WORKING-MAN KEV is rolling along at the office - only 4 weeks to go, whew. Because I’m interning at the Dept. of Commerce, I have to rock a suit to work every day. You have to understand where I’m living, though - my part of town is middle class, but Chinese middle class. Lots of bikes, no Westerners living near us, two wholesale clothing markets on my street, and no restaurant within a couple blocks where you could spend more than 3-4 bucks US per person for dinner. It takes me a bit over an hour to get to work every day (20 minute walk to the subway, 10 minutes on Line 1, transfer, 20 minutes of Line 2, another 10 minute walk to the office), and I pretty much walk through the neighborhood. In any case, a ton of people know me now. Like, I went to get a haircut, and they were like, “Your the guy with the suit, right?” At McD’s, if I walk in with a suit, I don’t have to order because they know I want a jiada (Supersize) McNugget meal, Coke with not too much ice and three packets of ketchup.The suit is cool is other ways. The first is the price - I had this suit custom-made, with custom fabric and cut selections, and three visits by the tailor, for about US$97. I’ve got five ties which I bought for $1.20 each and four dress shirts (most expensive - $5.50). So basically, you can look sharp for 100 bucks. The first Friday I was working, I headed down to Yonganli, an area near the Embassies with a lot of Westerners. The DVD shops there are a bit more than elsewhere in town (9-10 kuai, or $1.10-1.20, vs. 7 kuai in my part of town), but they have tons and tons of Western TV shows and movies you can’t get anywhere else. I found the Sliders boxset, and I didn’t even know they had that in the states. In any case, I worked the suit magic at a store staffed by two girls (probably about my age) to pick up a 20% discount. Good stuff.
Work is rolling along smooth. I’ve primarily been writing Market Research Reports and preparing for a visit in late May of Las Vegas executives. We give the market research reports to US companies who want to export to China. I basically write them myself front to back - my first one was on direct sales (like Amway, Avon) and I’m writing one now on Sporting Goods. For the direct sales paper, I interviewed two CEOs, read a few hundred pages of confidential documents (ambassador demarches, letters from Dick Cheney among others, drafts of upcoming laws that were somehow smuggled out of the Chinese ministry, that sort of stuff). I don’t think I’ll ever work for government after I finish school, but it’s interesting to see how things operate, especially how strong lobbies and industry assocations can be.
I’m still doing school one day a week (7 hours of class though, damn). For my modern Chinese society class (in English), we had this one rock guitarist come in last week. Basically, he was the Asian version of Jack Black. The guy was in college in 1988 (he’s Asian of some sort ethnically, but I’m pretty sure he’s American) when he came to do a semester abroad in China. There was very little in the way of Western music in China at the time. This dude and his friend went to the only instrument store in Beijing, and the manager let them rock out, which soon drew a big crowd. The manager asked them to play a show in two weeks (mind you, they had no experience, no songs, and probably marginal musical talent, but at least they knew who Springsteen was). He ended up forming a rock band with a couple Chinese dudes he met, then went back to the States to do grad school. Every summer he came back to China, though, and the band kept growing better. By the early 1990s, their band (Tang Dynasty) was massive - groupies, stadiums, the works. So this guy would study at Berkeley 8 months of the year as a mild-mannered student, then tour China as a rock star, quite literally, all summer. Crazy.
Outside of school and work, I’ve been doing the usual (basketball, walking aimlessly without a map until I’m lost and 12 miles from my dorm (really- that was two weekends ago), but a ton of us went up to the Great Wall for a camping trip this weekend. I use “camping” in the broadest sense of the word, as you’ll see. We started at Simitai, a pretty remote part of the Wall four hours by car from Beijing city proper, and walked 11km down the wall. Even though the wall is quite steep (and unrenovated) in many parts, I can’t see how this could take anyone more than 3 hours to walk. It was 75+ degrees and sunny during the day. After dinner and nightfall, we set tents and sleeping bags up on the Great Wall itself. About half the kids with us were Chinese roommates, and not a single one of them had ever been camping. Now, we were protected bwind by the sides of the Wall, there was no chance of rain, and the low was predicted to be 50 degrees. To my mind, sleeping in a tent in those conditions rather than looking up at the stars is essentially heresy. Nonetheless, the Chinese immediately started setting up tents. We persuaded two of them to sleep outside, and us hardy outside folks got to see shooting stars flying over the 400 year-old parapets while the rest of the folks saw the top of the tent. (They may have had reason, though - Chinese sleeping bags are about as thick as saran wrap, and it got pretty cold during the night. Of course, Chinese tents are also as thick as saran wrap, so…).
I don’t know if it’s been in the news in US (it certainly hasn’t been here - we don’t have what you would call a “free press”) but China had a pretty major crackdown on liberty in the last week. A ton of dissidents (by this I mean democracy activists, NGO organizers, AIDS activists, etc.) were arrested and held without charge. Closer to home, a bunch of new google restrictions popped up. There are more than 1000 words that you just can’t search from China on google - not only will it not give you results, it will block your computer from using google for 10-20 minutes afterward. So stupid. Many of the words are Falun Gong or Tiananmen related, but, and I swear I’m not kidding, ziyou (”freedom”, in English or Chinese) is among the blacklisted. That right - freedom is officially banned in China.
The parents are arriving in 25 days for a 10 day trip over here. I’m sure I’ll show them around Beijing for 4 or so days, but after that, we’re either going to Kashgar (Moslim desert town in way West China), Guilin (most beautiful scenery in the country, but very rainy this time of year) or Yunnan (tons of varied terrain, Tibetan and Thai towns, but also rainy and I visited there myself already back in February). I’m hoping for Kashgar, but any of them will be sweet, especially if the folks are paying, right?
