Quarantine

Hello!

I’m on hiatus from the blog, as you may have noticed.

To update: New Years Eve was like a punch in the face – good night but left me reeling; then I headed out to Shanghai, where I was a first-hand witness to the “third culture kids,” those students/kids who live abroad with their families and go to international school; Suzhou had beautiful gardens; two weeks of partying in Beijing ensued.

I want to develop all of these experiences in written form, but not here yet. I’m developing something on the DL – to be worked on in full between January and February…perhaps a series of vignettes?

Sorry I haven’t been here commenting about Google (does anyone think their potential pullout of China has anything to do with other issues, such as their highly publicized (in China) apology to the PRC Writer’s Union last week?) or other prominent issues. I’ve kind of been in my own world for a bit – focusing on friends before I head out of here.

HAPPY FIFTH NIGHT OF HANUKKAH EVERYONE!!!!

I put a picture of a menorah outside of my room, an action which has resulted in my relating the story of the good ol’ Maccabees a good four or five times.

In the States, the day after Thanksgiving marks the commencement of holiday shopping and its attendant rampant advertising and discount campaigns. And, as much as we may not like to admit it, the month-long Christmas/Hanukkah fever is shared by many an American, unless you are Muslim or a Jehovah’s Witness.

Perhaps because the majority of Americans celebrate either Christmas or Hanukkah, the proliferation of Santa Clauses, christmas trees, elves, menorahs, and the ever-present Christmas song doesn’t stand out as strange,  purely commercial, or misplaced.

In Beijing, however, everyone – Chinese or expat – can easily view the holiday season in the same way that singles perceive Valentine’s Day: as a commercialized, commodity-driven month.

Cashier wearing a Santa hat

Except this one is full of discounts and sad, sad employees who grudgingly wear floppy Santa hats.

In The Village, one of Beijing’s most popular (and posh) shopping centers, a Smart Car and a Christmas tree are enclosed in a glass bubble. On the rim of the bubble, the message, “You could be the lucky winner of a brand new Smart Car!” is written in a happy, Christmas-y font. Ten meters away, at the entrance of UniQlo, a Japanese-owned clothing store, cutouts of Christmas hats and Santa Clauses block one’s view of the store’s interior. Inside the store, Christmas discounts abound (yay!) and foreigners are lined up, 10 or 20 at any given time, at the changing rooms or registers. Of course, there are Chinese people shopping too, but they are, I must say, the minority here.

And so, at first glance, there is a holiday fervor in the shopping area. But once one steps away from The Village, all of that dissipates, and one remembers that China is not a country in which holidays are celebrated in December. Chun Jie, the Spring Festival, isn’t until the end of January. On a second take of The Village’s Christmas trees and decorations, I couldn’t help but notice that while foreigners were walking past the decorations with smiles on their faces, the Chinese patrons walked by slowly, staring at the decorations,

Christmas decorations in The Village

as if they were looking at something that wasn’t their own, in a place that didn’t belong to them, in the midst of a celebration of which they were not a part.

On seeing this disconnect, I realized that I really don’t like the holiday season in China. I like China’s holiday seasons. I really loved it when every single store and home put out a Chinese flag during National Day. And I loved it when all of the small stores sold moon cakes during the Moon Festival. But Christmas? (Hanukkah is way beyond the capacity of these international corporate designs.) I don’t like it. Not one bit! And I especially don’t like it when Chinese employees are made to wear Santa hats!!!! Do they have a choice? In the States, do all employees have to abide by their companies’ costume policies?

I’d rather not have a commercial holiday season at all. Just knowing that Hanukkah

Cooking latkes at Maria's

 is going on right now is good enough for me. I don’t have a menorah, but I did make latkes!!! Tonight, at Maria’s, most of my friends got together for a holiday party, at which I made latkes from SCRATCH. We also ate salad, Swedish pancakes (American crepes), fruit with melted chocolate, and Danish sweets. The meal was 1/4 dinner fare and 3/4 dessert. It was amazing.

OK – so that’s the one thing – LATKES. I can’t do without them during the holiday season.

My very own latkes!

The title of this blog entry may imply that I took part in Beijing’s most glamourous Thanksgiving presentation of 2009. This, unfortunately, is not true. Despite being held at the Shangri-la’s prized hotel, the Kerry Centre, the Thanksgiving feast was a disappointment.

Instead of mashed potatoes, I ate soupy potatoes. In place of yams, I consumed undercooked diced sweet potatoes. Instead of stuffing, I ate a prawn.

The dessert, however, was a success, and my friends and I took part in devouring the greater portion of the buffet offerings.

And, of course, Thanksgiving has more to do with who you’re with than what you’re eating, so I must say that I was happy with who showed up to the event. If it were only the Americans, I wouldn’t have gone (I hate one out of the three of us). Thankfully, Bolette came and so did other friends from Spain, Canada, Kazakhstan, Turkey, China, and Thailand.

Finally, the night wouldn’t have been the same without the bottle of red wine I drank in the cab and the one that I imbibed at the dinner table.

Here  are the pictures in chronological order. Towards the end of the night, I couldn’t exactly breathe nor stand up straight.

Heading downtown with Bolette and Vicente

Alex, Yang, and Vicente in the Kerry Centre lobby

Just beginning

Our table

Done

With Yang

Jin Wu Xing, the large warehouse market, provided the kitschy French masquerade masks, while the bar and art districts provided the parties. But no one in Beijing supplied the essential components of America’s favorite pagan holiday: children and candy.

Halloween in Beijing is an opportunity for bars to make a buck and for foreign students to try to capture the feel of a longstanding tradition in the States and elsewhere. For me, however, I was generally unenthused and uninspired by the events of the night, which included a Tim Burton pre-game playlist, a decision to not spend 200 kuai for an overcrowded dance party (that we previously attended for free), and a few hours at Nan Jie, a foreigners’ bar in Sanlitun.

Maybe I’m just not a partier. Or maybe I’m starting to realize that Halloween parties in Beijing are simulacra; just because bars are decorated with pumpkins doesn’t mean that the tradition exists here. Without the sheer enjoyment and genuine fear expressed by the real revelers of the holiday – children - Halloween is dead. But then again, this point of view is clearly an American’s. Moments of disappointment such as these always harken back to the real point of the matter: I can’t step out of the American perspective. I continually try to enter these blank spaces, ironically embodied in a decorated and loud bar, and find myself wishing that I felt something. But what exactly am I looking to feel? And if I felt the feeling of home or of a connection to something familiar, would I be satisfied? Should I be looking for America here?

I remember when I first read James Joyce’s short story, “Clay,” in his work Dubliners, I felt a connection to Halloween even though the author depicted an All Hallow’s Eve celebration from early 20th-century Dublin. Though I hadn’t intentionally been looking for connections between the celebration of the pagan holiday at home and abroad, I was strangely excited by Joyce’s depiction of a rainy night, a woman clad in brown who accidentally chooses death in a game of chance, who also has a pointed nose and a small little body – a husbandless, lonely, and isolated woman who has become the quintessential figure of an American (and Irish?) Halloween. Looking back on my first reading of the story, I can say why I felt connected to Joyce’s depiction of the holiday. Now, having just read it again, I realize that I like the story because it’s layered; Joyce intertwines the rich Celtic history of All Hallow’s Eve with the state of Ireland’s then contemporary social ailments. Though I can’t necessarily relate, I can tap into a rich space - the piece begs its readers to come along and play in a kind of Sartrean fantasy land – where both reader and author put in half of the effort.

In Beijing, I sometimes have a hard time tapping in. I sensed that the Halloween scene was vapid, while the days leading up to the National Day was laden with a heavy and rich history. Yet, I couldn’t enter into either of those spaces, as the former didn’t offer anything and the latter was so layered and complex that all that I wanted to do was watch (and that was all that I was allowed). Critical inquiry in China requires so much of me. Culturally, there aren’t many crossovers. And when there are, I feel as though they’re empty – I don’t want to dig deeply into consumerism in China and its adaptation of American cultural practices.

So for now, I am on the outside just taking it all in. Critical inquiry will come later, but this first trip is purely experiential.

Now can someone please sum all of this up in a concise and well written statement of purpose?

At the south gate before departing (everyone sans Maria)

During my trip to Xi’an last week, I promised myself that I would write down every minute of it for all to see and enjoy. Now, seven days later and with a load of new memories under my belt, I am reluctant to write down everything. I’ve just copied Maria and Johnny’s pictures to my computer and found some really funny and illustrative photos, plus I have a lot of my own that I’d like to feature here. So, I think it’s best to describe my trip mostly through the photos that I think capture the essence of our 36 hours in a small, yet crowded and bustling city twelve hours southwest of Beijing.

Heading onto the train

Though we went to Xi’an during the second-busiest holiday during the year (the first being the Chinese New Year), we managed to get tickets on one of the night trains. There are five types of tickets for each train: soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat, standing ticket. Ideally, we would have liked to have soft sleepers for the twelve-hour trip – you get your own bed and cabin – but we only managed to get soft seat tickets. Third best, I guess. Going there, the train was fairly empty, so we each found two seats to lay across. Sleep was tenuous though, as the sounds of snacking passengers and interminably long Chinese ballads pervaded the car.

Catching some sleep

Johnny, a photography aesthete, found himself working the nocturnal shift and decided to take pictures of all of us mid-sleep.

We went straight to the hotel after arriving in Xi’an, but first had to walk through the bustling train station, where we were surprised to find several people screaming “bing ma yong!” in our faces. Bing ma yong, or the terracotta army – one of China’s most famous tourist sites, second only to the Great Wall – is literally an army of clay soldiers that was dug up by archaelogists in the 1970s (well, discovered by laborers building a highway, one of whom sells his autograph at the main site).

Train station grounds

The army was built in 200 BC (-ish) to protect the tomb of Qin Shihuang, the emperor who, as it turns out, was the first to charter the building of the Great Wall during the Qin dynasty. Anyway, the buses that go to the site, around an hour away from Xi’an, are located right outside the train station, and hawkers will stop at almost nothing to get you on their tour buses, which are priced over 100 rmb more than the city’s bus, which costs a pleasant 7 rmb.

Johnny had booked the hotel online, haphazardly choosing the only one that wasn’t already full. The empty hotel is usually the one that you don’t want to go to, but we actually found ourselves in luck when we realized that the only cost of buying the cheaper chicken was that we had to walk through a filth-laden street to get to our destination.

posing in the hotel room

 The hotel was located on a small street full of wholesale vendors and garbarge. After a brutal beating of our olfactory senses, we hit upon a fairly nice hotel; the rooms had individual bathrooms and only cost us 50 rmb/night.

Because we only had 36 hours to travel around Xi’an (there were no tickets left for a return three days later, and we didn’t want to stay for four), we headed out that day to bing ma yong and later to a very famous Muslim market, where one can buy wares and baubles from the Hui Chinese, a group of Muslim Chinese who represent one of many minority groups in China.

The Terracotta Soldiers

Kabobs at the Market

Walking through the market is certainly my favorite memory from Xi’an. While the avenues were as crowded as those in markets in Beijing, the energy was calmer. I didn’t come across clawing vendors or animal cruelty (I really just hate the rabbits in the little box cages). The setting, though, really made me catch my breath.

The Drum Tower

A view of the market from the top of the Drum Tower

 The market is located directly under the Drum Tower, which is lit up at night and shines over the entire market, shedding a gold and red light on all of the small tables and their wares. Once you walk through the maze of streets and alleys, you find yourself back at the Tower, where tourists and locals alike mill around eating food and buying postcards. The night ended with a few beers at an outside stand, where all was well except for the drunkard at the table to our left, who made a point to chew rice and then spit it back into his bowl, one mouthful at a time.

Our second and final day was spent climbing the Wild Goose Pagoda (I may have forgotten to mention that Xi’an was the eastern terminus for the Silk Road, which brought Buddhism to China. The pagoda is famous for the massive translations that went on in there, specifically the translating of Buddhist texts from Hindi to Chinese in the year 652 AD.), walking through a beautiful park (and playing ping pong with some local experts), biking along the city wall, and taking the train back home. I’ll leave the rest of my story to my photos and those shot by Maria and Johnny.

The Wild Goose Pagoda and its tourists

"Lucky Buddha"

A wish

Playing at the playground

An American Apparel ad

Biking/resting on the wall

Xi'an train station right before our departure

I wrote my last entry just as I was heading out the door to go to Xi’an, a very old and famous city twelve hours southwest of Beijing – by train, that is. The trip was short and sweet; I, along with four others, left Beijing at 9:24 PM on Saturday the third and returned at 7 AM on Tuesday the sixth. I have a lot of fun stories and beautiful pictures. I’ll write about it all shortly. But first I’d like to talk about something else: the Beijing nightlife scene.

Last night I went to three different party spots in the city, all located in the middle and east sections of the city, but all vastly different and inordinately fun. If you want to see Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese bands – male bands, that is – playing original work, you must go to Mao’s Livehouse (www.maolive.com). The venue is similar to one you may find in Williamsburg or Alphabet City. The outside facade is designed to look like a warehouse and the interior is similar. The walls are adorned with graffiti and record label banners; the hall itself is a big room with a fairly large floor space with a raised stage. Though the venue can accomodate rocked-out scene, the fun level varies immensely depending on the nights you go, so it’s important to choose your date of attendance wisely. (A group of us hit up this spot a few weeks ago and found the lights on and some fans sitting on the ground watching a mellow band – suffice it to say we left immediately.) Last night was a brilliant night to go, as bands were lined up to play all night and all of the Chinese students were still on vacation. Maria, Isabel, and I got there at around 9:30 and caught a Taiwanese band, Burn, finishing up a set. Their music is pretty catchy if you like alternative rock from the late 80s and early 90s. We heard a song that I’m pretty sure was a rip off of R.E.M’s “Losing My Religion.” The lead singer was an adorable, skinny, suspender-wearing Taiwanese guy with bleached hair (well, partially bleached) and a not-so-great voice. His energy was there, but his sound just didn’t deliver. Nevertheless, we all found ourselves nodding to the beat and enjoying the scene, which, I must say, did not resemble that of a Williamsburg one at all.

Chinese college students don’t go out as much as American students (really, students anywhere else in the world) do. That’s number one. Secondly, if students or young people go out, they won’t drink nearly as much as one would expect at a club scene or concert. Women, especially, drink less than men. While we were in Xi’an, Isabel told me that her language partner never goes out, because, to her, going out is considered dirty, gross, obscene. Of course I can go into an analysis of this attitude towards drinking – but I think I should keep it simple. I actually think that the situation is fairly simple.  Either you go out and you’re not studious or dedicated enough, or you stay in and you are a good girl or boy. On this particular night at Livehouse, the venue was filled to half of the hall’s capacity – there were only around six foreigners in the spot. It was nice to see so many people out, but it was clear that people were going out to hear music; no one was holding a drink, and no one stopped off at the bar after the show was over. The lack of drinkers did make me feel a bit more conscious of the beer (or two, or three?) that I inevitably hold in my hand on a night out, but I’m alright with it.

I haven’t even made it to the second set, have I? I must talk briefly about it, because it was much better than Burn. The band had six or so musicians, all men, all young, all about rock and hip-hop and beards and generally being more beautiful than any of the other Chinese men any of us had seen in Bejing up until that point.

Lucky Monkey playing at Mao Livehouse

Anyway, I have their album, and I will make everyone that I know in the States listen to Lucky Monkey (www.luckymonkey.org), not because their music is especially amazing, but because they do a hip-hop rendition of a popular nationalist song we heard for 24 hours straight on October 1st. Aren’t rock and hip-hop about counter-cultural sentiments at their foundations? The utter irony is enough to warrant constant listening.

The concert ended after Lucky Monkey’s set. While the Beijing crowd piled out as if the building was about to burn down, the foreigners (waiguoren) lingered to chat with the boys of Burn and LM. I ended striking up a conversation with one of the guitarists from Burn, who spoke a bit of English and wanted to practice on me, but let me speak Chinese for the majority of the conversation. “Oec”  – as he’s called by his friends –  explained that while playing in a band is fun, his real dream is to graduate with a PhD from Princeton (okay, yes, I got excited and did talk a little bit about you, Joe) in Physics. First though, he has to complete a mandatory year in Taiwan’s military. Because I’ll be in Taiwan next spring, I thought it’d be good to exchange number and emails, so we’ll be hanging out next spring! I told him I’d help him prepare for the TOEFL, an English proficiency examination for foreigners, and he said he’d help me prepare for the HSK, a Mandarin proficiency test.

When the conversations all but died out, we decided to go to an opium den-themed bar, Bed, which is located in a small hutong that even taxi drivers don’t recognize (or is it our Chinese?? No, this time the driver really didn’t know the hutong. But I’ve actually been kicked out of a cab before because the driver didn’t understand what I was  saying – okay, that’s not true. He understood what I was saying, he just didn’t want to go to the destination….another cab driver understood it perfectly!!) Remember when I said that young people don’t really go out in Beijing?

Isabel on a bed in Bed

Well, that’s true of the savvier scene too during the weekdays. Bed, which is considered one of trendier bars in the city, was empty when we arrived at 11:30. It didn’t matter though, because the owner of the place let us sit anywhere we wanted. Usually you’d have to pay 400 rmb to sit in the nicer sections of the bar, which feature nineteenth-century style beds that patrons actually have to take their shoes off for before climbing in. The bar is dimly lit and must be really nice on a Saturday, when the owner brings in a DJ to play house and techno beats. The three of us got to scramble into the nicest bed and tried to imagine what being an opium addict at a opium den in a narrow hutong in Beijing must have been like 150 years ago. It was hard to imagine, since we were drinking whiskey and cokes and smoking cigarettes with Jack Daniels ashtrays (I’ve only been bumming, if anyone cares - just trying to be honest).

The bar was nice, but too silent for our last night out before resuming our daily classes (Saturday-Friday this upcoming week – weekend classes to make up for our extravagant holiday). Dario and Mechal kept calling us, anyway, to remind us that it was imperative that we celebrate Mechal and Vincente’s birthdays at Mix, a gigantic meatmarket of a club, in front of which everyone had collected themselves. After gingerly exiting our bed, we headed out of the hutong (not before I mistakenly told the owner of the bar that I’d be back with all of friends. This Saturday? she asked. I had to tell her that we all had class and assured her that Yexu xia ge xing qi de zhou mo wo men yao hui lai!  (Maybe next weekend we’ll come back!)). When we got to Mix, we found around fifteen of our people there, who informed us that girls were free, the club was crowded as all hell, and it was time to go in, NOW.

The club is housed in a mammoth building. Security guards greet you at the door and shove flashlights in your bags, then they make your check your coats and bags (I held on to mine) before corralling you onto the dance floor. Before you can enter the gyrating mass of bodies,

The only image my camera would pick up of the scene at Mix

a free drink is handed to you by the bartender (no explanation as to the contents), and then, finally, you make your way to the fun. The three hours that I was there was a bit of a whirlwind. The club is a really great place for dancing, as the DJ spins really current hip-hop beats and mixes in some pop songs in between. No Chinese songs, though, just American and British. Somepeople acquired a corner table in the back of the bar, so I hopped from table to floor over the course of the nether hours.

We ended up leaving at 3:30-ish. Before going to my dorm, though, I picked up some circular dumplings (baozi) at our favorite spot right outside of the south gate. It was great to be there so late, because we got to see a young guy and his mom (?) preparing the baozi for the morning’s breakfast crowd. I asked him how many they make every day, and he said around 2000 pieces, which is quite a lot, don’t you think?

Tonight marks the last night of our vacation. We’re celebrating by going to a sushi restaurant on the other side of town. It’s a little pricey (we have to make reservations), but it’s a necessary ending to a peaceful yet productive and active break. Thank you, Chairman Mao, for kicking out the Nationalists sixty years ago. But, also, thanks to those involved in Cross-Strait relations for allowing Taiwanese people (young musicians, especially) to come back to China and show us a good time.

Marching Military Women

I saw national pride last night when I went to qianhai, a lively bar area along one of Beijing’s many lakes, and saw older couples dancing to traditional songs,

Playing hackeysack

 young people playing with a hackeysack-esque feathered ball, and old men writing traditional characters with a large paintbrush and water on stone slabs. However, today’s parade and the evening performances seemed to lack those images of comfort and contentment that I saw in the demeanors of the revelers at qianhai.

I woke up just in time today to watch the military parade, the preparation of which I wrote about in one of yesterday’s entries. All of the pins, therapy, and threads certainly paid off, because the soldiers walked in unison with a precision matched only by last year’s Olympic Opening Ceremony.

Jiaoda students returning from the morning's military parade

Among the military marchers were some interesting groups, such as the women soldiers who wore white go-go boots and sported small white pistols, and the student groups, 1000 of which were from Jiaoda.

I have yet to speak with any Chinese friends about today’s parade, but I have the feeling that while a majority of the viewers felt proud about China’s magnificent display of military prowess (planes flew, missiles sat  atop of large tanks), there were others who found the whole day’s event  a  bit too elaborate. Many of the people around Jiaoda hold the former opinion, but I did spot some young people snickering at the television tonight during one of the many traditional dances that took place at Tiananmen Square this evening.

I’m looking forward to asking my language partner about her National Day experience. Was it merely a day off for her? Did she feel a connection to the CCP? Or was it a day that confirmed her belief in her nation’s ability to defend itself from its enemies?

Yesteday, a journalist from the NY Times walked around and got people’s opinions. To me, the most intriguing element of the responses was that many people were just happy about China being strong, when it had been so weak prior to 1949. But this strength does not exactly belong to the CCP, because several people also quoted the 4000-ish years prior to the iffy time in the 19th and 20th centuries as being very strong times for China. The article reminded me of a conversation (in Chinese, yes!) with one of Maria’s friends, a Chinese graduate student at Jiaoda, who explained to me how history was taught to her in middle school and high school. In middle school, the students learn about ancient history through the 19th century. In high school, the curriculum focused heavily on the period between 1860 and 1949, China’s weakest period, in order to highlight the country’s current strength. That China is strong is not up to debate, as seen in the countless articles on China’s ownership of American debt, but it’s interesting to think of whether or not the government’s core ideology is still strong or not. The Times’ article argues that people in Beijing are quickly losing its grasp of Communist allegiance and values, but I’m not so sure that one day (or perhaps a few) of interviewing random people on the street can really determine that.