First Week of Class

I can imagine that there are probably more than a couple of readers that I’ve lost because I’ve taken too long in between posts. Just so we can both be on the same page in terms of expectations, I’ll say that I’m probably going to be posting just about every week to two weeks, which, given the typical length of each post, seems appropriate. There might be the odd post here or there, but in general I would expect about one big one each week, especially towards the end of the week and the weekend—all 16 of my credit hours are packed into the first three weekdays, so Thursdays, Fridays and the weekend will be left for throwing myself into learning Mandarin, maybe practicing taiqi or some other kind of martial arts, reading, and posting on this blog. Thanks to everyone that’s read and especially to those that are still reading.

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I’m teaching seven speaking classes this semester and one writing class. As mentioned above, in total, that’s 16 credit hours—a full course load. In all, as it stands right now, I have just about 200 students in those eight classes. I say “as it stands right now” because, during the first three weeks of the semester, the students have the option of jumping in and out of classes that seem more or less conducive to their interests and study habits. So, because of the National Day holiday coming up two weeks from now, my classes will really not be set in stone until the second week of October—a frustrating prospect, when my job is largely to become quickly familiar with 200 students so that they feel comfortable speaking in front of and writing for a foreigner. For many of the freshman, I’m the first white person they’ve ever had as a teacher or as an acquaintance, and their reactions largely tell me that their minds are pretty blown by the whole scenario.

For the past two weeks previous to Monday I’ve been slowly picking away at the preparation process, so by the time last Saturday and Sunday rolled around, I felt quite comfortable with what I had set up. Walking into my first class on Monday made me feel even better—35 freshman faces stared up at me from their desks with a mixture of nervousness, amazement and excitement on their faces. This was their first ever class at Tsinghua. Many of them come from small towns in more rural provinces, and the fact that they had a young-looking white kid standing in front of them waiting to teach them how to speak English must have subsequently been quite a trip. I made a point of welcoming this first class to the university, and, as I did with each subsequent class, I informed them that it was an honor to be their teacher. I told them that I believed that, throughout the semester, there would be a tremendous amount of teaching being done not just by me but by them, and I mentioned that several assignments had been shaped in order to help them teach me a little bit more about this incredible new country I’m trying to wrap my head around a bit more.

The syllabi I’ve set up, which are largely the same for all of my speaking classes, are pretty comprehensive; I made sure to include some heady vocabulary and phrasing in there, so that we had something to go over on the very first day of class. For many of them, I think it was all a bit too much of a shock. I teach three freshman speaking courses for English majors. After each one, several students would hang around outside the classroom, wanting one of two things: 1) my mobile phone number so that they could have more time to practice their English/talk to me about basketball, or 2) a new syllabus that actually made sense. Several students went so far as to say that they literally understood nothing that I said. On her way out of class following the end of my third class on Monday, a girl repeated to me what she had said once already during class discussion: “I would like it more if you made this class fun.” When she had said it in front of the class earlier, I laughed and said that I’ll try to find a clown suit over the weekend and I’ll wear it to class on Monday.

Most freshman at Tsinghua have somewhere between 5 and 10 years of intensive experience with English. The issue is that this experience is almost entire relegated to reading and writing, and not to spoken English. By making the syllabus so comprehensive and (in typical fashion for me) wordy I had really thrown many of them into a bit of a tailspin of nerves and anxiety. There is also a somewhat dramatic quality apparent in these frazzled students somewhere in there, but I think this conclusion is tied into students perhaps making their situation sound worse with the hopes of me losing faith and making the course uselessly easy. For a student to say that they understood “nothing”—which several of them emphatically confirmed and reconfirmed, several times over, in English—seems to me a bit much.

Seven people showed up to my second class on Monday. During our orientation three weeks ago, we had been told by the department that all classes with less than 10 students enrolled would be cancelled. I asked the class if they had ever heard of this regulation, to which one girl replied, “oh, don’t worry—there’s more than 10 people in this class.” I responded by asking here where they were, then, on the first day of class. She laughed nervously in my face. I asked them to go around the room and to mention, in their oral introductions, from which province in China they were from. All seven of them let out a laugh simultaneously—“we’re Korean,” they told me.

The classes in the department are segregated by nationality; some classes have all Chinese students, and others have foreign students, the biggest contingency of which come from South Korea. Korean students enrolled at Tsinghua have an infamous relationship with the Department of Foreign Languages here. At our orientation, several different teachers spoke up to complain “about the Koreans.” In past classes that they had taught, several teachers noted that attendance and plagiarism were severe problems amongst their “foreign”/Korean classes. Apparently, several students had been failed but subsequently were granted a passing grade by the department after they went over the teacher’s head and appealed to one of the deans. The appeals process only involves the Chinese dean of the department and the complaining student, while the teacher of the course is left out of the equation. As one of my colleagues asked rhetorically outside of the conference room following the end of the meeting, “who goes to school in China to learn English, anyways?” Or so I’ve heard, many of the Korean students end up at Tsinghua after having been rejected from the universities in South Korea and America they applied to with more comprehensive English programs. The key factor in this whole equation seems to be money—parents of Korean students are willing to pay, and Tsinghua is more than happy to have the business. Left without much incentive to perform while going to school in a foreign country where partying is cheap, the Korean students in the department have gained the reputation of being unappreciative and lazy. They act, of course, just like many students from middle-class and upper middle-class families in America when they encounter the freedom and responsibility of university life. They are frequently cited as at times some of the most fun students to teach, as they are generally much more extroverted than their Chinese peers.

I have two foreign classes in total. All of my students in those classes are Korean, with two exceptions: in one class, there is a girl from Myanmar and another from Kazakhstan. The girl from Myanmar (formerly Burma) repeated her name to me at least six times, spelled it for me, and I still had absolutely no clue how to pronounce it. I also have two Uygur (pronounced “WEE-gur”) girls in two different classes. Uygurs are a famous (or infamous, to the Chinese government) ethnic minority from the largest province in China, Xinjiang, which takes up essentially the entire northwest quadrant of the country.

Like Tibetans, Uygurs speak a different language (a Turkish dialect), follow a different religion (Islam), and have had since they were incorporated into the country in 1949 an active secession movement that has been given to bouts of terrorism around China. During the Olympics, it was supposed threats by Uygur separatists that was marketed as the government’s excuse to crack down even further on security regulations designed supposedly to “protect” both Chinese and foreigners in the country—arbitrary measures like not allowing any foreign residents living on university grounds to have anyone stay overnight at their apartment, rules that are still in effect now and that will probably remain in effect for the foreseeable future. After my writing class on Tuesday evening, the Uygur student walked up to me outside and introduced herself. She at first just told me her name and thanked me for a nice first class, but as I was riding away she practically shouted into my back: “I’m a minority student!” I stopped in my tracks and turned around, and asked her where she was from. She was impressed that when she said Xinjiang (pronounced “szhin-jiang”) I asked if she was a Uygur. We talked for a moment about how I had heard about their culture from a friend in Boston who had done a lot of work to invite a threatened Uygur scholar to come study at her university, less for a visit and more for purposes of finding a safe haven outside of China. She sighed, kind of nervously smiled, and said, “yes, well…” It was the kind of sigh that told a hell of story. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Jena as the semester moves on about what it’s like to not conform in a country that is unhealthily obsessed with falling in line and not asking questions.

In many ways, the uniqueness of the people and the challenges that the foreign students pose to me might end up making them some of my most interesting students. One of the quirks that struck me like an anvil falling from the sky was when many of them, in their oral introductions to the class, brought up the issue of weight problems. When Jay, a Korean third-year student, stood up to introduce himself during my second period class on Monday, the words coming out of his mouth practically rumbled out of him—he looked a bit awkward, but the sheer size of him seemed to command the student’s respect. He was wearing a sweatsuit and looked as if he was either coming from the gym or heading there after class. He looked like he could have been a defensive end on the high school football team. “I used to be very fat,” he declared to 12 or so perfect strangers. “Very fat—over 100 kilograms. Then my father made me run 8 miles a day. I ran a lot and slowly got less fat. Now I enjoy staying in shape when I am not studying.” I commended Jay straight-facedly for his resolve and thanked him for his introduction. Earlier in the day, another girl had stood up and said something to the effect of, “I am a fat girl. I enjoy food very much, but maybe too much.” Again, I tried not to flinch in shock lest in be interpreted by the class as a malicious reaction. I told her that I did not think that she was fat—which, by American standards certainly, she wasn’t. It seemed as if the female Korean students in my classes were particularly preoccupied with weight issues, but there were comments made by Korean men as well as male and female Chinese students. I didn’t quite know what to say when each of them cited something about their weight in their introductions. It was something that, gauging by class reaction, was slightly embarrassing, but which was clearly discussed very openly anyways outside of class. I know that, at least in Chinese culture, extreme thinness (to an American’s eye) among women is a highly-valued characteristic. It seems as if weight is just something that is way more out in the open and subject to dialogue over here.

By far the biggest surprise of the first week was how much more accomplished the non-English majors were than the English majors in terms of their English skills. Three of the English major speaking courses I’m teaching are freshman courses, so although they’ve had a bunch of exposure to reading and writing English, many of them have never heard nor spoken much English at all in their lives. Zhang Nainai came up to me after our class on Tuesday morning looking very upset; she was one of my students who apparently did not understand anything at all about what had just happened in the last hour and a half of my class. She looked close to the brink of tears and could hardly express herself in English, under as much duress as she was at the moment. “I’m from a small town in Hunan,” she said, “and you’re the first foreign teacher I’ve ever had. The other students, I can tell they can see what you’re saying. But I can’t. What can I do?” I told her to, first of all, not worry so much—“it’s a long semester,” I told her, “and I guarantee you that you were not the only student in there who felt confused.” After she spent about ten minutes reiterating how scared she was about the class and about not doing well, she excused herself for taking up too much of my time and ran off. The foreign/Korean English majors that are second, third, and fourth year students are generally on about the same level in speaking ability as the Chinese freshman that I have. During their introductions, when I asked any of the girls whether or not they had many hobbies, the two most popular responses were “no” and “shopping”—one word answers. The most articulate answer I had came from Ralph, who had clearly had a thorough background in English. After standing up and brushing himself off, Ralph tousled his expensively-styled hair and broke into an extended metaphor comparing himself to a peach—“soft and fuzzy on the outside, sweet on the inside.” That drew giggles from the girls and high-fives from the boys in the class. I laughed gently and thanked him for the very poetic description.

Many of the engineers, architects, biologists, chemists, designers, and artists that populate the speaking elective courses that I teach actually possess a much greater knowledge of textbook English grammar than I do. Their pronunciation of course needs frequent correction, and they sometimes phrase things improperly, but they seemed to understand everything I said and I understood everything they said. They speak slowly but precisely, and there wasn’t one bit of heady vocabulary that escaped the grasp of at least one person in each class. Pressed for time because I had taken too long explaining the syllabus in one class, I said that we only had about one minute or less for each of the 35 of them to stand up and introduce themselves to the class. I’ll be damned if one of them took more than 45 seconds, and all of the each managed to fit in everything I requested of them—Chinese name, English name if they had one, major, and then “something about yourself that I wouldn’t know by looking at you.” Their responses were thoughtful and funny, and they were so efficient that we were left with 10 minutes to kill before the class ended. I opened up the floor for them to ask me questions, and I was barraged. Most poignantly, a girl asked me what differences I perceived between “perhaps the old, backwards China I was expecting and the new, modern China” I saw here in Beijing. I clarified that I wasn’t expecting to see cow pastures outside the campus walls, but that I was surprised particularly by how much the Haidian District (one part of which I learned tonight is known as the “Silicon Valley of China”) looks like a central business district and not an outlying neighborhood. These were by far my best students, and I think that three classes worth of them (around 110 in total) is going to make for some intelligent, heated discussion as the semester moves on.

I also began taking Mandarin lessons this week. There is a small language school down by the subway stop that is run by a Korean company that was recommended to me by a colleague, and, after my first class on Thursday night, I was happy with the teacher and the pace. I went again yesterday evening, and will be going to the class for an hour an a half, five days a week for the foreseeable future. The class is an eclectic one, to say the least—one Portuguese language teacher from Macau who teaches at Beijing University (BeiDa), a post-doctoral Japanese thirty-something also working out of BeiDa, an Icelandic girl, two Puerto Ricans, and a Norwegian. It’s a small class, so there’s plenty of time for the teacher—Teacher Ming (Ming laoshi), a young Chinese woman in her late 20s—to hear and correct all of our pronunciation at multiple points throughout the class. As of yet, I haven’t been asked to pay for any classes, so there’s another boon.

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I met Rob and his son, Doug, on the plane ride over from Newark into Beijing when I was first heading over to Paul’s place in Hong Kong before heading to Beijing. I met him while still sitting in the airport in New Jersey. Doug, who was about 7 or so years old, wandered over to me, fascinated by my headphones and egged on by the faces I was making at him. After a few minutes we were leafing through his Star Wars picture book together, looking for pictures of explosions. At one point during the flight over, John came by where I was sitting and reading and struck up a conversation about what I was going to be doing in China. He explained that he was in the scooter business—in the scooter machinery and parts business, specifically—and that he had been commuting back and forth between North Carolina and his supplier in Shandong province periodically for several years now. At first, the trips were to simply check on and fix some hiccups that were happening with the supply line, but China soon grew on him and he’s begun to spend more and more time over here as the years have passed. He’s a bright-eyed Stanford graduate who looks the part of a Californian intellectual, and the conversation was essentially an introductory lecture on “Foreign Chinese Entrepreneurism 101.” After we finished our conversation on the plane he handed me his card and told me to drop him a line when I settled in. I did, and today when he was in Haidian getting buying a camera lens he gave me a call and we met up for some fried rice, kung pao chicken, and a couple of beers. As I was sitting there talking to him about how things were getting on with the job at the university, it began to occur to me just how big and at the same time how small the world is, and how strange it is how these relationships that one forges while traveling or living abroad seem to literally fall out of the sky.

It was yet another moment of pleasurable vertigo, a feeling that has occurred several times over the first month or so I’ve been here in town. Dodging buses and scooters on the ride up Zhongguancunlu and into campus’ west gate, I couldn’t help but feel slightly integrated into this blossoming global city. I smiled at the ridiculous sense of pride washing over me as I smelled the mixture of sewage and willow leaves hanging in the night air. I've been sniffling constantly for the past week or so: seasonal allergies, I think. Every night it's getting colder now. Soon the mountains to the west of school will start changing colors as leaves begin to fall, and I will go hiking there. Autumn is coming in Beijing.

An American Tragedy

I was told earlier today by a fellow American foreign teacher in Tsinghua's Department of Foreign Languages that American literature has suffered a tremendous setback. David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest as well as other novels, essays, and short stories, was found dead after apparently hanging himself to death in his home in Claremont, California on Saturday. He was 46.

Wallace was noted by many critics as one of the best, if not the best, living American writers. He has (had?) some stiff competition in this category--Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon--but he is right up there with the very best of our time. A piece of fiction from a 2007 edition of the New Yorker, called "Good People," was recommended to me by the same colleague that told me about the tragedy. It's quite short, but rife with the brilliance that has given Wallace his reputation in the world of American (and global) letters. Please give it a Google and check it out if you have a few minutes to spare.

Rou

I had dinner tonight with Xia, the girl who was assigned by the university to show me around when I first arrived in Beijing. The last time I saw her was about 10 days ago, when we went exploring in the Yuanmingyuan relics park across the street from the university. I met her in front of her dormitory a bit after the 6pm rush on the dining halls.

We talked about how we each were doing on the walk across campus, and we also chatted about what we were doing to prepare for class. She insisted that I not be nervous because “teaching in China is easy,” meaning to assuage my nervousness, I take it, and not to knock my profession. I laughed and asked her where in China she had taught before, and she caught the joke, laughing.

I told her that I was going to ask her to identify exclusively jirou (chicken) for me to eat, after the last time I was here and accidentally ordered eel. (It really wasn’t that bad until the third or fourth bite or so, after which the texture was just too much to bear. What’s even crazier was that I could see it sitting there on the buffet line—no ambiguous menus involved—and it was the most appetizing-looking thing in eyeshot.) I got a massive bowl of rice with my sweet-and-sour chicken, along with a broccoli and pork dish that was very salty, but not as salty as most of the dishes served over here. Food in the Tsinghua dining halls have two primary flavors—extremely salty, and extremely spicy. I really like the spicy stuff, but—and this is amazing, being the salt hound that I am—I am really developing an appreciation for bland food in reaction to the blood pressure nightmare represented by the amount of sodium in Chinese food.

The sodium and the eel aside, the dining halls here are probably the best deal in town for a meal, as of right now. I'm sure that there's other things out around Wudaokou that are just as cheap, but I can't imagine a place where the variety is as far-reaching and where you can point to pre-made bins of food instead of having to deal with hundreds of Chinese characters. At somewhere between 3 and 5 kuai for breakfast, and 5 and 7 kuai for dinner (exchange rate: 6.7 kuai = $1), 100 kuai on my meal card can last for quite some time. As it is that I'm trying to budget in order to save for traveling and random extravagances that might cost me a bunch, the dining halls and on-campus restaurants are what I'll be sticking with for a while, I think.

We sat down, and I'm not quite sure what it was, but the conversation got off to a quick start:

“Do you believe in God?” Xia asked.

The last few times we had eaten together, I had taken a moment or three before eating to examine my food before diving in—usually because I had no idea what it was that was in front of me. After seeing me bow my head and cast my eyes downward for what must have seemed like a moment of silence before eating for the second or third time, Xia asked, “are you praying?” I smiled and replied that I wasn't, but that I could see how it looked like I was. I also said that showing such thankfulness in the face of a heaping plate of food seemed like an extremely sensible thing to do.

But this enquiry caught me a bit off guard—Xia wasn't mincing words, and I didn't quite know how to respond.

“Yes, I think so. I believe in something larger than humanity or the universe that logically must have predated and that perhaps still oversees all things. I like the idea of God or a Creator, to the extent that it makes you humble, but I don't like the conflicts that different interpretations of such a force often create.”

She had just visited a multi-denominational church on the Tsinghua campus with a friend of hers that was Korean. They had knocked down a couple of walls on the 15th floor of a dormitory and made space for a congregation. It was the first time she had ever been in an organized place of worship in her entire life. She remarked about how strange organized religion was and I agreed. I then described to her what I meant by the term, “cult,” and the distinction (or lack thereof) between that term and another one, “religion.”

What's endlessly interesting to me is how I often feel like I'm the one getting an education in English while I'm speaking with different peopleover here. Words and concepts that once seemed familiar or graspable become alienated from my understanding, or defamiliarized, and I then realize how true it is that different languages and cultures don't simply have different ways of saying the same things, but instead they have very different ways of saying and thinking very different things. It would seem, then, that cultural differences might stem from language differences--or is it the other way around? I think of how the Chinese can get very blunt sometimes--it is not impoilite to say to a waiter or waitress "give/get me that one" when ordering food, and how saying "please" is in some contexts considered somewhat effeminate--and how Western cultural practices can be a bit more gentle, and how the languages of each have adjusted--or have the languages adjusted the cultures? I don't know...

We started talking about the concept of infinity, and Xia insisted that there is nothing that is infinite. “Things change all the time,” she said, “no thing ever stays the same forever.” I thought that was in many ways awfully wise, thinking a bit about thermodynamics and such, but there were of course problems with the statement. I didn't want to get too far into semantics, however, considering Xia's limited-but-increasingly-impressive English and my nonexistent Mandarin.

Xia mentioned that there were three big religious groups in China, but she either couldn't come up with the English terms for them despite my intervention, or she didn't know what they were. I didn't want to stumble into a political discussion here, even though Xia had demonstrated in the past either an incredible degree of naivete or a very original brand of logic when it came to blindly defending the party line (without indignance or a sense of skepticism) when it came to abnormal norms in China. Despite the strangeness or “cultishness,” Xia finally mentioned, she could see why people like me and her friends liked religion.

On the subject of infinity, we came of course to the mutually terrifying idea of death. What scares Xia the most about it, she said to me almost trembling, is not her own death, but the death of one or both of her parents before she was ready for them to pass away. The one “religion” I've heard Chinese subscribe to in large numbers is a kind of ancestor worship, and in this regard Xia was no exception. Beyond losing her parents, what most scared her was the idea of losing her parents before they've seen her surpass them in terms of material success and/or social prestige. I assured her that, like my parents and most parents, all they typically ever want is for their children to be happy. Different cultures have different techniques of either suggesting or trying to assure or demand “happiness” for their young ones, but I saw that as the common denominator, and Xia agreed.

We then moved onto less weighty subject: whether or not it is morally reprehensible that human beings raise thousands and millions of animals only to kill them before their time for food. “Life is life,” Xia stated in her typical tone of tremendous understatement. “There are no levels.” She had a plate of chicken there in front of her, and acknowledged the hypocrisy. “Whenever I cannot finish my food, especially rou [“flesh,” “meat”], I get very, very sad and angry at myself.” I told her about a couple of people I know who hunt, and how once, when I was coming down on him for his insensitivity to animal rights, one of them asked how I could eat meat without being willing to kill the animal I'm eating myself. Xia was horrified, but understood.

Let it be noted that, at several points in our conversation, Xia said that she thought I was missing what her point was. I insisted that I didn't think that I was, and we she remembered that I had majored in philosophy she felt embarrassed that she had repeatedly said such a thing. I assured her that, despite my background, it is entirely possible that, given the language barrier and our different backgrounds and general approaches to life, I had in fact misunderstood her at some point.

As I was about to pedal off on my bike (which is, despite a easily-fixable loosening pair of handlebars, holding up admirably), Xia brought up something that we had talked about the last time we met—her thought that Americans, when compared to Chinese, are very “extroverted.” I again agreed, and began to see that she seemed to find these conversations in some way very cathartic. I thanked her for what I took to be a compliment and rode off towards the other side of campus.

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My office on the first floor of the Department of Foreign Languages is a broom closet. Literally. It was exclusively a broom/wash closet in the past, but a week or so ago the staff converted it into an office for three or four foreign staff members. I'm making it sound worse than it seems, however--there are several computers with internet access, and great natural light during the day. The office is northward-facing, so it stays cool essentially all day. I have a small courtyard outside the window that my desk faces, and you can occassionally see older Chinese yardworkers practicing taichi right outside, if you get here early enough.

I've been working here a lot recently. Typically I find it difficult to get much work done in rooms where there is a bed three feet to my right, so I've been retreating to my office as crunch time has approached (t-miuns 40 hours or so until the first class). I came in yesterday and the place was abuzz with staff doing the same as myself--photocopying, getting everything ready for Monday. One of the persistent distractions, however, beginning at around 2pm or so yesterday--around when many Chinese take something of a mid-afternoon siesta--was the repeat playing of an awful Chinese pop song, over and over and over again, by one of the inhabitants of the office down the hall. I stopped for a moment at one point and listened a bit harder, then realized that here were two voices--the artist's, and someone singing along. For at least an hour or so, I was subjected to repeating karaoke booming down the office hallway. Given the high ceilings and tile floors in our buildings, the song sounded like it was being played thruogh a megaphone. Luckily, the repetition eventually made the sound less distracting, and I was able to get a bit more work done before dinner.

As I write from my office now, he's stopped for the moment, but had been going for the past half an hour or so up until maybe a minute ago. I'm heading out in a little bit to see the US play Japan in a Paralympic wheelchair rugby match--very excited to see that, and to see my friend Nick after the game. Looks like I'll be doing most of my work for the day later on tonight, in my karaokeless apartment.

Update: wheelchair rugby gold medal game webcast on universalsports.com

This is in reference to the post below about Nick Springer and the US Wheelchair Rugby team, which will begin competing in the 2008 Paralympic Games tomorrow against China.

UniversalSports.com will be televising the wheelchair/quad rugby finals live on Tuesday morning, September 16th, at 8:00am. The US team and Nick could and should be playing in that game, and I guarantee you it'll be a great one to watch. If you have some free time between 8:00am and 10:00am next Tuesday morning, tune into universalsports.com to check out the live webcast.

I met with Nick's dad, Gary, yesterday for lunch and he was able to get a ticket to the Saturday game against Japan for me. Unfortunately, I've been spending and still need to spend quite a bit of time prepping for the semester, so I won't be able to go to any other games this weekend, but I am going to try to get tickets to the finals, happening at 8:00pm Beijing time next Tuesday. The venue--the gymnasium at the Beijing Science and Technology University, is a ten-minute bike ride from the Tsinghua campus.

Again, if you have a chance next Tuesday morning, September 16th, at 8:00am, tune into the Paralympics section of UniversalSports.com to check out the gold medal game.

Cheese

While many who come to China find that authentic Chinese food immediately becomes their favorite food out there, and while I still am definitely holding any lasting judgment of the cuisine here in abeyance until I can manage to interpret more than 1% of the characters on every menu I see, I will say right now that, following several runs on Imodium and a couple of encounters with plates of food that are staring back at you as you eat them, I've already had several incredible cravings for American food—American food with cheese, particularly. There is essentially no cheese in China, and many visitors to the country find that they return home lactose intolerant after their time abroad here.

I love cheese. I really didn't know how much I loved cheese until I couldn't have it. There's plenty of dairy in other forms in China, predominantly in the form of eggs (hardboiled and soaked in soy sauce, fried and mashed up in rice, etc.), but the cows here are used solely for their meat and not for their milk. There does seem to be a fair amount of soy milk consumed here, but for the life of my I cannot figure out why some of the most resourceful people on the planet when it comes to most things haven't decided to use animal milk to create another food group so highly sought after by Westerners like myself. I haven't really asked around about this, but is there an issue with many Chinese and lactose intolerance, similar to the widespread allergy amongst Chinese to alcohol? I'll have to find out, but for now, if anyone knows, feel free to comment on this below. Anyways, last week I was thinking about cheese quite a bit and needed a fix. I had heard that there’s a pizza place on campus--DuFeng Pizza Bar--so I decided to stop by to check it out.

Located on a second-story patio above a post office, DuFeng Pizza Bar is quite popular amongst Tsinghua students looking to go out while staying on campus on weekend nights. As the name advertises, there is in fact a full bar at this pizza parlor, serving and thoroughly advertising classic American beers and liquor like Budweiser and Jack Daniels. The advertising seems to be working—two bottles of Jack Daniels sit on the plywood shelves behind the polished wood bar, one totally full and one with one or two fingers of bourbon left sitting below the label. Budweiser labels--all organized and facing outwards, covered in Chinese characters—gleam through the plexiglass door of a refrigerator. Another plexiglass window allows patrons to see two dirty-aproned men shoveling pies in and out of the pizza oven aside the bar area. It’s about 1:00pm when I sit down, so the stage in the back of the seating area is noiseless and bare except for a drum set that remains set up there waiting for the next band to show up. Poppy music with Chinese lyrics is playing quietly throughout the place, accompanying the reading and writing of the 7 or 8 other Chinese folks who are sitting around and trying to get some work done while out to lunch.

A massive poster of beer bottles takes up a quarter of one wall in front of me. It's one of those posters you see on the walls of many sports-type bars in America—sweating glass bottles arranged like bowling pins, emphasizing both the variety and volume of the drink available behind the bar. Despite the presence of perhaps two dozen bottles and bottlenecks in the frame of the poster, you're only able to see w or 3 other brands besides Budweiser, whose labels again gleam in glossy print. I order a Coke and a margharita pizza. At 22 kuai, it’s by far the most expensive meal I've had in ten days, and it didn't help that the free-refills Coke cost 15 kuai on top of that. But I was craving some cheese, and this was the only show in town, I thought at the time. The pizza was better than decent—fresh toppings, well cooked break, good sauce—but had hardly any cheese on it at all. I would get a sense of some cheese being in my mouth once every three or so bites. But it was a bit of cheese, so I left DuFeng contented and with their telephone number in case I ever had another attack of hunger pangs for American Italian back in my apartment.

A few days later I heard a story about someone named Kro who ran the other pizza shop frequented by students of both Tsinghua and BeiDa (the informal name for Tsinghua's rival university, Beijing University). I was outside the western part of campus, north of BeiDa, near Kunming Lake. A vague sense of homesickness had set in the day before, and, combined with thoughts of cheese being peddled by a fellow countryman, I again felt the need to get outside campus and to sample some more Beijing pizza. Also, I was interested to see what this American's entrepreneurial spirit had accomplished in China.

Kro is an American who moved to Beijing somewhere around a decade ago, perhaps starting off by teaching English but soon moving on to other things. Around five or six years ago he opened up a restaurant located on West Qinghua Road, a five-minute bike ride from Tsinghua University's West Gate, called the Kro's Nest, a pizza bar. He was able, with the Mandarin he knew and the political connections he cultivated, to hire a full staff and get the place up and running, and it rapidly became a popular haunt for the students of the two neighboring universities.

One day, maybe six months to a year after opening, Kro came in to open up shop and no one else was there waiting and getting ready to work. They weren't there the next day, either. Within a couple of weeks or months, advertisements starting popping up around the Tsinghua campus noting the grand opening of a pizza parlor and bar on campus—DuFeng Pizza Bar. The former staff of the Kro's Nest had stayed on just as long as it took to learn everything they could about the pizza bar business, and, when the time was right, they all had quit simultaneously to go set up a shop of their own in the midst of a college campus containing tens of thousands of students and staff. The pizza was the same—same sized pies, same bread, same sauce, the same specialty toppings. Although he nearly went out of business, Kro managed to pick together a new staff and stayed on his feet.

Thinking about the history between DuFeng and Kro's Nest, I rode by back westward along the northern wall of Beijing University out towards the Summer Palace. I passed a construction site on my right, and had to dodge around three dozen hard-hatted men on my bike as I made my way long the sidewalk. About a half a mile from Tsinghua I saw a neon sign for the pizzeria on my right, on the front of what looked like an abandoned greenhouse. The sun had set about a half an hour beforehand and night was setting in; no noise escaped the restaurant to disturb the birds nesting for the evening in the tress above where I locked up my bike.

I walked past several thick wood tables outside, which were covered in menus and ashtrays, then almost fell over as the wall of sound hit me when I pushed open the double doors to get inside. There had to have been a couple of hundred folks there, sitting around large, family-style tables, finishing up their beers from the happy hour that had just wrapped up. I seated myself on a high stool behind a thick oak bar table and took a look at the menu as the waitress walked over. After perusing for a bit with the waitress standing over me (which they tend to do here, ready to write as soon as you've decided your order), I ordered a pie with a bunch of different toppings, the most critical of which was extra cheese. I also got a Tsingtao, the price of which had jumped from 5 kuai to 10 kuai in the past 15 minutes. I was happy to see that the beer that came back was poured into a big pint glass. I ended up ordering two more before I left.

(I don't know if I've explained what money is called in Chinat: The formal term when you're writing about money is “ren min bi”—“people's money,” or “people's currency.” When speaking about money, you can say “yuan” or “kuai,” which is more of a slang term, like “cash.”)

As I sat there in the corner by myself, drinking and reading Maxine Hong Kingston's fantastic book, "China Men," I looked up and drank in the vibe of the place. Instead of the cheap, plastic chairs probably bought at Ikea by the owners of DuFeng, Kro's had heavy wooden barstools. Etched into walls and seats with pens and penknives were the typical scribblings and barroom defacements—“Ken was here 7/10/06,” “Beijing Rocks,” etc. Neon beer advertisements hung from the walls. The Chinese students sitting around me were speaking English, not Mandarin. The waitresses and cooks were dressed in the alternative, hipster garb of the younger generation of city kids worldwide, but their clothes seemed to sit on them more naturally than it did on many of the other young people I had seen around the city. The music playing loudly overhead was one of the most striking features: everything from John Mellincamp and Springsteen to The Cure, Live, Green Day and Tupac. What sounded like a loud cap gun exploded just above me—I jerked up to see the fizzling purple light of a mosquito attractor. Laying across the transparent roof above my stool were several wet leaves, and, beyond them, a starless, smoggy Beijing sky.

I wondered what the conversations must have been like between Kro and everyone who works at Kro's Nest. How were they vetted? Did he have them sign something, or were all of these people friends of his that had began working to help him out after he had been abandoned? Did these employees feel and value that they were inside a place that had somewhat genuine character, a place that seemed individual in a city full of rip-offs? Although I was paying 30 kuai more for a pizza of the same size at Kro's, I was happy to pay a premium for the ambiance. I had a feeling that many of the students sitting around me—the most brilliant young minds in the country—were willing to pay a premium for their pizza for similar reasons. And, anyways, it was the only place I had been and have been thus far in China where you could taste cheese in every bite of the food you have in front of you--delicious.

--

I've been spending most of my time in recent days trying to get at least a couple of weeks of notes prepared for my classes, which begin next Monday, September 15. I'll be teaching seven speaking classes and one writing class—16 course hours in total. A late night at a bar down by the Wudaokou subway stop kept me from going on a field trip this morning to the Capital Museum, where there's apparently a stunning exhibition of Greek antiquities being put on. I might ask that some of my students examine the exhibition and give a presentation on their findings in one of my speaking classes. I hope to be able to get down to the museum at some point before the Greek stuff is removed at the end of October, but every day here has me meeting new people, agreeing to more lectures, and arranging more stuff to do with my free time. Things are getting busier, and a routine is starting to form. I'm getting up quite early in the morning in preparation for the 8am classes I'll be teaching on Mondays and Tuesdays. I hope to have a Mandarin tutor lined up for 4 or 6 hours a week of 1-on-1 lessons soon, which should help to drastically open up to me this country and its encyclopedic and as-yet undecipherable menus.

Shoot-around

In the midst of worrying about what topics seemed appropriate for oral presentation for an "Advanced Speaking" class for Chinese sophomores, I looked over today and again saw the Chinglish scrawled across my new basketball--"BASKET New Beijing Great Olympic Ball"--and felt the claws of procrastination sinking into my back, and into my increasingly idle hands, which then began reaching for my hi-tops in the closet. Although the AC in the room here makes whatever summer time I spend inside quite pleasant, with the window blinds drawn and the doors closed, this place, like most places associated with work, eventually gets to feeling like a cave. There were storm clouds rolling in in the distance, I could see them coming, but at the moment the sunlight was still bright outside. I threw on a sleeveless t-shirt, lending my barely-21-year-old appearance the looks of a 17-year-old, tied up the kicks, and headed outside.

Along with ping-pong (the national sport), the Chinese love badminton and basketball, or so I've seen thus far. The two-dozen or so courts that lie right outside my apartment building, between the hours of 4pm and 9pm, are absolutely packed. I presume that students, who are still on break and therefore have loads of free time, like to sleep in in the mornings, and are waiting for the heat of midday to pass before they get outside to exert themselves in sport. (The Chinese practice of xiuxi, akin to the European siesta, might also account for the late afternoon start to ball and racket games outside, as students might be either sleeping or relaxing during the early afternoon by cultural mandate.) Being the self-conscious person that I am, I seek out the court with the fewest people, look around for a court with fewer people when I get there, and then ask to join in the shoot-around.

The two Chinese undergraduates (so they looked) readily let me jump in, responding to my request in English and with smiles. One of the students is decked out in a new-looking practice jersey, and the other is dressed as if he just walked out of a library. As I look around me, I realize that all of the courts that contain less than 10 people are also taken up with shoot-arounds--not 2-on-2s, or 3-on-3s, or 1-on-1s. Even on the more crowded courts, the competition that is going on is not quite heated. The kids that are decked out in the proper attire for a basketball game are moving just as avidly and athletically as those without gear. The mood, therefore, throughout the courts, is a relaxed one. This seems appropriate--given the little I know about basketball, my untrained eyes can only pick up maybe a half-dozen dcent looking ballplayers in the whole lot taking up my field of vision. To be both bad at basketball and tense about it would be a waste of time, so the students are relaxed and at ease with what skill they have. Despite this relaxed mood permeating the space, I airball my first two shots, and reassure myself that I was right in feeling self-conscious about both my sleeveless t-shirt and the basketball ability that such a t-shirt seems to advertise. I relax, however, as the mood seems to demand, and I shoot around as rain begins to fall.

Taking free throws in the drizzle, a more accomplished-looking student ballplayer comes onto our court. I tighten up for a few shots, looking to live up to the t-shirt and the skin I'm in, then loosen up and make a nice-looking, Ewing-esque baseline jumper--not fading, just standing still, but nicely arcing and nicely dropping into the hole in mid-basket. Something is said by the newcomer in Chinese that is probably directed at me, and I don't respond--I don't speak Chinese. There's a pause, a few shots, a few misses, and as I run back into the key he approaches me and asks me what I'm studying at Tsinghua. "Uh... wo shi laoshi," I say in busted tones, laughing at myself. He gets the gist, that I am a teacher, and widens his eyes in disbelief when I later indirectly mention that I'm 24.

Bill Young, as he introduced himself, is from Liaoning province, a coastal province like Shandong that lies to the northeast of Beijing. Its southern coast comprises the north shore of Bo Hai, the bay which empties into Korea Bay and then the Yellow Sea beyond. It gets cold in Liaoning, colder than it does in Beijing, and they get snow there--not up over your head, like in Harbin, but up to around your waist and, sometimes, up to your nipples. Bill couldn't believe that the U.S. Olympic basketball team hadn't won every single Olympic basketball match that they'd ever played in, and he was happy to see that such talented athletes were able to pull it together to come away with a gold medal here in Beijing. He couldn't get over how quick Chris Paul could move. We both share a respect of Allen Iverson, despite his image problems. And no, Bill corrected me, Iverson does not have a ring--but he's still a good player.

We talked about financial engineering, or rather Bill talked to me about financial engineering, and I reassured him, despite his doubts, that he almost without a doubt has a decent job waiting for him when he gets out of college. We talked about where I went to school, and that led into a conversation about our mutual respect of Kevin Garnett. He was excited to hear that KG and I share first names. It made it easier for him to remember. He's going to see if he'll be able to take my class if I'm still around next year. For now, he's still too busy struggling to get at 3.0 in his major courses.

What would it be like to have a second name, to have to have a second name because your first name wasn't conducive to the language of commerce and the forces dominating a shrinking world? I asked Bill to reconfirm his family name, and he again said to me, "Young," which in retrospect was probably, "Yung," or "Yeong." But it seemed at that moment as if his name had been sacrificed in search of something that would be easier to attain as Bill Young. Perhaps, at that moment, it was solely for easing the conversation along--for my convenience, so that it would be easier to remember Bill's name. My Chinese name is Mai Kaiwen--in time, will that name take on characteristics all its own? Will the person called by that name, a person that presumably can speak at least a bit of Mandarin, will that person be different from the one called by my English name? Probably--how different, and different how? Will something about the other person I am, the other person I was, be sacrificed?

As we spoke, the rain subsided and a blue sky was revealed. Like many storms that sweep through the Beijing valley, this one had knocked out the smog, revealing a beautiful afternoon that had been hidden just 30 minutes earlier. The rain had mixed with the dust and grime on the court to form a kind of paste that was now all over my hands, forearms, and the ball. Every time the ball bounced off the wet court, it splashed the thin layer of muck up against the sides of our shoes.

As the sun broke through, an older woman with a creased, tanned face, with a wide-brimmed hat tied to her head, and with a threadbare floral-print shirt on biked up right onto the court and offered us two bottles of water out of the cardboard box tied onto the back of her bicycle. The box also contained a couple of bananas, and some bottles of juice drink. Both Bill and I politely refused. "Don't buy from them," Bill said as she turned and biked on to the next court. "They buy from the supermarket then make theirs more expensive. Also, it maybe old bottles with other water." I responded that I didn't have any intention to, because I had water in my refrigerator upstairs that was free. Thinking that the dirt that had accumulated on my hands was enough for now, and thinking also that I had work to get back to up in my room, I said goodbye to Bill and headed back to my apartment.

A Fake Interview on the University Website Sparks Controversy

I’ve been waiting to post on this to see if or how much I would hear about this news story around campus since the event occurred four of five days ago. I’ve heard nothing about it, but the incident has received a lot of coverage from blogs and from the press in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

A new post appeared just about a week ago on the main page of my university’s website. The post was described as the summary of an “interview with the president” of the university. Excerpts from one English translation I found online follow:

“Yesterday afternoon, -------- University principal Mr. ---------- expressed his worries about current university education conditions during an interview with a student reporter. He indicated straightforwardly that the university education system is in effect ‘pouring s*** into the students minds.’

“Principal ---------- indicated that the 1900s-1940s could be considered the golden age for Chinese education circles. During this short period of time, China’s universities trained large quantities of outstanding talents for society, amongst them great thinkers and educators, righteous political revolutionaries and anti-Japanese resistance heroes, and the backbone of scientific knowledge and national elites. But this flourising situation began to deteriorate following the Liberation and especially during the 1990s. Today’s various institutions of higher learning, including -------- and ------- University, no longer have the educational goal of fostering talent. Serious academic corruption, dry and irrelevant to society curriculum, and rote memorization teaching methods will lead to students developing rigid ways of thinking, losing interest in the curriculum, losing confidence in the college and even China’s entire education system. dropping out of school to express their disappointment with the university education system in the most extreme way.”

The post went on to list three things that any “real university” should foster in its students: “independent skill,” “unique thinking methods,” and “the spirit to challenge authority.”

An article from United Press International, based out of Hong Kong, describes the aftermath of the post:

“The interesting thing about this item was that it was widely circulated on the Internet, where it was received with almost complete approval. People expressed their excitement, surprise and comfort at reading such comments from a supposed school official, whom they took to be unusually brave.

“The school removed the original from its Web site the same day it was posted, replacing it with a notice expressing “strong outrage and condemnation” over the article. The discovery that it was a hoax disappointed many readers – although many had already guessed it must be a spoof.

“A lawyer warned that the hacker who posted the article, if discovered, could be sentenced to more than five years in prison. He could be accused of harming the school’s computer system and misusing the president’s name to damage his reputation, he said.

“However, several media critics advised the school to be more magnanimous, claiming the hacker’s intention was not to humiliate the president. It was merely a radical attempt to bring his concerns about university education to public attention.

“Damaging the school’s information system and misusing the president’s name are illegal and inappropriate, the critics conceded. But, they argued, the president in the story had aroused people’s respect rather than giving him a bad name. The strong clarification released by the school, on the other hand, made the university look bad, some wrote.”

I’ve now read through several dozen blog comments responding to both the initial post and subsequent articles written by both the Chinese and international press. In all, perhaps the most surprising comment was written by a graduate of my university (supposedly) who, during his or her second year, did no work whatsoever in any class but was able to bribe all of his or her professors into giving him or her passable grades for each course. I’ve imagined in my head several times now what I would do if ever approached with such a bribe, thinking to myself about how I would manage the abject fury that I would want to unleash in the face of such brashness.

Needless to say, regardless of the fact that I don’t know too many people here, I’ve heard no talk even amongst my colleagues about this incident. I’d like to put it out there to hear your thoughts on the matter.

On Monday of this week, we had our teacher’s orientation at the Department of Foreign Languages, followed by a delicious lunch at one of the 15 restaurants located on the university grounds. All of the folks I’ll be working with this semester seem energetic and intelligent, which has gotten me even more excited to throw myself into things full bore. It’s difficult sitting inside thinking about and writing syllabi when the weather is so nice outside, but I’m sure I’ll get out later to shoot around on one of the dozen courts next to my building with the new basketball I bought two days ago, which reads, below the brand name, “New Beijing Great Olympic.”