Sunset in North Beijing

About one in every eight or nine nights, if you walk out of my apartment door at about 6:15pm (and getting earlier by the day), make a left, walk 100 feet, make a right, pass under lines of drying clothes, pop the door and step out onto the patio at the western end of the 11th floor of the my building, you're treated to a 100%-natural fireworks show:

Another Summer Palace

One of the few tourist trips I did get around to making during the National Day holiday was to the second, more oft-visited Summer Palace several kilometers west of the Old Summer Palace that I visited before school started. Although construction here began in 1750, it took the Empress Cixi's embezzlement of government funds intended for the Chinese navy to build up the palace to its present grandeur. The navy was defeated by the Japanese, but visitors to the park can still benefit from the funds stolen by Cixi. Yiheyuan is in substantially better condition than its older counterpart next to the university, Yuanmingyuan, and the couple of hours I spent here did not allow me to see nearly as much as I could have if I had a half day or whole day to explore. At times over the summer, Chairman Mao himself was known to retreat from the hustle and bustle of downtown to the shores of the Kunming Lake in the city's northwest for a few weeks' reprieve.


The park, which surrounds the massive Kunming Lake (easily locatable by searching "Beijing, China" on Google Maps and by scrolling northwest of the city center), has as its centerpiece the terraced, hilltop Incense Burning Tower, which faces out directly south onto a man-made island containing a temple that looks due north back across the lake. The tall, white temple pointing out of the Xiangshan ("Fragrant Hills") in the distance to the west of the park can be seen alongside the setting, smog-muddled sun that made its way into many of the pictures I took that afternoon. Unfortunately, tourists were swarming all over the park that day, coming from all over the country to see the second-most visited site in Beijing after the Forbidden City. Essentially every non-critical worker in the country had off from Wednesday, Oct. 1 through the following Monday, and at points it seemed as if every one of them had converged on Kunming Lake that afternoon.


After being informed that the "student fee" was only applicable for Chinese students (and that, no, even though I was teaching Chinese students, that didn't matter) I shelled out 30 kuai and passed through the massive series of entranceways into the park. On the bike ride over, a massive wall composed of hedges and concrete had made it impossible for any non-paying passerby to get a glimpse of the windswept, sunbathed expanse of water that greeted me only after I had passed by no less than a dozen stands featuring exorbitant prices for fast food and souvenirs. Bright new paint glistened under the eaves of each temple that I passed by, paint that was just recently applied by hundreds of artisans employed in advance of the Olympics. Hundreds upon hundreds of domestic tourists, taking advantage of China's increasingly-profitable economic reform, now had the cash to spend on all-inclusive trips to Beijing to get some use out of recently-purchased, high-end digital cameras--everyone I saw, including me, seemed to have one glued to their hand.


I passed the food stands and out onto the promenade surrounding the lake, upon which were strewn dozens of paddle and rowboats. Families had taken out massive floaters that allowed six people at a time to pedal the boat along. On the island directly over the bridge in front of me, younger couples had climbed down large boulders to the water's edge, where the girls would test the water gingerly, laughing into hands placed demurely over their mouths. An older woman practiced taiji as the sun set, unaware of the children running around her against their parents' wishes. For about two hours I wandered over bridges and around temples, participating with the throngs in snapping up photos of the experience. It was a beautiful Friday afternoon and the wind coming off the lake was buffeting my fleece and turning my cheeks red, but it felt great. Autumn in Beijing.


The next trip will be to Xiangshan where from the summits at the end of October you can look out onto a sea of burning red maple leaves. There'll be many pictures to follow after that excursion. Additionally, I haven't yet been to any kind of haggle-intensive market, which should produce not only a bunch of pictures but a bit more lively story as well. Still haven't been to the Forbidden City or done a proper tour of Tiananmen either, so there'll be much more to come if you're interested in more photos. Until then...

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Speaking of the Summer Palace, I just read a great bit of fiction by Yiyun Li that appears in the most recent edition of the New Yorker. Mentions a couple's walk along the very promenade I strolled along the other day. Check it out if you have the chance.

The Office

Although it’s not quite something straight out of the Scranton, PA-based office that Steve Carrell heads up the NBC sitcom, my office in the Department of Foreign Languages is slowly developing into an extremely quirky locale that I get to experience on a sometimes pleasantly and sometimes unpleasantly consistent basis.

A few days after the school year began, I met a Chinese colleague on the way down the hallway who works in the office across the way from mine. Walter had just gotten back from spending a year teaching a class on modern Chinese art at a small liberal arts college in the American Midwest, and he was interested to hear what it was that was pumping into my head through the massive Bose headphones I had wrapped around my head. We starting talking about music and then a bit about the class he was teaching here at Tsinghua—“English for Art Criticism.” By the end of the conversation I had agreed to come in one day to tell the class what I thought about modern art generally. We’ll see if that lecture ever comes to fruition and, if it does, how much of a catastrophe it turns out to be. (I would probably just end up going over Paul Klee’s On Modern Art with them, which, for anyone who’s interested, is a very short but very very interesting discussion of Klee’s personal theory of modern art and what it is supposed to do—if anything at all.)

Its high ceilings and large windows (with a little green courtyard outside) make the place seem surprisingly appealing, despite the bars stripped across the glass to prevent robbers from breaking in and grabbing the computers. There is a pile of what looks like either mulch or dirt in a plastic bowl filled with water right in front of where you enter the office. The mystery mix—perhaps meant for gardening in the courtyard outside—actually gives the place a kind of earthy smell that counteracts the sterile effect of the cleanly-mopped white tiles covering the floor.

While writing at one of the computers early on a sunny Thursday afternoon two weeks ago, I heard a song come on loudly in an office down the hall from mine. It was some kind of Chinese pop tune, and the male singer’s voice was strained in what must have been a lover’s lament. The song ended and then immediately was replayed, this time with an extra male voice thrown into the mix. Someone down the hall then proceeded to replay this Chinese pop song at least a dozen times, singing along each time, until their voice must have just been absolutely obliterated. I took a rest from work for a minute to listen in—all I could make out were some lyrics saying something like “I love you”—but to be frank neither one of the singers’ voices were that good. The fact that myself and everyone on the hall had to listen in over a dozen times not to gentle crooning but to booming, out-of-tune Chinapop seemed a little bit much to ask, even if this guy down the hall was aspiring to karaoke superstardom or something.

I am pretty sure that the singer is a fellow who constantly comes in to my office early in the morning to wash up and brush his teeth. We have a sink, as well as a bunch of brooms and mops, right behind where our desks and filing cabinets are located (the office itself actually used to be a broom closet that they converted into an “office”). The past several times I’ve been around at about 7am or so, someone has rolled out of the department’s periodicals library next door and came in, toothbrush and washtowel in hand, ready for his morning toilet. I’m not quite sure what the deal is, but I think that there is a good chance that this guy sleeps in the periodicals library either on some nights or every night. We’ve now ran into each other several times and, unlike Walter, he’s made absolutely zero attempt to introduce himself. When we do “speak” to one another on those early mornings and even later on in the day, his answers are monosyllabic grunts more so than language. Apparently I am not the only one to experience some rude behavior from the periodicals librarian—even some of the Chinese folks have commented laughingly that he has a reputation for ornery comportment.

One day about a week ago, I was sitting in my office on another beautiful early afternoon towards the end of the week, and I heard another voice coming out of the office next door. This one was unaccompanied by any music, but it was richer and more refined than even the “professional” pop singer I had heard the week before. I was an older tune—the song didn’t follow a verse-chorus-verse progression, and some of the notes were haunting, like those that come out of an erhu (an instrument that consists of “two strings,” the literal translation of its Chinese name). The voice stopped and, maybe 15 minutes later, Walter walked out of the office across the hall and made his was out the department’s main door, done with work for the day.

I’ve begun to work in my office more and more as my first month in the city has moved along. I can come in at any time I want, thanks to the 24-hour security guards who are “standing watch” over the department’s always-open doors. They have a TV in the office where there is usually a couple of them stationed, and from what I’ve seen the overnight routine usually consists of one watching the tube while the other catches some ZZZs—easy money, if you don’t mind living like a vampire.

I no longer have to show my i.d. to any of the guards in the office, as it is that, for the first three weeks of the semester, I had an excuse to be constantly in their face asking whether or not several packages from the States had arrived. At one point, I was standing in their door two or three times a day when I was waiting for some crucial medical documents I needed for my residency visa. After I finally got the materials for my visa, I was expecting a delivery of a couple of boxes from Amazon, which had me in the same doorway slightly less often. At one point around a week ago, before I could even open my mouth as I approached the office, one of them gave me a preemptive meiyou (“don’t have [it]”) before I even noticed that they were looking in my direction. Eyes rolled as I craned my neck to look at the stack of boxes behind the two men on the other side of the window, and my scan revealed two boxes with the characteristic Amazon smile on their sides. They were two boxes in a stack of twenty other similarly-sized boxes, and, because I didn’t yet know how to say “below” or “above,” they went through almost every single one before they got to the first Amazon box. I figured that a good way to gesture to them about what I wanted was to smile maniacally (imitating the Amazon logo), point at my face, and then point at the boxes they were rifling though, saying zhege, zhege (“that one, that one”) over and over again. They were both very happy to see me leave after they finally found both boxes. At least when I walk by the guard office now, all I get are smiles—massive, maniacal smiles. Those were the last boxes I needed from them, and I think I might have stuff shipped to my apartment instead from now on.

Speaking of vampires: Although I do like working in my office at night, the walk from the guard’s office to my door can be a real gut check. (See photo: “Cozy if you’re ... Hannibal Lecter.) Once I get inside, sit down at my desk and start working, I’m always slightly stressed as I hear shoes patter down the tile hallway approaching my door. The last several times I’ve heard those footsteps, however, it’s been my officemate, Rob, an Englishman, who also likes to work there late. I liked Rob immediately from the minute he opened his mouth at orientation, commenting that he taught “English Literature and Culture—or a lack thereof” here at Tsinghua. Extremely funny individual. His lecture this semester is going to be on the Chinese obsession with football/soccer and, in particular, David Beckham. Looking forward to that one. He teaches English for law majors here, along with several courses in a program designed for wealthier Chinese high school post-graduates who want to brush up on their English to help with their chances of getting into British colleges. I saw him earlier this evening, actually. He stopped by for a minute with a third-year law student who was looking to expand her musical horizons, and Rob was able to provide her with some albums by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Radiohead. The three of us talked for a while about Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and Rob was pleased to see that someone in America knew about them. The student who came in with Rob was involved with a guitar-playing club on campus, and we talked about the prospect of me stopping by one day to perhaps learn a couple of chords with them.

After Rob and I parted ways outside of the department, I put on my jacket and pedaled home through the rain. I was dressed as if I’d just come from the gym—the only laundry I had available, the rest of it being strewn all over my room drying in the super-dry Beijing air in my apartment. I’ll probably venture down to Wal-Mart at some point soon to pick up a drying rack, but the colors strewn across the furniture in my living room actually helped to brighten up a living space that has been described by someone down the hall as “depressingly Spartan.” (Note bedsheet hanging from an open window.)

Wudaokou

I peddle for chuan (pronounced chew-ARE in Beijing dialect) outside of the bar I roll out of at around three o’clock in the morning. I’m a bit drunk, and as I walk across the crosswalk passing Chengfu Road I have a group of cab drivers without licenses hit me up for a fare on the north side. I honestly have no money left on me and I shrug accordingly, and they leave me alone without too much of a hassle. I keep walking along the street, keep seeing cabs whizzing by me in the direction that I’m walking probably going where I’m going, and I feel content with the pace that I’m moving at.

The sidewalk is composed of tiles, small rectangular tiles and not larger sheets of concrete, and these smaller gray tiles allow for light-yellow colored grooved tiles along the outside that are supposed to serve as a trail for those who have bad eyesight. As I playfully follow this trail back home, my head hits into layers of rhodedendrum-like leaves cut shortly to the height of Chinese, not Americans. As the leaves hit me in the face I feel better and not clumsy.

I pass under power lines much higher and less noticeable than the waxy leaves and I get back soon to the intersection where I meet all of the cabs passing into where I enter the university. It’s a mile walk from where I rolled out onto the street but my thinking about everything I’ve passed makes it seem longer. The guard station at dongbei menr lets me pass as I choose and I move slowly through the bikes and into the lobby and up to my room upstairs.

Milk and Kashgar

For anyone that's wondering, despite my love of cheese I've recently been avoiding milk and milk-based products here in China. I think that the news of the milk crisis here has spread to news outlets around the world, but just in case, here's a link to an article in the International Herald Tribune, the newspaper that I've been checking in with most often while I've been over here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/28/asia/milk.php

On a related note, an article was just posted on iht.com that describes twenty or so new photos that were released to the New York Times that document the aftermath of what China described as a Uighur separatist terror attack in the town of Kashgar in Xinjiang province. the attack happened several days before the opening ceremony earlier on in August. Like with the milk scandal, many of the details concerning both stories were withheld as the government tried to do everything it could to appear "harmonious" with the Olympic season afoot. Here's a link to that article as well:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/29/asia/29kashgar.php

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Just found this article a moment ago--please be aware: Melamine, the plastics additive that many Chinese dairy farmers were using to boost the testable protein content in their milk, has been found in Cadbury chocolate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7641317.stm

Before buying dairy products at the supermarket, it might be wise to check into whether the food you plan on buying uses milk from Chinese farms.

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.

US Wheelchair Rugby Team Takes Home Gold

It was an absolute pleasure to get to spend some time over the past week with Gary, Olivia, June, and Nick Springer while they were here in Beijing. It was a thrill to get to go to the gold medal match against Australia this past Tuesday, and to see Nick almost single-handedly shut down Australia's biggest scoring threat. On the defensive end, there was no one out there who was better, and, between the scoring he added at times and that stunning defensive performance, little is left to think about when one considers who was the finest player out there on the court that night.

The crowning moment of my time in Beijing thus far would have to be seeing Nick outside of the stadium after the game and, following being mobbed by the press in the US and Chinese press in the locker room and the fans outside, being able to speak to him for a moment about how he was feeling. The one part of the conversation that stands out was when, following my inquiries about how he felt, Nick replied, "I can't feel anything." The situation was surreal for me--in Beijing, outside of a wheelchair rugby game, talking to a gold medalist--but for Nick, it seemed to be indescribable.

One of the most impossible moments I've ever had in my life to date was when Nick did me the honor of letting me handle his gold medal for a second. It was extremely heavy, to the point that it would be uncomfortable to have it hanging around your neck for very long. Nick, however, will be keeping that medal close to him for the rest of his life, as is explained in the story that is linked to below. That same night, the younger portion of the Springer family was informed of a terrible tragedy that may have overshadowed the greatest of triumphs. In true heroic fashion, however, the family is keeping on keepin' on. Here's the story from the Hudson Valley Journal News that explains more:

http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008809190435

I have nothing but love and admiration for the whole Springer family, and I thank you guys for providing me with proof that, even in this somewhat cynical age of ours, true heroes still exist.