SOME PEOPLE SAY THAT the first thing they notice about China is the everpresent smell - some combination of street-cooked sweet potatoes, gasoline and urine. Some say they notice the absolutely absurd amount of construction - there’re literally full streets of skycrapers being built simultaneously. Others first notice Beijing’s orange-red sun; air pollution is so heavy that you can stare directly at the sun in the evening and not hurt your eyes.I first noticed the prices. Hey, if I’m going to be a jingjixuejia, an economist, I’ve got to notice these things, right? It’s amazing how cheap everything is. A 15-minute taxi ride will run you US$3. There are beers at the supermarket as cheap as 1 kuai 4, which is 17 cents US. Bootleg DVDs (the high-quality Hong Kong version with all the packaging) is less than $1US, and non-bootleg copies only cost 2 or 3 bucks. 8 of us ate lunch today for 96 kuai - $12US all told. I’m having a three-piece suit tailored as we speak - $97.50US. Honestly, it’s incredible.
Aside from shopping, your boy is doing pretty well over here. I’m in China until June 13, at which point I have no idea what the hell I’m going to do because I don’t know how I’m going to get a summer job if I can’t interview. I’ve got some issues with the roommate and the classes - more on these later - but mostly I’m just having fun looking around. I’ve headed to the Great Wall and Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven. You know those “I Climbed the Great Wall” T-shirts? I never understood why people bought those - how hard can it be to climb a wall? I planned to run up the steps to the wall from the parking lot. Suffice to say, I didn’t make it. I counted on the way down - 1,126 steps to the Wall, and almost a thousand more on the wall itself to get to the good views. Damn. I’ve threw some pics up to the right; below the 3 wall pictures are two older pictures I like (from London) that I’ve rotated in.
Tian Tan is a massive Ming-era temple in South Beijing, but honestly, the temple itself really is not on the same level of places like Westminster Abbey in history or Fallingwater in architecture. What is cool, though, is the giant park that surrounds the Temple. We went there on Saturday morning, and the place was filled with old Chinese folks playing instruments, dancing, singing along, playing taijiqiu (a crazy combination of tai chi and juggling), just having a good time in general. Pretty rad.
My semester is structured such that I have one intensive Chinese class for the first month, then take Chinese History (in English) and Business Chinese for two months, then work for two months. I’m much more interested in learning about the Chinese economy than I am in learning Chinese grammar. I didn’t know this until I got here, but we’re actually not allowed to talk in English for the first month, period. This sucks. My boys from Boston are headed to the Super Bowl, and the only football terms I know in Chinese are football, throw a pass and tackle. Most of the kids here are the type that are most interested in language, so they have no problems. But I’m not here for that reason, and I’m a bit peeved that the program I’m on really isn’t as it was described. Ah well. The workload is also pretty massive - we have a weekly oral exam, and I have to prepare and memorize six separate five-minute presentations for each exam. Damn.
My only other real problem is the Chinese roommate. The guy is really an amazingly nice guy - on my birthday (yep, 21 now - the next milestone birthday is when I retire, right?) he set up a whole event, cooked a huge meal with some girls, bought a gift, the works. Mind you, this was like a week after I got here. He’s always willing to go around everywhere to help me find anything I need. The problem is - you know your boy the Cure likes his privacy, right? Like, if I’m reading my book (I’m almost done my 4th book since I got here, whew), it’s a good sign that I don’t want to make small talk? Or that occasionally I want to walk around or go get some food or explore some part of town ziji yi ge ren, right? Or that you shouldn’t look through my papers or borrow my stuff without asking? F’real, this guy does not understand that. It’s all good intentions, so I don’t want to tell him “Go eat with your buds, man, I’m headed…somewhere, haven’t decided yet.”
7 of us are going to Yunnan (in way, way, tigers and snakes and monkeys South China - Beijing is in the North, and it’s damn freezing up here right now) in two weeks during our break (roommate included). I’m looking forward to the trip, but especially the last 6 days or so, because I’m going to leave Kunming alone (the capital of Yunnan) and somehow make my way back to Beijing a week later. 1.3 billion people makes it hard to get time alone, for real.
Oh man, playing b-ball has been one of the highlights of coming here thus far. Just as I expected, the Chinese are pretty much all god-awful at basketball, but still love to play. At 6′0, 200 or so, I’m basically the equivalent of a 6′5″, 250 guy in America; I post up on these guys and score pretty much every time. In one game, I dribbled the ball between the legs of guys on the other team five different times (on three different people). And it’s not like I’m Aonier, Shaquille O’Neal. Good times.
I’ve been meaning to take more pictures of this, but you guys would appreciate the Chinglish over here. If you ever wondered why Chinese in the US tended to have god-awful English, I have found the reason: the written English is China is terrible. My roommate’s CET-6 test, the 3rd highest national college English exam in China, was akwardly written in many parts and flat-out wrong on one answer (reluctant and prohibited are not synonyms, it turns out). And it’s not little mom n’ pops with bad English - huge government buildings and signs at multinational stores are all horrendous. Examples? I’m currently drinking “Orangeate”, which is Chinglish for Orange Juice. A cable car at the Great Wall had a sign that said “Welcome to taking the cable cat!” A birthday card I got says “I’m so happy everyday because make me fun”; I haven’t figured that one out yet. The 6-story foreign language bookstore at Wangfujing (Beijing’s 5th Avenue) sold a book called “A Guiding Tour Through Whole China” and had a section of books for “Kenergarden”. I’m not even trying to find this stuff - it’s everywhere.
OK, so how about the food? If you know me, you know I’m not a big fan of Asian food in general, though I can always go for a good plate of Pad Thai. So here I’ve eaten a ton of Chinese food, and I can report that there are at least a few dishes that are pretty good. Meiyou rou de dan miantiao’r, xian de are thin Chinese noodles with eggs, onions and a somewhat salty taste. Basi pingguo is basically apple pie wrapped in a pastry and dipped in honey. There’s also some kind of jirou, chicken, dipped in an orange sauce, but I don’t know what it’s name is (they have it at the cafeteria). Nonetheless, I’m grateful that nearby are Sarku-style Japanese, Maidanglao (c’mon, you know what this one is - I’ll give you a hint, they have wonderful Super Sized shutiao), KFC and Carrefour (a French supermarket chain similar to Walmart where I buy cheap loafs of French bread).
And now, you can’t buy Doritos here. I will be dying for a bag of Munchies when I get back to the US.
My other question before I got here concerned the Communists - how totalitarian are they really? It turns out, here in a major city, not too bad. I mean, there are a ton of websites that are outright blocked (such as BBC News), you can’t buy many magazines (Playboy is banned, though Playboy-brand clothing is everywhere), tons of books are banned, there are police on pretty much every corner, and on and on. I decided before I got here is to say, fuck the communists. I brought a book about the Cultural Revolution written by a Chinese dissident which I’m pretty sure is banned here. My roommate got worried when I started talking about Zhao Ziyang, a former Chairman that died this week. Zhao fell out of favor when he went against the government decision to use force in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and the Chinese print and TV media pretty much let his death go unannounced. I don’t care, though. The way I see it is that I really have to piss them off if they’re going to deport me - I have no work history (all Chinese have a personal file that follows them wherever they go), no danwei (family/work unit), so there are no consequences if I stick it to the man. You will see my picture wearing my “Enjoy Capitalism” shirt in front of the giant Mao picture at Tiananmen Square before the end of next month, I promise you that.
The Chinese are more or less clueless on their country’s politics, though. My roommate is a) rich by Chinese standards, b) highly educated, c) interested enough in the West that he wants to go to grad school in America and applied to have an American roommate this semester, and d) knows enough English to read a newspaper, but he had no idea what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989. That 1-3000 Beijing students were killed by the government was complete news to him. When I was explaining Tiananmen to him, I noted the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He asked me what the guanxi, or relationship, between Tiananmen and the fall of the Berlin Wall was. What? You don’t know that the Berlin Wall coming down was the end of communism in Germany? Incredible.
The other odd political thing here is the Mao propaganda so popular with tourists. Mao watches, posters and bags are everywhere. It’s not a secret that Mao was responsible for 30 million (low end estimate) to 45 million (high end estimate) deaths in China, right? That he was behind the Cultural Revolution which basically destroyed China’s cultural history? I mean, people don’t buy Hitler watches, and at least he did a great job fixing up Germany’s economy, which is more than can be said for Mao. It reminds me of the Che T-shirts and posters in America - Che may have been a long-haired revolutionary, but he also thought gays should be sent to concentration camps and murdered a number of people, among other things.
Oh, last thing: I finally got around to watching Super Size Me. I more or less bashed the guy last summer despite not seeing the movie, but I granted that he was at least funny. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m going to bash him again and I didn’t even find the movie funny. The movie is completely ridiculous - not only does he eat massive McDonalds meals every day, but he also completely cuts out any physical activity, using a pedometer to keep his walking under a mile a day. And I don’t know what meals he was getting at McD’s, but I know that my McNugget Super Size meal is in the area of 1500 calories including the Coke, so even if you got that Super Size meal 3 times a day, you still haven’t eaten the 5000+ Spurlock claimed to eat every day. The “McDonald’s is like drugs” meme was neither subtle nor factual - it’s not a surprise that food that tastes good triggers some happy feeling in your brain. Spurlock says something like “with these foods, it’s not a mouth-and-tongue sensation, but a chemical reaction in your brain.” Yeah. I think that’s how nerves work. The part I really didn’t get was at the end, where he claims that McDs serves unhealthy food not because consumers want it, but instead because it benefits shareholders. What? McDonalds doesn’t have 93 empty restaurants on Manhattan island. Clearly some people like their food, right?
My big problem with the movie, though, is that going after McD’s is elitist and unfair. Sure, McD’s isn’t healthy. Neither is filet mignon at the 5-star restaurant downtown. If you ate out at New York’s finest restaurants for every meal, “only getting dessert when they asked you”, I have no doubt that you’d be packing in just as many calories as you doing eating at McDs. But we don’t claim that a parent telling her kid to try the foie gras is “luring him into an unhealthy addiction”, do we? No. Eating fast food from time to time is truly no problem, just as having a big steak at the Ritz Carlton is not problem, as long as you have some self-control.
Team America, on the other hand - that was hilarious. Ok, I’m out. No MP3 suggestions in China - I don’t have internet in my room, so I have no way to download the songs! Let me know what’s good and new and I’ll try to find it here.
