Quarantine

Sometimes I get the feeling like I’m writing into a void on this thing. Knock, knock, knock. Is anybody there? Is anyone even reading this anymore?

Originally, I wasn’t sure if this blog was going to be for me or for you, the audience. What I’ve found is that in the end, it’s more for you, isn’t it? Yes, I’m recording my time here, and, of course, examining it through these entries, but the fun of it all, the amusement – that’s all for you.

The question of audience, reader-response, fun, these are all issues that I think about when I reflect on my experience here. Sometimes it feels like a burden; I know I’ve done something great or gone somewhere interesting, but sometimes I just want feelings to linger and remain in my memory. The process of describing my experiences and giving them to an audience can be a challenge at times; sometimes I worry that putting something on “paper” takes away from the sanctity of my personal memory and also makes me self-conscious of the event that I am – strangely, I suppose, in light of my previous statement – so eager to share.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is this: the process of blogging – writing down my thoughts and memories for an audience – is a difficult one, as at some point I have to become detached from my experience to write about it and make it interesting. The challenge of writing descriptive language to thoroughly convey emotion or conjure an image requires more than the act of experiencing something; it requires me to create a narrative of a trajectory of sorts.

The fact that I no longer receive comments on this blog isn’t the only thing that has brought my attention to story-telling and narrative creation lately. I’m currently applying to graduate school in order to further my literary studes (in this case, I want to pursue contemporary Chinese literature), and while composing my statement of purpose have become unusually focused on literature’s role in society, the process of creating literature, and what literature means to me.

In an effort to stop speaking to myself for hours on end, I’ve channeled a lot of my thoughts into conversations with friends. Recently, I decided to start up a blog with Sarah, Madeline, and Michelle, among others, in order to begin some sort of dialogue on our post-undergraduate thoughts regarding culture, literature, art, etc., In Beijing, I’ve gone on many an outing with friends such as Isabel, Maria, and Dario, to places such as the Literature Museum (an absolute bore!), 798, and myriad events, such as the ones I’ve previously mentioned.

Moreover, I’ve been trying to meet Chinese friends with whom I can discuss issues of Chinese literature and the future of the art form here. On Cultural Day, I met a student at Jiaoda who is studying English and loves literature. Though he is a wee freshman, his genuine interest in American culture and his ability to converse almost fluently in English made me think that we could potentially be friends and discuss culture and literature from time to time. This idea came to fruition on Saturday, when I took the student, Barry, to Wangfujing’s bookstore, the largest in Beijing. It was kind of cute, because Barry doesn’t really leave the Jiaoda area, and he became this wide-eyed kid when I told him we were going to go to a bookstore for the afternoon. We spent over two hours in the store. Besides showing him all the good classics to read and checking out China’s top ten list – Twilight is number one – we also went to the Chinese literature area, and Barry explained the difference between contemporary literature (dang dai), which is Chinese literature written between 1949 to the present, and modern literature (xian dai), which is categorized as literature written between 1919 and 1949. I ended up buying him Great Expectations, even though he already knew what to expect (I asked him if he wanted to read about England during the Industrial Revolution to see what London was like then. He said, “smelly? dirty?”). I bought five books, two written only in Chinese.

On Monday, I continued Barry’s literary education by explaining some key phrases in one of Donald Trump’s brilliant works, which Barry decided to read after making it through Kite Runner, a task which required an arduous three-day reading spree (not bad, right?). I spent some time explaining terms such as “keeping it in perspective” and “living on the edge.” Barry also came with Twilight, which he plans to read this upcoming weekend. I am not at the level to read high falutin’ Chinese literature yet, so I brought a textbook from the States that I think has much more interesting topics than the ten-year-old books we’ve been given here. Because Barry has five brothers and sisters (talk about the fees!!) I thought it’d be interesting to talk using vocabulary from the chapter, “Birth Control and Human Rights.” Our conversation ended up being quite interesting. Barry pretty much made the point that the book made, which is: with all the kids that China would have without birth control, human rights organizations would be worrying about why the children were so poor and families couldn’t support them. With birth control, people worry that China is violating people’s human rights. There are two sides to the issue; long story short, you won’t lose your job (anymore) if you have more than one child. You just have to pay the fee.

At the end of our converation, Barry told me that he really liked talking about the one child policy, and was eager to talk with me about other policies that China has taken and ideas that are specific to China, especially those which sprout from Confucian thought (he showed me a Confucian saying that says that a man should be independent at thirty, and explained that there’s one for forty, too). In the States, we hear a lot about complacency of the people. We read about convictions of corrupt financiers and of horror stories about corrupt officials. It’s also important that we keep in mind that news is carefully chosen; how often do you read about students’ healthy inquiry into Chinese policy without condemning it? (Also, how often do you read about manufactured snow, which is what we had on Halloween!) In the two times that I have seen Barry, he’s both quoted Obama (”Obama says that the government can’t do everything. You have to leave it in the hands of the people.”) and Confucius. He’s praised policies made by the Chinese government – especially regarding the reform and open up (gai ge kai fang) movement - and talked about the fact that the government has smart people running it, but people have to contribute ideas for things to change.

I look forward to more talks with Barry, though he is a young’n. Speaking with him about literature, about the influence that the works that he’s reading has had on him, makes me think more about the role that literature plays in social environments. It also reminds me of why I enjoy the practice of examining the creation of narratives. What sort of narratives inspire Barry? If he knows about the world mainly through books, which ones are they, and what do they do for him?

One of Barry’s favorite authors is Ernest Hemingway. He recently read his novella The Old Man and the Sea. I had never read it before, so I picked it up in Wangfujing and read it last night. In the story, an old fisherman tells himself, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” This is Barry’s favorite line in the book, perhaps because his mother always told him never to give up, even if he meets challenges. While Barry took the advice of Hemingway, which happened to also be that of his mother, and perhaps Confucian thought (?), I read the novella as a Daoist allegory. In Daoist theory, life is generational, there is no linear history, and man and animal are one. In the one hundred-and-ten page work, the passage that resonated for me was: “The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.”

To me, my existence here cannot be a linear one. Perhaps I will leave as a person who is better at Chinese. But each time I learn something new or meet someone new, I feel like I can know everything, that I am getting closer to understanding the status of contemporary Chinese culture. Yet, my perpetual distancing of myself from this fact, my knowledge that everything I learn can be isolated, shows that I don’t truly condone the act of possessing full knowledge of anything. I hope that when I return from Beijing, I’m still thirsty – no, parched - for experience and for reception of others’ experiences, without feeling like I’ve missed out – only that I know that I want more.

Life was pretty miserable between Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning, as I had the Jiayuan Czuo  ganmao, better known as my dormitory’s common cold. Coughing and sweating  (and the composition of an occasional blog post) comprised most of my daily activity; a friend or two stopped by in the interim.

On Friday morning, I woke up in a pool of my own sweat and decided that I really didn’t want to be sick anymore. Moreover, when I took my temperature and realized that it was 37.9 for the billionth time, I decided to throw it away, as only a broken thermometer would show the same exact temperature that many times. Without knowing whether or not I had a fever (or whether I ever had a fever, or whether the fever I had was higher or lower than 37.9), I gave Isabel a call and asked if we could do something. Luckily, she had read about an ongoing series at 798 (Beijing’s trendy art district located in renovated warehouses on the east side of of the city) entitled “China Stories,” which features weekly interviews with successful foreigners living in Beijing. Friday’s interview gave the spotlight to Johannes Neubacher, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese edition of Madame Figaro, a French fashion magazine.

What we expected to gain from going to this interview we couldn’t quite decipher, but we nevertheless headed to the art district to see Mr. Neubacher and two art exhibits by Ai Wei Wei and Zhang Xiaogang, two of China’s most prominent contemporary artists. Between bouts of sporadic coughs and nose-blows, I managed to tip-toe appropriately through the exhibits, but didn’t hold back from gingerly touching Ai Wei Wei’s three-dimensional world – made out of hundreds of layers of thin cotton strips, which are meant to represent how China is inextricably linked to the rest of the world (and vice versa) through the cotton trade, among other things – and Zhang Xiaogang’s cement figures of the relics of his youth.

In an unfortunate turn of events, the interview with Heubacher ended up being weak in comparison to the exhibits. Though we arrived on time, Isabel and I were dismayed to find only a handful of attendees at the free event; the translator arrived late – hence, the interview started late – and she only translated questions she deemed “important”; and Heubacher only skimmed the surface of the cultural issues inherent in such a transitory and generally  insidious atmosphere as the fashion magazine industry. (My nose blowing and general coughing didn’t exactly make the event more enjoyable.)

On leaving the event, our information regarding fashion magazine culture in Beijing had increased to the extent that we knew that the three tenets of personal fashion are: 1. people want to show off wealth by wearing name brands 2. people want to distinguish themselves from other people, and 3. people want to make sure that the way in which people distinguish themselves corresponds with their personalities. We also found out that magazines in Beijing make much more money on advertising than on distribution, so that’s why all of the fashion magazines look like magazine-length Jimmy Choo ads.

What we felt like we were missing was a discussion that pursued larger questions such as why foreigners become editor-in-chiefs of magazines that serve to represent Beijing fashion, or how this EIC perceives his role as a contributor to the rampant consumerism taking place in Beijing’s 26-35 year old women – the age group that Madame Figaro represents. Interestingly, we ended up using these lingering questions as prompts for what became a two-hour discussion at a nearby Japanese restaurant on topics ranging from the possiblity of fluency in Chinese to examinations of our own reactions to our Chinese friends’ perspectives on government structures and current policies.

For me, the conversation was long overdue, as I have been trying to grapple with many feelings of alienation and frustration in a culture that can sometimes seem inaccessible. Moreover, our talk set the stage for my outing today with a Chinese student I met during Cultural Day, whose outlook on China and its future was a stark comparison to what I have previously observed and/or assumed. I’ll get into this more in my next entry, which will also feature pictures of the top sellers in the foreign book market at Beijing’s largest book store.

Look forward to details of Obama-praising, Twilight hype, and the wide-eyed hopes of a young college student in Beijing.

A short note: From now on,  I plan on responding to comments in the comments section of each entry. So, if you leave a comment, you can now expect a response.

I feel a story coming on about the person  – or shall I say (eek!) my driver – who takes me to work every Tuesday at 3:00 pm sharp.

On an average Tuesday at say 3:15 pm you can find me asking a begrudging man how his day was: What have you been doing? Have you had a lot of customers today? What do you and your wife do on a common outing? Do you like the weather? Don’t you like the weather?

Lin shi fu, a perennial dweller of Beijing, husband of one, father of one, chain-smoker, park-goer, spitter, sleeper, and – of course –  driver always answers my questions, and he even asks me some too. Today, he told me a story, and it went like this:

     Melissa: When you were a child, in which area of Beijing did you live?*

     LSF: Tian’anmen

     Melissa: Is that the same as Qian men?

     LSF: No! Tian’anmen. Understand?

     Melissa: Ah, yes! Tian’anmen. Of course! Wow, right there in the middle of the city.

     LSF: Actually, I am part of an old Beijing famiily.

     Melissa:  But you are not old!

     LSF: No, I am part of an old family. We’ve been here since the Qing dynasty. Do you know the Qing dynasty?

     Melissa: The Qing dynasty! Of course I know it. Your family must have been famous.

   LSF: Well, I don’t know about that. My great-grandfather worked for the dynasty.

   Melissa: Wow! What did he do?

    LSF: About that, I’m not very sure. But my father told me that he died at the ripe age of 20.

    Melissa: Oh. That’s young. Killed?

    LSF: Sickness.

    Melissa: Shot?

    LSF: Sickness.

    Melissa: Sickness?

    LSF: Sickness.

*Following conversation is all in Chinese, and should be imagined as such.

The above conversation happens three times at least in varying forms throughout the weekly forty-minute car ride home. (Sometimes, if I’m not sleeping, we talk on the way there, too.) Clearly, there are some gaps in our conversations; maybe I’m not the best at understanding Beijing driver-speak just yet. But I find the conversations helpful and interesting, even though it seems to be at the expense of Lin shi fu’s peace and privacy in the driver’s seat.

Though I may come off as slightly impish here, I actually do try to back off if I feel like I’m asking too many questions. But Lin shi fu always greets me with a warm smile and leaves with one, so I’m pretty sure that I’m not imposing too much. Moreover, we do discuss things of interest to the both of us. Last week, we talked about inter-generational smoking habits; today, we discussed common ages for children to leave home.

In the following weeks, I plan on writing more about my Tuesday interactions with Lin shi fu. Also, did anyone pick up on the fact that I spent the latter portion of this evening reading McSweeney’s articles? Jesus, I’m a chameleon (or a Dave Eggers wannabe – you choose)!

As I was looking through my entries today, I realized that I haven’t spoken much about food since my takeout experiences last week and my special Peking duck dinner. I think I should take a moment to update on what (and how) I eat on a daily basis over here.

Monday through Friday, I have class from 8:00 am-12:00 pm, so I tend to eat breakfast at around 10:00 am, lunch at 12:30 pm, and dinner at around 6:00 or 7:00 pm.

At around 7:40 am I pick up a refrigerated beverage by the name of Caffe Latte. I need it to hold me over for the first two hours of class. For breakfast, I’ve been eating a guan bing, a pancake with an egg in the middle that closes in on lettuce and smoked chicken in a taco-esque fashion, which you can find being sold on major streets or in small alley ways. Though it’s delicious, it’s around a trillion calories, so I don’t think I’ll be eating it every morning this semester.

Lunch is a bit more exciting, as the fourth-level class (si ban) tends to go to lunch together. We don’t travel more than a few blocks away from campus, but we try to go to a different restaurant every day.

Flower Tea Water

 Ordering gets a little bit easier with each meal, but sometimes it’s a challenge. It took until yesterday to order the right flavored tea, as we kept forgetting to say shui, which means water, after saying the words hua cha, which means flower tea. In China, restaurants do not serve tea, they serve tea water. Tea water looks a lot like tea. We’re really not sure why our fu yuan - waiters/waitresses – have had such a difficult time working through our language deficiencies, but we think it’s because they think that we want tea bags, which really isn’t the case.

OK. Enough about the tea. Let’s get to the real food. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten more eggplant, or qie zi, in my whole life. All we order is chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, noodle, and eggplant dishes. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever ingested more oil in the 22 years that I’ve been alive. Every single dish is cooked with oil, and arrives at our table glistening with it. We eat the dishes as fast as we can, because we know

Our usual eggplant dish

that when the food gets cold, the magic is over. What was once a beautiful dish of vegetables becomes a plate of wilted vegetables sitting in a pool – literally, a pool – of oil.

For dinner, many of the international students regroup into a horde and we head out to one of the local restaurants. While dinner is usually a copy of lunch, lately I’ve been considering heading out to wudaokou or another area to try some other cuisines.

On Thursday, Bolette and I tried out some Italian cuisine in sanlitun, the area where all the shooter bars are and also where all of the embassies are located. Though we didn’t plan on eating international cuisine, we saw some red-and-white-checkered tableclothes and immediately became moths to the  flame that was this small, dinky Italian restaurant.

Bolette, in a moment of haste and delusion, ordered an entire pizza for

Four-cheese penne

 herself. I, in a similar state of delirium, ordered a four-cheese penne dish. Despite our restaurant choice, we couldn’t help but speak Chinese to the waiter, who was pleasantly surprised by our ability to speak at all. I asked him if the people that usually dine at this restaurant speak Chinese, and he said that most people in the area don’t. This fact made me (and Bolette) remember how lucky we are to live wayyy on the west side of town, where the trees aren’t manicured and HSBC banks are nowhere in the near distance. Rather, we have toilet paper-less squatter toilets to deal with (I carry around single-wrapped wipes in a cute knock-off LeSportsSac bag) and street vendors to talk to (and yes, Uncle Jake, they speak the same dialect of Chinese that we all do). A New Yorker - a nuyorican, I should say –  can think of it like this: it’s like living in Washington Heights and going to 72nd and Park for dinner.So, while it’s nice to go to the fancy part of town, it’s still great to go back home to xizhemen, home sweet home.

Interestingly, because Bolette and I have been eating Chinese food – and only Chinese food – for around two weeks, our bodies did not take well to our Italian meals. I felt a bit under the weather when I got home, but thankfully my body’s lactose-intolerant bout lasted only a bit, because I got to skip the whole diarrhea experience that could have been the next step in my body’s effort to rid itself of new food.

My haircut!

My beautiful new dictionary!

was a free 2 GB SD along with your 800RMB purchase (yeah, they’re kind of pricey). While it’s practically a sin to “lose face” in China, Swedes and Americans don’t worry about that so much, so we decided to go back to the snickering associate and buy a dictionary from her. When we got back, we talked for a bit and decided to be nicer than she had been, which went over well, because she decided to compliment us on our Chinese instead of laugh at it. When we were just about to make our purchase, she brought up – can I hear the “dun dun dunnnnns” – a fa piao issue. Look back at my quarantine entries for my problems with these last week. Apparently, the machine that prints these government-stamped receipts wasn’t working today, so they had to give us – and try to imagine this happening at Best Buy – hand-written receipts, with the promise that they’d call us when the fa piao were ready for us to pick up. That means we’d have to go all the way back for the receipt. Plus, they had some enigmatic issue with my name, so they wanted to put both purchases on Maria’s name, which we both did not concede to. It was quite bizarro, I must say.

Tomorrow, Bolette and I will continue our exploration of the city. I’m looking forward to bargaining and purchasing a fall scarf or two. I really like traveling with Bolette because we’re both not fantastic at kou yu,which means spoken Chinese, and we’re usually underheard when we’re with speakers who are better than us. So, tomorrow we’re going to try to speak as much as possible.

Thus far, I’ve met international students from over ten countries: Thailand, Brazil, Sudan, Cameroon, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Peru, France, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, the United States, Pakistan, and Belaruz. Every single one of these students have been able to speak English – almost fluently. While it’s great to be able to chat with people from all around the world, it’s disheartening to think that I am from a country that does not require its students to speak a language on a level much higher than that of a kindergartener.

On another note, everyone is so friendly in this international setting. I guess this is because people don’t feel the need to size others up when there isn’t any relevant competition involved. By this I mean that when Americans meet one another, they usually ask questions about careers, education, etc., and then proceed to compare each others’ answers against their own. In an international setting, one may ask the same questions, but the self-reflexivity disapperas. I’m not concerned about how much money a chemical engineer from Sweden makes, or if it surpasses my income, or if it challenges my own potential problems with my choice of career. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but it’s something I’m noticing.

On a more personal note, going to NYU for three years has trained me to move in and out of classrooms without the intention of meeting many new friends or sticking together after class ends. At Jiaoda, everyone’s on a rampant hunt for friends and everyone’s interested in each other’s cultures/histories/languages. We go out to lunch after class and make plans for the evening, and then we hang out during the afternoon because we all live on the same floor.

After being by myself for the first week of my stay at Jiaoda, I’m really not used to all of the plans and the hanging out and the doing homework together. I sound like a recluse, I know. Of course I’m taking people up on their offers, but it’s still new and fun just to go to lunch with people or go out for a beer. How sad!

Speaking of beer, I drank a beer on the street yesterday. It was quite the fun time. Renata, from Brazil, was shocked at the fact that we can’t drink alcohol on the street in the New York area.

Tonight I’ll be going into the main city area of Beijing to he hen duo pi jiu. That means I’m going to drink a lot of beer. Tomorrow I’m going to go with Yang, an American and recent Stonybrook graduate from Long Island (who is a Deadhead, by the way, and loves to go to Dark Star Orchestra concerts!) , to the Bird’s Nest. I’m not exactly sure what the Bird’s Nest is, but I think it’s one the main sites of the 2008 Olympics.

Until then!