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.

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.

--

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.

--

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.