Arrival in the Middle Kingdom

Early on the morning of August 25, 2008, I drove with Paul over the mountain and down to the Hong Kong Central train station to check my bags and to jump on the train to the airport on Lantau Island, directly to the west of Hong Kong Island and situated closer to the mouth of the Pearl River. I was impressed by how streamlined and convenient the check-in process was; before I even arrived at the airport, I had checked both of my bags and had my boarding pass in hand. After grabbing a cup of Starbucks coffee, we said goodbye and I quickly moved downstairs to catch the Airport Express.

As the train made its way underneath Victoria Harbor and up into the mainland side in Kowloon, I was able to see in the bright morning light the massive port of Hong Kong that was hidden in darkness when I arrived five days earlier. Row upon row of metal containers stood waiting to be filled or emptied under massive twin-legged cargo cranes, and I finally saw where all of those tankers were coming and going out from. The real estate on Hong Kong Island was of course too expensive to maintain a massive port like this there, and I began to realize how my focus on the money that must be flowing through the marvelous buildings of the central business district was far too nearsighted—Hong Kong finance was just the tip of the iceberg.

As we taxied around and accelerated down the runway getting ready to take off, I saw for one last time the mist clinging to the green mountains of Lantau before I passed out.

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I really didn’t fully wake up until the tires of the plane hit the runway in Beijing. I had been thinking for days about what it would be like to finally arrive for good in the foreign city I had committed to working in, sight unseen, and to be honest, I simply felt tired. As I began to wake up and as I grabbed my bags out of the overhead compartment, the adrenaline started pumping a bit, and I began thinking more about who the person will be who Tsinghua had chosen to come pick me up at the airport.

(Important Note: As a preventative measure, please assume that, unless otherwise noted, all names recounted from my time in China have been changed from their original form for privacy purposes. Unfortunately, I don’t yet possess a good enough knowledge of Mandarin names to determine whether or not these new names are appropriate generally, much less gender appropriate. To all those who see the folly of my ways in this regard, I promise to soon improve in my naming capabilities.)

(I have been inspired by an excellent book on late 1990s Sichuan Chinese culture called River Town by Peter Hessler [a freelance writer and the present Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker and National Geographic, among other periodicals] to experiment a bit with a form of writing known as narrative nonfiction. I don’t know much about the genre academically, but I do know that it seems to blend the insight of fiction with the strictly factual, observational rigor required for nonfiction. I hope to get better with the technique as time moves on. The key point here is that I am not, of course, making any of the following up—aside from the names—and that I am instead trying to use some of the techniques employed by fiction writers to create a more vivid picture of my experiences here in Beijing and beyond. Please feel free to comment either positively or negatively on this approach at the conclusion of my posts.)

(Another brief note about the Chinese language: in the 1950’s, the government of China came up with a system called “hanyu pinyin,” a romanization of the Chinese language [which consists of characters, not combinations of letters from an alphabet] that could allow Chinese schoolchildren and foreigners to learn the language and its pronunciation using an easier system. Each syllable in hanyu pinyin represents a Chinese character. For instance, my Chinese name, “Mai Kaiwen,” contains three syllables, and therefore three characters: 麦凯文. When writing Chinese, I’ll be using this pinyin system without tonal indication—a facet of the language that will certainly come up later on.)

As was mentioned in an email I received from my contact at the university, there was indeed someone waiting for me when I stepped out of customs and into the smoggy city daylight pouring though the terminal’s sprawling glass walls. I walked awkwardly along a row of waiting Chinese faces holding out pages covered in non-Chinese names until I saw my own. I looked past the sheet of paper and into the face of a young woman whos mouth was at first agape, and then smiling when she saw my recognition of the name she held out in front of her.

“Ni hao ni hao!” I quickly said in broken tones over the metal barrier separating us, repeating the two characters that mean “hello” twice for emphasis of my excitement, as is the practice in Mandarin. I swung around and out the gate of the waiting area, and we made our way silently to the escalator leading down to the cab stand outside.

“My name is Wang Jiuxia,” she began tentatively, making a kind of “hmm” sound before speaking each clause, “but you can call me ‘Xia’ for short.” It generally takes quite a long time to get past the formal tag of “Mr.” or “Mrs.” with the Chinese, but there were two major exceptions here: most critically, I was older, and secondly, I was a foreigner and an American, who are quicker than the Chinese to call each other by first names soon after meeting. That Wang Jiuxia let me immediate call her by a nickname (“Xia” is the second character of her given name, which comes after the family name—“Wang” in this case) felt to me to be something of a privilege.

Wang Jiuxia is from Shandong province, a coastal province to the southeast of Beijing whose northeast reach forms the southeasterly cape enclosing Bo Hai, the massive bay to the east of Beijing that opens out into the Yellow Sea. Her hometown, which is close to Wehai in the northeast of the province looking out onto Korea Bay, is known as a beautiful seaside escape for tourists, and it is also famous for its seafood. Wang Jiuxia’s parents, however, are not involved in the town’s fishing industry—which could perhaps be a stroke of luck, as the seas to the east of China and south of Japan are notoriously overfished. Instead, they are florists, and at many points during the past several days we’ve spent together she has pointed out assorted water- and land-bound vegetation that strike her as beautiful, knowing most of the time only their Chinese names, which she patiently waits for me to pronounce correctly after her recitation. She has one sister that she swears looks nothing like her. She also has a cat that’s so black her father insisted on giving it the awkward name, “South Africa.”

We walked out of the airport and made our way to a cab. The cabbie grabbed one of my bags to throw in the trunk, hoisted it several inches off the ground, and let out a hoot of exertion. Wen, I said, pointing at the front pockets of the bag with embarrassment—“books,” or “literature.” I was meaning to say that it was books that were responsible for the heaviness. Xia laughed and the cabbie shrugged, and I just got into the cab and didn’t say much else for the rest of the ride.

Xia pointed out to me the now-famous Bird’s Nest on our way across the 4^th Ring Road, and it looked just as impressive as it did on television. I was surprised that I needed to be prompted by her in order to recognize the stadium’s immense metal frame—it was just across the street, right in front of me—but my mind was wandering at the moment. Although I was looking out the cab windows intently examining the city whizzing by, my mind felt preoccupied with considerations of what was waiting for me at my new home on Tsinghua’s campus.

We made a left off of Caijing Lu (lu meaning “street” or “road”) and drove through the campus’ East Gate. Guards wearing red armbands (indicating membership in the Communist party) questioned Xia briefly and in a moment we were being dropped off in front of a large apartment building right inside the university’s eastern wall. After checking in, we made our way up to my new home on the 11^th floor of Building 23. The apartment consists of two rooms—a living space that contains a television and several kitchen appliances, and a bedroom with a bathroom attached. The mattress is incredibly firm, which I’m not used to, but I wake up in the morning with my back feeling much better than it has felt when I’ve slept in softer beds. I essentially take a shower on top of the toilet, which is typical for an apartment here, and I was happy to see that there is no programming on television that is not in Mandarin, which 1) makes the TV useful exclusively as an assistant in learning the language, 2) puts me a position to do a great amount of reading, and 3) pushes me to spend time outside enjoying the waning Beijing summer.

What is perhaps the most impressive part of the apartment is the view. Building 23 (all of the residential buildings on campus have no names attached; they’re simply numbered) is the southernmost apartment building in a row of a half dozen, and my room faces south. Not only do I have a spectacular view of the campus to the south and the city skyline further on, but I’ve also been lucky enough to have a room that fits into the model suggested by traditional feng shui, wherein the home should face south to allow as much natural light as possible into the room. The picture above is a shot of the view I get every night from my apartment window, the view I can see out my window right now if I turn the lights off—absolutely beautiful.

The smog, however, is the one thing that prevents the view from being completely perfect. Even now, the neon lights of the skyscrapers and apartment buildings in the distance look muffled through the cloud of dust that is knocking up against my apartment window. Although my lungs seem to have adjusted, sometimes when I blow my nose there are faint streaks of dirt strewn across the tissue paper. There is one time of day, however, where the smog seems to have something of a positive aesthetic effect.

During the early evenings, when the summer sun that I can’t see through the smog is failing in the west, and the day is getting cooler, the sky gradually turns from a stormy gray to the lightest hue of pink imaginable, then very slowly into deeper shades of pink and purple as the sun sets. During the day, when the sun is geared up to its full brightness, the sky is usually nothing but drab. But when that light begins to dwindle, it illuminates the smog gently with pastel colors that I’ve never seen during nightfall anywhere else. This is the only time of day when I’m comfortable opening up my apartment windows to let some “fresh” air in. Even though there’s almost certainly just as much smog in the air as there was before, the vision of the skyline becomes crisper and the air is much cooler and even refreshing.

After having arrived in the city on Monday, I’ve spent the past several days primarily focused on getting settled in—figuring out appliances, dining halls, internet connectivity, shopping, and the like. Yesterday, I went with Xia to Yuanmingyuan, which I’ll write about in a following post. But no day has been more activity-filled than that first day I arrived on campus, Monday, when I first became familiar with the campus’ layout, its dining halls, its supermarket, and its bike stores along its western edge, on Zhongguacun Lu. (A word on pronunciation: “zh-“ in hanyu pinyin is pronounced with a “j-“ sound, while “c” is pronounced with a sound I still haven’t mastered—like the “-ts” in “cats,” almost a “tz-“ sound.)