biggest challenge right now looks like ordering from a menu, ever. Yesterday I overcame that problem by going to a baozi stand, which constituted my very first food in all of china. They were baked and flaky, sort of like croissants, except with a mishmash of pork and scallion on the inside. 

I know a lot of you reading this are food junkies, but unfortunately my lack of computer means no pictures for now. Once I find a way to get a new hard drive, I'll definitely start photographing the food here...the breakfast buffet alone is a world apart from what it would ever resemble stateside. Ever had pickled lotus root for breakfast?

Over and out.

The quickest of updates from Korea

All I want to say is that I have a newfound appreciation for Korean romantic comedies. I'm not sure how to reconcile that with only speaking Chinese for the next year, but I may have to find a way to do it.

Currently in Korea. Slightly concerned about potential quarantine/program postponement. More fun to come.