Shenme?

2010-04-20T21:45:00.002+08:00

I first heard the rumor yesterday afternoon: Hongmiao is getting torn down. This happens to be where I live and have lived for the last nine months. Obviously, if this were the States, that would be a pretty ridiculous notion. But this is Beijing, where the ridiculous, in the form of large-scale government intervention and investment, happens on a daily basis. He suggested that my apartment would be gone in two months and the entire school at which ACC is run would also go the way of the dinosaur, presumably endangering ACC's existence as well. His source - a friend of the father of a Chinese friend of his, sort of a tenuous link. The second person to bring it up was a teacher, a more reliable source except that he heard about it from the first person. So I was understandably skeptical.

I forgot about the notion for a while until on the walk back home, when it somehow came to mind again. I felt an urge to ask every one of the storekeepers who I walk past on a daily basis, the hairdresser with the ridiculous hair, the girl at the makeup shop, the other girl with the hat who's always at the nuts shop. Instead I went into my favorite bubble tea joint, and so the third person to tell me about it was one of the two girls who work there. Not just Hongmiao, a swath stretching from Chaoyang North road to that road where the 1 line is, and from jingwang bridge to the fourth ring road, will be wiped off the map. The entire area, encompassing maybe 100,000 people. The size of most towns in the states. What for? Here's the shocking part: a huge entertainment complex! Everyone's going to have to move elsewhere.

The girl was grinning the whole time as she said it, more in an impish way than anything else. What are you going to do? I asked. Where are you going to go? "I don't live here anyway" she says smiling. huh? Nope, she's from Tangshan, in Hebei province. "Tangshan? where the earthquake was?" I inquire. yep. that's the one. Home of one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, 1976. Covered up by the Chinese government after it happened, which would seem impossible when 200,000+ people die, but there you go. That's what happens when you control the media. But we don't really talk about that aspect. Instead she tells me about a hometown where the ground shakes four times a week, where the earth underneath is a big concave void because they're still digging out the bountiful coal hiding down there. All the while she's still smiling. How can she still smile?

Something about the world doesn't feel very stable at the moment. I'm reminded of a movie we watched in my Italian film class back at yale: Una Giornata Particulare, a Special Day, about a perfectly ordinary encounter on the day of Hitler's visit to Rome. Big changes left and right, and more than anything: Earthquakes. I'm the last person to believe in some kind of scientific conspiracy theory. But at the same time it's hard not to be disturbed by the large-scale death of people who happen to live in the wrong place. And at the same time the juxtaposition is with the ordinary: The banality of my daily life where I go to the little place downstairs to eat 5 times a week, buy my sesame balls at the entryway to the muslim restaurant and drink cup after cup of milk tea. Sometimes I go to starbucks. The same people are around day in and day out. I've started recognizing the dogs that walk around in the morning and evening. This is my neighborhood! It is in some ways insignificant, unideal, full of old apartments, but people have adapted to living here as they adapt to millions of climates across the world and seem to be doing just fine with it.

The natural instinct in the case of something that's about to go extinct is to do one's very best to make sure it is remembered. Humans have almost an irrational obsession with extinction, even. Why do we care so much about a panda instead of a kangaroo? Why do we like dodos so much even though they lasted about 20 years in the presence of predators? But when it comes down to it, I don't know how to go about chronicling the ordinary. I do crazy stuff all the time, hence why I love my life in Beijing. But in a way it kills me that I haven't tracked every meal and step just for someone to realize - wait, these people based their entire lives here. Every day around the Hongmiao intersection old men cluster around and play Chinese chess and cards. two or four people playing, dozens of people standing around them. The other day I saw a newbie - looked too young to be in the crew, but there he was, loitering around leaning against a wall observing a chinese chess game played with dirty, handmade pieces.

I know details that are relevant only and exactly to my daily life. The 117 bus is right outside, the 101 bus is in the middle lane. If you start walking on the left turn arrow at the intersection you'll get a head-start. The jianbing seller at hongmiao intersection shows up at 11pm or so but not if it's raining or too cold. A wealth of information that was going to be irrelevant the second I leave, but now will refer to a fantasm on top of being irrelevant. I will come back some day and there will not be a single trace of anything, most likely not even a landmark to rely on. I am already living in a world of ghosts.

So why was she smiling? Because this is the irony of progress. We move from towns where there's an earthquake every week to shiny beijing until your shop gets destroyed and you cycle back to being woken up by tremors in the middle of the night. All for the sake and glory of entertainment. Whose entertainment? 谁也说不清。 No one really knows. Wave of the future.

You know, anyone over 32 in China was alive during the Cultural Revolution. You see people in their 50s and 60s walking around collecting plastic bottles for 1 jiao a piece (in other words, 70 for a dollar US) because the vaunted revolution never bothered teaching them any actual skills. Chinese people are tough. No wonder she was smiling. Whatever curveball fate decides to throw next is nothing.

A long time ago, CUEB (my school) was the only thing out here. I've heard people talk about playing in ponds and the forest around this area when they were kids. In the 80s CUEB was like an outpost on the wild frontier, while now it is an obsolete holdfast at the edges of the thriving Central Business District. And now it's Hongmiao's turn to fall within the event horizon of the black hole that is modern Beijing.

a day in bangkok

2010-01-19T10:49:00.001+08:00

So, it turns out that being in Bangkok isn't such a bad thing after all. The trick was realizing that I needed to escape the tourist ghetto of Banglamphu. While it happens to be quite cozy around streets such as Soi Rambuttri where my hostel is, it's effectively a fantasyland of sorts, made for tourists given the expectations of tourists, and thus allows you to miss out on what's special about thailand itself. So instead I walked for about 45 minutes, eating a questionable but tasty lunch made a little too spicy by liberal application of thailand's special spice, peppers marinated in soy sauce; found an excellent temple with very intriguing chinese style decorations, including some octagonal pagodas and even some chinese looking drawings of people; a flea market populated almost entirely by locals with good drinks sold on the side; and then the royal palace, with thousands of armed police loitering in front; and finally to vimanmek museum. I was really tired at that point and was grumpy about being forced to change into long trousers but it was quite a fun excursion. I took a tuktuk back out of tiredness. At night I planned on wandering to sukhumvit but I slept until like 8:30 and instead was resigned to dinner n the tourist stretch until I decided to walk outside for a bit, and went past a restaurant with signs entirely in thai that was just packed. Fortunately one waiter stopped me and told me it was a vietnamese place! oh, well I know what to order then - pho! It was quite different from the vietnamese variant, without as many vegetable leafy things and with slices of sausage. But with the addition of some atomic spices that looked like the chinese variety but proved to be more potent, it was delicious, made even better because they were selling loaves of bread for a buck a piece! I bought two, one that I dipped in pho and ate, the other that I saved for breakfast this morning. Yumyumyum.

Today I was thinking about going on a big adventure, but I'm headed to the airport at 3 so instead I'm checking the royal barges museum out and then going over to chinatown/indiatown (they have real names, I just forget them) for lunch. I filled up my camera with pictures yesterday, so if I can get a new computer charger, you can look forward to those...800 pictures in 42 days of traveling.

I suppose that at the tail-end of my journey it's starting to dawn on me how much I've learned about this part of the world in the last month. At times it's seemed a bit remote, at others foolhardy (I clearly do not have the budget to afford this trip). All the same, though, this has to have been an opportunity worth taking. And it leaves already plotting what I'll do if I get the chance to come back through this part of the world...

What does a Thai Scrabble tournament look like?

2010-01-17T19:02:00.002+08:00

Since my laptop charger is broken, the pictures will have to wait a while, but here is my experience from this weekend, originally written in three instalments...necessary background: Thailand is a competitive Scrabble powerhouse, and the current world champion is Thai. Scrabble and other related games are played at the scholastic level by thousands of kids, as I found out this weekend...

oh man.

this tournament is so much crazier than anything I've ever seen before that it will likely take me a good half-hour to write all the things I want to say about it.

I showed up at the mall where the tournament was taking place at about 9:30 or so, knowing that the tournament was supposed to start some time around 10. I also knew I was supposed to find an aquarium somewhere on the ground floor. What I didn't expect is that I quickly stumbled upon wave after wave of schoolchildren. A lot of them were gathered by uniform, some younger, some older. But what was certainly the case is that there were hundreds of them, far more than mameow, my one contact in thai scrabble, had told me to expect. The official number was somewhere around 2000. This is for a minor regional tournament, mind you.

I literally spent twenty minutes wandering around trying to find where I was supposed to play scrabble. It felt like I was in a living ocean of sorts, surrounded by board after board. Not just Scrabble, but thai scrabble, a math game played on a scrabble board, even a sudoku competition with a good 200-300 competitors. Meanwhile, this was all surrounded by a very, very active mall, chiang mai's biggest, which was doing great business. Most popular of all was clearly the cookie store, with a line stretching out the door. I wandered everywhere on the ground floor and in every nook there seemed to be at least a couple of kids sipping on milkshakes or splaid out on the floor.

The internet cafe is closing up, but I'll be back tomorrow morning to tell you more about it...

my record: 6-3, 6th place!

I only have 15 minutes before I have to hop on a bus to the tourney but I'll try to condense that into a few paragraphs of awesome

Anyway, I figured out where I was only when Nawapadol and Amnuay (godfather of Thai scrabble, for those who don't know) saw the tall white guy wandering out in circles and figured it might be me. At that point I figured out why I had previously been unable to find the playing area - it didn't exist yet, and instead there was an opening ceremony going on, complete with pretty women, dignified long speeches in thai, an introductory video describing the state of Scrabble (known as crossword here) in Thailand, and the like. The one thing the video taught me is that I've missed my calling in life - Thailand's most prestigious university, Chulalongkorn University, apparently has an undergraduate degree in Crossword Games. The ceremony culminated with a dance done by ten little girls in ballerina's outfits and then a final speech by the prime minister of chiang mai, which is actually a province. This is the equivalent of your senator showing up for your next scrabble gathering. Amnuay and the prime minister stood next to each other and shook hands, and then a gigantic cannon belched glitter all over them. It was absolutely surreal and hysterical.

More ridiculous still was the process of actually playing games. I had joked about how noisy it was with mameow before the games started, and she told me it would quiet down a little. Well, dif it did I couldn't tell, because the gigantic speakers next to the playing area kept blasting out music the whole time we were there. Whoever said there was a crossword game theme song is not quite correct because as far as I can tell there's a good 4 or 5 of them, each with different moods and styles. My favorite is the one with the kids where they list all the different games, but even I tend towards the suicidal when I hear that on repeat ten times and I'm trying to solve an endgame. Also crazy is that this is just out there in the atrium of a huge mall, which means that every once in a while during a game I would look around and see people three storeys up just chilling there watching me play, not to mention the huge throng right outside the playing area. It took me a long time indeed to feel comfortable at all, compounded by the 22 minute clock which made almost every game into a near-frenzy. Occasionally final events for other competitions would take place on the stage next to us while we were playing, at which point the speaker would switch to playing the Final Countdown on repeat - I definitely found myself rocking out to the guitar solo once or twice.

OK, so what about the games themselves? The field is only 22-24 people, but it is ridiculously stratified. To wit - there are 5 former WSC participants here, Panupol, Jakkrit, Charnwit, Marut Siriwangso and Pichai Limprsaert. I assume Amnuay made it at some point too, and Nawapadol is just directing. On the other hand some of the players playing in this open division are total greenhorns. Thus, after the first two games I was quite pleased with my 220 spread until I looked over at the standings and saw the top 3 at 2-0 +600, 2-0 +600 and 2-0 +599!! I joked to Nawapadol that they had to be cheating. In any case I think I was 2-1 against WSC players yesterday after lucking out against Jakkrit and Marut and losing by about 50 to Charnwit. One of my losses was a once in a lifetime game, though - they had a big board with magnetic tiles and we actually played on it, drawing tiles from the table in front of it! Absolute craziness! And there was an announcer! I made it competitive with a timely phony but unfortunately still lost by ten or so, but it was still a seriously fun time.

Panupol is 8-1 +1500 and likely unattainable, but I at least have a shot at everyone below him. but I'm late already, so here I go! later folks! wish me luck!

ok, that's an exaggeration and a half. But yeah, as usual, I managed to build up some hope and then wipe out at the end. 3-3 on the day, but in the morning I won all three and then afternoon I lost them all back. ack! The morning went pretty smoothly, then after lunch I lost the next game after leading until the very last play, where to my eye there was nothing I could do, and then in the deciding game to see who would go to the final to play panupol, I played marut and sucked it up. Very bad timing. I lost by almost two hundred when I really should've been in it with a chance to win, but ended up going over by 5 minutes. Meltdown. The last game was never in my reach either. So I went from having a chance to play at the big board in front of hundreds of schoolchildren to losing the game for placement!

Final standing 9-6, 6th place. So close!

Though I am still grumpy, I brought my camera today and took a bunch of pictures, most of them very chaotic looking because there are just so many kids in them. They had an award ceremony to end the day where they handed out lots and lots of prizes, with big cheers coming from their schoolmates. Then the adult division winners went on stage and no one really cheered because they weren't from their school or anything and thus there was no rooting interest! I thought it was a hysterical reawakening to reality - just because you think what you're doing is important doesn't mean everyone else has to as well.

I wonder about the health of Thai Scrabble. On the one hand they have thousands of students playing, some of whom choose to continue doing it after they grow up. On the other hand, the scene I witnessed was so crazy that I can't imagine anyone over 30 not being completely exhausted by it. Indeed, most of the adult competition players are also very young. It reflects the divergent base of financial support for scrabble here - it comes from the thousands of students who play rather than the american foundation of wealthy old people. So for anyone who thinks thai scrabble is the best - yeah, it's pretty great, but every system has its problems.

ok, bus to bangkok at 8 pm, so I'm going to go get some northern thai cuisine and then head off. Sawatdee khrap!

return from the jungle

2010-01-15T23:52:00.001+08:00

When I think about writing any sort of blog entry I always have a dozen ideas but when it comes down to it I am often tired and have forgotten what made my ideas so good in the first place.

So I will tell you quite simply that I have been TREKKING! It sounds a little more extreme than it is. When it comes down to it, it just consisted of some pretty tame hiking, swimming in waterfalls, rubber rafting, bamboo rafting (excellent fun, especially when it became a waterfight) and then elephant riding!

I am still not sure how I feel about tourism here, or perhaps even the concept of being a tourist. How am I supposed to feel when I go to an ethnic minority village where there a line of stands selling me local trinkets at high prices. Should I feel morally obligated to buy? Am I wrong to want some sort of more authentic scene? This trip wasn't so bad because we actually did walk through a couple of pretty remarkable villages. It's just that this particular brand of tourism seems to result in an awkwardness that permeats almost every participant except for teh guides and the locals themselves. the guide guides because it is lucrative and fun. the locals earn much more than they would otherwise by selling goods. It's just that sometimes the visitors stand on an awkward line between wanting to have fun and the feeling that their presence has fundamentally altered local life. Perhaps this indicates that tourists who go to thailand or ethnic minority villages are a little more culturally aware than average in the first place.

2010-01-12T22:49:00.000+08:00

Two nights ago - sushi in hong kong, bolt for shenzhen airport. sojourn in Hades. last night - fitful sleep on slightly too small bus, leaving me with very, very sore buttocks (I had no idea that was even possible). How about now? Lying back in a garden on a borrowed laptop, listening to backpackers talking in french about their liking for marijuana and water running from the fish pond. where am I? I am in a 150 baht a night guesthouse in chiangmai, switching to a 100 baht room tomorrow night. that's 5 bucks US for the former, 3 for the latter. I have a bed, a fan and the sound of running water. The bathroom may be outside but it's pleasant to the point that I plan on adopting a two shower a day schedule if I don't fall asleep first.

it wasn't all good today - I rolled into chiang mai at 7:30 am with nowhere to stay, and ended up getting breakfast at one of the guesthouses and then alternately napping and reading foucault's pendulum, making an already odd book into a truly surreal one. Actually, the best part of the novel may well be its annotator, who has revealed a great deal about himself. His name is Eliot, he is 50-something, a wannabe writer, homosexual, a whiskey drinker, disorganized and evidently in the process of creating his masterpiece. The book is littered with notes such as "Use" or "NO" or passages that he thought particularly autobiographical, notated as "Me, Eliot". He seems to know a great deal about Eastern religions. It actually reminds me a little bit of Pale Fire, Nabokov's work where the erstwhile annotator effectively metamorphosizes into protagonist. Ironic that Eco already used Nova Zemlya and Ultima Thule in the first 100 pages...

so far chiang mai has been the perfect solution to my Hades doldrums. At 11:30 I met up with mameow, who traveled for an hour to meet me and didn't even mention it, and we spent the rest of the day wandering around together. Her english isn't great, but I gradually felt that to be less and less of a hurdle. She took me to the go-to tourist spot in chiang mai, the beautiful temple on the hillside whose thai name escapes me, and then we also played some crossword! She is also responsible for me finding the awesome guesthouse and in general having any idea what's going on at all.

the city somehow achieves a balance of foreign and local. the pace is markedly laidback. tourists and local farangs sit around at cafes in the old city and look quite happy about it as well. there are temples left and right to go with delicious street food, way better looking than bangkok. the climate is just a little bit milder, the guesthouses are much more bang-for-the-buck and it actually seems possible to find one's own quiet nook. I feel a lot better about Bangkok than I'm letting on here, but Chiang Mai seems to suit my current temperament and desires out of life.

Here is my plan for the rest of my time in chiangmai:
tomorrow - take it verrrry easy. walk around and see the sights. sleep.
tomorrow night - maybe try to hit up a khantoke joint? go watch muay thai? each of those is about 13 bucks US. Hell, I should really do both.
thursday - friday...debating going trekking into the hills which is pretty much what all tourists here end up doing evidently. 40 bucks for two days including food. Only worry is that my body has been complaining at me if I walk around too much, in which case I should get a massage...

I suppose it's not quite as cheap as I was hoping altogether. but while I'm here it seems so foolish not to take advantage in order to save 30-40 dollars...

and coming this weekend...

the scrabble tournament! mameow told me a lot more of the details today. For instance, the entry fee is 5 dollars US, while top prize is 300. and the open division will likely have 20-25 people. wow! however, it won't be easy because some heavy-hitters are reputedly showing up...charnwit and amnuay will be there for sure, with possible sighting of pakorn and panupol (though they might be headed to india). in any case, it's evidently 18 games, with a finals consisting of 2 more games! additionally the tournament will be starting at 10. I like it already. dear god, I will be getting my scrabble fix for sure. and maybe just maybe I will earn back the money I've spent on this trip...

Adventures in Hades

2010-01-11T17:34:00.001+08:00

As a backpacker or budget traveler visiting Bangkok, it seems to me that there is one particularly good option available: Going to Soi Rambuttri, a mostly quiet walkway, heavily touristed and pretty hard to get to from the airport, but largely peaceful. In particular the Bella Bella Hostel seems quite civilized and provides wireless, if you're into that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, having never been to this part of town, I landed at Bangkok airport at 1:30 am last night, courtesy of Airasia's budget flights, hopped in a taxi and asked to be taken to Khao Sanh Road (hereafter referred to as Hades), the most notorious backpacker street around. Even at 3 am the place was absolutely jammed with people, pool halls, food sellers, thumping music. A fun time, except that I had nowhere to stay and eventually wandered around for about twenty minutes, settling on 250 baht (8 dollars US) for my lodgings. It was certainly a rip-off because I ended up sleeping in a room with a fan, two beds (why?) and nothing else. The fan kept things just cool enough that I wasn't going out of my mind, but for the rest of the night I slept in no more than fifteen minute increments as the people around me drank, yelled, thumped repeatedly on the door (especially that one time at 6 am), moaned inappropriately and all that, all the while the music kept going and going and going. It was hard not to believe I'd been consigned to a prison sentence.

However, the rest of the town has been rather pleasant. I was here a few weeks ago so I have seen the things that are supposed to be seen and instead am contenting myself with taking life very, very easy. After my escape from Hades I ate a tasty three dollar lunch (sounds cheap until I realize it's actually expensive by China standards, but whatever), strolled around slowly, then stumbled across a used book seller with an eldritch copy of Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. My computer charger appears to have burnt a fuse or something so I have very little in the way of entertainment except for a thin roman by Paulo Coelho and my scrabble dictionary, and there's only so much time I can spend with the latter without feeling too nerdy for words. In any case, the guy had a great selection but the clincher was looking through the weatherbeaten copy of foucault's pendulum and seeing that it was absolutely loaded with notes, sometimes very relevant and scholarly, sometimes snarky, at other times bizarre. Going through the annotations is almost as much of an adventure as reading the book itself. I needed that little episode to recover my feeling that everything in the world pretty much works out and doesn't have to be quite so artificial. if that makes any sense.

Tonight I head for chiang mai, at 5:30 to be precise. The price I received, 400 baht, makes it clear that some sort of scam is in the works. But hell, I am patient, and the alternative seemed to be hanging around Hades for another night, entirely out of the question. Though Bangkok is pretty there's something about this part of town that very much unsettles me. I think I've been in China too long, because the volume of foreigners and their sort of indifference to anything but having fun makes me depressed. I would rather have every third person look at me and exclaim at how tall I am.

My belated semester report

2010-01-07T23:04:00.001+08:00

Jesse Day

Final Report

Associated Colleges in China, Fall ‘09

At the end of the semester, Ma laoshi, head of ACC, called me into her office to provide a message that was part injunction, part encouragement. Essentially, she was telling me that I needed to improve my attitude and be a role model of sorts for the new students of next semester. How, may you ask, did I gain the reputation for being a malcontent?

After being extremely happy with what I gained from HBA over the course of the summer, it was hard not to hold ACC to those standards. As a result, I came away with some mixed feelings when I might have been quite satisfied had this been my first experience in intensive Chinese study. As a third-year student the goal of the semester seemed to be providing a background in more formal Chinese, the kind used in news broadcasts, newspapers and scholar. On the one hand, the selection of articles definitely succeeded in introducing us to that particular style, although one of the textbooks (the light blue one, other students will know what I’m talking about) ended up seeing very heavy-handed and dull, likely due to how outdated the material was. As with any textbook some of the lessons seemed a bit arbitrary, but the choices all in all tended to provide a good sample of new vocabulary and discussions. The problem is that I found that most students felt a dissatisfaction with their ability to actually speak to Chinese people and participate in life in China - in other words, they wanted to work on their kouyu more. In general, I felt more of a sense of discontentment and tiredness at ACC than at HBA. The language pledge was not kept nearly as well, especially towards the end when lassitude seemed to overtake just about everyone.

Essentially, I felt that ACC didn’t stand up to HBA’s level of quality. This is certainly not to blame the teachers or the students. The teachers were hard-working and sociable. I would even say that a lot of them were excellent. The students worked hard and seemed to show more raw interest in China collectively than my HBA peers had. But I found ACC less effective than HBA at improving my Chinese. Part of this must be attributed to my situation. Being in China for the summer, and in particular studying at HBA, clearly gave me a head start. A lot of the grammar patterns early on looked rather familiar, though by the end that stopped being the case, and it seems to me that I may have had an easier time with the vocabulary due to already having studied a greater proportion of it. It’s also because the level of my fellow students was lower than at HBA. I liked the diversity of backgrounds of my classmates, but it also meant that they didn’t necessarily have the benefit of good first- and second-year programs. However, I think ACC can be squarely criticized on two fronts: Pronunciation and a lack of opportunities for creativity. The latter issue is that most students left third-year with pronunciation errors that the second-years at HBA had already eradicated. HBA dedicates half-an-hour a day just to reading aloud. I’m not saying that ACC has to do likewise, but I think that ACC teachers were too satisfied with a mediocre level of pronunciation. To my eyes, it often prevented my fellow students from communicating with Chinese people in elementary situations. The other issue is that HBA tended to leave students to invent phrases using a particular grammar, whereas ACC always gave an extremely specific sentence for students to repeat, taken from the lessons but irrelevant to real life. I felt that this left most people uncomfortable creating their own sentences even in routine circumstances. Ultimately, I don’t know about the validity of these complaints because I clearly made huge leaps forward in my Chinese ability. Perhaps my progress didn’t feel as dramatic as over the summer, but in my travels around China over the break I have never had any problems making myself understood. But I came away from the semester tired and a little bit disappointed.

In recalling my experience for the semester I definitely need to step beyond just evaluating ACC. Although my frustration permeates a lot of my recollections, there were all sorts of positives to mention. I love living in Beijing, and I think that relative to other students I went through very few days where I felt unhappy with life in China. Chinese food is better than what’s in the States, in my opinion, while being as cheap as you want. My favorite lunch (daoxiaomian, down the alleyway after the secret Korean restaurant, for anyone curious) costs 6 kuai. While ACC kept me very busy at times, I still had the time to regularly head over to Wudaokou on the weekends to catch up with my friends over there, wander around the city and play ultimate frisbee. With the latter in particular, I was playing about two times a week and even went to Tianjin to run a clinic for university students at TEDA. Having a working computer, while damaging to my studies, made Chinese study considerably easier. It also coincidentally allowed me to develop my taste for Chinese music. I also had the good fortune of having a great host family who I would go visit about once a month. I can’t even really think of any quality of life issues, other than my occasional craving for steak.

I feel very comfortable with living in China and am excited to keep doing so for the next four months. In spite of my earlier whining, ACC is definitely responsible for this latter situation. My roommate turned out to be a great guy and good for my overall sanity. He had never been out of the States before, but I was really impressed with his willingness to try new stuff. For next semester, ACC set me up to have my own apartment with a Chinese roommate, which should be a superb opportunity. ACC does a good job of providing fun activities (almost to a fault) and the teachers were always willing to talk to me, even politics and other potentially touchy situations. A particular episode comes to mind where a laoshi spent at least a couple of minutes trying to explain to me what duotai meant, as I failed to understand. Another major part of the semester was continuing to discover the city. My favorite part of Beijing is that it seems to consist of a thousand different neighborhoods, all suitable to how you‘re feeling and what you want to see. Korean barbecue, going to Minzu daxue, one-on-one beer pong at Pyro’s, wandering through a market catered to Russians...it may not always have been didao, but it was a superb break to the endless swathes of ACC work. I would like to do even better, but I went to a lot of new places, best of which was easily 798 art district. I hope to go back there all the time next semester.

There are some tough aspects to life in Beijing. The one that comes most readily to mind is the trouble of getting around such a big town. Going anywhere seems to take an hour by default. The subway never seems to have any seats regardless of what time it is. I kept in worse contact with my friends on the other side of town than I had hoped. There was a visit to Fragrant Hills with my host family in particular that took a good two and a half hours each way. Playing ultimate required a streak of masochism because the hour spent getting there and back meant that I would be sleep-deprived for the next day, not to mentioned tired and sore. Perhaps as a result, life at ACC tended to assume some aspects of cabin fever, especially around the due dates of major products. Some people started adopting bizarre sleep schedules and seemed to go outside only sparingly. To any future ACC students: do not become them, I beg you. Find places to go outside of the campus. The weather also contributed more than a little. After flirting with blue skies and 60 degrees, Beijing weather decided somewhere around mid-October to skip the entire season of fall and drop to the freezing point. It snowed at least five times during the month of November alone. I fear returning to frigid Beijing from South-East Asia and Southern China where I’ve been traveling. However, I suppose the fact that I am mentioning the weather at all indicates that I don’t have more urgent problems in life.

All in all, I am pretty optimistic for next semester. Taking a good long break has rekindled my passion for improving Chinese. For all that I was far too negative about ACC for the past few months, the teachers are excellent, the lessons tend to be compelling and my Chinese skills made leaps and bounds. I feel prepared to take charge of my Chinese study and rely on my own methods if I feel unsatisfied with what ACC has to offer. I also want to state that, in spite of being a negligent blogger, I am extremely grateful to the Light Fellowship. My life has changed in ways that I notice only when I drop Chinese words in conversations with my friends from the States and react casually to the prospect of eating chicken feet. On a bigger scale, I am applying to geophysics graduate school at the moment in no small part because of my experiences in China and the thought that I might be able to return and use my language skills to make some contribution to China’s environmental issues. I appreciate the faith that the Light Fellowship placed in me, and I hope to do a better job of validating it over the course of next semester.

Days 1 & 2 - Johor Bahru and Singapore

2009-12-12T22:46:00.000+08:00

Uncharacteristically, I will try to be succinct, mostly because I should be applying to grad school right now. Since I am nothing but irresponsible, I’ll try to include a paragraph about each of the places.

As I’d sort of gathered from other tournament reports, the Zon venue doesn’t really encourage you to wander outside. Nonetheless, dad and I had the chance to take a brief look around since we foolishly chose to take the train back to Singapore (bus is the way to go). With a couple of hours in hand, the first step was to find somewhere to grab a bite, not too huge of a challenge since the Malay word for Restaurant is evidently “Ristoran.” However, they were all packed, hole-in-the-wall kinds of places not all that suited for all the luggage we had (although I would’ve been down, but with dad in tow, maybe not). The thing that I really noticed about the town was the coexistence of completely different ethnic groups in one place. We passed by what I think was a Hindi temple of some sort, the first I’d ever seen, largely in yellow and primary colors, covered in lots of carvings of people and elephants. A lot of woman had the bindi. But there were also folks who looked ethnically South-East Asian or Chinese, and then the obvious predominance of Muslim culture (the hotel room had a qibla/an arrow pointing to mecca). It seemed that we walked through three or four different neighborhoods in a matter of blocks, one more Indian, one with every sign replicated in Chinese characters, a fully-modern downtown shopping mall…it also lacked a lot of the slickness of Singapore, with more trash strewn around, and a cute old train station that looked like it could’ve been there for a few decades.

So, what about Singapore? The first, overwhelming immediate detail has to be the lushness. I suppose it‘s especially striking coming from China, where any verdure is limited to a few parks. But every avenue is lined with trees, there are wide open spaces everywhere, and really, for somewhere the size of Manhattan with a population of 4 million, the city doesn‘t feel crowded at all. Beyond that, I have no idea how you could come here and not be super-impressed. I thought about coming here a couple of summers ago when I went to Hong Kong instead. However, at the time I had information from a few people that it maybe wasn‘t as interesting as HK, that it was a city of malls and not that much more. Well, I have to say that I would’ve had a much harder choice on my hands if I had been to both of them previously. I am astonished by Singapore’s juxtaposition of different styles. The most futuristic skyscrapers you can imagine stand next to a cricket pitch. Our hotel is in Chinatown, reconstructed in traditional style to be only two or three stories high as the houses used to be, even though most of it is has now predictably gentrified. The supreme court building looks like a flying saucer. Swaths of the island are covered in dense forest. For all the fact that Singapore’s population mostly lives in high-rises, there’s not quite the same overwhelming verticality that one experiences in Hong Kong. In fact, it feels somewhat more livable. And the food - oh, man. I haven’t had a bad meal once since getting here. Pretty much everything is available, but with an obvious focus on Chinese, Malay, Thai, and then Singaporean cuisine itself…today we had a great lunch at the invitation of Michael Tang, organizer of the Causeway Scrabble explotravaganza with the most typical Singaporean dishes: Chicken rice and fish-head stew, and then a dessert whose name escapes me with shaved ice, corn and red bean. I love the Asian style of cooking fish. Nothing in the states has ever excited me that much, salmon seems sort of predictable, fish and chips is pretty tasty, but Southern China and Singapore really know where it’s at. Also, fellow Western folk, I beg you: Eat the fish head. It is easily the best part. Being squeamish is silly because it’s all relative anyway. Except for stinky tofu, which just smells awful and you are allowed to avoid.

Oh, and there are birds outside all the time! and they chirp!

Shoot, if I could just write like this I would have already written my statement of purpose…sigh. Back to work I guess.

Return from the dead

2009-12-12T22:45:00.000+08:00

There was a well-publicized story lately about a writer who decided to spend a week in Heathrow Airport and then chronicle the experience, resulting in a pretty, astronomically-priced volume detailing the quirks of flying. Today, I’m carrying out an abbreviated redux of the same experiment. It’s 7:30 AM, and I’m camped out in Starbucks/星巴克, due to a law of physics involving foreigners and inevitability. Fortunately, their muffins are much tastier than they are in the States, I am well-practiced at ordering a 卡布其诺(cappucino) and the music is good jazz. Flighttime? Unclear. I get to standby onto the 3:30 flight to Singapore, and if that doesn’t pan out take the 11:30 redeye, identical to the flight I was originally booked onto, except a day later.

What happened, might you ask? I’ve done plenty of stupid things while traveling before. I’ve even attempted to put a list together every so often, just so that I can classify a situation with regards to my already sordid past. Previous idiocies include showing up for my plane home from Hong Kong at the complete wrong time because I somehow didn’t even bother looking up when I was supposed to leave, leaving for the airport about an hour and ten minutes before flight time when we went to Sichuan this summer, almost not making it to Vietnam because I realized my passport had expired shortly after buying my ticket, and then showing up to check-in all of 50 minutes before boarding…the list goes on and on. All of those incidents are from the last two and a half years. However, I have far and away topped any of those with my latest exploit: When I showed up to check in, I didn’t have my passport. I rifled through my bag for about a half-hour, but it was clear that it just wasn’t there. As a result, I had to go back to my dorm, startling a few people in the process, go through all of the stuff I’m leaving in Beijing while I go traveling, all without tracking it down. It came down to doing an exhaustive search - moving all of the beds, the desks, looking through the trash…and there it was, in the trashcan.

For further bonus points, I slept over at 嘉雯/Toni’s apartment, since her and 会智/Isabelle were leaving for Kunming extremely early, 4 or 5 am. Unfortunately, we all overslept, waking up in a panic at 6:10 or so with a 7:30 flight to catch. In spite of being aggressive, Beijing taxi drivers often have an orientation to risk befitting a teacher’s union and will not budge an inch over the speed limit. Fortunately, we found an exception who seemed to take great pleasure in the opportunity of becoming a speed demon, thereby getting us to the airport in 25 minutes.

I haven’t done a very good job of keeping up with my blog for the last few months. In fact, I haven’t even posted anything in about three months, in spite of actually having a working computer, albeit no convenient way around the great firewall. So I should explain what’s going on in my life right now, though I’m not going to go into depth about the ACC experience yet as I’m required to by the Light Fellowship standards. That will go in a separate entry.

I’ve wrapped up my first semester at ACC. Right now, I should already be in Singapore, maybe even at my hotel in Malaysia. When I do eventually make it there, it will be as the beginning to the following preposterous itinerary. From the 8th to the 10th of December, I’m playing a Scrabble tournament in Johor, Malaysia, the last of three continuous week of different tournaments, being held as a side-feature to the World Youth Scrabble Championship. My dad is meeting up with me somewhere in the middle. From then, I’ll spend about 3 days in Singapore, then spend the next 10-12 days finding my way to Saigon by way of Northern Malaysia and Thailand. Then, on the 26th and 27th, I’ll be playing an ultimate tournament in Saigon. I even brought my cleats in my newly purchased $20 travel backpack. After that, fly to Hong Kong to meet up with a friend, then spend the next two weeks traveling in Guilin, and then back in Guangdong. And then, after all that, move into my new ACC-provided apartment, a definite step up from dorm life.

so much for free Internet ...

2009-09-01T00:34:00.001+08:00

I previously thought that I'd found a solution to my internet woes by using yale vpn. unfortunately, today my computer refuses to connect, which means that I'm back on the wrong side of the great firewall anew. This sort of mimics my situation for the last few days - I put together a very long to-do list (an uncharacteristic move on my part, but I was abusing my newfound computer privileges), and while I've gotten through some of them I keep adding new bullet points one after another.

Actually, forgive me if this is indicative of particular laziness on my part, but I'm going to post the list because I think it gives a good summary of my life in slightly non-traditional form. unclear points will be explained.

to do

1. mail gifts to mom

3. email HBA teachers (as in, tell them I'm alive and would love to take them out to a meal because god knows they've earned it)

4. post blog update(s)

5. launder (not money...)

9. GRAD SCHOOL recommendations (you need three of them??)

10. SIGN UP FOR THE GRE IN THE NEXT WEEK OR SO! (URGENT!)

11. explore the neighborhood more12. chinese review

13. buy an alarm clock

14. use acne medication (hah, that's an embarassing one)

16. sign up for bally's

18. buy a microphone (computers always find new ways to make my life more complicated)

21. buy fruit

22. download music illegally (uh...legally would be fine too)

23. GET GRAD SCHOOL RECOMMENDATIONS - THREE! OF THEM (I suppose this is on my mind at the moment)

24. heal knee by not being stupid

25. new visa

completed

2. HAVE TAPE (my desk is now decorated)

6. TALKED TO ALL PARENTALS

7. VPN SOLVED (hah)

8. 2:30, dinner at 6:30 (I'll explan this)

15. the bathroom smells bad and you're just going to have to deal with it

17. FOUND CCB (my bank)

19. grad school deadlines are all well off in the future

20. BOUGHT PHONE MINUTES (about time)

I suppose that's not a hugely informative list. but it's a summary of what's going through my head at the moment. I think I'll punch in two more paragraphs right now and hopefully add more at some point in the near future. Although judging from my track record, if you read this blog you must have come to the conclusion that I'm a pathological liar.

I will start with today. Started out verrrry slow, although I did some actual useful web-surfing amidst my procrastinatory behavior. however, from about 2:15 onwards to 5:30, I had the chance to hang out with 李汀羽 (li tingyu)， one of the few chinese friends I have in town. I wish I could start explaining effectively how amazingly cool she is - she's a french major (which means we have three languages to overlap, which actually came in handy once or twice). She just about went with us to sichuan on remarkably short notice. I'm still sad that that fell through. Her knowledge of western culture in general is realllly impressive, too - she talked to me today about how her favorite actor was al pacino, then told me her theory about devil's advocate, its connection to paradise lost, and what she thought of milton's motives in his portrayal of Satan. I'm embarassed by my own lack of knowledge of Chinese literature and culture by comparison - I mean, what do you learn in the states about anyone besides your western canon? and who actually reads paradise lost, anyway??

realllllly quick aside...I remember reading confucius, lao tzu and chuang tzu (孔子，老子 and 庄子） in high school and being somewhat underwhelmed in some respects. but if I had just started to realize the impossibility of translating terms with their proper context, I'd like to think I would've not been as obnoxious about them as I most likely was. I can't read classical Chinese to save my life, but just looking at a little book of confucian dicta that my lovely language tutor gave me makes me realize how little I knew.

There is one point on which 汀羽 really amazes me: That she's willing at all to spend time with me one-on-one. Here's what I mean: I had a great conversation with my new friend Toni here at ACC about how stereotyping works not only against foreigners but anyone who associates with them, too. To my discredit, I'd never really noticed as much as I should have. But Toni, who is an Asian girl, explained to me that anyone who saw us hanging out together would naturally assume that she was, effectively, a prostitute or a call-girl, and even as we were walking the street together she would notice the occasional ill-meaning glance or look of judgment from other Chinese people we walked past. And today, walking around with 汀羽, I noticed for the first time how many people would look at her judgingly as she walked past, sometimes directly, other times turning their heads once she had passed. I found it so hard not to be furious at times at the injustice imposed on 汀羽 by a generation of my own western kindred who create the stereotypes that exist by their willingness to exploit China for all its worth, and now the prejudice against any chinese girl who interacts with a western guy. it's also why I get angry at my classmates, but mostly at myself, for sometimes buying into a system that allows us to get whatever we want for cheap (though obviously above indigenous prices) and creating our own, unreal expatriate pocket. But that's also too naive of a way of looking at things as well - is that not what the chinese middle class is angling for, and what the upper class already has? and is my odd puritanical streak not hypocritical in and of itself, an act of self-denial?

In any case, 汀羽 amazes me, because I've never seen her notice the attention around her once. if she does, she's never let it show. I respect her equanimity in a situation that would incite my anger.

Ironically (in light of the long rant above about expat life not being "real" somehow) I ended up going to pizza hut with kevin, a classmate of mine from yale who happens to speak great chinese as well as being an extremely nice guy. we started at the same time, but I think he's definitely a step or two ahead of me. It was an encouraging evening on the whole on several fronts. I ended up going back to wudaokou, my old neighborhood, satisfying in itself because I really like the place and also because it makes me feel like this semester could in some way be a continuation rather than starting over. kevin's going to be around for a year, along with kevin olusola, which is also hugely encouraging - they're great folks. for all that I miss the great friends I developed over the summer, I'm starting to convince myself successfully that life goes on. I'm planning on sending my teachers a mass email telling them that I'm around and that I'll treat them to dinner any time - the least I could do given that they're all amazing, worked harder than any of the students all summer, not to mention each and everyone one of them is a good-hearted, nice, fun person. I seriously hope that they'll get back to me. but at the very least I've got some links here already.

I was going to take one last paragraph to talk about my overall circumstances. however, I have a recently purchased dvd of slumdog millionaire currently loading, not to mention seasons 1-4 of meteor garden, which I'm hoping will carry on the tradition of using bad chinese sitcoms to improve my skills. but I suppose I'll mention a thing or two about my circumstances. my roommate got here today, and he seems like a great guy, although he goes to bed early, which means I may have to preemptively start scouting out nearby late night hideouts. I'll certainly miss my habits from the summer, which would including taking 2 am study breaks to watch german soccer games broadcast in chinese, or listening to V (think mtv, only more chinese music and maybe not quite as slick) at all hours of day and night. I'm sure I'll find a way to bring the insanity to my life no matter what though.

So far all of the ACC folks I've met have been fantastic. Just about everyone here has spent a lot of time in China, more than I have in most cases, although my roommate is a fun exception (he's never left the states before, which means I get to play cicerone). still not sure if my chinese will place me into third or fourth year, or whatever the equivalent is, as well as whether I should worry one way or the other. Gu laoshi, head of HBA and former head of ACC, suggested that the 5th year program here is not as good as 3rd and 4th and that I　should try to request a place in intermediate because I'd still be able to learn a lot. I may just leave it up to them to decide. whatever happens, my chinese abilities are in for a wild ride...

Mildly triumphant return

2009-08-28T12:25:00.002+08:00

Three nights ago at dinner, at one of the hotel's restaurants because dad and I were too tired to go anywhere else after our great wall adventure, a first ensued. We struck up conversation with one of the waitresses, who was either teasing me or delusional, because she asked “你不是明星呢？” (aren't you a celebrity?) I tried my best to convince her that I was a penniless college student, but she wouldn't buy it, insisting that I sign my name for her. I obliged, throwing in my Chinese name for the sake of it. Dad signed his name too as well. She then scampered off, excitedly showing the rest of the waiters and waitresses her newly acquired possession. Now I almost want to go and become famous now just to vindicate her.

I only bring up the anecdote for two reasons: Firstly, because I thought it was hilarious, and second, to show that even though I've been here for three months, the surprises keep on coming, one after another.

It's going on a month since my last post here. My apologies to my four (!) followers and the Light Fellowship committee. I spent a week of that in Sichuan legitimately without any internet access, and then the last week here in Beijing with my dad, running around the city and taking advantage of the opportunity to eat a nice meal or two. A whole bunch of things have materialized in the last month - I now have a working computer which I have just enabled to circumvent certain obstacles, meaning I can now post whenever I want! Now I have no excuse whatsoever for not updating my blog, which means that I advise you to heckle me if I fail to regularly update.

I'm actually hoping that the computer will enhance my chinese skills by allowing me much easier access to MDBG and such tools, and maybe even finding a good flashcard program of some sort. Mom keeps inferring that not having a computer was probably good for my productivity. She's most likely right, but I hope that over the year I'll still find the time to watch a few tacky sitcoms on chinese tv to keep working on my 听力/listening skills.

I now have about two weeks until my first class actually starts. Other students will start to get here sometime in the next few days, probably about 3 or 4 days from now. I'm going to be moving over to CUEB pretty much as soon as I figure writing this post, which means that I'll have a good long time to settle down, and probably nothing better to do than to fill in the details of the last three weeks.

Actually, one last note - not to be blatant, but what do you guys recommend as the best way to avoid the great firewall? Right now, I'm relying on the yale proxy server, which I unexpectedly still have access to (possibly mistakenly so...don't tell anyone, ok?). I also have Gladder installed, but that's not actually proving all that useful. It appears I can also find other proxy servers online, but some of them appear to cost money. So - what do y'all suggest? Apologies if this is too blunt of a request, but I spent an entire summer using my mom as my blog's courier, and doing it myself will allow me to start posting pictures, including some stunning images from beautiful jiuzhaigou national park.

Over the next few days, expect to see a recap of sichuan, probably something about my time with dad here in beijing, and then maybe more of a "life in china" update. Although I think I might be surprisingly busy over the next few days...shopping, getting situated, and, hopefully, buying a 友友球/空竹/chinese yoyo...I'm actually not really sure how to refer to it, or where to find one, but it'll be a fun hunt.

Hi Blog

2009-08-04T00:55:00.001+08:00

It's pretty hard to make myself update the blog at the moment. For whatever reason, I feel pretty exhausted (most likely because I haven't been sleeping enough, surprisingly). To compound that, I hurt my knee playing ultimate yesterday. No problem for about the first five minutes, then a bunch of swelling, lack of flexibility and pain. Lots of pain, more than I've ever felt out of my knees before. At times it hurt enough that walking was painful. I played some more in the second half, during which we blew an 11-8 lead to lose 13-12. as you can imagine, I wasn't all that happy, and then to compound matters the pain came back in full force. I found some ice in the evening (not an easy task here in china) and also elevated the knee for a long time, but it's still pretty tender, and I've been trying not to walk around too much if I can avoid it (one might argue that this is a good excuse for being lazy). this weekend other than that was highly enjoyable, other than my newly bought "kaiweiyi" (cute, a loanword from japanese, as learned in class today...not sure what the characters are) water cube mug, complete with jingjing the panda hua/mascot thing on the side...adorable, really...except that the first time I put in boiling water the mug immediately cracked, spilling boiling water on my hands, my desk, my textbook and most of my papers. Beyond that rightly justified outburst of profanity, the weekend was very much smooth sailing, beyond not getting enough sleep.

On Friday night I went on a shopping spree, if you can call spending ten dollars a "spree". But a friend of mine and I together spent about three hours wandering around the little roadside goodsellers finding trinkets. I have an increasingly long shopping list, and it remains quite protracted, but I managed to acquire a belt (unfortunately too long...I was so worried about it being too short that I had them give me the longest one they could find), a rubik's cube which I plan to learn how to solve in the near future if my computer will ever fix itself, new headphones, a murakami book and...twilight. I have no idea why I felt the urge to buy it, other than my ever-present desire to gain favor with the ladies. But so far I've already knocked out about 200 pages. It's pretty swift reading. I feel that the longer I read the weaker the writing gets, and there are also all of two, rather wooden characters in the entire book, as far as I can tell. But it's not meant to be fine art, and it did cost maybe a buck and a half US. It's worth mentioning that none of the things I bought could possibly be real...how can headphones cost 10 kuai (haggled to a buck US)? But they sounded decent, and if they break next week I guess I'll just go back again.

wow, I can tell I'm tired by my overuse of clauses. sorry about that.

My principal leisure activity the last couple of days has been checking in on the outcome of the National Scrabble Championships, being held as we speak in Dayton, ohio. It's the first time I haven't been to nationals since I started seriously playing. That's not all that significant to me, but I really do miss playing. I played my first game in two months today after finding a way to surpass the great firewall of china and download quackle, the best computer-playing program out there. The tiredness means that my brain is having trouble refinding its scrabble brainways, and it's sort of frustrating that I can't play whenever I want. Even more frustrating is that I can visualize myself being there right now, and the thought kills me. I could be competitive with the folks who are there; a lot of my friends are doing pretty well for themselves. Maybe it's more the camaraderie that I miss - for all the great people I've met here, I definitely miss my scrabble buddies. I already missed a wedding this summer - and sure, that's not a reason not to go to china, but sometimes I feel as if I'm asleep, in a protracted dream, and when I go back everybody will have changed and be older and moved on with their lives in directions perpendicular to my own.

The blog topics I have written in my journal are starting to feel out of date. They've been on my mind for a month, two months, and maybe I've processed them and come to my own conclusions about them. That being said, I think I'm going to try to pick my favorite one and write about it. I'll get through the backlog some day. if my computer problems are ever fixed. grr.

These are all fairly good topics, but I think maybe what I'll talk about right now is how I feel about my peers. And while I assume that pretty much no one else reads this journal except for my two followers (mom and dad...thanks, guys) I think I'll apologize in advance if anyone's hurt by what I said. anyway. the composition of the different courses is interesting. second year is mostly freshmen, with the occasional old person like myself. third year seems to have a lot of heritage speakers, fifth year is mostly grad students. fourth year consists of a big majority of preppies, your good old-fashioned sort, the kind yale doesn't actually seem to have that much of (maybe I hang out in the wrong crowds). I was pretty curious about why that should be, until I had an epiphany: If you've made it to your fourth year of chinese, you're probably in one of two situations: you either grew up speaking chinese at least part of the time, OR you started in high school. what kind of high school has a chinese program? probably an elite private school. my high school classmate here, lanben, started in high school. It only placed him into second year. but other fourth years went to places such as eton, andover, the usual bunch. leading to the curious demographic trend in question. Although maybe there are other explanations.

on a whole other note, something that I talk about every so often is about the nature of the community here. Because after all, everyone here, just about, is from harvard or yale, which tends to imply that they have secretly already done ridiculous things with their lives, even if they're only freshmen. But I went through a period when I felt let down by the student community here. A lot of them work extremely hard, and it's hard not be impressed with their skills. but some of them I feel are here for the ride. A lot of folks speak english in private, fourth year students especially, for whatever reason. one fourth year buddy of mine had a great observation: not all of the people here necessarily like china that much. Maybe some people are here for resume boosting purposes, which hadn't occurred to me until someone else pointed out. More troubling to me, though, is what I feel is a sort of disrespect for local culture. Sometimes it's in small ways, sometimes big ones, but I often feel that people are here to take advantage of the country rather than understand it. I wish I had better examples. But I feel that there's a pervasive mindset, even amongst people who have been here for a while, of using the countries developing status as a boon. Whether it's getting a business started in china's booming economy, or plundering the local grocery store of their 2.5 kuai bottles of beer, a lot of people are here to make a profit, whether in small ways or with future intentions of working on a large scale. And I suppose I don't know why I'm here, or why it makes for a better worldview than anybody elses. But it's sort of a reality I'm learning to accept. Being at HBA is much like yale, or high school, or life anywhere else. A lot of people aren't in it for the purest of motives. But I've found a few people I seriously respect and will miss very, very much. So take this paragraph less as a plaint, and more as a retrospective on my early experience here in 中国。

My last little paragraph is about a chance encounter, this weekend, playing ultimate. Rumors abound in the beijing ultimate community about this guy named gareth, one of the best players in china, dating a beijing player. Well, I ran into him this weekend, and he's none other than a high school schoolmate of mine. I knew he was getting really good at ultimate but it somehow never occurred to me that it was the same guy, even though gareths are few and far between. but he's currently in chengdu, just started the first pickup group there, and writes for an english journal. Sometimes the best thing is running into people you haven't seen for a long time and finding out that they've done some extremely cool things with themselves. He's also moving to beijing, which will probably improve the local squad a great deal. I'm looking forward to having him around.

where have I been?

2009-07-27T21:54:00.002+08:00

Ack. I was doing a reasonable job of updating the blog until the last couple of weeks. I have a pretty good excuse for week 1 - I spent it in Inner Mongolia doing our social study report, as per HBA mandate (I feel like the longer I'm here, the clunkier my prose becomes...apologies). Without much advanced knowledge of any sort, I decided to do my report on Mongolian (the language, that is) because it's the sort of topic I've always been interested in, and I thought that my background knowledge on language preservation was enough that I might be able to produce something whose importance extended beyond exceeding the word length.

But really, for all the talk about producing the report, that's not what the week was about. Writing 1200 characters isn't really going to be that much of a challenge - I think a lot of people took two or three hours. I had to handwrite mine (remind me to explain sometime while my computer is still broken) and then type it up, but that probably took...6 hours total? Beyond that it was just an unbelievably fortunate week where I had the chance to explore somewhere beyond the boundaries of what I had ever encountered before. And it's not that Inner Mongolia should be exaggerated as some distant ultima thule (see nabokov) because it's really very much like the rest of China in lots of respects, which is a lesson in itself. But I also saw the most remote terrain I've ever seen in my life, inhabited only by shepherds and goatherds. I have the pictures if I ever find a way to put them on the internet - but maybe a better description is that I'm pretty sure I could pick most directions and then walk for a hundred miles without encountering another human being, except maybe for a flock of sheep or two. overlying the rapidly desertifying grasslands you can see distant, jagged red-purple mountains, which we crossed once on a somewhat terrifying return trip to the citified part of inner mongolia.

The experience deserves to be better described, and I hope that it will be in more detail at some point, but it stacks up with any of the most fortunate experiences of my increasingly inexplicably fortunate life. I'll go as far as saying that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I was lucky enough to stumble open. I hope I get to go back some day.

Currently going through somewhat of a Chinese music binge, again tricky given that I don't have a computer. Ends up leading to a lot of frustration most of the time as I turn on V, china's answer to MTV, and hope that they'll play a decent song or two. For now, check out here for what's currently on my mind. Actually, I normally don't have youtube at my internet cafe, so I'll take the opportunity to link up to this as well (watch the whole thing...although I promise the lyrics are very moving as well if you don't speak any chinese)

I seriously have at least 8 topics for blog posts in one of my coursebooks right now, but just no time to write them down at all. Shawn (a.k.a. 少华） is consistently unbelievably friendly in letting me barge into his room and monopolize his computer for long stretches of time, but even so I barely have time to keep up with whatever happenings are in the outside world. the blog is high on my priorities list, but so are the other things I don't have time to do. As of right now I'm already neglecting a particularly challenging new lesson. Probably another hour and a half tonight to memorize, and then wake up tomorrow to review/复习...so, that's it for now. Pictures could be coming if I ever get around to taking up weimin on his offer of loaning his computer so I can start uploading.

post of the time period

2009-07-04T01:52:00.000+08:00

It's sort of hard to figure out exactly what to write when everytime I want to post I'm put on the spot with about twenty minutes to write down the things I've been stewing over for the last few days. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with our blogging prompts. what are you going to do.

The biggest thing on my mind is that, on and off, I'm starting to feel like I have some idea of what Iw ant to do with myself. Truth be told, if you'd asked me why I was here, the simplest answer would just be that I really like learning Chinese. But the more I'm around here, the more the puzzle pieces begin to interlock. Of course, it's often just a passing revelation and the next day I have no idea what I was thinking. But lately, I've been thinking that the best way to combine my interests might be to go to geophysics grad school, get involved in climate issues of some sort, and then try to get involved in a job in China with some sort of environmental capacity. The longer I'm here the more I am, first and foremost, blown away by how quickly life moves around here and how fast things are changing, and as a result just how much damage china's environment is taking. One of my teachers mentioned that when she was a kid, the city centers were all cooler than they are now because widespread use of air conditioners has raised the ambient temperature. We're talking about a country that is developing rampantly, and will continue to do so even as shanghai and beijing settle down, thanks to the "Develop the west" campaign. If there is a battle against global warming to be won, it will be here in China. So why not try to get involved?

Beyond that, I've mostly been musing about the places I want to go. Last night, I didn't sleep too much because I postponed studying for my test, instead reading my china lonely planet, courtesy of the kind folks at light. For any of you who have ever read my travel blogs in the past (maybe two of you, but then again there are about five people reading this, so there) I actually dislike using guides to navigate once I get somewhere. But this one's a little different, because its pages contain hundreds of cities I had never even heard of, but now get to contemplate visiting, a distant fantasy in case the fellowship money lasts. Did you know there's an actual town called Shangri-la in China? Some enterprising local politicians in Yunnan renamed their city in a bid to draw more tourists.

Trips that I've contemplated: trying to go to korea by boat to meet up with jason kb, going to qufu, confucius's home (this one I expect to happen), getting to india by going through tibet and nepal, traveling to western sichuan, going to inner mongolia...except that the last one is really going to happen!

About ten minutes worth of ramblings

2009-07-01T22:32:00.001+08:00

There are times when this city can be frustrating. First of all, the scale of the place makes getting anywhere a matter of concerted effort. This isn't like Boston, where a good half hour will get you to Southie, or New Haven when about half an hour of biking can get you clear across town. Though the subway system is far-flung and fairly quick, Beijing is quite simply huge. In the States, the only city I can think of that comes close is New York City - a much better analog than LA, where people drive everywhere, because really Beijing is just a series of neighborhoods, one after another, turning toward the fringes into farm towns, all growing the same crops. My botanical knowledge is sorely lacking, but rather than the rice paddies of Vietnam, which are essentially my only good comparison, these are rows after rows of what look like cornstalks, with the occasional root vegetable or orchard of peaches all growing in paper bags (pollution induced, perhaps?). I'm not tired of the food at this point, but it's becoming a possibility whereas before I wouldn't have worried about it.

The weather as legitimately beautiful yesterday. Blue sky, interspersed with clouds. Warm but not drenched-in-sweat-inducingly so. The rumor has it that August will see the haze return in style, but for now, I can't complain.

Planned to write more, no time as usual. Now if dell would just get their act together...

Food and language

2009-06-30T04:48:00.000+08:00

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

2009-06-24T23:33:00.000+08:00

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

2009-06-21T23:50:00.001+08:00

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

2009-06-15T22:23:00.001+08:00

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

2009-06-14T13:17:00.001+08:00

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

2009-06-13T13:58:00.000+08:00

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

2009-06-11T16:16:00.000+08:00

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.

Why do I start what I can't finish?

2009-05-31T00:20:00.004+08:00

I was at the mall yesterday buying pants, something I had hoped to postpone until Beijing until every pair I owned spontaneously developed large, embarassing tears. While at Sears I had one of those unfortunate dressing room encounters when you test a door to see if it'll open and someone simultaneously walks out. After an awkward apology followed by "are you done?" I suddenly wondered - what if I were in Beijing? How would I say that in Chinese?

I'm not sure whether Beijing stores have dressing rooms or not. Nonetheless, I panicked because while I could think of kaishi (not sure how to pinyinize text yet), I had no idea how to talk about finishing anything! After a couple of minutes, I thought of the phrase "ni zuowan le ma?" but that didn't seem quite right either, since it seemed to imply some kind of potentially sordid dressing room activity. Even a look at www.mdbg.net, my go-to Chinese resource, proved fruitless. Maybe one always has to be finishing some task as opposed to being "done". I'm still not sure, though perhaps one of my three readers might be able to help me out.

The theme of this message might seem somewhat on the defeatist side. But I think it's actually a reformulation of a question I've received a few times about my decision to go to Beijing. There are a couple of major categories of inquisition. The first assumes that I'm making a good business decision by acquiring Chinese in advance of the country's future economic hegemony. The second express concern about the detriments to my health, mostly due to Beijing's eternal smog. Frankly, after my five days in Shanghai last year I'm somewhat worried myself. Some combination of avian and swine flu usually interjects itself as well. I've had to spend some time reassuring my mom that I'll most likely have much bigger problems on my hands, such as finding time to sleep.

The third reaction I tend to receive is the blunt question: "Why?" Sometimes the question is couched in much more delicate verbiage, sometimes not. In spite of my overall excitement about going to China, I sometimes ask myself the same thing. Depending on who's asking, my responses will vary - but in truth, I don't have a simple response. I could say something about how much I enjoy learning Chinese - that had better be the case, given how much time I'll spend doing just that next year! I could talk about how much I enjoyed visiting Hong Kong and wanting to see what's different about the mainland. Maybe Chinese will end up being useful somewhere down the road. And sometimes it's hard not to get concerned about what will end up being an unfinishable task. By definition, I cannot become a native speaker of Chinese - from my linguistics classes I know that the difference between fluency and nativedom lies in unconscious language instincts reserved almost always for those whose plastic young brains spent ten years of life surrounded by the chatter of their native tongue.

It's also hard for me not to be terrified at times of the magnitude of my task. I have a stack of five hundred flashcards sitting on the living room table, barely a tenth of the characters in a literate Chinese repertoire, and yet as many as a hundred of them will look shockingly unfamiliar as I try to review them in the next week. And even in a more general sense, I sometimes wonder if I'm worthy of the Light Fellowship. All I've ever really done is graduate from high school and college, play scrabble (a money-losing venture, it has to be mentioned) and play ultimate frisbee. Until last night, I didn't even have a way of getting a student visa, thanks to my own idiocy in losing a crucial, supposedly irreplaceable form. I've somehow set myself for up this crazy, yearlong task that I hardly feel competent in achieving at the moment, lollygagging as I am about my house. But then I remind myself once again how much I've enjoyed all the new things I've tried over the years and the places I've gone, my first junk boat trip in hong kong, riding a scooter in saigon traffic, running up payne whitney's stairs over and over again for winter training. And that's the answer to the question, really. I start things I can't finish - perfecting my putonghua, understanding how China works, bettering my scrabble game, learning new juggling tricks - precisely because I'll never run out of things to do, so long as I can keep myself excited.

In general, I plan to be updating this blog very regularly, hopefully as much as three or four times a week. I've tried my hand at travel-blogging before, first during a two week trip around Vietnam, more recently during my ten-week layover in Hong Kong last summer. I've gotten some positive feedback, although almost entirely from my Scrabble buddies and my mom, but really I just like attempting to communicate my own responses to new discoveries. I moved so frequently when I was growing up, something like 12 or 13 times, that I never really considered travel to be a priority in my life. It was axiomatic. But in the last few years, as I've been more responsible for orchestrating my journeys, I've started to realize that going to new places might be one of my favorite things in life. My writerly skills are not all that remarkable, barely reasonable for a Yale and English 120 graduate. But I think that I have an eye for the absurd, and hopefully as I discover Beijing I'll be able to impart some of my own wonderment to whoever ends up reading this blog.