Quarantine

As many of you many know, I have been interested in documentary film for a very long time. And lately I have been toying with the idea of going into journalism/documentary filmmaking. The funny thing is, I have never actually produced my own doc; I’ve done work with development and post-production, but I’ve never put the whole thing together. So I thought that it would be a good idea to shoot some footage while I’m out here and do some editing at home, and actually make a film, before deciding to enter a journalism program or a documentary media studies program.

Long story short, I bought a digital camcorder today. It’s not a great one, but it wasn’t expensive either. And it only required one trip to the mammoth market, Zhongguancun (which is comprised of around 8 buildings), one trip down a scary set of stairs and through a labyrinth of offices and floors, and one bout of flirting with the salesmen (okay, I probably won’t go have that beer with them in Sanlitun tomorrow) to get a good price on it.

No one has ever heard of the brand,Ordro, and the model is from 2006, but it has a lot of nice features. So get ready for a lot of video viewing when I get home. EVERYONE HAS TO WATCH EVERY CLIP.

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 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.

Hello to all who are diligently reading this blog. I’m really sorry that I haven’t been updating more often, but I’m just having some difficulty finding time to write really thorough entries about my experiences here.

I am keeping a journal, though, and I have a bunch of topics that I have yet to write about. So, here’s my plan: in order to catch up, I’m going to give some short summaries about what I’ve been up to. I will write more detailed entries about these experiences later, or I will incorporate them into other entries at some point during the semester. If you’re reading this and you’d like to hear more about one of my many excursions/experiences, let me know! I check all of my comments. Oh, and thanks for reading this blog! It’s great to know that people are staying up to date  on my life in Beijing!

1. I recently went to one of the famous markets in Beijing, Yashow Market, and

Great buys at Yashow

managed to bargain my way into some really great prices for several “luxury” items. My favorite bargain was a camera case that the saleswoman originally priced at 25 RMB that I got down to 9 RMB. Though this wasn’t my most successful bargain, it was fun because I held my own and kept my price at 9 RMB, even when the woman was offering it to me for 10 RMB. She knew I knew Chinese, so she kept saying, “Ni hen ma fan!” which literally means, “You are very annoying!” I was really elated by her dissatisfaction with me, I guess because bargaining is just so much fun, and I knew she was putting on a show, just like I was.

2. On Friday, I went to the Beijing Zoo (Beijing dong wu yuan) to see the pandas. Along the way, we saw a few really sad rhinoceroses who probably hated the fact that they were dying a very slow death. It looked like they didn’t have enough (or any)

A sad rhinoceros

 water, but then we saw that it was possible for them to walk into a big  holding room, so we hoped that there was water in there. We also saw a lot of other animals, including an elephant who looked really upset about being outside, and was sticking his trunk into a closed

A happy panda

door, but was getting no answer. The pandas looked like they were well taken care of, and were a good end to a pretty sad visit. I mean, all zoos are terrible, so even a trip to the Bronx zoo may have left me feeling the same way.

3. The employed: There are so many service-employees in China. Every restaurant, store, subway station, etc. is overstaffed. While this can be really great for situations when one puts her subway card into a machine when she’s not supposed to and someone has to fetch it out and is immediately at her service (not me, of course!) it’s great. But when five waiters are staring at your table and giggling, it can get a little weird and uncomfortable.

4. I went to two places of extreme interest to some readers today: McDonalds and

Me with a Swede and a Spaniard in front of Ikea

 Ikea. The McDonalds experience was interesting because nothing was really different.On the walls,  there were many pictures of white people laughing, and the menu was exactly the same as in New York, but perhaps without the triple burger. Ikea, on the other hand – wait a minute here, it was also the same as in the States!! Perhaps most interesting, though, was the pile of woks available for purchase and a Chinese woman who was eating Swedish meatballs

Eating Swedish meatballs with chopsticks

 with chopsticks. The experience was especially cool because I went with two Swedes, who showed me a side to Ikea that I have never known before, like which candies to buy and what the names of the furniture mean.

5. On Saturday, Maria and I got full body massages at a place for 45 RMB/ hour (that’s less than $7.00/hour). It was amazing, but painful. I felt good afterwards, so I think I’ll go back again.

6. I have a language partner! Her name is Victoria (Chinese name: Li Hua). She’s really funny – asked about Oprah and American Idol today. She loves Michael Jackson, as well. Awesome point: She’s from Xi’An, a city that I really want to go to during my October holiday. She said that if I went she’d be a tourist guide for me and my friends, and she’d also help us with finding a cheap and clean hotel to stay in for a few days.

7. To Dad: No, everyone does not smell bad in China. I’m confident in the fact that everyone brings tissue, or if they don’t, they have a way of going that doesn’t allow for much drippage. Also, I don’t know how everyone stays so thin. There’s a shit-ton of oil in all of the food. Perhaps it’s because they don’t eat food in very high quantities.

It’s 1:42 am now and I have class at 8:00 am!!!

Goodnight!

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.

Today was my best day in Beijing to date. I’m a bit too tired to give all the details, but I’ll certainly fill in the blanks in another post. Here’s my day in list form.

1. Got up, went to the office, then head off to my intermediate level class, where I spent three hours learning Chinese.

2. Went to my dorm and moved, and met Renata, an MBA student from Brazil, on the way.

3. Moved into my dorm room, then was asked by Renata if I wanted to chill. Gladly accepted and met her Sudanese friend, Mei, on the way.

4. Was treated as the newbie for two hours before heading back to the office, where I was told to go to the Bank of China.

5. Head over to the Bank of China and saw a child peeing on the ground and a neon sign that read, “Fragrant and Hot Marxism” over a restaurant. I am not sure what to say about that.

6. I successfully attained a bank card, but this was mostly due to the fact that the staff spoke pretty good English. My school will use this card to put money into my account.

7. Head back to school, bought some cleaning supplies for my room, and withrdrew some money from China Construction Bank (woohoo!)

Mei Mei and Me

8. Put my room together and met my Thai roommate, Mei Mei, who’s really awesome!!

10. Went for a walk down the main street east of campus with Renata and Mei. Renata showed me this store this store that magically morphed from flower shop to nail salon to lingerie shop to pirated DVD store in around ten steps. It was pretty impressive. I bought Bruno, which I’m pretty excited about!

11. Went back to my dorm room, hung out with Mei Mei, wrote a blog post and went to bed!!

I’ll fill in more fun and weird details later.

I made good on Liu’s offer today and took a walk around the neighborhood this evening. I forgot to take my camera, so there aren’t any visuals. Hopefully my words will create the vision that is the Jiaoda campus and its radius.

On leaving my room, I decided to take a long walk down a crowded block called “Jiaoda East Road.” During the day, Jiaoda East Road seems pretty bland. There are a few marts, trillions of hair salons, some clothing shops, liquor stores, pharmacies, banks, and real estate offices. At night, though, everything is lit up with neon lights and tons of street vendors line the streets, selling wares from toys to pirated dvds to clothes to peaches. Tonight seemed like an especially crowded night, probably because all of the new students arrived today accompanied by their parents, and everyone seemed to want a night on the town.

On my long walk, there were a few things I noticed that caught my attention.

1. Children can urinate on the street in Beijing. A few days ago by my hotel I saw a mom take her baby’s pants down and face the baby’s genitals towards a plot of grass, where the baby eventually built up the courage to pee. Tonight, I saw a young girl squatting between two cars, shamelessly urinating to her heart’s content.

2. Women who are friends tend to hold hands in China. Because homosexuality is strictly hidden and contained  in mainstream culture, I’m going to assume that the several female couples I saw tenderly gripping one another were not significant others, but friends. Maybe we should take up that practice in the States.

3. I finally found the gigantic statue of Mao that is so often publicized as one of Jiaoda’s claims to fame. In the mid-20th century, when Chairman Mao named Jiaoda as a major institution of China, the university christened him by putting up this gigantic statue. I’ll get a picture of it for you in the daylight.

My sojourn was pretty short, so there isn’t much else to say. A highlight for me – but probably not for my reader – was that I found a China Construction Bank on my walk. This bank is linked to my home bank, Bank of America, and therefore allows me to make free withdrawals.