Quarantine

Superman (the most recent film) is on CCTV 6 tonight – in English, with Chinese subtitles (so happy they don’t dub over anymore). I feel as though some readers will enjoy this information. I was just at my computer, reading away, when I heard, “from father to son…” Of course, I had to turn around, and was glad to find the big block letters passing through the screen in English and Chinese characters.

I may spend a bit of time watching the film tonight as well as the commercials that highlight skin lotions that whiten skin, the joy of hand-washing, and the delicious attributes of Minute Maid orange “juice” (it’s orange drink, let’s be serious), among others.

Soldiers stand at attention for the flag lowering ceremony

The New York Times has an article in today’s paper on China’s National Day preparation details. I knew there were fewer birds flying around the city…

Tomorrow I may head down to Tiananmen Square for a glimpse of the majestic pillars and the carpeted stairs. For now, I have sufficed with Mei Mei’s brilliant image of soldiers standing in front of Tiananmen for the flag lowering ceremony that will be going on daily up until the National Day Parade.

Nationalism, nationalism, nationalism. It’s fun to see so much of it, but I don’t exactly love getting roped into the performative aspect of conveying my own love of China. I love China on my own terms, but today I got really fed up with the constant congratulatory and repetitive performances that I always have to participate in as a foreign student at Jiaoda. This morning, all of the scholarship students were told to attend a meeting at 1:30 pm. No explanation, no description, just “be there.” So, all of us went over after lunch, expecting some sort of explanation as to why our money came a month late (just got 4500 RMB though, so I’m okay financially for now) or when we should be expecting our monthly allowances in the future. Instead of this, however, we were given a presentation on the progress of the country over the past sixty years by a member of the China Scholarship Council and the president of Jiaoda. I learned that China has 1.4 billion people, half of which are women and half men. I learned that there is good food in China and that China has many provinces. I also learned that each person now has 26.2 meters squared of living space, whereas they only had 3.6 meters squared twenty years ago. After the presentation, ten foreign students came up and told the group why they love Beijing.

After around two hours when some administrators gave us an intermission to prepare a video, a group of us decided to leave, agitated and distressed from the meandering monologues from students and administrators alike.

I’m not sure if I will attend another meeting based off of an unclear and generally deceptive invitatation.

On October 24th, Jiaoda is presenting a cultural fair/performance for its students and the Beijing community. Last week, the international office asked us to attend a meeting about the fair, at which we were told that we could do an exhibition or a performance. The American and Canadian students – we had to link up since there are only two Canadians, but I’m not sure that doing this will be that successful in adequately highlighting Canadian culture and history — should we just post pictures of Mike Myers and Alanis Morissette? –  will be doing an exhibition. What we weren’t told, though, is that the office would be requiring the Chinese language students to participate in the performance section as Chinese song performers.

Today, our class was asked to attend an extra session of “class” after our 4-hour stint in the morning in order to practice Beijing’s most overplayed welcome song in the history of the world, “Beijing Huan Ying Ni (Beijing Welcomes You).”

Check out the video here.

Can you find this shot in the video?

 I mean, I love the song. I’m excited about singing it. I’m not excited about memorizing the entire song or having a solo line. I’ve heard that colleges in China like to show off their international students, but I didn’t think it would happen at Jiaoda, a school with such a high academic profile. In short, I was wrong.

It’s funny that we’re rehearsing this song now, right before the National Day. All of the teachers are  just in happier, sing-ier moods. Our speaking teacher made us all sing our national anthems in class today. Yang (Chinese-American from Long Island) and I had a pretty hard time getting past the first few lines of our national anthem – nothing is sacred in America. Then again, Dario, my BFF from Spain, couldn’t sing his anthem and chose to sing a French hit from the ’80s.

I must say, the Saudi Arabian (Sale), Swedish (Maria), Peruvian (Nataly), and Thai (Ban) students knew their anthems best.

People are getting hurt in Beijing and our teachers are worried about us. I’m having a hard time finding articles on it, but our teachers told us yesterday - yes, we had class on Sunday, had to make up for the nine-day vacation we’re about to have to celebrate the sixtieth – anyway, told us today that a few foreigners have died over the past two weeks and that we should be careful!

Wish I had the whole story, here is some of it. And here is some more. My friend, Johnny, told me that his teacher told him to get out of Beijing.

No worries, there are plenty of gigantic tanks with soldiers holding mammoth guns around…I feel safe enough.

Scare or no scare, people are ready to party. There’s a lot of nationalism going around, and even our teachers are showing pride.

Flags are hung outside of homes all over the city

Friday, our grammar teacher made up the sentence, “Wo jue de Mao Ze Dong liao bu qi. (I think that Mao Ze Dong is praiseworthy.)”

I want to update on the Great Wall and the hutongs, but I’m having a hard time writing about my touristy adventures. I’d rather post pictures of babies and Chinese flags. So, here are some photos from my recent walks around Beijing and on the Wall. (Really, I don’t want to show myself on the Wall because I was sweating like a sick cow in Saudi Arabia (it gets to 132 degrees in the summer there!).) There really is so much to say about both the hutongs and the Wall. I really enjoyed the feeling of being there – consummating my wish to see these thousand-year old (or more, or less…) structures that used to have real relevance and use for various dynasties over the past 2000 years. I must say, the Great Wall was inordinately, fascinatingly, breathtaking-ly, mindblowing-ly, distressingly, and unfathomably long.

The view from the top of a steep portion of the Wall

 It just curled and rose and twisted and extended forever (around 5,500 miles, actually).

Baby on the wall!

Interestingly, and maybe not so safe-ly, there were many children climbing the Wall. Bolette and I did the walk together and were stopped many a time for a picture with a baby. We also stopped just to play with some of the kids (and also to catch our breaths).

The touristy flavor was also really amusing. The hutongs had bookstores that featured both Obama’s works and Mao’s. Notebooks that featured sexual acts lined the bookshelves, but so did notebooks with images of Communist propaganda (commentary or what?) and ancient sayings. The Great Wall was magnificent, but clearly a mammoth structure that needs to be tended to at all times – workers were carrying a large piece of timber (I think) up a steep slope while we were there,

Laborers of a sort carrying a heavy block of metal up the wall

and we spotted six others laying down stone for a new addition to the easy walkway back down to the ticket area, where one can find a KFC and a Starbucks

waiting for your arrival. My friend, Mechal, happened to find a touristy spot in the form of a bear attraction. I have a video clip of him throwing apples to these bears; you can only see the bears if you take a roller coaster down from an area of the Wall to a random zoo.  The file is too big for the blog, but I’ll try to edit it and post it soon.

Apparently, everyone must touch the Wall when you reach one of the uppermost portions, so I have a bunch of pictures of me touching the Wall with Bolette, with Mei Mei, and with other friends. Many Chinese tourists also touched the Wall, and thought it would be fun for Bolette and me to take pictures with them touching the Wall, as well. I didn’t get any shots of this, but I did get one of a really happy family just after they touched!

Post-touch

Post-touch glory

There were many victorious moments on the Wall and it was really fun. But I think one visit is enough for this trip. Some people are thinking about going back to sleep on the Wall (yes, on it), but I was fine with my free two and a half hour excursion there.

Random note: In addition to my bout of heat exhaustion at the Wall, my computer has been working on overdrive, too. I had to delete a ridiculously new and angry Trojan off of my computer today (thank you CA anti-virus technicians) and do a system restore of my computer. So, I’m happy to say that my computer is up and running as well as it was on August 30th, 2009.

I have been actively taking notes these past few days, but haven’t found the time to transfer them over to the blog. There are some interesting topics that I’d like to combine – for instance hutongsand my trip to the Great Wall tomorrow – so look forward to some themed entries.

A hint of what's to come

While traveling around and seeing the famous sites of Beijing is very entertaining and informative (though I haven’t seen enough of anything yet…I can’t wait to go to the temples!), I am finding that my everyday life supplies me with more fodder for writing than anything else.

For instance, a group of us recently discovered the best campus cafeteria (out of four), where you can get a quickly cooked meal for 1/3 of the price at one of the nearby restaurants. Each cafeteria (or canteen, actually) has three levels. The first level offers buffet-style meals which you need your student card to buy, as they do not accept cash. The second floor has another buffet-style set-up. On the third floor, however, you can use cash and you get to order a dish of your choice. After you order your food at a large counter, you bring one out of the two receipts you receive to a person who stands in front of the kitchen. This person then gives the receipt to a cook. After the food is made, the cook gives the dish to a waiter/waitress, who must find you at the random table you have chosen to dine at.

Okay – so eating at the canteen may not seem that strange, but most of us have never been anywhere where someone must haphazardly find you…if you go to Cosi or a similar chain where the food is brough to you, you usually have a number. But here, there are people who are incredibly skilled at remembering faces telling a waiter where you are sitting and what you have ordered. The system does have its own check built in, though: you must give your receipt to the waiter who brings your food to you, so you can’t be given the wrong food.

Other moments in one’s daily life: I went swimming at the gym, where I recently bought a 3-month membership, yesterday with Maria. This gym is not as lavish/fabulous/posh as the Shangri-La hotel pools that I’ve been swimming in with Scott and Matt, but it is pretty cute and up to date , AND I don’t have to teach a swim lesson to gain access to it.

The pool is really nice, but it’s located in the basement and is always crowded. On the wall on the far side of the pool there’s a sign written in large red letters that reads: ”Slapstick is stricty prohibited…”

Important Notice

I wonder, do they mean roughhousing or slapstick comedy?  Next time I go to the gym, I’ll write the characters down and find the translation…forgot to do that this time around.   On another note, the lanes in the pool are much larger than one might find at a gym in the States. One should not assume that the lanes were designed to increase the comfort level of each swimmer. Rather, each lane proffers room for 10-20 swimmers at a time, so swimming in a lane is similar to crossing a Beijing street during lunch time.

Average Beijing crowd during lunch hours (12:30-2:30 PM)

Moreover, there are small spittoons placed at the end of each lane. (You can see a small pink one in the photo.) I made the mistake of looking into one once and was duly rewarded by my body in the form of a long and overwrought gag. I tried to get Maria to come over to see the pools of brown-tinted spittle by the poolside, but she told me that she gets queasy easily and refused to take a peek.

I’m going to head out to get my weekly massage now, so I will update further over the weekend. More to come about weekend classes, the National Day parade, the Great Wall, and other local happenings.

I took a few photos the other day after commuting from my area of town, xizhimen, to the fancy side and back. Everytime I come back from the pretty and pruned neighborhoods of Beijing, I get to see my neighborhood for the first time all over again.

A heavily populated subway car

While crowded subways, smelly sidewalks, grubby children, and speeding bikes and cars are not always the most pleasant things to see, hear, and smell, I love that I am here during a time when Beijing is still grimy. All around me construction is actively taking place. A few hundred feet outside of the campus there is a big, modern residential complex being built over what used to be (and what still is, for around a block) a very small

A quaint street near campus

 group of streets where vendors hawk wares to men and women resting on the curb and people live in the back of their small corner stores.

Though it seems as if all of the bulldozers will eventually wipe out all of the small buildings in this area, it’s hard to imagine the same speedy transition for Beijing’s smaller infrastructures, such as sanitation. In the east

Garbage disposal on a city sidewalk

area of Beijing, it’s clear that street cleaners clean the streets on a daily basis, perhaps with machines. Where I live, garbage is swept up and piled into random areas of the streets and sidewalks. While walking to class at 7:45 am, I am usually overwhelmed by the smell of garbage rising up from the street and sidewalk. I’m beginning to wonder where all the garbage is hiding during the morning, since I cannot see it. Of course, the west village and the Washington Square area  also smell like garbage on a Monday morning, so I certainly cannot single out Beijing as a city that smells like garbage.

One contributing factor to the garbage situation is food. The street right outside of our campus’ gate is lined with food vendors, and I’m sure that a lot

China's Wal-Mart

of the food garbage is thrown into the sewers. On Friday, a group of us went to a market “better than Wal-Mart” (according to my friend, Johnny). Right outside of the market (which was placed in a large warehouse) was a food market, where we found a couple selling fish on the street. Cooked fish is more likely to be found in these street markets, but here we found this couple picking up live fish out of basins and scaling them alive on a dirty

A woman scaling fish in a street market

 piece of cloth. Two questions arose in my mind after witnessing this: 1. where are all the scales thrown out?, and 2. can people really make a living on selling these fish?

The answer to the first question is up to anyone’s imagination. I’m sure that the sewer or the general ground area is a good enough answer for anyone concerned. The answer to the second question is more problematic and complicated, I think, especially because the phrase “make a living” evokes extraordinarily different images from one culture to the next. An anecdote: a Chinese friend of one of my international friends works at a bookstore and makes 10 rmb/hour, 80 rmb/day. Her rent is 200 rmb a month. She can live on this salary in Beijing. To put this into perspective, an average English tutor makes between 100-150 rmb/hour; a swim instructor makes 300 rmb/hour. So, how much money does the fish-vending couple make? And is it enough for them to live on?

Fruit vending

Many of the street vendors and construction workers that I see around Beijing probably make more money in Beijing than they would where they are from, which is probably an area outside of Beijing. The city is full of “migrants,” Chinese people who live outside the city’s limits, who travel to Beijing to work and make money for their families. (I have tried to do a bit of research on street vendors here, but some of the better sites are blocked (not sure why). If you’re interested, check out streetvendor.org)

The same question – can they make a living? – goes out to the construction workers that one can see all over the city in orange and

A construction worker in xizhimen

white-striped vests. The construction workers, I know for a fact, do need permits to work here under the hukou system , which allows workers from rural areas to obtain permits to work in the city. Under the system, everyone is registered as residents of their place of birth, not the entire country, so if someone wants to work outside of their birthplace, he/she must obtain a permit. Read more about it here. While parents can make more money for their children while working in the city, they cannot change their original place of residence and therefore lose benefits – healthcare, schooling, etc. – for themselves and their children while in the area. Scott has been telling me a bit about this and I did some research on the hukou system and occupational health for the Social Science Research Council in 2008. Seeing migrant workers and imagining what their life trajectories have been like or where they live with their children, what schools their children are allowed to go to, and how they make it through their daily lives is something that I’ve been thinking about while I’ve been here – and I don’t think I’d be able to get a feel for it from New Jersey or anywhere else.

60th anniversary of PRC panda - found at the zoo

As many people reading this blog may know, October 1st marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Because of this great event, the government has instated many preventive and preparatory measures to ensure that the day will go well – without any interruptions.

Prevention: No one may enter campus without flashing a student id card at the campus gates. Though international students are required to show their student cards, the government is more interested in Chinese students, who are not allowed to bring any students from other universities to their own. This is because the government does not want to take the chance of allowing any student-organized protests.

Preparation: The first full rehearsal for the upcoming parade was held on Friday. In order to halt foot traffic around the Tian’anmen Square area, the government closed down many subway stops, and, in turn, blocked the way home for many commuters.

Prevention: A group of us took a walk around the wangfujing area tonight, a section of the city reminiscent of Times Square. We decided to walk a few kilometers west to Tian’anmen Square, but found that the road was blocked off a few hundred feet before the entrance. Though cars and buses were allowed through, pedestrians were not. It’s interesting that the square is off limits even though the rehearsal ended last night at 5 am. A few of us have conjectured that the government is wary of pedestrians a. dirtying up the place, or b. placing explosives around the area.

Prevention: As a means of ensuring that no one will be injured or killed during the parade, the government is not allowing anyone who lives in a building or is staying at a hotel on the parade route to look outside of their windows during the parade. Those who have not been granted official access to the parade will have to watch it from their tvs  and not from their windows, roofs, or stoops.

Last night, eight of us went to jishuitan, an area a little northeast of Jiaoda, to watch The Shop Around the Corner on the rooftop of Club Obiwan (check my entry “A Good Weekend” to hear more about the spot).

We got there pretty early because we thought every student around would want to see a movie from 1940, but only a few more people ended up joining us.

Though only expats/students attended, the film had Chinese subtitles, which made the movie even more fun to watch, as most of us could read a lot of the characters. The translations didn’t do the movie justice. For instance, when Klara sees the necklace that Alfred secretly plans on giving to her, she is utterly taken aback. Per the Chinese translation, however, Klara just says, “Pretty (mei hao).” It was hysterical.

On the topic of film, I am really interested to see a film coming up about Tiananmen Square. A few of us are interested in the depiction, and I’ll be sure to write about it when I see it.

In response to a comment about film, art, and literature in Beijing, I will say that contemporary art has risen in popularity since the 1970s and is widely displayed in art galleries around Beijing. Film, on the other hand, is perhaps stifled a bit more, as no film is able to be in wide release unless it is approved by the government. Evan Osnos, from the New Yorker, has written extensively about this in an article on Jia Zhangke, a famous auteur here who is gigantic in the independent world and has just sold out (a bit) by making a Kung Fu movie. I suggest that you google Jia Zhangke rather than look for the article, as it is not available for non-subscribers.

Literature, my discipline of choice, I do not know much about. Part of the reason that I am in China is to learn more about the literary scene and the authors that are big here. I haven’t really started my research on this yet, but I have begun perusing small bookstores and large ones for information. I also plan on meeting with a professor or two at Beijing Language and Culture University and Peking University, the two most famous schools in China for the humanities.

Going back to The Shop Around the Corner, I forgot to mention that I didn’t know that You’ve Got Mail is a re-make (of sorts) of this movie. If you’ve never seen either film, I suggest you set aside a few hours, because the movies are both really cute!

I’m off to teach a swim lesson now – hopefully I won’t get sick again from the water. Did I mention my sniffles/diarrhea bout earlier this week? I’m okay now, just trying to purell as much as possible.

In response to the questions I’ve been receiving regarding bookstores, McDonalds, Starbucks, toilets,and  air conditioners, I’d like to say that I’m working on collecting all the fun facts/information requested. Here’s a bit of information for your perusal:

First off, here’s a big picture of my newly decorated room:

I have walked into several large bookstores, and no, Twilight is not the novel featured at the front of the store. Rather, one might see the latest history of a government official at the top of the new book pile.

Also, I haven’t gone to Starbucks yet because one coffee is 28 RMB, which is more than I would pay for a dinner at a nice restaurant or a taxi ride from one end of Beijing to the other. But, for my readers and for my journalistic endeavors (can I get a reimbursement?), I will go to Starbucks and check out the coffee.

Interestingly, McDonalds is priced just right. The price for a Filet-o-Fish meal is a bit less than a regular meal would be at a middling-to-good restuarant in the city (around 25 RMB). If you’re interested in reading more about McDonalds, I suggest you read Golden Arches East: McDonalds in East Asia. While I was in the restaurant, I did see something that I had read about in Golden Arches: in China, because people are not eating the cheapest food, they treat the chain as if it is a legitimate restaurant and therefore do not feel the need to throw out their food. So people either leave their food on the table or bring their trays up to the garbage, where an attendant is waiting to literally dump the food into the garbage. The chapter on Beijing was written in 1998, I believe, so it’s interesting that McDonalds is still perceived as a restaurant (of sorts).

An average toilet - without a foot pedal

Toilets and air conditioning is a hot topic around here, as

 toilets can toy with one’s gag reflexes and air conditioning is often difficult to come by, though they have mysteriously come out of the woodwork in the past few (unbelievably) hot days. I do have a nice and new air conditioner in my dorm room. Actually, everything in my room is new, from the desks to the sink to the air conditioner to the TV to the boiling pot to the beds…

My air conditioner

Another note in toilets: I actually think that squatter toilets are more sanitary than anything else. Beijing has a lot of public bathrooms around the city, and I wouldn’t mind using one if I had to (actually had to use one in a bit of an emergency state yesterday – taking some Immodium now…), because you don’t actually touch anything. There are footpedals for flushing and you don’t have to touch a bacterial feeding ground.

I hope the visuals are helpful. I stole the picture of this toilet, so I’ll make sure to get one of my own and take a nice big picture of it.

Old layout

In yesterday’s entry, I forgot to mention that I bought 900 RMB worth of fun goodies from Ikea! The $120 or so went a long way, as Mei Mei confirmed tonight when she said that our room is one made for a princess.

So though I’m in a different room, the original layout and look was the same as that of my quarantine hellhole.

Now, our room is all decked out. We moved the beds around so that they are parallel to the window, moved our desks towards the front door, and added some beautiful curtains, desk lamps, carpets (one you won’t be able to see in the photos, it’s a runner that we placed in between our beds), and some fun utensils.

So, take a look!

The view from the front door

Check out our cool desk lamps!