Year of the Dragon

I finally took out my big camera! Here’s a few shots to start with:

This is where I’m staying until I find my own place. Needless to say, my own place won’t be quite this fancy, so I’m enjoying the luxury while it lasts. 

This is in “Central Park,” one of the big residential compounds in the Central Business District (CBD). A lot of the richer kind of expats live here, people that work in their embassies and such. It’s not unusual to see blonde kids running around and pretty moms pushing baby carriages. 

Some days, the smog is really bad. This is the view out of my window this morning, when the US Embassy Air Quality Index declared the pollution levels “Very unhealthy.” Encouraging, huh? 

This is how Beijingers deal with the cold when riding a bike/ motorcycle in the frigid winter. 

These delivery guys ride at top speeds on sidewalks. Never been so close to death so often. (I love this photo)

So many lanterns!

More lanterns and motorcycles

Restaurants at night. Lots of red. 

And more Chinese new year as sponsored by… Coca Cola! (sorry for all the lantern photos. I figure that they will come down soon until next year, so I had to get my fix)

I think my first couple of posts about my new Chinese life did not seem the cheeriest, but let me assure you, Bejing and I are quickly falling in love (to be fair, I’m not sure how Beijing feels about me. But it hasn’t tried to kill me in the past two days or so, which I take as a good sign).

The weekend was good for forgiveness and reconciliation. After my last unfortunate attempt, I woke up on Saturday feeling brave, and headed for Tian’anmen Square again. As soon as I walked out of the station, some woman cheerily said hi, wanting to know if I had been to the Great Wall yet. Little did she know how savvy a traveler I am! Ready to deal with any scamming attempts, I shot her back my fail-proof reply: “I no speak Engleesh.” I tried to look convincingly confused, and quickly walked away. After trying that line half a dozen times on different vendors and “friends” of all varieties, I figured out that it does, in fact, work much better than just saying you are not interested. They give up more quickly. 

When I asked some girls to take a picture of me with Mao (my first real tourist photo in China!) they actually asked me if they could take a picture with me. So yes, as I had read in my travel guide, it IS true that Chinese tourists do sometimes want a picture with a rando foreigner. This made me feel inexplicably better about my gullibility earlier in the week. Like I’d been somehow justified.

But my small triumph in visiting the city’s major tourist attraction without getting totally ripped off was not even the best thing that happened Saturday. Later that day, I met my friend Kay for an afternoon of wandering around and learning a whole lot about China. Kay and I met in a chat room where Chinese students interested in studying in the US can talk to American students. He is a cancer researcher at at military hospital, and we have been emailing back and forth for a little while. I am the first foreigner Kay has ever been friends with. 

How bad would it be if I said, on the same that I visited Tian’anmen square and saw (the outside of) the Forbidden City, that one of my favorite parts about China so far has been Walmart? Well, I don’t care. It was. Kay and I spent at least an hour wandering through the aisles of the food section, and he patiently explained everything I had questions about. Which was a lot. 

Did you know that in a Chinese Walmart you can pick your fish while still alive in big tanks? Or that you can buy chicken feet? Or that you can buy dried, spiced duck tongues to eat as a snack like Doritos? Or duck necks? Or that the milk is not really milk but just a “milk flavored” drink? Or that you can buy mini mangoes the size of strawberries? or fermented quail eggs? or beef-stew-flavored potato chips? Or that they crack eggs and put them in wine glasses so you can compare the difference in yolk size and color between two brands? Me neither. 

Fish doesn’t get much fresher.

Nom nom nom. 

Mini mangoes!

I love the Chinese versions of American brands. Especially when I’m with someone that can read the name to me

After our amazing stroll through Walmart, we went to eat at a restaurant. Kay ordered a preposterous amount of food for the two of us, and I have since learned that that’s one of the ways that a host will show his hospitality in China. He had thoughtfully looked up online earlier “food that foreigners like” and got some crowd-pleasers like scallion pancakes, sweet and sour pork, and sechuanese chili tofu. He also got a fresh salad with a nice peanut dressing, which he seemed to think the most exotic of the dishes, since it’s very unusual here to eat raw vegetables. The food was all absolutely delicious, and I learned a lot about table manners, the Chinese names of different foods, and to never offer to pay for a meal when a Chinese host is showing his hospitality. 

One last thing I should mention was this fun little video Kay introduced me to, a 10 minute tutorial to understand China (if only it were so simple!). Notice Youku, the Chinese version of YouTube. Any similarities are entirely coincidental…

Kay, with the feast that was theoretically a meal for two people.

Of course I expected that sitting down and trying to learn how to write Chinese characters would be hard. Of course I know that it’s not like Italian and Portuguese where you sort of fake your way through the whole thing and it all works out. I knew those things, which is why this may be my most unoriginal statement of all time, but let me just say it again, guys: Chinese is really friggin’ hard.

It seems silly to complain about how hard the language is when I haven’t even taken my first Chinese lesson. But again, I’m not talking about constructing sentences or carrying out complex conversations here. This marks my first whole week in Beijing, and I am not exaggerating when I say I have not been able to memorize the name of the subway stop next to where I’m staying. And it’s not for lack of trying. When I am on the train, there’s is a helpful, sweet voice in English with a perfect American accent that repeats whatever the Chinese announcer is saying. When she says the name of my station, I repeat it after her, so it’ll stick. I say it out loud, ignoring the weirded-out stares of everyone around me: Jintaixizhao. JEEN THAI SHEE JAO. Jeen thai shee jao. 

And the minute I get off the train, I have once again forgotten the name of the station, except for the fact that it starts with the letter J. (As in, I actually had to google it to write this post!). This is the case with the name of every neighborhood I visit, every street, everything. When I’m trying to find my way around, another monumental task on itself, I look up and read the name of the street, and by the time my eyes travel down to the map in my hand, I have forgotten what I just read already. Really. This is not a figure of speech. 

If being incapable of memorizing the simplest of things didn’t have me questioning my intelligence enough on a regular basis, the fact that some basic hand gestures don’t match up is not helping me either. Did you know that holding up six fingers does not mean the number six? Nope. If you want to say six, you better be ready to close your hand and extend your thumb and pinky out to the sides like some sort of market-bargaining superstar. Here’s a picture so you can see what the rest of the numbers are like:

So every time I’m wildly nodding my head up and down (and smiling as much as possible in order to make up with niceness for my annoying communicational impairments) I am left wondering whether that even means yes at all. Freaking out, I get home and google the answer because knowing how to say “yes” and “no” seems pretty important. And I get the following disheartening result:

There are no words that mean “yes” or “no” in Chinese. There are, however, words that roughly compare to English words for “yes” and “no”. The closest word to “yes” in Chinese is shi the verb that means to be. Thus, if someone asks if such and such a condition is true, the answer could be, quite simply shi, “it is”. Another word that fits for general purposes is dui ”true”, which can also be used to affirm any question posed. However, beyond this, the easiest way to say “yes” in Chinese is just by using the appropriate verb for the sentence. For example, if asked ni yao chi wufan ma ”do you want to eat lunch”, the best response may be yao ”want”; or even by answering the entire question in the affirmative.

While trying to calm myself down, I made the firm decision to tell no one about this. I rationalized it as a way of protecting those who care about me, of not giving them reasons to worry. Lies to myself, of course, I was just trying to spare me the humiliation. But I guess if I’m going to do this blog thing, I might as well do it honestly, I might as well tell the unflattering stuff too, if I don’t want to end up writing a fifth grade report about my summer vacation.

I headed towards Tian’anmen, and on my way out of the subway station, a young girl and a guy saw me and excitedly asked me where I was from.  I keep reading that Chinese tourists from other provinces often come to Beijing and are fascinated when they see are foreigner for the first time. It’s supposedly quite common to be asked to be on a picture with them, like another landmark they need to brag about when they get back home. I figured this is what was going on so I ignored my instinct to keep going and decided to be nice.

The girl spoke pretty decent English and was genuinely excited to practice.  I thought this was cute, and didn’t mind when they walked out with me towards the entrance to the Forbidden City. It was closed already, since it was past 5pm, but I took a picture while my new friend “Anna” walked along with me. She pointed to the enormous picture of Mao and explained that he was the leader of her country but was now dead. She was very surprised when I told her that people knew Mao all over the world. She couldn’t believe that my hair wasn’t dyed, that in fact, it was naturally black “just like Chinese girl!”

I hesitated for a moment when they told me they were on their way to get a drink and would love for me to join them. But she had just told me that her brother, who was with her and was also an accounting student in college, had cost her parents a lot of money. A one-child policy fine! “Look at me,” I thought, “just on day four and so immersed with locals already!” I remembered the advice from the other Rockefeller fellows to say yes to things you normally wouldn’t consider, and decided to go for it. With so many priceless comments already this HAD to make for a good story!

A red flag that size of Mao’s portrait went off in my head, but I utterly ignored it, over and over. After all, these kids weren’t trying to sell me anything, and from my experience with other Chinese people my age, it seemed plausible that they would be that excited to get to hang out with a sort-of-American.

We walked on a street along the edge of the Forbidden City and they led me into a little hole-in-the-wall. We sat in a private room, a table with all sorts of jars with teas in them, and they brought us some tiny mandarin oranges, some sort of Chex Mix-like snack and two kinds of tea. It was precious. I took pictures and I was beginning to draft an imaginary blog post about it in my head, I was so excited about the whole experience. When they told me to put my bag on a chair in the side of the room, I retained the last shred of good judgment and kept it on my lap.

I said it was my treat, since I hear it’s rude in China to go Dutch.  But of course, the fun ended when the bill came. 1040 Yuan. To put that in perspective, I saw a room in an apartment today where the rent was 2000 Yuan a month. “This is a mistake” I said. Anna helpfully broke down the bill for me. “This is how much tea rooms cost in China. It’s because you can stay all day.” I felt my face flush with anger, I could feel my own heart beating faster. I wouldn’t pay that much if I were buying the damn place. But, in this vital “fight or flight” moment,  I neither fought nor fled.  Instead, I proceeded to act like a complete and total idiot.

“I’m not stupid” I said to them, but I was.  “I know this can’t cost this much, I don’t even have that much money”. Oh. It’s totally okay. Unlike pretty much any other friggin’ establishment in China, this helpful little tea room had access to a card reader. And because I have the mental speed of a dead slug, I didn’t even lie about having a card. I got flustered. Vague ideas about what to do fluttered through my head. The language barrier felt insurmountable. These people were two adorable little Chinese girls that looked at me with wide eyes like I was just confused and a post-pubescent boy that didn’t speak a lick of English, but they already were conspiring against me, and how could I know who else or how scary was hiding in the back of that stupid tea room? How would they react if I tried to walk out without paying? I got scared. I could make a scene, threaten to call the police, but the prices, and they pointed out after the fact, were helpfully set on the table in an easily ignored corner, in English. I guess it’s not a crime to charge too much if you say you’re going to?

I thought of calling Paul, of asking him for help. But interrupting him at work, or worse, at the beginning of his Valentine’s day date for such an embarrassing situation made me cringe. A million better alternatives are going through my head now, but, stupidly, inexplicably, the best I could come up with at the time was to say that we should split the bill then. I divided the damage in half, and yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is how I came to spend EIGHTY SIX American dollars on two cups of bitter tea.

I was so angry at China, at not being able to do anything about it or ask for help, at having been so naïve and trusting and nice at first, but most of all, at having been completely, absolutely incapable of dealing with the situation. On day four, I felt like I was already done with China. I was done with locals, and “authentic” experiences, and trying to do stuff for the good stories. I felt betrayed by the whole country, and my adventurous traveler identity was crushed. I couldn’t wait to get back to the sweet embrace of cushy expat life.

These things will pass, of course, and I feel a little better already. But it doesn’t help that was I nearly trampled to death on the subway at rush hour (more updates on that later). China was rough on me today. When I saw the one white guy all day, all hipster and bearded in the middle of the 6:30pm human traffic jam, I felt like I could hug him just for standing there, like he were almost family by virtue of being fellow outsiders in this sea of Chinese people.

And to think, after all that, that I freaking hate tea. That’s what I get for being such a poser.  

This is the beginning of Day Three in Beijing, and I feel like I have lived at least two or three months in the past 60 hours. Trying to decide what to write about is hard, since arriving in a new place means noticing and remembering details that go usually ignored in a world of routine and familiarity. From the sticker on your shampoo to the shape of light switches in every room, everything is noticed, wondered about, somehow stored as vital information that must not be forgotten. Having a million things to say, combined with the twilight sleeplessness of jetlag have resulted in a monster of a post. Deal with it. 

The trek was long. I left Boston at 6am on Thursday, and after a nicely layovered three-legged trip that took me to Minneapolis and Seattle on the way, finally made it to Beijing on Friday at 10 pm, Chinese time. The flight was as good as I could have asked for, the plane was practically empty and I got my whole row of seats to stretch and endlessly change positions, which is a big luxury in such a long flight. It was night for the entire 12 hours, which was disappointing, since I had specifically chosen the window seat hoping to get a glimpse of the Pole and my first look at Beijing from the air.

I had envisioned the plane ride as a sort of final prep-time, a long time to think deeply about the year to come and practice some more last minute survival phrases in Chinese. Instead, I spent my time watching terrible chick flicks and getting teary-eyed every time the actors so much as hugged, always thinking back the latest of my long row of sad airport farewells with my boyfriend Robb. 

Paul, an old tutor and good friend form my college dorm, was waiting for me at the airport. I will be staying at his place for a few days, until I find my bearings and a more permanent place to stay. Having that kind of a stepping stone is the luckiest kind of luck, and the kind of thing that makes my parents sleep a little better at night. He and his girlfriend have spent the entire weekend showing me around, feeding me, handing me books and maps to read, and coddling me in every way a newcomer can hope for. 

The first night I immediately collapsed, but early on Saturday morning I met Paul for breakfast. It’s funny, back home, every time I said I was headed for China the first comment I’d get was about how terrible and scary the food would be. I don’t know how many times I heard the same lame jokes about having to eat dog and cockroaches, and even a Chinese high school student I had been emailing for a few weeks had warned me not to eat from unauthorized places because I “don’t have a Chinese stomach that can convert the poisons to nutrients.”

Yet, despite all that, my first meal was straight from a cart of street food. If this food is any indication, China and I will very much fall in love. I had Jian Bing, a sort of batter pancake that is then stuffed with an egg, deep fried, and then folded with a thin layer of a red spicy chilli sauce and a piece of lettuce into a little bundle of heaven. I am a fan of deep frying, of eggs, and of breakfast foods in general, but even I couldn’t have predicted the higher elevation of perfection that this ~ US $.70 breakfast could achieve. It has now become one of my quests in my time here to learn how to make these guys, and post a recipe for the curious to try back home. 

After breakfast, Paul and I wandered around some parts of Chaoyang district, a pretty Western part of town, home to most foreign embassies, and a great deal of the city’s expats. The area is mostly made up of very modern high rise buildings, some spectacularly designed such as the famous CCTV tower, which is just across the street from the building where I am staying. I was surprised by the number of cafes, which included quite a few Starbucks. The streets are full of a combination of luxury cars (a whole of Audis) and a bunch of little funky moto-taxis that seem united in a quest to terminate any pedestrian that dares try to cross a street. 

After quite some time walking by Louis Vuittons and through the lobbies of five star hotels that clearly hire their employees based on looks, it was a big surprise to suddenly walk through a narrow alleyway in the middle of all these skyscrapers that was host to a full blown open air market. It certainly had more choices than any market I’d ever been to, from live chickens and ducks (technically forbidden due to concerns over bird flu) to live fish and your pick of fat, black, absolutely terrifying live frogs. The locals seem to be getting a kick of my staring, laughing out loud when I just couldn’t resist taking a picture. 

At night, we go out with another couple of Americans, friends of a common friend (hey Gabe!) that recently moved to Beijing to work at the US Consulate’s visa division. The Chinese, I have been told over the weekend, seem to be endlessly fascinated by regional differences in culture and food. Each province actually has an official sort of “embassy” in the capital, complete with a restaurant that features their local food. We headed for the Sechuanese one, and I was introduced to more of the joys of Chinese food, the woes of Chinese service, and the common practice of private dining rooms.

The next day I wake up and venture out to grab food by myself for the first time. I don’t go to the same street cart that Paul took me to on Saturday, instead heading for a small restaurant where I just put in place my new food ordering strategy, which I have decided to name “point and pray.” I choose some sort of meat-like substance, imagine that the lady wants to know if I want it to go when she asks me something, so I point out of the store in exaggerated gestures. Yes. I want it to go. This meat is then cut up, and folded into a savory pancake with some sort of tuber cut into thin, noodle-like strips and something else I can’t even begin to decipher. I hand her money, let her give me back the right amount. “Xiexie,” I say. There goes the second half of my Chinese vocabulary. This time, I really may have eaten dog, but it was delicious enough to be perfectly worth it.

I spend some time in a café, attempting to climb the great firewall and failing. No Facebook allowed quite yet, it seems. I can deal. What’s really driving me crazy is that my Google search results are in Chinese and I can’t seem to find a way to fix it. A Chinese customer comes in and asks to turn the TV to the Knicks game. I chuckle. It’s obviously not just Harvard that is obsessed with Jeremy Lin. I sit there wishing that I had met him at least once in college, because I anticipate that’s a question that I’ll be asked a lot over the next year, if things keep going this way for him. I notice a couple speaking Spanish, Colombian Spanish. Having lost my shame somewhere in the 8000 miles separating me from home, I just go up and introduce myself. They are beyond nice. He works at the Colombian Embassy. She’s taking me to her Chinese class this week. Things just seem to go. This is good.

After lunch at his girlfriend’s, Paul takes me to one of the most exciting places I’ve visited so far. A huge antiques market, or maybe just an “antiques” market, Panjiayuan. In endless neat rows, men and women hawk every imaginable trinket. Jade necklaces; huge crystals; delicately hand carved pipes; real antique telephones; fake antique Qing dynasty coins; fossils; old watches; communist posters and a thousand copies of the little red book; vases indistinctly painted in intricate cherry blossoms or Mao’s stern portrait, fist in the air; large scrolls of Chinese calligraphy; traditional embroidered robes; People Liberation Army hats; and on and on and on. On an especially fascinating stretch, enormous statues that could only fit in a temple, several times life size. Lions, fat pigs and Budhas, and, hilariously, two or three Roman statues in the middle of the whole mess. I want to buy half the things I see, and the other half make me laugh out loud. I didn’t buy anything that day, but I was instructed to offer ten percent of the asking price, and agree to settle at around thirty. And never to show too much interest.

I have a hard time with the not showing too much interest part. Everything around seems fascinating. Some of the things I had been repeatedly warned about don’t seem so bad after I’d braced for them. The smog makes for terrible visibility, which is a shame given my location on a 37^th floor, but the air so far has not seemed hard to breathe or particularly unpleasant. People don’t spit in the street as much as I had expected given the warnings, but when they do, they do it with such theatricality and enthusiasm (and to my horror, poor aim) that they certainly make up for any lack of volume. The air is very dry, my lips are chapping and the skin around my mouth and nose is getting flaky. I have to buy some moisturizer, but I’ve been warned to be careful to not buy the whitening kind. Yes. Because that actually exists, and is a big thing here. Whitening body lotion.

Anyway, today is Monday and I’m on my own in Beijing for the first time. I’m going to attempt to buy a SIM card for my phone, and to try to wander in Beijing without failing to find my way back. 

Allons! we must not stop here! However sweet these laid-up stores—however convenient this dwelling, we cannot remain here; However shelter’d this port, and however calm these waters, we must not anchor here; However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us, we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

Walt Whitman,  The Song of the Open Road

After what turned out to be a much-longer-than-planned stop at home in Colombia, I have finally set out on my grand adventure. I packed 50.5 lbs worth of stuff in my suitcase again, and I am in the States for a few days saying hi to family, boyfriend and friends before heading for Beijing, where I am planning to stay for a year. 

Though I have unfortunately missed the Lunar New Year celebrations by a few days, I am very excited that my year in China will be a Year of the Dragon. As it turns out, the dragon is the only mythical creature in the Chinese zodiac, and it represents big positive changes and mobility. (Or at least that’s what some random article said online, this may be  the first of many cultural fouls to come.) The dragon is such a powerful symbol of optimism, that many Asian countries see a small baby boom every Dragon Year as many couples strive to have children under that zodiac sign.

So, taking advantage of the lucky symbolism, I have decided to rename the blog, which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while. In any case, spending the Year of the Dragon in China certainly sounds a lot cooler than some of the alternatives, like, say, the Year of the Pig, or the Year of the Rat. Perfect. 

I am currently on my way to Boston, after two days in Florida seeing family. Yesterday, on my drive across the Everglades with my sister, I saw 46 alligators by the water along the end of the hightway. That’s right, FORTY SIX of them. I have been hearing stories of all the alligators laying along that stretch of Interstate 75 aptly named “Alligator Alley” but I’d never been able to see any and figured most of the sightings where hopeful interpretations of floating logs. But the weather must have been just right for gator sunbathing yesterday, and I saw clusters of unmistakable gators laying by the shore. It was so exciting, I stuck my nose to the car window like a five year old. The drive had never seemed to short.

I tried to take pictures going 75 miles an hour so I could prove my story. Predictably, I failed,  but here is a picture I found online that looks like what I saw:

I have decided that these little dragons were some sort of reptilian charm of good luck. Here’s so a year of big dragon changes, and hopefully frequent blog updates!

PS. I didn’t realize how much I missed Pandora.