Warm Beer

After a hectic week culminating in two busy days and two long nights in a row, I finally have pulled the trigger on committing to another longish session in front of my laptop to get back to the business of recounting what an amazing time my time in Beijing continues to be. I’ve completed two weeks of class, and find myself sitting here on a Sunday night basking in the glory of the week-long holiday that is happening this week on account of National Day, occurring this Wednesday. Fifty-nine years ago, on October 2^nd, 1949, the newly-victorious Communist party passed a “Resolution on the National Day of the People’s Republic of China” that bestowed on the previous day (October 1^st) the honor or being a Golden Week that allotted for a seven-day holiday from work for Chinese. Why the resolution was officially passed the day after the actual National Day, I wouldn’t know.

Regardless, I have this week off from work. While many of my colleagues are joining the millions of Beijingers who use this week to indulge in a little domestic tourism, I’m hanging tight in Beijing, content with passing these eleven days by seeing the many sights around the city I’ve yet to see, by studying Mandarin, and by reworking syllabi. A layer of smog has returned after several pristine days of blue skies mixed with wisps of cirrus clouds. I am hoping that the layer of loess vapor and car exhaust lifts for a few tomorrow so that I can get a few nice pictures in of the Summer Palace and the rest of the area around the Western Hills. I should have some great photos ready for display when I next post later next week.

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By the last half-hour of my eighth class this week, which occurred on Wednesday afternoon, I thought that my brain was going to boil in my head if I had to spend another minute going over the PowerPoint presentation that I had now been through seven and a half times in the past two days. In retrospect, it was a ridiculous model for an oral English class—I was speaking at my students with the intention in mind of teaching them how to speak properly. They liked the PowerPoint, however. God knows they’ve both constructed and sat through too many of them, but from what I gather that method of breaking complex ideas down into perhaps overly-simplified bullet points is more comfortable for many of them than any alternative I didn’t come up with. Despite the lack of ClipArt and photographs—two of the critical components that seem to hold a near-magical sway over attracting a Chinese audience’s attention to what comes off to me as Microsoft-managed electrobabble—they seemed generally appreciative of the specificity and scope of the discussion and of my attempts to keep them involved through questions and showy examples of what I meant by “bad body language.”

What had to have been the highlight of classes this week was the example presentation I gave setting up for our unit on Showing and Telling, which will commence when everyone gets back from break. I put the title of my presentation on the board—“My Medal”—and then proceeded to explain the history and significance of the dime-sized medal of Mother Cabrini that I carry around on the keychain that I keep in my right front pocket, along with some other things that I carry with me always.

Following a rejection preventing her from doing missionary work in China because of chronic bad health, Mother Cabrini was a young Italian girl when she was sent by the Pope to New York, where she first opened an orphanage in Ulster County upstate, followed by almost 70 other schools and orphanages across the nation. Several of the schools and orphanages she set up were located in New York City. I explained to the class that the medal reminds me of various parts of my identity: my family (my mother is an educator and Mother Cabrini is a well-known figure in the neighborhood around the high school my father graduated from), my job (she was, of course, a teacher like me), and my religion (she was Catholic—the first nationalized American that was ever canonized, actually). I contextualized the medal by saying that, in some ways, this medal was more precious to me than any of the other medals received by the Olympians and Paralympians in Beijing over the past month—it didn’t need to be made out of gold, silver, or bronze to be important to me.

They seemed totally captivated, especially the freshmen. I can imagine that many of them were considering how “extroverted” their teacher is, and how strange and foreign this whole religion thing was to them. Many students came up after class and asked me the question Xia dropped on me a couple of weeks ago—“do you believe in God?” “Yes,” I said. “It’s a part of my religion.”

“We don’t have religion in China,” was the general response, although one student went so far as to note that there are some religions, like Buddhism in Tibet and Islam in Xinjiang, but that they were different than the Confucianism, Taoism, and ancestor worship more familiar to most Chinese, which weren’t widely practiced and seemed to hold less sway over ideology than Christianity did to me. I then explained to them that, although there are many parts of the United States in which Christianity takes on a more fundamental role in everyday life, I came from a more skeptical portion of America in which religion plays less of a role in, for instance, political decision-making. Several students stayed after class as I talked about what Catholics have to do to be good Catholics—go to mass, take communion, have their sins absolved, etc. Not wanting to go too far down a dark road, I cut the conversation off when I felt the students were beginning to feel that the conversation was less of an intellectual discussion and more of a covert missionary’s pitch.

I then explained the assignment—that I wanted them to attempt to find a unique object to bring in that perhaps no one else has, and that will allow them to tell the class a little bit more about themselves and about their lives. I wanted them to choose objects that were interesting, that had a story behind how the student obtained them and related to them.

I began getting emails a couple of days ago, as students began more seriously brainstorming about what they wanted to bring in. The first email I received was from a student in one of my Advanced Speaking courses—who seem like the most diligent students I have, at this point—asking if he could bring in his “personal scheduler,” his PDA. The next email asked if a “high school textbook” was an appropriate object. And then I got an email about a student who wants to bring in a whole “fish tank,” the former home of a beloved turtle. Although I think they get the point that I want some kind of personal story to be told, many students seem confused about what objects to choose to access such a story. The issue seems to be that they’re picking fairly common objects with the intention of telling a tale about their novel experiences behind this commonly-held object, which may produce more interesting presentations than one might think. I tried to suggest souvenirs and family heirlooms as very interesting objects for Show and Tell, but not many people seemed to have much in the way of souvenirs or heirlooms lying around their crowded dorm rooms. Many of the freshman have gone home for break, so I think that they might be able to come back with some really interesting materials.

After class on Tuesday I headed towards the southwestern part of campus, into the neighborhood south of the Old Gate. I had heard from several people about a delicious restaurant on the third floor of some building around here, by a Bank of Beijing. Biking over the canal bridge and under the canopy of oak tree limbs hanging above me, I looked around at the low-walled, brown-brick walls of hundred-year-old Chinese tenements. Through doors covered in thick, blood-red paint left ajar I was able to look into the stone courtyards and gardens hidden away by the brick walls that lined the shaded street. Off of each small, square courtyard, other paths and other doorways led to homes and other courtyards beyond. This area, originally just outside of the old campus walls, was one of the oldest on the modern Tsinghua campus. Larger, dozen-story-high apartment buildings flanked the older, brown-brick courtyards on the street I was cruising down, and after a minute or so I found a Bank of Beijing. Down the street, two stories about a large greengrocer and fruit shop, was the restaurant I was looking for.

It really is more like a food court than a restaurant. Walking in through the door, small fluorescent lights hanging from a ceiling of black plastic latticework light up hundreds of small, plastic tables with students sitting at them, eating quietly and hurriedly. Along two opposite sides of the large room are rows of food vendors, private enterpriseurs shouting at you as you walk by to come by their food and not that also-really-delicious-looking stuff ten feet further away. I walked around for a bit, and each time my eyes came within several feet of the food in the glass cases in front of a stall, the owner would begin hawking to me quickly and repetitively in Chinese. I settled on a noodle bar that had a fantastic-looking beef noodle dish. For 7 yuan, I was handed a bowl containing perhaps a quart of beef broth, bok choy, carrots, celery, coriander, and beef chunks, with wide, hand-rolled rice noodles sitting at the bottom waiting to be fished out.

It was love at first sight. I’ve been back to the restaurant almost every day since Tuesday, haggling with the early evening vendors for a bit of fruit laid out on the sidewalk after I come outside from my meal. There’s always plenty of fruit to buy on the street at around 6pm or so; grocers simply take everything outside that might spoil overnight and try to unload it at whatever price they can get. The one variety of dumplings at this place that I’ve tried were outstanding, and there’s only about a dozen other kinds to try next. Last night, I had a Korean dish that I’ve had before called bibimbab—a flaming-hot stone bowl filled with sticky rice, about ten different kinds of vegetables, one kind of meat, and then topped with a fried egg, sesame seeds, and thick red chili sauce. Although it was 12 yuan (less than $2 but more expensive that what I’m used to paying for dinner here), I could barely fit it all in my stomach and was hard-pressed to not simply inhale everything in the bowl in about 30 seconds.

After class on Wednesday, a colleague and I went out for some drinks, and the evening brought us to a rock club just outside of Tsinghua’s southern gate. I had heard about a place called “D-22” before, about how mind-shatteringly loud the music can be, and about the lack of quality acts that come through there. Hipply-attired Beida students were jumping around as a thrash punk band screamed in their faces, and the music wasn’t quite as loud as it is at some of the venues I’ve been to in Boston, nor quite as good. As we hung out perhaps a bit longer than my friend would have liked, I tried to drink in the phenomenon that is Chinese counter-culture. The band—the “Carsick Cars,” maybe?—performed a couple of rousing Joan Jett covers that had me smiling and bobbing my head. The quality of the music left something to be desired, but there was something reassuring about the volume of energy being released by the kids bellowing out into the smoky room. In China (as in America, in certain respects) there seems to be an enormous space that gets filled up by the things people don’t say to one another—“thank you,” “sorry,” “please,” “shut up, you moron,” “I can’t stand this,” etc. In a place filled with people and students who seem in some ways to be living lives of quiet desperation far beyond what even Thoreau could have imagined, it was powerful to see young people living this vibrantly and aggressively, as ridiculous as the scene may have gotten at times. Regardless, I’ll be back to D-22 soon, I think.

On Friday another colleague that I’ve become friends with and I went down to the Public Security Bureau to pick up our residency permits, the documents that will allow us to take up residence in China for ten months, thereby completing the month-long immigration process. The university went through the trouble of applying for and picking up our foreign expert certificates right after we arrived, but with the residency permits, my friend and I were on our own. Luckily, a week earlier I had been to the PSB to drop off my passport, which I picked up on Friday with a new “residency visa” pasted into one of its pages. My friend had also been there before, and we spent the two hours of so traveling to and from the PSB talking about how the place gave off the vibes of “a DMV on steroids.” Same deal—take a number, wait, come up, have all 5 or 7 or 11 documents that you need, and if one of them is out of order, go home and come back later. Luckily, we were just there to pick up, which required us to fork over 400RMB to pay for the glue and 3.2 seconds of labor time it took to paste the visa into our passports. We brought over our receipts to the desk where we were to pick up our passports (China, along with being a land of stamps and signatures, is a land of receipts—receipts for everything, and you better not lose them, because that’s the only way you can either get a refund, or get some valuable document back, etc.), and a security guard grabbed the white pieces of paper out of our hands before we knew what was happening. It was the same security guard that I had seen working behind that desk a week ago, sitting in the same chair in the same exact place. A young woman behind him handed him our passports over his shoulder and, after glancing at them for a moment, he threw our passports to us with the deftness of a veteran Vegas five-card dealer. Imagine: all day long, taking receipts, handing back passports, over and over again, for days, months, years. I wonder still how much the small process of tossing passports back to patrons alleviated the sense of unbearable repetitiveness that must come with such a mindless occupation. The passport man was the one person in the PSB we saw who actually smiled at us after we were done conducting business with him.

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I’ve been here for a whole month now. Just over, actually. In many ways, it seems like it’s been a long time, and in some ways, it feels as if it has been no time. From Monday through Wednesday, it feels as if I’m living and working in just another city—my mind is occupied enough that I could be going through the same routine in Chicago, or Los Angeles, or New York or Miami. But when I wake up on Thursdays and am given a few hours to reflect on how things are going, time slows down a bit and I still think to myself how incredible it is that I am here, in China, in Beijing—that I am teaching at a college here, that I am learning Mandarin, that I am looking to being to learn more about and practice taiqi, that I attended a Paralympic gold medal game and held a gold medal in my hands—all in a month. On Saturday night, sitting by the shores of Houhai Lake, sipping beer after a massive feed on Uygur cuisine, hanging out on the roof of a Thai restaurant overlooking the Drum and Bell Towers right across the treetops from me, I thought to myself, “so I am here, wherever that is.” As quickly as they have moved, almost every day has brought an experience that makes me laugh hysterically, or droop depressingly, or flush angrily. Those are the motions of life, and I feel them intensely and constantly here in Beijing.

The Portuguese teacher from Beida who is in my Mandarin class mentioned last night that his son is one of six Portuguese soldiers deployed in the Middle East based on NATO obligations to the United States. He is an officer in the Portuguese Special Forces unit, and he’s teaching ethics and tactics to a fledgling Iraqi police force in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Despite the relative security provided by the five-meter-thick walls and Kevlar vests, my classmate still worries desperately about his son getting involved in combat brought about by a war that the Portuguese have been drawn into largely against their will. His wife moved from China back to Lisbon to be closer to the rest of their family during this difficult time. His soon is slated to return home soon, at which time he’ll travel back through Macau to Lisbon to be with his child again.

After class last night, I stopped by a small shop located in the lobby of an apartment building on the bike route back from Mandarin class to my dorm. I’ve stopped by this place maybe a half-dozen times since I first got to know the Wudaokou neighborhood, and I use the minutes I spend in there trying to begin to use what little textbook knowledge of Mandarin I possess. The shop appears to be run by the entire building—there are usually between two and zero people working in it, and frequently the person running the cash register is someone who I’ve never seen before. Most of the attendants there are women, perhaps the wives of husbands who are out hustling around Beijing while their spouses attempt to earn a bit of extra income while staying at home watching the children. On the typical night after class, I’ll stop by for a minute to pick up a bag of chips to snack on and a beer to put me to sleep as I read back in my apartment. I asked for a beer last night, and the woman on duty walked past the refrigerator and into the hallway in back, appearing a moment later with a slightly-over-room-temperature beer to put into my hand. “Cold beer?” (“Bing pijiu?”) She shook her head and said, “no.” I pointed to the refrigerator, insistent, and she smiled back at me, wrapping her arms around her fleece-covered body, shivering dramatically. “Bad for you in this weather,” she said. Or something to that effect.

The temperature around Beijing has dropped by about 20 or so degrees Fahrenheit since last week. Apparently, a typhoon that hit southern China about two weeks ago has sucked a bunch of cold air down from Inner Mongolia onto the North China Plain, giving early September the feel of late October around the city. Even during warm weather, the Chinese are generally quite averse to cold beverages. I’ve heard two different reasons. One is because warmer drinks are apparently better for digestion—your body doesn’t have to expend any energy cooling down what you’re drinking, and the temperature of the stuff your drinking matches the temperature of the stuff that you’re eating, making the mash in your stomach more rapidly absorbable. Secondly, I’ve heard that the aversion also comes from the sense that, in the case of water served warm, people want to sense that what might have been once dirty water was perhaps recently boiled and is still cooling.

This woman at this small shop I have now visited several times and that I will return to was showing genuine concern for my well-being by serving me a warm beer when she knew that people like me usually like cold ones. She was trying to keep me warm on a cold night.

This is China, and it’s quickly beginning to feel more and more like home.