East Asia Diary

2006-01-27T23:02:00.000-06:00

Sunday, August 7th, it was time to leave behind the mainland and head back to old, very familiar territory: Taipei. I had decided that my original packing scheme for the summer, which involved my backpack overstuffed and very heavy, along with a small tote bag and a computer case, was not a convenient way to move things around, and that it would be wise to have a suitcase I could pull along. I picked one up near my apartment for about $7. I knew this would not mean a lifetime guarantee, but really, all I wanted was for it to survive the trip to Taipei, Singapore, back to Beijing and home.

To get to Taipei, I was taking the train down to Shenzhen, crossing the border into Hong Kong at Lo Wu, and then flying from Hong Kong to Taipei (necessary because there are no direct flights between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic, nor will there be until some political and territorial issues are settled). A little complicated, but I was confident it wouldn’t be a problem.

The first wheel of my suitcase broke in front of my apartment building. The wheel structure cracked further in front of the Guangzhou East train station, and the wheels just fell off altogether at the ticket checkpoint. I half carried, half dragged the suitcase (which was heavier than it had any right to be – I’m only up a couple books and five small terra cotta soldiers since Beijing, so it should be lift-able. Of course, when all the same things were divided into three bags in different hands and shoulders, they were easier to lug than when they were in a large box shape in front of me) and somehow made it onto the train platform. There the ground was quite smooth, so I gave up on all pretense of lifting the blasted thing and just started to drag it behind me. Minutes later, there was a loud THUD, and I noticed the suitcase was infinitely lighter. I looked behind me, and found my hand still tightly grasped around the pull handle, which was now, sadly, attached to nothing. The suitcase was flat on the ground a few feet back.
Somehow I managed to get the suitcase on the train, and from there a very nice Japanese gentleman (and a professional boxer, he informed me) helped me get it situated on the luggage rack over my head. I think spent the entire hour-long ride to Shenzhen wondering how I would manage to get myself and that suitcase across the border to the airport. These concerns were magnified by the amount of time it took me to lug it out of the train station and onto the sidewalk outside. About when I started quite seriously considering just abandoning it and wearing the same clothes for the next three weeks and forgoing the other assorted items inside, I saw my salvation: a very enterprising young man sitting just outside the station selling cigarettes, beer, and (da dum!) wheeled fold down luggage carts. For 30 kuai, he hooked me up with a cart and bungee cord to strap my suitcase down, and even did the honors himself, making sure that the weight was even so that the whole thing could not tip over. At that moment, he was my favorite person in China, never mind the other 1.3 billion.

As I trekked through the border, assorted pieces of the wheel and handle gear kept falling out at pretty regular intervals. In the no man’s land after clearing China immigration but before passing through the Hong Kong side, I finally dumped the wheels and handle that I had for some reason held on to. When I reached the Hong Kong side, I took the KCR (railway) one stop to the airport bus, where I lost two screws and another piece of the handle. As I went, I kept shedding loose parts, as if leaving a little Hansel-and-Gretel-like trail behind me in case I got lost and needed to find my way back to China. Once to the airport, I was delighted to be relieved of the burden of my suitcase, and made use of the little cart to pull around my backpack (the mere presence of my computer in the backpack, even with nothing else in it, is enough to make it too heavy to wear for long).

In Taipei I had arranged to stay in a hostel of sorts, which was actually just a three-bedroom apartment that the owner rents out to travelers. It was right behind the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, though, which put it a ten-minute walk from my destination, the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) headquarters. Right off the bat, I was unimpressed with the hostel management. I told him I was taking a cab in and wanted the name of an intersection to go to. Xinyi Road was not a problem, but I couldn’t get from him whether the cross street was Jinshan or Xinsheng Road – both intersect with Xinyi road, but a good two miles apart. What made it difficult is that fact that spoken aloud, the names sound sort of similar – especially when spoken by a guy who knows kinda how they sound but not the characters, the meaning, or the Romanization. With the help of a very patient cab driver with a cell phone, we found the right place – but not until after calling the guy three times, having the cabbie speak to him personally (which only led us further from our destination), and going down Xinyi from Jinshan to Xinsheng a total of five times. Here we go round the mulberry bush…

All told, it took over twelve hours to go from my apartment in Guangzhou to the hostel in Taipei, door to door. Pretty sad given the fact that the flight between the two cities, if direct flights were offered, would be a bit shy of 90 minutes.

My days in Taipei were consumed by my attempts to do research at the GMD Party History office. The research facility consists of one table up on the seventh floor, with a bank of lockers, a power strip, and about 300 little drawers full of cards on which one document each is listed. The cards are grouped into three, er, categories: party congress records, pre-1949 records brought over from the mainland, and everything else. Within these three categories, the cards – thousands and thousands of them – were arranged in semi-chronological order. The problem with semi-chronological order is that for every 10 cards that appear in order, there’s one so far off base that you still have to go through every card individually, but it feels more pointless than if you were going through cards that were arranged in no order whatsoever. I asked for some advice from the young woman in charge of things, and her answer was to take out a drawer, and flip, flip, flip.

I had only 8 days in the archive, so clearly I could not devote the lifetime that it would require to systematically search the drawers for references to relevant documents. What I did do was go all the way through the party congress and 1940s records at warp speed. Really. I’m surprised smoke didn’t start to come from the friction as my fingers flipped through the cards. I wrote down a list of about 50 files I felt I absolutely must see, and started ordering. Once the records came, I had the new challenge of trying to speed read and translate or type in Chinese anything I thought I needed. Because naturally they don’t allow photocopies or digital cameras. Of course not. Sometimes, at these little moments in historical research, bureaucracy on Taiwan and bureaucracy on the mainland is so similar, you can start to forget just how far apart the two governments’ politics really are.

The one advantage of research in China or Chinese renegade provinces is that no matter where you are, you can count on the facility closing early. With only 8 days to work, this was actually probably not an advantage, but I know that I can really only sit and speed-read Chinese documents for so many hours in the day – and after 8 or so (with an hour for lunch, during which all records must be stowed but the card catalog is available for extracurricular flipping) is about my limit, and then my brain turns to mush and frequent repetition of the epithet “those communist bandits” starts to make me giggle uncontrollably. So it is nice that at this point, the archives will inevitably close and I spend a guilt-free evening enjoying my surroundings.

The evenings in Taipei were like old times, for me. Lancelot was conveniently in town at the same time, so I got to hang out a bit with him, and I also spent as much time as possible with my good friend Yu-wen. We did the culinary tour of Taipei, trying to get in old favorites (my mouth waters at the very thought of the barbeque octopus at the Shi-da Road Korean restaurant. I know, me with the octopus cravings. I’m not sure how that happened, except that once you get over the tentacles, it’s really quite tasty), and try some new digs.

On Saturday night, we went to an all you can eat Chinese-style restaurant. I must say, Taipei has perfected the art of the all-you-can-eat restaurant. Most places are feature steak, Korean barbeque, or hot pot with elaborate salad and extras bars, but this place was a full-service Chinese restaurant with a standard menu and lots of pictures of the available dishes. It was made special, however, by the fact that you could order as much as you wanted, all for the same price. We got there at 5:30, and started right in. We ordered new dishes roughly every 20 minutes for the next three and a half hours. We skipped the beef and chicken dishes, but ordered literally everything else on the menu. And no little bits or “just a taste” – we sent back clean, empty plates with each new order. After every table in the area had turned over at least twice around us, the waiters began to approach us with trepidation. For the last hour, we had to go to great lengths to flag them down to keep ordering, as they started to steer a wide path around our table. When we finally conceded to their almost pleaded request to bring us our fruit and dessert and the bill, we stood very slowly and waddled up to the counter to pay. In US terms, $11 each, inclusive. Desperate to move, we decided to walk over an hour back home. On the way, we discussed whether we ought to feel good about our rather remarkable accomplishment, or embarrassed that the restaurant just lost money on us (I’ve attached a picture of the two of us, so you can see just how unlikely the two of us managing to consume so much really is). We ultimately settled on a sort of sheepish pride as most appropriate.

On Sunday, my only Sunday in town, I went first to my old church on Xinglong Road. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming back to Taiwan, so there was a great deal of exclaiming and “do my eyes deceive me?” After a lovely morning catching up and promising to stay in touch, I met up with Yu-wen’s whole family and we went out together on an adventure.

They took me up to Ye-liu on the North coast, which is known for colorful layers of rock that have been sculpted over thousands of years of typhoons. Parts of it look like a landscape on Mars or some other, similarly otherworldly, location, and other parts of it are made famous by the rocks’ remarkable resemblance to something of this earth, like a sandal or Queen Victoria’s head in profile (really). Sometimes you have to squint to see it, but then you line up to have your picture taken alongside it, which is really all you can do with rocks said to resemble long-dead foreign leaders.

From there, we visited an extinct volcano in Yangmingshan (a national park made up of gorgeous mountain scenery in Taipei) and went out for a fabulous dinner at an outdoor mountaintop eatery. Before heading back into town, we stopped at Wenhua University. Perched on the side of the mountain, the campus is reported to be the most beautiful college grounds in Taiwan, and it affords a panoramic view of the lights of Taipei at night.

Much, much too soon, I was back at the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport and headed for Singapore. My purpose in returning to Singapore, other than completing my post-research East Asian Victory Lap, of course, was to attend a conference on Overseas Chinese studies. 2005 marked the 600th anniversary of the start of the voyages of Zheng He (a Ming Chinese eunuch who commanded a fleet of ships that traveled across East to the East coast of Africa… and even to North America, if you’ve read Gavin Menzies’ version of events and were gullible enough to believe in it). The conference was interesting, certainly for the papers and the academic contacts, but even more so for the cultural differences between academic conferences hosted in the US and those hosted in Asia. In particular, I think of the evening of Perenakan culture presented by the local Perenakan society.

Perenakan is a Malay word for Straits Chinese – that is, people whose roots go back to China, if you go back far enough, but whose families have been settled in Singapore or Malaysia for the past few hundred years. The entertainment extravaganza consisted of a couple of very off-key numbers by a group of Perenakan octogenarians, who were cute in their sarongs, if nothing else; an elderly man in drag cracking jokes in English so accented it was completely incomprehensible; half of a DVD, which ultimately succumbed to technical difficulties; and a fashion show that involved all of three outfits, each repeated up to four times to make it seem longer. I would have tried to sneak out if I hadn’t found myself sitting next to an established Chinese-American musicologist with a talent for sarcastic commentary and biting remarks. We muttered and snorted our way through the evening, and ultimately thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

On my day off in Singapore, I went out to scoff at the 1421 exhibit on the esplanade in Singapore, devoted entirely to the bad scholarship and questionable findings of Gavin Menzies’ study of Zheng He. Rest assured, I had my snarky new friend with me, and a good time was had by all.

Flying back to Beijing (where I had left my suitcase full of research and books for the summer) was about the least fun I’ve ever had traveling in my life; up at 3:30 a.m. to head for the Singapore airport, then flying to Hong Kong, taking a bus over the border (with frequent stops for immigration and customs formalities) to Shenzhen, and then waiting for a much-delayed flight to Beijing, the city upmost in my loathing. I spent three days in Beijing, clearing up archival matters and doing a bit of last-minute shopping, and then I was off for home.

I think I was home a week before I began to really miss China. I don’t miss Beijing, of course, but if I stay away long enough, even that might happen eventually.

Things I’ll miss about China:
1. Everything’s just so darn cheap
2. Sleeper trains that go everywhere
3. Korean food (I know, I know… but I like this better than Chinese food and there is really a lot of it all over China)
4. Friendly people who love to chat about anything and everything, especially my much-beloved neighbors in Nanjing
5. Bicycle commuting (really!)
6. The randomness of it all, in particular the abrupt juxtaposition of old and new, communist and capitalist
7. Great Wall Dry Red Wine (Ack! I think I developed a taste for it!)
8. Fun new mandopop CDs every week
9. Constant challenges to my Chinese: speaking, reading and learning something new all the time
10. Having an Adventure every day

Things I will never miss about China:
1. Pick-pockets
2. The unbelievable crowds, especially on holidays but also on random Tuesdays
3. Defending Taiwan or the Japanese to every cab driver
4. Risking my life as a passenger in every speeding cab
5. Beijing in all its… Beijingness
6. Anything that costs four kuai, eight mao and three fen (it’s impossible to do exact change when it gets down to fen; the coins are so tiny, and they all look alike)
7. Being solicited for anything and everything while walking down the street: from spare change, to Chinese art to walk-on roles as the foreign barbarian in Chinese soap operas (the last of which happened three times in one day in Guangzhou)
8. Cab drivers who try to cheat you by taking an extra lap around the city… because you are, after all, a stupid foreigner
9. Registering with the police every time I move ten feet in any direction
10. Worrying about not having registered: visions, however unrealistic or unlikely, of Chinese prisons

Weighing the two against each other, there’s only one conclusion: I’ll be back.

At long last, the tree

2005-08-15T11:32:00.000-05:00

I have a fan boy. I only mention it because it’s not something that happens often in the field of historical research. You can imagine my excitement.

Of course, when said fan boy (who is also, as it happens, a security guard at the Guangdong Provincial Archives) spends an hour at a time chatting at me in a freewheeling and, to me, largely indecipherable mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese while I’m trying to read and take notes on documents, the novelty starts to wear off. But still.

Actually, as of last Friday I took leave of my fan boy, not to mention the rest of the archives staff, and, of course, Louis of Citibank Guangzhou, because I’m now in Taipei. I admit, I was sorry to leave this archive. It was by far the nicest facility I’ve worked in anywhere in Asia and second only to London in the worldwide race to build the prettiest archive ever (it was built only last year, and it shows).

Moreover, they’ve opened all sorts of wonderful documents from the 1950s, which in addition to being helpful for my dissertation, have allowed me to brush up on my communist Chinese vocabulary (you know: struggle meeting, malevolent landlord, agricultural collectivization, rightist, counterrevolutionary, running dog, capitalist roader, Nationalist bandits, and so forth).

I admit, however, that only a few days ago my feelings toward the place were not so warm and fuzzy. Over the course of the last few weeks, I had applied to copy a stack of documents – some up to 20 pages of really tiny Chinese type – and because my previous copy requests had all been granted, did not think much about the outcome.

On Wednesday morning of this week, with just two and a half days left in the archive (they close early on Fridays. So China), they told me that none of my copy requests have been granted. None. The girl behind the desk (who lives across the street from me, so we sometimes walk home together at lunch) commiserated with me, and said that in her opinion, the head of the archive is somewhat … overzealous in protecting documents from foreigners. Unfair, but unavoidable.

Again, China. I got through what I could, laboriously taking notes and copying Chinese characters, but by Friday morning there were still three multi-page, fine print documents left. That’s when the girls at the desk really came through for me. It turns out that they were not merely feigning sympathy, but were quite genuinely concerned about my research. When I went up for the last few files with next to no time to read them, instead of the files, they handed me a disk. On the disk, were all three documents, typed. They had typed them up in their spare time while I was frantically reading the other files. This is a whole new level of archive service.

Anyway, I have promised Guangxi Province travel stories and these I will deliver. In June I had the supreme privilege of having friends from home in town– Sarah is my classmate at Georgetown, and she and her boyfriend Danny were traveling around China for a while and started their journey in Guangzhou. They took a few days in Guangzhou to relax and sightsee, though that first day it became glaringly obvious that I was also new to town and not able to be remotely knowledgeable about the terrain. Really, it was the worst tour ever. The company was great, but it was definitely a low point in my life as an amateur tour guide. We started with the Sun Yat-sen memorial, which involved a concert hall, a tiny museum consisting mostly of Chinese documents with no descriptive titles, and random trees and bushes named for mythical animals, like dragons and phoenixes, but which did not bear any actual resemblance to said animals, even if one squinted hard and turned one’s head.

Frankly, I imagine it would take nothing less than a fifth of bourbon to make those trees look like their descriptions, and I imagine that drunken tree gazing is frowned up on the grounds of the memorial to the Father of Modern China. There were also several "ancient trees" which did not even date as far back as imperial China and therefore failed to qualify in any discerning garden aficionado’s mind as ancient. (The astute among you might have noticed that I have previously mentioned Sun Yat-sen as having been memorialized in Nanjing. That fine structure is in fact where he is buried; however, Dr. Sun was from Guangdong province, so the memorials to him in these parts are abundant. Boring, but plentiful.)

From there we went on to lunch (some pretty random noodles which, in Sarah and Danny’s case, were served with unidentifiable chicken parts), and then decided to head to some of the famous markets on our maps and mentioned in their guidebook.

Now I can say with some authority that we certainly visited markets. There is not a doubt in my mind that we were in areas where things were being sold, and they were being sold on the street and in small, market-like stalls. However, I am not at all convinced that we were at any of the markets we were looking for. The first two contained Random Junk, and it was hard to see why anyone would get excited about them. Lots of soft, cartoon-character cases for cell phones and fake plastic flowers. Then, after much walking, and some backtracking, we came to roughly the location of another famous market.

I say roughly because we found a series of merchants hawking fish and puppies (for pets, no worries, though yes, dog is consumed in China, and in South China not even in Korean restaurants. The standard – and very old – joke is that the Cantonese will eat anything with four legs except the table. This witticism ignores the fact that the people of South China will eat many things with fewer legs or none at all, like snake and frog and so forth. Of course, as we have seen over the course of the year, so do I, apparently. My, but how the mighty have fallen). But as an approximation of the infamous Qingping market (famous not only as a large, bustling outdoor market, but also as the site where the illegal civet cats were sold that ultimately transferred the SARS virus to the Chinese people and, from there, to the world), it was something of a humbug. Still, we faced south and walked to the left and found the street on the map immediately east of Qingping, then walked to the right and found the street immediately west of Qingping. I’m not sure how it happened, then, that the street in the middle did not seem to be Qingping. It is one of those mysteries of life, I suppose.

Ultimately, we ended up on Shamian Island, which is the former site of the British Maritime Customs Service (a.k.a. Arrogant Imperialists and Capitalist Roaders), a great deal of colonial architecture, and the current site of the American consulate. We admired the river, which looked precisely like a river, and was even, if fact, the river we were looking for, which at the end of this day felt like no mean feat indeed. Then we went to dinner at a bizarre restaurant that caters to the foreign crowd and claims to cook specialties from all world cuisines with equal skill. This should be viewed quite skeptically.

Sarah ordered Japanese Shrimp Tempura from a picture (which did look like shrimp tempura), but was surprised to be served shelled shrimp in some kind of curry sauce. After a long argument with the waiter, which ultimately involved the manager and finally the cook himself, everyone agreed that what was sitting on our table looked absolutely nothing like the picture on the menu. I’d been rather lazy, and in the meantime I read the Chinese description of the dish more closely: while the English just said "Japanese shrimp tempura," the Chinese read, "Japanese style shrimp curry." Never mind the fact that curry is about as Japanese as guacamole is Russian; in neither language should the shrimp have arrived without breading. The cook seemed ultimately to come to terms with this point, and some minutes later we were served breaded shrimp – that is, whole shrimp, with breading.

That means that the breading was attached to the shells, and when pulling off the shells, the breading, naturally, came with it. Still, we felt that we had won a moral victory of sorts, and accepted it. Only after the first few shrimp were consumed did we discover them to be resting on what was undeniably a bed of vegetable and potato curry. Sometimes it is best to quit while you’re ahead.

The second day were out touring Guangzhou together, we had a much better plan. We highlighted temples and markets and mapped it into a geographically logical route. Then it started to rain. The thing about rain at this latitude is that it does not come all that often, but when it comes, it has a monsoon quality about it. Hard and fast, and that day at least, long. Very long. We ended up ditching our pagoda plans in favor of a very leisurely lunch, the managed to take in a mediocre temple (I’m getting hard to impress in this area, I admit, though it was the oldest in Guangzhou and for that reason should likely be cut some slack) before the downpours began again. Then we cabbed our way down to another temple containing a couple of hundred gold statues- which would have been really impressive if they had been ancient relics, instead of reproductions a third the age of the ancient trees at Dr. Sun’s place- and we dashed through an outdoor Jade market, lingering at the one building that had many merchants under a single roof. As tourist adventures go, it was not an impressive day. Wet, though.

That night we flew up to Guilin, in the north of Guangxi Province. We spent a day hanging out, seeing the sights of the city. We started in a former Ming dynasty palace (a minor palace, for family, not the emperor himself), which included a bizarre little exhibition hall in which the lights for each room had to be located and turned on separately (we ended up following a Chinese tour closely to avoid disaster), and an odd little dance was performed by two women who seem to sit behind a curtain in one of the rooms for hours waiting for someone to come by and witness their show. We climbed the Solitary Beauty Peak behind the palace for a lovely view of the city, then took off for the Seven Star Park.

The Seven Star Park is so named because it has seven mountains that are supposed to be in the shape of the big dipper (we couldn’t see it, but if someone else can, more power to them). This part of Guangxi province was a communist stronghold during the revolution, a fact that was instantly apparent as we entered the park and noticed a tall stone with a row of characters carved in it. Now this in itself is not all that unusual in China – in Xi’an, there are carved bits of Tang Dynasty poetry everywhere, in Beijing Qing dynasty literature, in Nanjing Ming literature, usually things related to nature and the scenery and so forth. But in this case, the characters read, "Long Live Mao Ze-dong Thought," which to me would be better suited for, say, a meeting hall than a park, but perhaps the park is a nice place to go and contemplate the wonders of Mao Zedong thought.

Actually, though, the park itself was a nice place to observe Chinese capitalism in action. They had separate admission tickets for the park and for its greatest attraction, a large series of caves. The caves were a fine example of how neon lighting can be used to make visiting something not inherently all that exciting into a major event. We had to enter in groups, to be taken through the caves by a guide who would turn on the elaborate lighting in each section as we arrived. Many of the assorted stalactites and stalagmites were named for what the parks’ founders thought they resembled, which left us all squinting at the brightly lit, colorful and misshapen masses of rock trying to see a camel kneeling before a dragon or an old man visiting the theater.

On the bright side (as if the caves weren’t bright and garish enough), the park outside the cave had its own unique qualities. We went into the zoo, a very sad place, where an elderly and lethargic tiger was available to pose for pictures with your small children on its back (this does not strike me as being a terribly good idea under any circumstances, but anything for a few kuai, right?). In the zoo, we also saw the oldest living Panda in captivity, who at 36 was so ancient she did seemed to be past moving and content to lie in the shade, barely breathing.

Actually, we were among the very last people to see her in even that state, as the state media reported she died the following week. Another attraction in the park was the monkey, uh, area, where they wander at will and you wander among them, perhaps feeding them a few things they shouldn’t eat to tease them out of the trees.

In the afternoon, we grabbed a bus down to Yangshuo.

Yangshuo is a famous tourist area in China, something made obvious by the fact that along its main drag, West Street, you’ll see more English than Chinese and every restaurant’s menu sports, in addition to the standard Chinese fare, pizza and banana pancakes. I confess to being a bit puzzled about the supposed centrality of banana pancakes in traveling westerners’ lives – they’re even mentioned in the Lonely Planet – but still, a bit of a break from the standard fare is worth a visit in and of itself. But there was actually an additional reason for going there.
Traditional Chinese paintings depict scenes of scholars sipping tea and thinking sage thoughts out in the midst of oddly thin and rounded mountains that stick up into the sky looking like nothing that could possibly exist in real life, except that it does, and that is the skyline of the country around Yangshuo.

There are two recommended methods of seeing the countryside: one is to rent a bike and explore the paths, and the other is to take a boat up or down the nearby river. Since we had several days in Yangshuo, we thought we’d do both.

I was, from the start, wildly enthusiastic about the idea of the bike ride. I think that all of that biking around Nanjing sort of got to my head and made me overconfident about my cycling capabilities. After all, in my months of biking there, I never actually caused permanent damage to myself or others. I may have hit a few things here or there – other bikes in traffic, a parked bus, whatever – but no long term consequences had emerged from these mishaps.
What I failed to really note, however, is that there is something of a difference between taking your bike down the nice paved road with its wide bike lanes and taking it out for a spin on a rocky path that is sometimes a path and sometimes merely a single-tire-width suggestion as to which way one might go if one was crazy enough to try to bicycle through a rice paddy. What’s more, the path started out wide and paved, so the real difference was not immediately apparent, and in fact, only stood out in retrospect once quite far beyond the point of no return. That point being, of course, when the path back is as ugly as the path ahead.

The trouble really began with the maps. There were four total – the good one, which we lost before we even got out of Yangshuo; the pretty one, that was a fine keepsake but lousy for directions; the cave brochure one, that was intent only on directing us to a tourist trap we had no plans to visit; and the local one, hand-drawn one purchased off a man who gave us such elaborate directions I felt duty bound to accept his handiwork in exchange for two kuai.

With a solid plan to sort of follow the river up to the last bridge to cross over, and then come down the other side – paths for which all the maps showed in varying colors and scales – it came as a bit of a shock when we found ourselves spit out onto a highway far, far off course. None of us remember ever seeing a place where two paths presented us with a choice of roads, so the fact that we had made a wrong turn somewhere along the line was all the more perplexing. After a brief and terribly un-scenic jaunt through town, during which a kind women heading our way led us back on course, we managed to make it to the bridge.

At the bridge, the locals tried to talk us into hiring one of their boats to ride down the river, claiming that the bike path wasn’t great and that their way would be much better. Seasoned China Hand that I am, I scoffed at this. I mean really, I can recognize a tourist trap when I see one. They were just assuming we were unaccustomed to the exercise or easily cowed by warnings of ugly biking ahead, but we were not so easily daunted. A fine example, if ever there was one, of being too clever by half.

The bridge over the river alone should have clued us in to the fact that not so many people choose the bike path over the river boats. It was a series of steep stone steps, and pulling the mountain bikes up and over was not easy (well, for me anyway, which could have more to do with a lack of upper body strength than any inherent challenge in the task. Still, if bikers often traveled this route, there’d be a narrow ramp on the bridge to push the bike up. These are everywhere in China, er, everywhere else, at least).

Down on the other side and heading off, we started on an uneven path with huge rocks that made for a really bumpy ride. Unpleasant, but not impossible. This situation created some sense of overconfidence, I think. Whereas the path on the other side had many different paths available on the map and absolutely no visible intersections in real life, this side had plenty of intersections, but only one route marked out on the maps. From there, the path began to narrow.

By narrow, I mean it went from being a couple feet wide and epically bumpy to being the width of a single bicycle tire before averaging out at around a foot wide. The challenge increased when the right side of the narrow path dropped steeply, if only about a foot, into a muddy rice paddy, while the left side was lined with trees.

Here is where my lifelong steering deficiencies really worked against me. I was
incapable of staying on the path.

Twice I slipped off the path and down into the rice paddy on my right, then had to pull the bike up and try to get going again. Each time I fell, I got to be more concerned about my ability to stay on the path in the future, and the likelihood of falling only increased.

Ultimately, I overcompensated and landed in a tree on the left side, which resulted in about a half a dozen scratches on my arm but no permanent damage. I think, though, that in reality it might not have been my steering so much as the tree itself being overaggressive. I have something of a history with killer attack trees, but most vivid recollection being that one in the garden at UNC Charlotte that popped out of nowhere and took me down when I was out jogging one afternoon. I had some nasty scrapes from that incident, and I've never really trusted trees since then. In fact, I think I can blame the threatening nature of the trees on the left for my constant drops off the path to the right - trying not to get too close to something I knew could strike at any time.

It only makes good sense, really. At least this time, I escaped largely unscathed. When I finally decided to walk the bike, that proved no better, as I still slipped off the path and submerged my foot to the ankle in thick mud. Sarah and Danny struggled as well, but to the best of my knowledge did not fall off or hit trees. At all. Bit annoying, actually.

What’s more, I ended up covered in mud, and the two of them were only slightly dirty. I was, of course, the one with all the recent biking experience, whereas they both admitted it’d been a few years since they’d ridden. That, my friends, can be called a pretty serious loss of face for me. Call me chagrined.

Muddy and disgruntled as I may have been, we all shared a different problem: we were lost.

Quite lost, actually. Fortunately for us, we happened upon two other slightly shell-shocked bikers who no doubt were joining us in our wonder and amazement that the sales pitch for the boats was not merely hyperbole, but the honest-to-goodness truth, and they kept receiving directions from local inhabitants, which they would then relay back to us. When the worst was over – that is, when we were back on a rocky and difficult path that was once again a few feet wide (though my confidence was badly shaken, and I nearly fell a few more times) – we managed to get a few snap-shots of nearby mountains, small villages, and mostly submerged water buffalo.

When we finally made our way back to Yangshuo, close to five hours after we’d left, I made another discovery. In spite of my SPF30 sunscreen, I was pretty badly burned (blasted Norwegian skin). Not just badly sunburned, however, but oddly sunburned, which is infinitely worse. I had weird lines on my back from where my tank top and slid around, but far stranger, my forearms and especially the backs of my hands were bright pink up to the knuckles, where a stark line divided them from my pasty white fingers – the fingers that were curled around the handles of the bike and therefore not exposed to the sun. Lovely.

Thank goodness I had put all thoughts of appearances aside and donned my floppy sun hat for the duration of the trip, or I’d have had a Rudolf nose to match my glowing hands.

The really sad part of all this is that although we took a number of pictures and saw some lovely scenery, we did not manage to get to the place we actually headed out for in the morning. Sadder still was the fact that by the end of it all, we didn’t particularly care. We were content, instead, to visit a (slightly humbug of a) park, clean up, and then sit around at nice tables, waving fans, drinking beer, and working out crossword puzzles from a book Sarah had brought along.

The next day, we hired a boat to take us down the river and to a village, which we walked around a bit before boating back. We had bargained down the price on the boat, but typically, we probably still paid twice what the trip would cost a local. My only comfort there is that we saw the receipt book for other people booking trips, and they all paid more than we did, so if we were being cheated, and least we were all cheated together. Perhaps the most interesting site in the village came from looking in the open doors of homes and seeing the large, lit up Mao Ze-dong portraits, usually shown flanked by lesser images of Zhou En-lai and Deng Xiao-ping.

The village appears to be as poor as it has ever been – certainly, life in one of those homes could not be easy, and we saw people out walking cows and washing clothes in the river – but each lowly hovel now boasts a big screen T.V., which must be accepted as the positive proof of the virtues of communism. The peasants still work hard, die young, and live in poverty, but now they have access to state-produced soap operas to help pass the time. And, it only took 50 years to reach this glorious condition. Long Live the Communist Party and Mao Ze-dong Thought!

The boat ride itself was thankfully uneventful (not being able to swim, I would not have enjoyed any antics that resulted in falling in), and we lounged on chairs in the sun (my palms carefully placed upward, to protect my poor, blistery skin from more abuse) and watched the riverbanks slip by. A little shopping, an absolutely huge serving of Beer Fish (the local delicacy, aside, of course, from the banana pancakes where are not actually indigenous to China), and many crossword puzzles later, we were heading back to Guilin, where our diverging plans would take Sarah and Danny on to Beijing and myself back to Guangzhou.

My apologies to everyone for the fact that this message was long overdue. I’ve only hurt myself, really, because by swearing for so long that it was coming, I’ve likely only built up a few unreasonable expectations for how interesting the content would be. I can only say that I’m sorry, and that I have no idea when the Taipei stories will arrive in your mailbox. See, I learn.

Down and out in Guangzhou

2005-08-01T11:29:00.000-05:00

Last week was not what you would describe as having a great week. Certainly not catastrophic or anything like that – I have at this moment no sense that the universe is actually plotting against me, in spite of my fleeting suspicions – but in the grand scheme of things, not the best.

Well. After a year of hearing stories of rampant thievery and lawlessness from friends long resident in China (not to mention Taiwan), I finally got a taste of it myself. This weekend I was hit by an extraordinarily adept pickpocket, who managed to unzip my purse and remove my wallet without my knowledge, and all in the space of a few minutes (i.e. from when I knew I had it to when I discovered my purse open and the wallet gone).

I want you all to know that I take great comfort in the fact that this person was that good. It would be rather disheartening to lose one’s belongings to a thief who is merely mediocre. A stolen wallet is unpleasant under any circumstances, but China being China means that I’m faced with a few extra, bonus complexities. I lost:

1. The Citibank ATM card that after all the blood, sweat, and tears finally showed up here to replace my expired card. The irony is almost overwhelming. Fortunately for me, and proof, in my mind, that things happen for a reason, the ridiculous confusion surrounding the replacement ATM card operation that led them to mail not one but three new cards to China meant that I actually had a spare one – the stolen one was the second, and the third could still be activated to replace it. So at least I don’t have to live on instant noodles while I deal with all this. Whew.
2. My Bank of China ATM card, which, of course, was for a Nanjing account- which means that if I want to replace it or ever see the money in the account again, I have to come up with a way to get myself bodily back to Nanjing. Fabulous. I have less than a week left in Guangzhou now, and then three days in Beijing in August before I fly home. This is like being in Washington for three days and needing to run over to Chicago to go to the bank. Sure. If I can’t make it back, I’ll have to take comfort in the fact that some day I will go back to Nanjing, and when I do, there’s about $200 waiting for me there.
3. My Citibank Mastercard, which by itself would not be a huge loss, except for the fact that I bought an e-ticket for Taipei on Eva Airlines, and they have this unique regulation that when you check in you must present the exact card that you used to book the flight. I remember thinking when I booked the ticket, "Gee, what happens if you lose the card?" Serves me right for thinking.
Apparently, without this card I have to purchase a new ticket at the airport, and then apply for one of the tickets to be refunded once I get to Taipei… or something like that. I’m still not clear on the details and the first time I tried to call, they reacted as if there has never been a lost or stolen credit card in all of history.
4. My driver’s license, which of course I can replace once I’m back in the US, but this is complicated by the fact that I moved out of the DC address on the card in April, 2004 and don’t have a new address and on’t for some time, and of course, there are no guarantees the new address once I have one, it will be n DC and not Virginia or Maryland.
5. My Nanjing University and National Library library cards. The latter I’ll need to replace if I want to check back on materials when I return to Beijing. Not a big deal, really, but I’m padding the list a bit to play up the sympathy angle.
6. My kimchi store frequent customer card. Hands down the most irreplaceable item on this list, and most definitely not list-padding. Now I’m going to have to buy all kinds of kimchi before I can start getting the sexy 10% discount again. There’s just not time. Talk about adding insult to injury.
7. About 350 RMB (divide by 8, about US $40) which is, frankly, the least of my concerns. Of course, that is what the thief was most likely after; it is quite possible that after taking the cash, the rest of the belongings that mean so much more to me found their way into a roadside trash can.
8. My wallet. As much as this pains me, the fact that I had purchased it for about US $2 on the street in Hong Kong probably means this does not qualify as having anything but sentimental value. But it was the perfect size, with a strong zipper and a handy ID window on the outside. I mourn.

The really frustrating thing is that aside from the cash, there is no real reason to have any of these things in my wallet at all, other than force of habit. But we will dwell no further on that point. Grrrrr.

Dealing with the fallout from the stolen wallet was complicated by the fact that I have no international phone line. I have no way of setting one up, either. The best solution I had was to try a phone card and a phone booth, but the first few times I tried this the phone card didn’t work; I ended up going back to where

I bought the phone card and got one of the proprietors, a college student, to accompany me to the phone booth to work it out. The two of us tried 5 phone booths before we found one that could connect internationally, and then all of the Citibank international toll-free numbers did not work.

There was only one thing left to do, and that was to appear before my dear friend Louis of Citibank Guangzhou first thing the next morning and ask to use the phone there to call the US Citibank line.

I just want to say, I love Louis. Good thing, too, because I’ll be seeing him next week when I head in to pick up the UPS’ed replacement card. Perhaps I should bring flowers.

At the end of the day, there are worse things in the world than losing your wallet. For example:

1. Losing your passport with its residence permit and absolutely vital reentry visas
2. Losing your computer (though I am fastidious about backups and mail CDs of information home to Minnesota periodically)
3. Losing a limb or an eye (I actually put myself in some minor danger of losing an eye last month in Yangshuo, when I was putting on some bug spray. I held the bottle right up to my upper arm and pushed down on the nozzle. It was not until the spray hit my face that I realized I was holding the bottle backwards. As uncomfortable as flushing out ones eye is generally, it is even worse with bad unfiltered, undrinkable water. That hurt more than the bug spray going in, but I felt a little Chinese water torture was worth enduring for the sake of the greater good of preserving my sight.)

Of course, I’m being slowly driven mad by the number of people around here (mostly archives staff, actually) who hear the wallet story and come up with the brilliant advice that, "you should really be more careful."

Ya think? Granted it’s me, but there is just the slightest chance that I might have managed to reach that conclusion all on my own without having it pointed out to me. Noting that having my wallet stolen is really more my own fault than anything is so remarkably NOT helpful. It may be true, mind you, but that does not make it helpful. The two are at times mutually exclusive, and I must insist - INSIST - that this is one of those times. Outrage and condemnation for the world of petty thievery would be so much better.

Two days after the wallet’s disappearance, and long before I’d managed to handle all the fallout, I had another adventure thrust upon me. (You know, as in, "some choose adventures, others have adventures thrust upon them." I have always fallen squarely into the latter category.)

When I came home from the archives for lunch the other day, my power was out. At first I didn’t think much of it; I wondered if burn-outs aren’t common with all the air-con blasting in Guangzhou this time of year. Then, of course, it occurred to me (as you knew it would eventually), that I had taken the elevator up to my 16th floor abode, so the power outage might not be general, but might instead be just me.

I went down to the doorman, and he explained that the building cut off the power to apartments with long overdue power bills. Having moved in last month, I wondered if the "long overdue" bill didn’t predate me.

In fact, I have no control over any of the utilities – I’m supposed to settle with my landlady when I leave, and before that she’s supposed to take care of it. My hunch proved correct, however, and it was eventually revealed that the bill hadn’t been paid in almost a year – the entire time the last tenant lived here.

(The question here is, how does it not occur to anyone that a long period of time has passed without that particular bill coming through? Does one live a happy-go-lucky existence in which power is free? Just how out of touch with reality do you have to be to be financially solvent and still not pay the power bill for a year at a time??)

My landlady called late in the day to say that she’d gone and paid the bill, but that power would not be restored until the next day. She felt bad, though, so she offered to take me to dinner, and then had arranged for me to sleep in the spare bedroom of one of her other tenants’ apartments, just two blocks away (the key being the air-con – its hot and muggy and still this week, so trying to sleep in my oven-like apartment would likely not do me much good in the long run).

We met down in a Hunan style restaurant, where she and a friend had already ordered an array of delicacies for my dining pleasure. She ordered two of the house specialties just for me: fish head and shredded beef stomach (I know, I know, hadn’t I suffered enough? Apparently not).
After dinner I went back upstairs to take a quick shower in the dark. All the light I had was what was floating up from the street, again, 16 sories below. In the light of the next day, I glanced over my bathroom shelf and was struck with a deep suspicion that I had mistakenly washed my hair with sunscreen, but that is no longer important now. (And, to be honest, that might have no connection to the darkness. Just today I absently doused all of my dirty dishes with olive oil before I realized that the dish soap is in the *other* green bottle. Whoops.)

The girl whose guest room was offered me did not get home until after 11. She had no bedding, just a spare bed and an air conditioner, but that was enough for me. I wrapped up a sheet and stuffed it down my pillow case, and headed out. The bewildered look on the night watchman’s face when I trudged out the door at 11:30 in comfortable clothes and clutching my pillow to my chest could be matched only by the one on the face of the morning guard who stared as I padded back in at 7 am.

It took until around 9 the following night to get my power back on, and then only after I had lost my temper and yelled at my landlord over the phone (the problem here was not that it was all her fault-although it was- but rather that she said she’d been "too busy" to follow up on getting my power restored like she promised, and was now out to dinner and pretending I didn’t exist. This annoyed me) and spent some quality time with the night guard (he seemed to figure out what I was doing with the pillow the night before when I told him my power was still out, though perhaps not where exactly I went) while he searched for a maintenance man.

When the lights finally blinked on and my refrigerator began to buzz once more (not before absolutely everything inside had spoiled, but at least I had an opportunity to defrost my freezer), I was filled with that greatest and purest of joys, the one that comes from the restoration of something important often taken for granted until it is lost.

Even with the power back on, the apartment continues to astound and impress. The kitchen faucet came off in my hand the other day, leaving a small geyser of water shooting up from a hole in the countertop. It would have taken much less time for me to get it screwed back on had I:

a) remembered to turn the water off first or
b) not been laughing almost hysterically at the sight.

Every time I plug something (most often my computer) into the same outlet the TV is plugged into, there is a bright spark and the TV spontaneously turns off or on. The air conditioner will only change temperature in groups of two or three degrees at a time. This place is, in a word, quirky. I suspect it suits me.

This is, once again, not about Yangshuo. But I wanted to share while the events were still recent, and with Yangshuo it is already much too late for that. So I promise, this week – as in, in the next six days before I head off to Taipei – there will be an email with my tree story. I swear it.

Everything is more complicated than it really needs to be

2005-07-18T09:53:00.000-05:00

I have a cold. A dreaded, seemingly never-ending summer cold. This, of course, has no bearing on the rest of this post, except as a blatant and shameless sympathy ploy.

Ah, life in Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton). When I got into Guangzhou, I went straight for the cheap hotel I had booked over the internet. It was, well, it was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed in my life and travels, that award goes to a certain Kaohsiung crack house, er, I mean hostel, but let’s just say I had a strong motivation to get out first thing the next morning and find someplace to live on a more permanent basis.

After commuting around an hour each way to get to the archives in both Nanjing and Beijing, I was determined to live as close to the Guangzhou archives as possible. My plan was simple: I went to the archives, and then walking away from the building walked into the first real estate office I found and asked about renting apartments. The first few I tried told me to forget it – no one would rent for only two months. I have a friend who rented an apartment in Nanjing for only two months, though, and she gave me a few pointers.

First, she said, do not accept the "that’s impossible" line. It’s China. Anything is possible for enough money. There is always a landlord who sees a two month lease (at a rate slightly elevated over the standard) as better than an empty apartment waiting for a tenant. Then, she said, be prepared to make a snap decision. No thinking, mulling, weighing options.

This is difficult for me. I am a champion muller. I mull so well I rarely reach actual conclusions. So this advice was, essentially, to go against everything that is intrinsic to my nature.

Okay then.

As I walked out of my third "not a chance, but we’ll call you," a woman who’d been lurking in the doorway of the rental office followed me out. She asked about my requirements in an apartment, heard my request for a two month lease, and then told me to follow her to her office. She guided me to a storefront a few blocks away. As we walked, she called the office and spoke in Cantonese, presumably to prevent me from understanding when she reported that she’s bringing in a live one. Once there, they sat me in a chair and put a cup of water in my hand, while the whole office chattered over my head. After a lively argument, the women who caught me and, presumably, her boss, pulled out two keys and told me to follow.

A tall apartment building towered over their office, and they took me into this very building to look at apartments. The two they showed me were essentially the same – they had an entrance with a full kitchen and a table, a hallway with the bathroom on one side leading back to the main room, which had a bed, a desk, a couch, and (of course) a big TV. The whole place was quite small – like a studio, but with the kitchen divided out – but there was a small balcony with a view – it was up on the 16th floor), air conditioner, and a washing machine. The building was only a few years old, though, so everything was in good shape.

We looked at both places, and I after a truly minimal amount of hedging on my part, I told them to see if I could take the first one.

When they first showed me the place, the rent was 2000 RMB a month. After the landlord learned about the two month time limit, she raised it to 2400. I refused and countered with 2200, which she accepted. All of this, of course, was through the rental agency, which means that each stage was a separate conversation with me, followed by a phone call to her, and so forth. The rental agency also had its fee, and in spite of the fact that I was only staying for two months, I had to provide a two month security deposit. This meant, of course, that if I wanted to continue being Ms. Fabulous Snap Decision Maker, I had to go to the bank and pull out a fat wad of cash to make everything official and get the paperwork signed.

Being the full service real estate agents that they are, they offered to drive me to Citibank. I demurred, but ultimately found them to be more determined than I, and was soon strapped into their company car and heading for the bank. Just before we got there, a problem occurred to me. If I handed the landlord 4400 RMB as a security deposit, I’d get back 4400 RMB just as I was leaving China.

The problem is that Chinese currency is non-transferable – you can’t simply change it for dollars and head home. If you have a large wad of RMB when you leave China, you are stuck with a large wad of RMB until you can get back to China to spend it. And 4400 RMB (about $530) is somewhat more money than I’m willing to spend on last minute souvenirs.

Actually, I think it is also more money than I could spend on last minute souvenirs. How many stuffed pandas equal $530? I’d have to buy an extra seat for my flight home. I explained the problem to my real estate agents, and they called the landlord again, who agreed to take my security deposit in US dollars. Problem solved, right?

Nope. Now I had to figure out how to get $530. Even though my Citibank account is a US dollar account, it’s not a local Citibank account but an American account, so the only way for me to get cash is through the ATM, which only gives RMB. My Bank of China ATM account also only handles RMB. The real estate agent, a very nice Citibank employee, and I sat in the lobby of the bank for twenty minutes brainstorming possible solutions. The Citibank guy ("Call me Louis," he said, congenially) finally had the winning idea: I’d give the security deposit in RMB, then open a bank account that could accept US dollar wire transfers ("But not here," he said, "Citibank charges fees for this kind of account. You’ll go to Bank of China where it’s free").

Technically, I already have a Bank of China Savings account that could accept a US dollar wire transfer, but it’s in Nanjing, and I can only access it from Nanjing. So instead, I’d need to open a Guangzhou account, which is, incidentally, my third Bank of China account of the year. Finally, when the money arrived, I’d call my landlord and trade the dollars for the original 4400 RMB. That way when I left, she would give me back my dollars, which as we all know, can be traded freely anywhere in the world. Whew.

My only concern was that this plan would leave me with 4400 RMB to spend in 6 weeks, but then the bright minds at Citibank pointed out that I still needed to buy plane tickets, which in China is strictly a cash transaction. It wasn’t simple, but it was a solution.

It took a few transactions to get all the cash I needed, but soon we were off. Or so we thought.

Somewhere between the door of the bank and the car door, it dawned on me that I no longer had my ATM card. I apologized to the real estate agents and ran back to the ATM to get it, but there was no card there. I asked Louis if anyone had come to the machine in the five minutes or so I was gone, but he said no, and that if I didn’t take my card at all, it was likely taken into the machine. That began a rather lengthy process that began with them taking the back off the machine with a screwdriver to retrieve my card, and included copies of my passport and signing multiple notarized documents so they could affirm that I was, in fact, me, with me blushing beet red and stammering apologies to the real estate agents and the Citibank personnel all the while.

As we were waiting for this long process to be completed, we chatted about the apartment and the paperwork that needed to be done. Over the course of the conversation, I realized I had miscalculated and still needed to pull out another 2000 RMB. Along the way, however, it dawned on me that I was wrong to be taking all this money out of my Citibank account, when I still had a Bank of China account with RMB. So I continued to apologize and told them once I had my Citibank ATM back in hand, I’d walk up two blocks to a Chinese bank where I could use the ATM (it’s an internal network, so I couldn’t use my Bank of China ATM card on a Citibank ATM machine), and then really, I’d be ready. They said they’d drive up to meet me. I took longer than they did, so they ended up trailing me slowly in the car as I walked, shouting out the occasional commentary on my progress.

Poor Louis, incidentally, has not yet heard the last from me – he is a part of another rather involved process of getting my Citibank ATM card replaced. For some unfathomable reason, it has an expiration date of July 31. If I was staying in China until I return home in August, this would be no problem – I’d just budget out what I need and put it in one of my Bank of China accounts.

The problem is that I can’t use my domestic RMB Bank of China ATM in Taipei or Singapore, so I either need to apply for a fourth, international account (a very involved process), or get a new Citibank card. I don’t have a legal permanent address (I’m, er, not registered in the new apartment either, and have no mailbox), so I can’t have my parents send me the card. The Citibank in Beijing had the bright idea to have Citibank USA send my card to the Guangzhou branch, where I could simply pick it up.

Easier said than done: my poor mom, whom I now owe at least one, perhaps two very large pitchers of margaritas for her suffering, has spent literally hours on the phone with half the Citibank "customer service" people in the US (or more likely, based on her descriptions of the conversations, Bombay) trying to get this done. She has power of attorney and can call directly; I could call collect, but I don’t have a phone in the apartment and my cell phone is not registered for international calls (and I’m not paying the 2000 RMB to get access. My Nanjing number could call internationally – it was set up before China Mobile set up that fee – but it is out of money and I can only recharge it in Nanjing, so I’d have to go out to find a street phone with international access…. It should be abundantly clear by now that the moral of this email is: Nothing, but nothing, is simple in China.)

The problems began at the most basic level: Citibank USA claims it doesn’t have a branch in Guangzhou. Poor Louis would be heartbroken.

From that inauspicious start, there have been a total of four mailed replacements (three to China, one to my parents), about 20 phone calls, many requests for supervisors, three trips on my end to see Louis and discuss progress, and finally, one phone call yesterday from Louis to say my card has arrived. This at the same time that Citibank USA was telling my mom that in fact they’ve realized that they can’t send it at all without talking to me first.

Ahem.

Citibank is marvelous everywhere I’ve been outside the US, but it is a beast to deal with at home.

Anyway, back to our tale of intrigue and adventure in the Guangzhou real estate world. When we finally returned to the real estate office with all that cash in hand, the landlord had come and gone – she’d be back after lunch. So I returned to my chair and a fresh cup of water to wait. She came back and we worked on the rest of the formalities: signing the lease, handing over the money, getting the key, and so forth. Then someone from the office took me up to the apartment to do the standard inventory. That’s when the Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House sensation first kicked in, and it has not yet really worn off. If only my fixer-upper came equipped with Cary Grant….

Right off the bat, I realized something I hadn’t noticed before: the place was filthy. Covering every flat surface was a thin layer of grime. Clearly it had been a while since anyone had lived there. Then, we realized as we flipped all the switches on that the air conditioner, hot water heater, and washing machine weren’t working. The man from the real estate office told me not to worry – he’d have it all fixed within 24 hours. In the meantime, he asked if I wanted to hire someone to scrub the place down. We agreed this was a good plan, and for 30 kuai, a woman came and spent most of the evening making the place sparkle.

The boss from the real estate office – the same evidently multi-talented guy who chauffeured me around town on my bank adventures – came up and fixed the appliances. By the end of the day I was starting to feel like the service fee I paid them – which at first, I balked at – in actuality wasn’t nearly enough.

I left for a few hours to check out of my hotel, have dinner, open the new Bank of China account, and gather my belongings – I felt that the sooner I could get into the place and settle in, the better. When the cleaning woman finally left at 9:30 p.m., I grabbed my wallet and keys and dashed off to the neighborhood department store to buy towels, sheets, and assorted other necessary items for the night. I admit, though, I was feeling triumphant: I inquired about, rented, and moved into an apartment in a single day. It only took 12 hours.

Over the course of the weekend, I took four more trips out to various local shops to get the basics (one bowl, one cup, one plate, one set of chopsticks… bit sad, really). I also had a rather catastrophic plumbing emergency (turns out something else was broken when I moved in), which I will refrain from describing in any detail.

Soon, however, I settled into an easy routine in the place. Granted, it is still a bit quirky. The overhead bar for drying clothes on the porch came swinging down on my head and collapsed against the wall of the porch one afternoon, never to rise again (at least it didn’t tumble down 16 stories to the street below). And then last night, when I was making dinner, I ran into another little glitch. I had my vegetables and tofu all chopped up and ready to go, I reached for the knob to turn on the burner, and… nothing. It had worked the day before. What’s more, I could hear and smell the gas coming from the burner. There was just suddenly and spontaneously no fire. I went down to the 5th floor maintenance office, but I found it dark and empty. From there I went to the entrance guard, and explained my problem. He got on his walkie talkie and sent a guy up to fix my stove.

When the man came into the apartment, he spent about 30 seconds examining my stove before giving me his exasperated conclusion: "There’s nothing wrong with it," he said, "it’s just a dead battery." Right. The stove battery. I wonder why I didn’t think of that. He reached into my hot water heater (which apparently also runs on batteries), pulled out one D battery and replaced the one in the cabinet under the stove. He turned on the burner and voila! Blue flames.

I tried to save face. "American stoves don’t have batteries," I explained desperately. "I really didn’t know." He gave me a look and muttered a bit. I think it was something along the lines of, "Oh yeah? So what do they run on then? No batteries. Humph. You just don’t know where the batteries are…" I suspect I have failed us all, and the Fulbright program in general, in that rather than creating a positive view of America and Americans wherever I go, I have instead convinced one more industrious Chinese worker that Americans are so rich and spoiled, they don’t even replace their own stove batteries. I’m truly sorry.

My fabulous apartment is a mere two blocks from the Guangdong Provincial Archive, which means that not only is commuting a snap, but I have the joy of spending the forced two hour break at lunch time at home, instead of loitering in some neighborhood coffee shop watching the minutes tick by. It also means I have fewer excuses for skipping a morning session. In Nanjing, where it would be a full hour from my door to actually sitting down in the archives, I wouldn’t bother going if I was leaving my house anytime after 9. They’d close for lunch at 11:30, and so if I arrived much later than 10, the trek wasn’t really worth it. Here, I have no such excuse. If I leave home at 9:30, I get to the archives at 9:35.

The Provincial Archive is beautiful – a new building with some of the nicest reading facilities I’ve ever seen. Of course, the trade off is that they don’t have much for me in terms of records: everything before 1945 burned in the war, and everything after 1949 is not open or somehow unavailable (I’m working on this. They have some 1950s records, they just don’t seem to want to give them to me. Perhaps they think I’m a spy instead of a scholar. Or, better yet, a CIA agent disguised as a scholar. That must be it. The first class of Fulbright scholars to come to China in the late 40s were either sent home in a hurry in 1949 or stayed to be arrested as imperialist spies, and there could be some lingering suspicion about the program).

Hmmm, I know I promised tales of sunburn and violent forestry, but I had not counted on being so verbose (you’d think I don’t know myself at all). So stay tuned for the next installment, Guilin and Yangshuo.

Facing my terra cotta demons

2005-07-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

I confess: I was very happy to leave Beijing. For a while I thought I just preferred Taiwan to China, but I really fell in love with Nanjing. Then I thought I had a weakness for Nationalist Chinese strongholds, but I adore Shanghai, Guangzhou and Suzhou. Then I thought perhaps it was a North/South thing, and I just prefer the ‘nanfang’ (South) – but I delighted in everything about Xi’an. Now I’ve finally realized that elaborate explanations are totally unnecessary: I just hate Beijing.

I hate the broad streets that can only be crossed with tunnels and bridges that are clogged with chaotic traffic and totally anti-pedestrian. I hate that no matter if you’re going 6 blocks or 6 miles by bus, cab, subway, bike or foot, it takes at least an hour to get there. At least. I hate that it must have one of the only subway systems in the world where there is no automatic ticketing system – every time you ride, you have to queue in front of a window for a ticket, then hand it seconds later to a young woman in a smart uniform and pillbox hat. That’s fine at off-hours, but at rush hour it is chaotic and time-consuming.

The Beijing subway, incidentally, has three lines, named Line 1, Line 2, and Line 13. (No word yet on lines 3 through 12, though I’ve heard rumors that there is a master plan and some of them will be open by the 2008 Olympics, but the ones that open will also be random, such as lines 4, 8 and 11.)

I hate the fact that downtown Beijing ‘night markets’ are neat and orderly rows of identically decorated stalls with official registration numbers and two wandering policemen for each stall. Actually, I just hate the sheer number of policemen or military guys you see on patrol in general – generally one for every three people walking the streets (my distaste for the police might have been related to residual guilt for being unregistered, but still).

I hate the fact that any time you walk down the street in Beijing, an art student tries to sell you a painting because you’re a foreigner. I totally grant that my bad experience there could be related to the fact that I lived so close to the tourist areas, so I couldn’t walk out the door without having an extended conversation with someone on why I didn’t want to buy postcards. Not just that I don’t want to, but why. They always required reasons. Once I was almost talked into a watch because I had trouble making a case for why I didn’t need one. Leaving Beijing did not hurt me, not at all.

The day I left, I got into a cab first thing in the morning and spent the next hour stuck in fabulous Beijing traffic. When we’d finally gotten out of the mess of the ring roads and out onto the Airport Expressway, I had an experience that I defy anyone who’s ever been to China to try to match – something so unexpected and unbelievable that I doubt that many of you will really have much faith in my account. But I will swear on anything you put before me that it did, in fact, occur.

What happened was this: on an open road with light traffic, my cab was the slowest vehicle on the road. What’s more, we did not change lanes once. Not once! I almost don’t believe it myself, and I lived it.

Beijing cab drivers, well, really any cab drivers in China, but especially in Beijing, are notorious road racers. They swing from the right ditch to the lanes intended for opposing traffic (minor detail) and back again, dodging trucks, buses and bicycles at neck-breaking speeds, covering at least twice the distance that they would if they had merely traveled in a straight line. They speed even when they can see the red light and traffic stopped ahead, causing passengers in the seatbelt-less back seats frequent whiplash. I don’t care how fast you’re going or what you’re driving – and that includes any vehicle currently on the NASCAR circuit – a Beijing cabbie will pass you, and without breaking a sweat or missing a word of his blasting talk radio show. Failing to pass everyone between you and your destination at least once is, it seems, a colossal loss of face. I have no idea what was wrong with my driver on Tuesday, but clearly it must have been catastrophic, because even the airport bus managed to lumber past us and leave us in the dust. Even I, as passenger, felt the shame of it all (only shame, thankfully, as I was in no danger of missing my flight).

On to my two day ‘vacation’ in Xi’an. For the curious, the name of the city is spelled with an apostrophe to indicate that it is made up of two characters, Xi and An, a two syllable word, as opposed to being one character with the pinyin Xian, which is pronounced as a single syllable. Apostrophes are used when there are multiple options presented by the pinyin. Another example is the ancient name of the city, Chang’an, in which case the apostrophe indicates that the name is made up of Chang and An, not Chan and Gan, which are also possibilities if all you see are the letters.

Pinyin is not a perfect – or even great – system for writing Chinese because it repeats too much – even with tone marks, there are often a wealth of possible characters with different meanings to choose from. Even as a stand-in for the characters it presents problems: Xi’an is in Shaanxi province. The proper romanization for Shaanxi is actually Shanxi, but there already is a Shanxi province – the names are different in characters, but the romanization doesn’t reflect that, so the "a" had to be added to distinguish between them. Some foreigners misunderstand this, and amusingly try to say the two names to reflect what they think is a pronunciation difference, talking about Shanxi and Shaaaaaaaaaaaanxi provinces.

Xi’an is where the emperor that united China in the Qin dynasty (think "Hero," if anyone saw the Jet Li flick last year) is entombed, and it is the site of the famous terra cotta army. In addition to these 2000-plus year old relics, Xi’an (as Chang’an) was the capital of China under the Tang dynasty, and in this era, was the eastern terminus of the famous Silk Road connecting the Middle East with China and opening up a flourishing trade between the two.

As a result of this history, Xi’an still has a large Muslim population, and houses the largest and oldest mosque in China. It’s also one of very few major Chinese cities that has a standing city wall; once, most large Chinese cities had outer walls as fortifications, but these were declared rightist, decadent, and counter-revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution and many were destroyed (as were many priceless and now nonexistent relics of China’s past). Some, admittedly, particularly those more than a thousand years old, were in fact crumbling before the Cultural Revolution swept in to deal the death blows. But those that survived the Taiping, the Opium Wars, the Boxers, the Japanese, and the Communist Revolution were doing all right, largely because the brick makers (like those involved in the building of the Great Wall) had to put their names on their bricks, so if problems developed they, or perhaps one of their descendents, could be executed in punishment. Say what you will, the system led to excellent construction standards.

In Xi’an the walls contain so much history even the Red Guards didn’t care to bring them down, and in fact, they have been under pretty much constant restoration in the last decade or two. The combination of these things also means that the economy of Xi’an is quite dependent on its flourishing tourist trade – I think 90% of the people on my plane were foreign tour groups.

I arrived in Xi’an at midday, found my hotel, and after a cup of tea, took off for the Shaanxi Province History Museum. The museum is quite famous, or so they told me at the door when I paid for my ticket, as one of the finest collections of ancient Chinese relics in the world (for those who’ve followed my Chinese museum adventures from the very beginning, yes, this is code for "a bunch of pots") (but they were awfully nice pots). The weather in Xi’an was just a bit warmer than Beijing, around 103, so the museum seemed like a good plan.

After the museum, however, I looked over the map and realized that the Big Goose Pagoda (I’m actually still not sure why it is named that, other than to distinguish it from the Small Goose Pagoda a few blocks away) was nearby, so I wandered over there. Never one to reach a pagoda and not climb it, I trekked up the seven stories almost all alone (climbing pagodas apparently not being a popular pastime on stiflingly hot afternoons). By the time I got to the top, I wondered if the Cooked Goose Pagoda wouldn’t be a better name for it (sorry, couldn’t resist).

The pagoda was originally built in 684 AD, which is a new personal best for ancient pagoda climbing (my previous record being the 1005-year-old one in Suzhou). Sweaty and wilting, I returned to my hotel. I’d been back in my room for about ten minutes when my friend’s brother-in-law and his wife came for me.

This is standard Chinese etiquette – I know someone who knows someone who’s in the city I’m in, so they take charge of showing me a good time while I’m there. I’ve never actually met my friend’s wife, but her brother spent two days taking me around and buying me dinners. They were the nicest people ever and they made my trip to their city perfect.

First, they brought me to the Muslim quarter for some proper night market snacks and a "light" dinner (it was important to keep it light, they noted, because we would eat again later; overfeeding foreigners in my experience is also a very Chinese thing - they ordered us three dishes apiece which did not exactly fit my own definition of light). From there we went back down to the Big Goose Pagoda to wander around and wait for the fountain and light show at the plaza near there. As we were walking toward the pagoda, my friend asked if I knew its significance. I confessed my ignorance. He then asked if I was familiar with the story of Sun Wu Kong, a.k.a. the Monkey King.

In the story (written in the Tang Dynasty and officially titled Journey to the West), a monk is joined by the monkey king, who has god-like powers but is somewhat mischievous and uncontrollable; Ba Jie, who was once punished by the gods for being overly lascivious by being made into a half-man, half-pig; and Wu Jing, once a sea god. Together, the four travel to the West, or India, to collect the Buddhist scriptures and bring them back to the Chinese emperor. It’s a famous adventure story, and it is filled with battles and obstacles and general trauma before the ultimate triumph. Every few years, someone makes it into a serial drama for Chinese TV (even NBC did a mini-series in the US a few years back), and last year Mayday wrote a song about it.

I told my friend that I, too, knew the story (I cheated – I read it in English. I have an abridged Chinese version but I haven’t gotten to it yet). He replied, "Oh good. Well, this is where they translated the texts brought back from India."

I was momentarily flabbergasted. As soon as I recovered, I realized that I had to tread lightly. After all, I’d known him for all of an hour; perhaps his entire belief system is founded on an absolute faith in the evident truth of the Journey to the West, but I had always thought that the story was accepted as that, and had no place of its own in Buddhist mythology.

I nodded, and hoped I sounded simply ignorant rather than doubting or defiant as I asked, "But there, ah, wasn’t really a monkey king, right?" He stared hard at me, and for a moment I thought I’d offended him. I’m sure in actuality he spent that moment trying to decide how to address my question without mocking my apparent faith in monkey adventurers, but he finally started to laugh. He explained that he only mentioned the story as a reference; of course the texts were retrieved by real live monks, not through any great monkey/pig heroics.

After the pagoda, we got some ice cream and sat down to wait for the fountain performance. The ice cream was inexplicably in the shape of an ear of corn on a stick, and was vaguely corn flavored, but still sweet and, most importantly, cold. The fountain performance was, er, everything I’d hoped it would be, and somewhat inexplicably to the tune of the "Blue Danube Waltz," which, incidentally, I’m still singing. From there we took motorcycle taxis – a three wheeler with two back seats for me and my friend’s wife and a regular motorcycle for my friend – across town to a restaurant (the idea behind the private motorcycle offering lifts to wayward travelers is that the driver gets a little extra cash, and the rider gets a ride that costs less than a taxi – my friends say they often take them if they only have a few kuai on them and need to get somewhere, but that night they took them for my benefit).

We spent the rest of the evening toasting to friends, the wonder that is terra cotta, Sun Wu Kong, the fountain and so on with beer served in bowls, which is apparently local custom in keeping with the ancient China theme (and eating, of course).

My second day in Xi’an I took care of an important bit of business. Many of you are aware of my past concerns that the terra cotta warriors have been stalking me. To date, they have tracked me to Washington, San Francisco, Paris, and Hong Kong; they just missed me in Seoul (I outwitted them). I once presented all of the evidence I had in favor of this to a friend of mine here, who listened quite seriously and ultimately wondered if perhaps it wasn’t that it was the terra cotta warriors themselves behind it all, but in fact the ghost of the emperor of Qin.

Either way, being stalked, even by inanimate objects, is somewhat unsettling (perhaps all the more so because they are, or at least ought to be, inanimate). I felt that the best way to put the whole thing to rest would be to confront them, en masse, in their place of residence. The soldiers are in their excavation pits about 40 kilometers outside of Xi’an. Fed up with organized tours that involve more shopping than sightseeing, I decided to go the Chinese way, on the public bus. 8 kuai (US $1) for the roundtrip, with a stop at Huaqing Chi (the imperial baths – a retreat for the emperor in the Tang dynasty, like the summer palace in Beijing was for emperors in the Ming and Qing Dynasties).

The gardens around the baths were very pretty (the baths themselves were decidedly not, as the hot spring source that supplied them with water in the Tang era have long since dried up), but the place has an additional claim to fame: it was the site of the Xi’an Incident during World War II, when two of Chiang Kai’shek’s officers placed him under house arrest to try to get him to adjust his policies of ending internal strife (read: hunting communists) over fighting the Japanese. Naturally, these two were lauded as heroes by the Communist government and there’s a rather lovely, if somewhat heavy handed, display complete with original preserved bullet holes, devoted to the affair.

Once at the site of the terra cotta soldiers, I wove through a tent city of souvenir stands and finally reached the entrance, where I hired a guide to show me around at the site. At first I wasn’t going to just because he stood right in front of a sign in Chinese that said that guides cost 30 kuai for groups of five people or fewer and asked for 100 kuai to show me around. When I pointed to the sign, he told me that price was only for Chinese people. I told him that if I could pay the Chinese price, he could give the tour in Chinese, but otherwise to forget it.

He must have decided this was better than nothing, because he came running up as I stalked away and started in on the history of the terra cotta soldiers (I did not reveal that I have a personal history with them. This is not a story I generally share with strangers). He did not tell me anything that was not on one of the handy bilingual signs posted around the area, but because I was visiting alone, he was at least useful as a photographer and occasionally, for holding my water bottle (had to get my 30 kuai’s worth somehow, right?).

He tried so hard to get me to buy a personal scaled down set of warriors in the gift shop that I assume the usual Chinese deal where the guide gets a cut of the profits was in play, but I expressed no interest in spite of his earnest claims that having at least one, but ideally, a group of five displayed in my home would ward off evil spirits. Having at present no evil spirits (other than that insidious sprite, dissertation procrastination) needing fending off, I politely declined.

In fact, I bought a set for a fraction of the price from one of the touts outside (using the classic bargaining trick of walking away, yelling ever lower prices over my shoulder until the peddler caved and ran after me to complete the sale). My logic is this: although I do not require them to help me ward off evil spirits, I would be eternally grateful if they will serve to ward off other terra cotta soldiers. It’s the same principle, for example, as having a small, portable ninja on hand to ward off its life-size (and infinitely more dangerous) counterparts. You understand. (Some of you actually do. The others, I trust, are well accustomed to humoring me by now.)

When I returned to the city that afternoon, I met up with my new friends and trekked up to the top of the city wall. There we rented bicycles and cycled the whole loop, stopping at each of the large city gates for rest, shade (107 that afternoon, and a cloudless sky), water, and, naturally, pictures of us wilting in the sun. It was easy biking, being flat and wide with nice tall walls on either side once used to conceal archers but now necessary to keep bikers with sub-standard steering capabilities like myself from careening over the edge.

Still, by the end of that long day in the sun, I was exhausted and starting to feel a bit sick from the sun. From there, however, we went straight for dinner at a Latin American barbeque place (which they chose because the restaurant brews its own beer, and they thought I’d appreciate some ‘good’ stuff. Of course, the beer showed up bright green and turned out to be seaweed flavored. Words fail me).

The concept behind the restaurant is that young men in soccer uniforms come around with big slabs of different kinds of meat – more than 20 in all – and cut off a bit for each diner before bringing the next kind. I knew I couldn’t refuse them all, as much as I would have liked to, so my plan was to work slowly on the first few kinds they brought and then claim I was too full to continue past there. This plan, I discovered, was somewhat flawed. If the first few things had been squid and roast beef (which I can choke down past my vegetarian esophagus pretty convincingly), I might have managed it.

Sadly, the first thing that showed up on my plate were two little sort of round, sort of oblong things that I couldn’t identify. I heard something about chicken, so I bravely doused them in ketchup and popped one in my mouth. As I was chewing, my friends asked how it compared to other chicken hearts I’d eaten. After a brief internal battle, I managed to swallow and look more closely at the other piece on my plate. Pushing the ketchup aside, I could see the little blood vessels pieces sticking up and recognize the shape for what it was. That was pretty much it for me. I managed some watermelon and most of an ear of corn, but I was resorting to some of my childhood antics with napkins to clear the meat from my plate, even as it kept magically reappearing in new and ever more frightening forms as the scary soccer guys attacked from all angles.

After dinner I said goodbye to my new friends, as they’d be working the next day when I took off for Guangzhou. Before my flight, I went and toured the mosque and had a snack in the Muslim quarter, and then finally tore myself away from a city I loved at first sight. The flight from Xi’an to Guangzhou was quite turbulent, which caused the flight attendant to come on the intercom and make the standard announcement in Chinese about encountering light turbulence, returning to seats and fastening seatbelts. A few moments later, and almost as an afterthought, the same woman reappeared and announced in English, "The plane has run into some problems. Fasten seatbelts." While absolutely true, I suspect this phraseology did not quite accomplish the same task of calming and informing that the Chinese version managed.

Da da da dum duuummm, dim dim, dum dum….. (you ripple and gleam....) sorry.

Okay, next time, and quite soon for that matter: Guangzhou apartment hunting (complete with a ravenous Citibank ATM), overseas visitors, bizarre sunburns and a run-in with a vicious attack tree.

Beijing life- traumatized by basic tasks

2005-06-11T11:49:00.000-05:00

Nothing is ever simple, it seems. And as much as I would like to blame China for this, I suspect that it is only part China, and that the other factor making my life somewhat, uh, interesting, is just me. But I have to say, lately accomplishing even the most basic tasks feels like a major production.

Recently, I wanted to call the water company and have them send over a new bottle of water for the water cooler (a fabulously convenient way to make drinkable water accessible in places like China where water has to be boiled before it can be ingested). Johanna, whose apartment I’m staying in, has a company that she goes through for this. They way she explained it, the process was very simple: leave the empty bottle outside the door with a ticket in it good for one new bottle, and then call and tell them to come exchange the empty bottle for a full one. She said that she had checked with the company on which number they prefer we use for ordering water the day before, and had noted it on the order slip.

Brimming with confidence, I called the phone number and explained that I wanted to order water. The women asked me what I was talking about, and I explained that I was out of water, and wanted them to deliver a new bottle. She hung up on me. After a few huffy thoughts about the quality of the company’s customer service representatives, I called back. A different person answered, which made me glad. This one just might have a bit more patience; my water-ordering-Chinese is fine, really, but as always, my pronunciation is a bit, er, accented, so over the phone, at least, I do best with patient people. "I’d like to order water," I told the young women grandly. "What?" She replied. "I’d like to order…" "Where are you?" She cut me off. "I live in the Denglongku hutong. One bottle, please." Without as much as a "excuse me," or "just one moment," she hung up.

Growling, I tried once more. This time, at the automated answering service, I selected 0 for an operator rather than staying on the line for customer service. When someone answered, I explained that I have an account with their company, that I’d like to order some water, and asked when they thought they might be able to deliver. The operator responded with a curt, "what?" "WAAATER," I emoted. "I would like to order water." She seemed to pause for a moment, filling me with hope, and then she hung up.

At this, I gave up. I was chagrined. My confidence in my phone Chinese was gone. Clearly, my tones were all wrong, my vocabulary limited, and my listening comprehension, as usual, abysmal. It was a flashback to Taipei when I’d always blow the dictation on our unit tests. But also, it was partly their fault: what lousy service. They apparently couldn’t be bothered with me, so finally I decided I’d ask the ayi who comes twice a week to clean the apartment to call for me (this, by the way, is Johanna’s set up – this women has been cleaning for her for months. I am, I admit, a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing, to the point that I always find myself frantically scrubbing counters and wiping tiles just before she comes over. After all, I don’t want her to think I’m messy. But given the dust in Beijing and how quickly it builds up, it is quite common to hire someone to stay on top of it. She also does laundry and helps me buy vegetables, because the vendors around here – especially, I’m told, a rather nefarious egg man – always try to cheat foreigners).

When the ayi came, I explained the situation and she was very understanding. She marched straight to the phone, and called. She talked to the person on the other end for a few minutes, and then hung up, satisfied. "Are they bringing water then?" I asked with interest. "Nope," she replied. "Why not?" I asked. "Because they," she explained, "are not the water company." Three times they hung up on me, and it never once occurred to me to ask if I had the right number.

Embarrassed as I was, I ended up being quite glad that I asked her for help. In addition to the wrong number that Johanna had written down for me, we had a second number for the company. The ayi called that one, and they gave her another number to call. At the other number, they were uncertain about whether they or the original number was closer for a deliver to this location, and wanted the ayi to call the first one back. She suggested that they discuss the matter among themselves and then call us back, which they ultimately agreed to. They called back twice asking for more information. The second time, it was a bicycle delivery man asking for directions (Johanna has used this company since last September, so I have no idea why they didn’t know how to get here, but we guessed this guy was new). I sat alongside her and listened to just this end of the conversations. I heard the ayi tell him first to head to Tiananmen Square, and then she’d direct him from there. Then there was a long pause, and she repeated, ‘Tiananmen." A few seconds later, she sounded exasperated as she said forcefully, "TIANANMEN. Look, if you don’t know, just go out on the street and ask absolutely anyone where it is." What followed, I assume, must be the Chinese for "sheesh."

When she left, we thought we had it all in hand, but about a half an hour later the water company called back and asked me to call yet another office, and have them take care of it. Thankfully, calling this number was more like what I had originally envisioned for the ordering water task: I said I wanted water and where I am, then how many bottles, and then they said "Ok!" and an hour later, there it was. I think, though, that I’ll go back to boiling water before I willingly go through that process again.

The day after the getting the runaround from the water company, I received a phone call from
Federal Express. They had a package for me, but it was hung up at customs and they wanted me to fax a copy of the identification page of my passport to their service at the airport right away. I looked around my apartment. Nope, no fax machine. I asked about the alternatives. The women I talked to was flustered: apparently everyone who receives FedEx packages in Beijing has instant access to a fax machine. She gave me a different number to call, telling me that they will send someone to my house to pick up a copy of my passport. Er, okay. I called the number.

They told me the best thought they had was for me to FedEx a copy of my passport to the Beijing Airport. Let’s all just pause for a moment and let sink in just how asinine that idea is.
We went back and forth for a few moments on possible solutions to the problem. I finally suggested that since there is, as she noted with the FedEx-ed passport idea, a FedEx office near here, why don’t I just run over there and ask them to fax my passport to their airport branch? She put me on hold for a bit while she, apparently, located a quorum of unhelpful customer service representatives to mull over and ultimately agree that my suggestion "might work."

This was my fault, really, I shouldn’t have asked. I should have simply gone directly to the FedEx office and demanded that they help me. When I got there, I found one very bored young man who snapped to and faxed my papers with such alacrity, I suspected I was the first customer he’d seen in days, if not weeks.

It took a full day for my package to be cleared by customs (the Hostess cupcakes and birthday cards inside sent by my parents being particularly suspicious). The next morning, I received another call from FedEx. This time it was the delivery guy, and he couldn’t find my hutong. After a few failed attempts at directions (he, at least, was on the right street and did not need to be informed of the existence of Tiananmen Square), I told him to wait out on the street and I’d come find him. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I slipped on my flip-flops and grabbed a sweater, and rushed out to the street. I looked in either direction, and finally saw the van about a block south from the entrance to my hutong. I started walking to it, but I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when it started to drive away, and turn left into an ally. This is how I came to be running down Nanchizi Street, arms waving, flip-flops thwacking the sidewalk noisily with each step after a disappearing van. It was a picture I daresay few people on the crowded street that morning will soon forget. Fortunately for me, the van got stopped up by a three-wheeled bicycle trying to pass him in the narrow ally, and I managed to close in and demand my package.

Speaking of cupcakes and cards, a few of you have asked how I spent my birthday. I was tempted to spend the entire day in bed with a new Korean soap opera, but was ultimately lured outside by gorgeous Spring weather and a desire for fresh air. I thought for a bit about what, ideally, I’d like to do, and then the proper course of action for the day came to me in a flash: I went to see the dinosaurs.

The Beijing Museum of Natural History is not on the level of the Museum of Natural History in London or the American Museum of Natural History in New York (which has the best dinosaurs I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen dinosaurs in six countries and around the US – but loses points for being too expensive. If you have to pay $13 or more to get in, you cannot justify simply going to see the dinosaurs and then leaving again; you feel somewhat obligated to go look at boring gemstones and dull anthropological dioramas to justify the expense. It saps some of the joy from the experience, really), though Beijing is miles ahead of Shanghai. (I remember when I showed up at the ticket window in Shanghai and asked to go in, the women at the window just stared back at me, with an incredulous look that plainly said, "Really? Why?") (To demonstrate the contrast between the two museums, I’ve included photos of a typical exhibit hallway outside the dinosaur area in Beijing and in Shanghai.)

Seeing dinosaurs in different parts of the world often means seeing very different fossils. Dinosaurs found in China date mostly to the Jurassic Period, whereas North America is known for its wealth of Cretaceous Period fossils, and they also developed quite separately; it is fascinating to see that, for example, a North American stegosaur (like the Stegosaurus) has rounded plates, but the Chinese stegosaur (most famously, Tuojiangosaurus) has pointed ones… I could go on, of course, but I think I’ll just say that in short, I had a lovely time at the museum. Everyone, I think, needs something (like the dinosaurs for me) that makes them inexplicably happy just because.

Aside from the dinosaurs, I also got myself some ice cream for a near-perfect afternoon. I stopped short of buying myself a balloon, largely because they were not dinosaur shaped, but also because the sad memory of my last balloon had not yet faded. (One day a few months ago, I was standing on the side of the road in Shanghai. A man walked up to me and handed me a balloon. "For you," he said. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve never just gotten a balloon from a stranger for no particular reason before. It made me quite happy. Then, as I was walking into the way into the Shanghai Railway Station that afternoon, I heard a sudden, loud BANG! I jumped about a foot, let out a little shriek, and then stared down sadly at the little bits of blue rubber at my feet. And that was the end of my balloon.)

After the Labor Day holiday (celebrated May 1 here, as in most of the world outside the United States), which provided for most of the first week of May off, a sort of anti-research, anti-translation, anti-dissertation lethargy set it. This, I believe, is also known as spring fever. Many days went by when I could not force myself to open the Word files on my computer, much less work on them. Those of you who are in grad school, if you have never had this experience, please don’t tell me. I won’t believe you anyway. But I’m trying now to fight my way back into making progress. I have just a little over a month left in Beijing, and much to do before I depart, so cheer for me, will you? In the meantime, another trip to the dinosaurs might be called for.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

2005-05-31T11:56:00.000-05:00

In the past week, I have:
- Broken my toe by tripping on my way down a steep flight of stairs. I take comfort in the fact that I did not actually fall down the stairs. It’s the little things that count.

- Spent over 24 hours on trains on a quick jaunt from Beijing to Shanghai, then Nanjing and back to Beijing, and discovered that overnight train tickets are quite easy to change if you miscalculate the amount of time it will take you to complete your business in Nanjing and have to extend your stay a couple days.

- Rode on the all co-ed car for my overnight train down to Shanghai, sandwiched between study tours from the University of Michigan at Flint and the University of Pittsburg. Drinking games on my right (20 is legal in China! Dinning car beer run!!) and angst on my left (sounded like a love triangle, but I’m not certain). Flash back to dorm life.

- Had a jammed door opened by a drunk locksmith (At my friend Caitrin’s place. And how do I know he was drunk? I submit the following evidence: 1. He introduced himself to me - he already knew Caitrin - three times 2. He kept pushing too hard on his tools while crouched in front of the doorknob and then falling over, all the while giggling hysterically 3. He propositioned Caitrin, me, and the 40-year-old (male) building superintendent 4. He said he was.)

- Sliced open my thumb rather catastrophically (or so it seemed by the amount of blood loss) at midnight (cutting up an apple) and was forced to attempt one-handed Creative First Aid with toilet paper and packing tape.

- Gotten my residence permit exchanged for a multiple re-entry visa (necessary now that I am contemplating heading out of China through Hong Kong and on to Taipei and Singapore when my grant ends in August. My return ticket is out of Shanghai, but I’m leaving my suitcase in Beijing, so I’ll have to race through these cities as well after the swing through Southeast Asia before heading back home. It’s all research related, and these are all destinations I visited for research sometime in the last year, but instead of sullenly thinking of how disorganized I am to require return visits, I’m calling the trip my East Asia Victory Lap.)

- Helped translate for two French tourists who wanted to extend their visitor visas, but spoke no Chinese and whose English the man at the Public Affairs Office couldn’t understand (though listening to him try was rather amusing), thus earning me bonus points with this same man, who therefore agreed to get my visa done a day early so I could get back to Beijing.

- Closed my blasted Bank of China account that I learned, too late, was only valid in Nanjing (my bank account was only accessible from Jiangsu Province. At the same time, my cell phone can only be recharged in Nanjing. Coincidence? Nope, try annoying little ways to control unauthorized migration).

- Got into a fight (no, no fists) with a librarian about what constitutes a ‘fragile’ book that should not be subjected to the stress of copying (I’m all for historical preservation and care of materials until it’s something I want to copy, and then I find myself in the ridiculous position of claiming that even if all the pages do fall out from damaging the book’s spine, they’re still there and readable, really.)

- Set off the security alarm at the library. Whoops. (No worries, I’ve done this the world over).

- Copied 700 pages of articles and book chapters on my dissertation, all in Chinese. Maybe I’ll have it all read by the time I’m 50. That will, incidentally, likely be right around when I’ll be ready to graduate.

- Caused a minor gas leak in my apartment, which resulted in the gas being shut off and led to a parade of helpful neighbors tramping in and out trying everything they could think of to adjust in my hot water heater and gas line to fix it, mostly in the realm of adjusting the water pressure, before we collectively decided that all we needed to do was hit the gas line’s reset button. Then it only took another 24 hours to find it.

- Discovered that the Natural History Museum in Beijing is NOT the home of the best dinosaurs in Beijing.

That was, in fact, merely a red herring. The good stuff is way over by the zoo in the bottom two floors of the Chinese Academy for Sciences subsection for the study of Ancient Animals. I literally ran into a large plastic dinosaur on the lawn on my walk from the National library to the subway. Being both uninjured and inordinately fond of dinosaurs, especially in unexpected places, this made my day. There was, I’d like to add, only one English sign in the entire museum. It read: "Roaming about, you will unconsciously savor the profound sense of the evolution in biology. Retrospecting, you will certainly be astonished by to comnipotent creativity of nature." I suspect I’ll run back for more roaming and retrospecting before I leave Beijing.

As you can see, I’m managing to keep myself busy, and if not entirely out of trouble, at least out of jail. Only two weeks left in Beijing, then I’m on the move again as I head south for fun with Guangzhou (Canton) in the summertime. It’s not necessarily the single hottest city in China in the summer, but it is close. This is remarkably bad planning on my part, but such is life.

In Praise of Globalization

2005-04-28T16:30:00.000-05:00

Let me begin by saying a few words in praise of globalization. I’m talking about the factors in the international economic system that cause there to be a Pizza Hut on every corner in Beijing and a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. The process that allows Carrefour to open up a branch in Hangzhou so that weary foreign travelers have a rare opportunity to buy a wide selection of organic vegetables and create a basic garden salad (as opposed to standard Chinese grown vegetables that contain such a wide variety of pesticides and other chemicals that one can eat them uncooked only at the risk of becoming deathly ill or growing an extra limb).

Or, for that matter, the means by which there is a line out the door to eat at P.F. Chang’s in Maple Grove, Minnesota. (I imagine, of course, that for every western chain restaurant open in China, there are twenty Chinese restaurants open in the West. But we Americans are oddly fond of engaging in a sort of cultural elitism that insists that thousands of years of Chinese culture with its vast experience in integrating invading barbarians and their ideas will somehow buckle under the weight of Kentucky Fried Chicken et. al. and cease to be China, instead turning every ancient Asian capital into a lesser Kansas City.)

What started all this? Well, April has been a month on the move for me, and when one is in constant motion, there is nothing more comforting than the occasional taste of something familiar and reliable, like decent coffee, the ability to purchase cheese and the occasionally guaranteed-to-be-MSG-free meal. I began my travels, appropriately enough, on the first of the month, when I got up early and took off on a five hour train ride to Hangzhou, a city south of Shanghai that boasts the most famous West Lake in China (there are many by that name, but this one inspired key passages of classical Chinese texts and therefore gets to be the Number One West Lake). I went for the sole purpose of hanging out on the lake – there are other attractions, like temples and pagodas, but I skipped them in favor of island-hopping.

Hangzhou (like Suzhou) is a major destination for domestic tourism, but only attracts foreigners with time to spare in East Central China, which meant that, since I was a lone foreigner-with-time-to-spare on that day, a lot of staring; but such is the life of a foreigner off the beaten track in China. It also means being the number one target for people begging for money – and in this case, I met up with some terribly persistent people. In general, I’ll give away my mao (a tenth of a kuai) at random as I wander the city, but being compelled into it by trickery always annoys me. Before this, my most uncomfortable encounter was with a women in Nanjing who actually wrapped her arms around my leg to stop me until I gave her money; in Hangzhou I met a woman who pushed me in front of an approaching bus and then pulled me out of the way, only to demand a kuai for ‘saving’ me.

The challenge of either facing or ignoring the demands of the severely impoverished made a stark contrast to the newly opened lakeside shopping centers, which naturally include Armani, Prada, and other luxury names because, after all, “to get rich is glorious,” at least, according to Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party. Hangzhou is, if nothing else, a pleasant place to sip some Longjing tea and contemplate the irony that is New China.

On April 2nd I took a late train from Hangzhou up to Shanghai to meet my parents and cousin Kristian at the airport. For the next 9 days, the four of us gallivanted about China (well, there was perhaps more Wizard-of-Oz-style skipping than actual gallivanting – and exactly one full chorus of ‘We’re off to see the Wizard’ at the Beijing Zoo – but let’s not split hairs here, the principle is the same). We got to a lot of places I’d never been before; for example, the Shanghai Bund ‘tourist light tunnel’, which promises to whisk (well, whisk slowly) passengers across the Huangpu River through a tunnel filled with psychedelic neon lights and indecipherable multilingual commentary. Lest anyone get to jealous of us for having had this great adventure, I’d like to point out that it could be replicated quite easily with a dark hallway, some blinking Christmas lights with tinsel garlands, and a wagon. Have fun.

We also took a day trip out from Shanghai to Zhouzhuang, fondly nicknamed ‘the Venice of the East’ by the local tourist board. Zhouzhuang is a water town – a city that relied on an elaborate canal system to move goods around the city and, via a connection with the old Grand Canal that connected Beijing and central China, goods could move elsewhere as well. Now, of course, it relies on a network of tourists to move cash in and goods out.

The city is about 900 years old, and its many bridges have been the subject of a great deal of very famous art we’d never heard of (ah, well, such is the art world). It is also the site of many new art galleries where works center on the town’s more famous vistas, and we were subjected to the hard sell by a man who was perhaps a bit overconfident in his English (he went on at length about how Chinese art is famous for being delicious, whereas Chinese cooking is famous for its aesthetics). (On second thought, maybe he’s right.)

Midweek we took off for my longstanding residence (six whole months!) of Nanjing, where we discarded our casual observer attitude in favor of supertourist status. This was done not entirely willingly – my neighbors (Liwei's- the young girl I had been helping to prepare for her Wnglish exam- parents) had rented a van (the Chinese for which, by the way, I really love: it’s ‘mianbaoche’ or bread car, so named because vans are shaped sort of like a loaf of bread) and made a plan to make the most of our one day in their city.

I talked them out of the suggested 7 a.m. start time all the way down to 8:30, and although I could tell they were a bit concerned about us wasting half the day like that, they were forced, by my insistence, to accept it. In the morning we visited the Purple Mountain Astronomical Observatory (someplace I had not only never seen, but actually never heard of), the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, and the Presidential Palace/Residence of Chiang Kai-shek while in Nanjing (and also the residence of the leader of the Taiping Rebellion when they briefly ruled over the city in the mid-19th century). Then off to lunch in a private room of a hotel restaurant, where my neighbors had ordered more than a dozen dishes for us and seemed to think we’d manage to eat them all.

I do not think that, until that point, my mom and Kristian (Dad went back to my apartment early, a bit under the weather) really appreciated what I’d been suffering at the hand of my neighbor’s many attempts to force-feed me. We ate until we were bursting and then were helped to more, all the while being implored to drink more Budweiser, of all things, which they bought for our sake, though not because it’s American, but because it’s ‘the best.’ (Sadly, they’re not wrong. Qingdao has some better quality products, but for a basic table beer – which often takes the place of a table wine in big Chinese meals – the local brands are a bit lacking) (of course, if your mind wanders to the memory of a Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout while drinking an insipid Chinese beer, it is enough to bring tears to your eyes and put a catch in your voice).

Of course, nothing lasts forever, and we were ultimately released from the table and allowed to stumble out of the restaurant and back into the van for more sights of Nanjing (the goal seeming to be, as Kristian noted, to get us drunk and then lead us around museums). The afternoon took us to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Fuzi Temple (Confucian), where I was kept busy talking them out of taking us to dinner, it having been, of course, only two hours since we’d finished lunch. We ultimately managed to negotiate our release and were returned to my apartment with a bag of food for the train and a promise to pick us up to take us to the station that night.

We took the overnight train from Nanjing to Beijing, which takes a mere 9 ½ hours and, in the soft sleeper cars at least, is marvelously comfortable. Each cabin has four bunks, and each bunk boasts of its own little TV and headphones broadcasting a selection of Chinese and American movies. Mom, Kristian and I hit the on-board bar for a nightcap and then settled in for a relaxing trip. I was dead tired from the challenges of codeswitching – by the end of the day I was inevitably speaking to my neighbors in English and my family in Chinese with the anticipated effect of enlightening no one and instead creating mass confusion – but I never sleep on trains (or planes or automobiles; I don’t know why), so that first afternoon in Beijing, I was a little bleary-eyed and, hence, so excited about the Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. Do not argue cultural heritage with the caffeine-deprived (really, it’s in an inconspicuous side building; it’s not like they’ve turned the emperor’s receiving room into a McCafe).

Our time in Beijing featured the discovery of a much-beloved bakery chain, climbing the Great Wall in the rain (hey, fewer tourists that way, which means you can form a can-can line without hurting anyone) (we have pictures- write and ask), and led a tourist group rebellion against a forced visit to a state-run silk factory.

I’ve actually written about the factory system in China before, but for the uninitiated, every time you join a tour group to go do something hard to do without one (like go to a relatively distant, less populated section of the Great Wall), you get forced to visit some sort of official factory which consists of a quick demonstration of how they make the goods contained within and then a long march through the showroom where they try to ply you, the rich American tourist, with three of everything; the tour leader, of course, gets some sort of kickback on whatever you buy. So far, I’ve been to jade, pearl, silk, and cloisonné factories, and my experiences with them led me to turn revolutionary to prevent yet another trip (the other weary tourists, having been to their fair share of these factories themselves, stepped into line quite easily, so it is not quite the feat of mass mobilization that it might sound. There were also only 7 of us total, including the four Oyens. Just short of a mass).

I was, of course, terribly sad to see everyone go. But the week after they left, I almost didn’t have time to think about it (almost). I saw them off in Shanghai, took the groovy new mag-lev train from the airport into the city (430 km/hr and only 7 minutes from Pudong International Airport to the Shanghai subway system, a trip that normally takes 45 minutes to an hour), then the subway to the train, and the train back to Nanjing. In Nanjing, I had four days to pack up my apartment, ship back excess books and clothes that I won’t need between now and August, and get back on the Beijing overnight train.

My neighbor came to see me off at the train station, which was lucky because otherwise I might have gotten stuck, pathetically, in the train station tunnels, unable to reach the platform. Basically, I had a suitcase, a duffel bag, a backpack, and a small shopping bag, the cumulative weight of which was roughly 2-3 times my own weight. Combine that 250 pounds of baggage (why so heavy? Mostly books, really: the life of a dissertator) with the chaos of doubletime construction at the Nanjing train station (which burned down last year but must be made pretty – not to mention functional – again for the Asian games to be hosted there in October, resulting in a not-so-passenger-friendly work zone), and you have a genuine ‘it takes a village’ moment. I missed my neighbor's help in Beijing, where it took me close to an hour to travel the 200 or so yards from the train platform to the taxi stand, with frequent rests.

So here I am in Beijing. I’ll be here until mid-June, when I head south to spend my last two months here archive-hopping across Southern China. I’m staying in a fellow Fulbrighter’s apartment while she’s in Nanjing (we also, conveniently, arranged a bicycle swap), and I have to say, it is the nicest apartment I’ve ever lived in. I have a cappuccino maker. And a neighborhood Starbucks – well two, if you count the Forbidden Starbucks – that sells the beans. No wait, three: there’re two on Wangfujing Avenue.

I only mention it because I nearly cried when I made my first cup of real, fresh coffee, not from instant granulated particles, in the privacy of my own home and while wearing my pajamas (i.e. good coffee without having to go out and fetch it). Three cheers for the oppressive forces of western cultural and economic imperialism that make my morning lattes possible! Hip, hip… yeah, okay. Anyway, the apartment is in a renovated hutong (traditional Beijing-style housing that consists of a collection of family homes centered around a garden with a gate), and it’s just off the East Gate of the Forbidden City, a location that cannot be beat. Except when I’m trying to get to the National Library, which is on roughly the other side of the world.

Actually, just getting around the library itself is something of a trip. The library takes up a full Chinese city block (each of which generally equals about 6 New York City blocks), and has, just for fun, apparently, no signs inside directing you anywhere. The first time I went, I was looking for 1950s era People’s Daily articles (I had collected a bunch of these off a really cool searchable CD-ROM in Hong Kong, not realizing that when I printed them out, each line was missing the last 5-6 characters, which is too much to guess at). I entered, as directed, at the far South entrance. At the first information desk I saw, I presented my query. The helpful people told me to find the first hallway I could that leads north, and take it as far as I possibly could, because the newspapers are located at the farthest point from the entrance.

Off I trekked, and about 10 minutes later walked into the newspaper room. But wait, that was the contemporary newspaper room; the kindly staff there sent me upstairs. Upstairs there were papers from the 1990s, to be sure, but nothing so far back as the 1950s. That is on microfilm, and microfilm is in the far west of the building, so find a hallway leading west and take it to the end. Once, finally, in the microfilm room, I ordered up a few sample microfilm reels from the late 1940s and put them through the manual machine. It was clear to me in minutes that this was not going to work: the machines had no function to enlarge, the characters were absolutely miniscule on the screen, and smudgy to boot.

I returned the reels to the desk and asked if the library didn’t, per chance, have the computerized edition. Miraculously, they did – but it is in the computer reading room. Where’s the computer reading room? Well, that was at the far east of the building – the southeast (i.e. right next to the entrance).

After my Grand Tour, I couldn’t help but wonder why they wouldn’t automatically send anyone looking for People’s Daily back issues to the fabulous, easy to use, low-maintenance, and searchable CD-ROM, but hey, it’s China. Don’t ask too many questions. Tomorrow, however, I have to go find statistical yearbooks, which are supposedly located in the sub-basement labyrinth. I plan on bringing snacks just in case I get lost down there and don’t make it out by closing time.

In fact, if you don’t hear from me for a while, assume that’s what happened. Maybe I’ll invest in a compass.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

The Doorbell Rang

2005-03-23T14:35:00.000-06:00

Last week it was 70 and sunny for four days, Monday through Thursday. Then, after a massive thunderstorm, the temperature plummeted and it was back to turning blue in the archives. I was biking home Friday alongside another grad student, Cathy, who’s from England. She commented that she’s never seen weather this bizarre. I told her that it was just like spring in Minnesota, except that in my home state, the temperature drop would be accompanied by gratuitous snowfall. As soon as the word ‘snow’ escaped my lips, I regretted it. One should never tempt fate in this way in the springtime, and sure enough, seconds later something small, wet and chilly hit my nose. The light flurries soon turned into quite the snowy mess (though admittedly, it didn’t really accumulate much, falling as it was on the sun-warmed pavement), and I discovered that if there is anything worse than driving home through a Friday rush-hour snowstorm, it’s biking through one.

When not slaving away on the dissertation (er, right) over the last few weeks, I’ve been tutoring my neighbor’s daughter, Liwei. I met her after her mom showed up on my doorstep one night, explaining that she’d heard there was an American in the neighborhood and thought she’d come by to see if the rumors proved true. Liwei is 15 and, true to the pressure-cooker mentality that underlies most Asian educational systems, she has two important, life-determining exams coming up. I’m helping her prepare for an English exam on April 2.

She’s currently a student at Nanjing’s foreign language middle school, and in order to get into the foreign language high school, she needs to test in the top half of this exam. In other words, 600 of the best English students in this city take the exam, but only 300 of them pass. Then in June, she takes the high school entrance exam. Her mom tells me that only a third of all middle school graduates get into a regular high school (with attending hopes to someday go to college) – the rest end up in trade school, all academic dreams over at age 15.

As a result, being a Chinese student, whether in elementary, middle, or high school, is a rough existence. Most families only have one child (that’s, er, due to the infamous “one child policy”), and everything depends on how he or she does in school, with college being the ultimate goal. Each step along the way, however, narrows the field considerably. As anyone from your friends, to cab drivers, to average guy on the street will tell you if you stand still long enough to listen, China has too many people. There are too few places in universities, so the 12 years leading up to college turn into a cut-throat competition for academic success. Add to this the fact that some of the precious few open slots are taken by people who have the money or connections to get into any given school through back channels, and you have a miserable existence for the rest of the test-takers.

Liwei goes to school every day from 7 to 5, then comes home to a few hours of tutoring, and then studies until midnight or one. Her mom works all day and keeps her company at night – as she says, if her daughter had to stay up all alone and study while the rest of the family slept, she’d become bitter. Her mom is quite worried about the exams, but also wants to avoid giving her daughter too much pressure – one night she regaled me with horror stories of young students being overcome by the stress and attempting suicide – it happens around test time every year.

Liwei’s family situation – not to mention her stress level – are complicated by the fact that her dad has leukemia. He was diagnosed four years ago, but it has been slow to develop. His white count is quite high now, however, and this spring he’ll undergo a bone marrow transplant. He was lucky in that first, his brother was a match for his bone marrow, and second, that he has a government job that can pick up the cost of the procedure – otherwise, he’d never be able to do it. That Liwei and her mom show up on my doorstop cheerful and chattering every night – and asking what they can do to help me – is an extraordinarily humbling thing to witness.

Being a cream-of-the-crop foreign language student, Liwei speaks extraordinarily good English already, though her studies thus far have been a bit too focused on rote memorization and not enough on organic conversation. (I help make up for this by demonstrating a pre-teen level of interest in soap operas and Mandopop stars and having her fill in the gaps in my knowledge.) The one complication in what would be a perfect student-tutor relationship is that I won’t let them pay me, and this causes angst. There are a few reasons for this – one is that while I’m on fellowship I’m not supposed to take paid employment (and yes, no one would ever know, but I would), another is that I’m not a trained tutor – I just explain things the best that I can and sometimes that’s not all that well. Her mom finally accepted the situation with the suggestion that perhaps there are things they can do for me instead of just handing me cash.

When we first agreed on the tutoring arrangement, they presented me with an economy size box of cookies: the logic being, I gather, that if they can’t pay me, they can at least feed me. The cookies were advertised as being milk flavored, the perfect accompaniment for afternoon tea. There was nothing on the packaging to prepare me for the fact that each individual cookie was stamped over and over again with “Beijing! 2008!!! Beijing! 2008!!!” It seems they’re pro-Olympics, patriotic cookies. Sadly, they’re also terrible: like eating compressed sand, only sweeter. On the other had, I can’t help but think that they might not be half bad if accompanied by ice cream – Chinese nationalism, a la mode.

It did not stop with the cookies, however. Although I came up with a few things related to my research that they could do to help me out (mostly in the realm of deciphering difficult-to-read characters from my archives copies), they clearly decided that the best course of action was to bring more and more food my way. While tutoring Yitei at her house one afternoon, I was kept busy by not only the constant stream of questions from my student (“Why is New York called the Big Apple?” “Why are college students called freshmen and sophomores?” “What’s the difference between blond and blonde?” I spent some quality time with Google that night, working out some of the answers), but by the constant supply of snacks from her mom. Every time I took a sip of tea, I’d set it back on the table and her mom would sweep in, grab the cup, and refill my mouthful’s worth of hot water. She handed me an apple, but before I could finish it, she took it out of my hand and replaced it with a mango, which was in turn replaced with yogurt. Protests were futile, and I became slightly concerned about opening my mouth too wide lest she stick something in it.

A few nights later, my doorbell rang. I had just finished dinner – a little tired of Chinese food, I had found some Italian rotini and olive oil at the import store, and cooked up broccoli, eggplant and tomatoes in oil, garlic and basil and combined it with the noodles. I fully acknowledge that it was not a gourmet creation, but I enjoyed it. When the doorbell rang, I was just heading into the kitchen to clean up and store the leftovers. I let in my neighbor, who came bearing a few bags of vegetables. She asked me if I’d eaten dinner yet, and I indicated I had, pointing at my leftovers. She asked if she could taste my creation, and I gladly handed over a clean pair of chopsticks. She took one bite and made a face. “It’s awful!” she exclaimed. I tried to explain that it was Italian style, and therefore might not suit her tastes, but really I was quite satisfied. She did not accept this, and immediately went to work making me soup. I protested: I was quite full from dinner. She gave my leftovers a disdainful look. “You’re full from eating that?” “Yes,” I answered, almost apologetically, “Really.”

She thought about this while the soup was simmering, during which I earned further incredulous looks for not having any MSG on hand to add flavor to the soup. I’m sure she thought that was one reason my pasta was so terrible. Fortunately, she told me, she had anticipated that I might not know to buy MSG and keep it on hand, so she brought some along, which she kindly left with me for my future cooking efforts. By the time the soup was done, she had apparently decided that she did not accept my claims of being full. My previous dinner, she declared, did not count because it was so bad, so clearly I must eat dinner all over again. With this established, she sat me down at my table with a giant bowl of soup and the command to eat it all. Then she sat down next to me to watch.

While I slowly worked my way through the soup, we talked history and politics. I had noticed that any mention she made of the Japanese, in any context, came in the form of “those Japanese devils.” This being Nanjing, that sentiment is not all that unusual; the Japanese army’s infamous sweep through this city and the surrounding countryside is a veritable A to Z catalog of war crimes. The depth of feeling over World War II and even longer-standing historical resentments between China, Korea, and Japan are often somewhat enigmatic in the West; after all, we were in the same war, fought Germany and Japan, and if it is not forgotten, it is all at least forgiven. But anyone with an eye on, for example, the present dispute between Korean and Japan over the Dokdo/Takeshima mess can see the depth of feeling that continues to exist between the two countries.

Likewise with some Chinese – particularly Nanjingers – and the Japanese. That’s not to say that people don’t get along on an individual level, because of course they do; but liking a few Japanese people who live down the street and wholesale acceptance of their homeland and its past is pretty different. In the case of my neighbor, her anti-Japanese attitude is rooted in the fact that her mother spent four days hiding in a cupboard when the Japanese army came through her hometown (outside of Nanjing) in 1937.

From the war, we moved forward in time to the communist liberation and the Mao era, which my neighbor described as a time when one had to very careful about what they said and to whom they said it – now is much better, of course, though that didn’t stop my neighbor from asking that if I ever told anyone about our conversations, I please not mention her name. Still, she spoke both freely and disdainfully of Mao’s early policies that made cultivating even a small plot of vegetables for one’s own family an anti-revolutionary act, and then blasted the extremism that led to the Cultural Revolution, which ended her own high school education a few years early. “My generation has no culture,” she told me, “No schooling, no culture. Most never had a chance to do or be anything.” She was lucky, because she was young enough and smart enough to test into college when the schools reopened in the 1970s, and now she’s an accountant with a good job and a decent life. Understandably, she thinks of Deng Xiao-ping, that great transformer of China, as the greatest man who ever lived, never mind Tiananmen.

Saturday mid-morning, the doorbell rang. She must think I’m starving to death, honestly, for the amount of food she brought over. (Well, given her opinion of my cooking, she’s likely convinced that I am starving to death, not for lack of eating, but for lack of eating anything good.) She spent an hour and a half cooking up a storm in my kitchen (the warning bells went off in my head when she looked at my jug of vegetable oil and worried that the cup and a half left inside might not be enough), and in the end I had a huge pot of rice, three vegetable dishes, a large fish, nine hard boiled quail eggs, and one vat of turtle and tofu soup. She kindly walked me through that last one, perhaps thinking that this week I could pick up a turtle and whip up a batch myself.

I am not, however, so wild about turtle (which does not taste like chicken) that I want to run right out and do that, but it was kind of her anyway. What was amusing, however, was her determination that we couldn’t possibly have turtles in the US, because – wait for it – they live on the banks of rivers and we don’t have rivers in America. Huh. I assured her that we, too, have rivers and turtles galore, but the last time I was in close contact with a turtle, it was a friend’s pet, not the base of a soup.

I actually get these kinds of questions a lot – do we have bean sprouts in the US? Yogurt? Do we all eat hamburgers or pizza three meals a day? (Some of us would if we could, eh, dad?) Had I eaten rice before I came to China? What about tofu? Sometimes answering these questions requires diplomacy: does the coffee-flavored milk tea in China taste like it does in the US? Does the Kentucky Fried Chicken in the US serve cancer-causing toxins to American customers? (Er, no, the barbeque chicken with Sudan I sauce was apparently just for the Chinese market….)

When she was done cooking and this feast was laid out on the table, she took off her apron and said her goodbyes. I was confused; wasn’t she going to join me? Nope – she had to go home and cook for her family. How embarrassing. So there I was with enough food for a family of ten, all by myself at the table. Her parting words to me were to eat it all – or worst case, heat up the leftovers for dinner – but they won’t keep after Saturday, so eat up (and without stopping, apparently, for the rest of the day). I ignored her and ate the last of the leftovers just today (not to mention working on the candy and dried plums they brought over in between cooking adventures).

The sudden presence of a refrigerator full of leftovers was complicated by the fact that I left town for two days early Sunday morning. I had an appointment in Shanghai on Monday, so I decided to leave a day early and explore Suzhou, a city between Nanjing and Shanghai. A famous proverb once declared that there is paradise in heaven, and Suzhou and Hangzhou on earth (I’m not sure where exactly the proverb is from, other than every guidebook ever written in Chinese or English on either of the two cities). Suzhou is an ancient city, and its main attractions are its gardens – there are dozens of major gardens, and countless minor ones. A classical Chinese garden is not about flowers so much as a mixture of architecture, handcrafted rock, and carefully sculpted nature. The effect is beautiful, though for anyone going Chinese garden hopping in the near future, let me offer this bit of sage advice: four in one afternoon is too many.

After the first few, you start to look around and think, “rocks and water, bamboo and goldfish, yup, all here,” take a few (by this point) gratuitous photos, and then leave, with the gate people wondering why you just spent 20 kuai for a gallop through their garden. This sort of attitude must necessarily detract from the wonder one would otherwise feel at the realization that these rocks and water, not to mention bamboo and plants (but not the goldfish)(at least, not the same goldfish), have been thus arranged for hundreds of years, in spite of dynastic collapse, Western imperialism, the Taiping rebellion, the Japanese invasion, the communist take-over and the cultural revolution. Which is more than one can say for your average American rocks and water.

Some structures have been replaced, of course, but the oldest garden dates back 1200 years, and I climbed to the top of a 1005-year-old pagoda. Actually, this was almost the story of how I got wedged in a 1005-year-old pagoda – the staircase was so narrow, deteriorating to a sort of slightly angled ladder for the last two stories, that I got a bit stuck before it occurred to me to back down, take off my backpack, and try it again pushing the overly-stuffed bag ahead of me. Thank goodness I got myself out of that one quietly, though, because I do not want to know what kind of attention a foreigner wedged in a pagoda would attract in Suzhou. In some things, we are better off remaining ignorant.

I had such beautiful weather for my outing that late in the day I decided not to rush back to the train station, but to take my time and walk part of it, and then just grab a cab when the time started to get tight. This would have been a great plan if it were not for the fact that there were no empty cabs to be had on a Sunday evening (and flagging one down was further complicated by the bike lane separating the road with the taxis from the sidewalk with their would-be passengers). As it happened, I just kept walking. And walking. And walking. Finally, I started getting nervous – my train was leaving in 25 minutes, I had no idea how far I still had to go, and I’ve never been in a Chinese train station that was not complete and utter chaos (and therefore requiring some time to navigate). I caught sight of a bus number L4, which I thought I remembered seeing when I left the train station that morning. I waved it down, confirmed with the bus driver that his destination was, indeed, the station, and jumped aboard. I deposited my 1 kuai (I love that you can ride the bus for 12 cents here), lurched forward to an empty seat (the bus was turning a corner), sat, and looked out the window… at the train station. I had boarded the bus maybe 50 yards away from the station entrance. I take comfort in the fact that at least I caught my train. With, uh, time to spare.

I’d attach a few photos of Suzhou, but – alas – my camera ate them. I apparently give off some sort of bizarre anti-electronics vibe. We’ve long known this. I’ve had trouble with watches (including one with a new battery that would spontaneously reverse time and start to tick backwards), phones, stereos, and computers (well, on that last one, who hasn’t). At one point last fall every single piece of electronics in my apartment, from my electronic Chinese-English dictionary down to my toaster oven, was in some way inoperable. For no apparent reason, my digital camera decided to crash and take the flash memory card with it (so much for my back up), so I have nothing but fond memories and gate tickets to show for my day in Suzhou. Ah well, someday I’ll go back. On the bright side, somewhere in China there is a couple that has photographic evidence that I was there – I refer, of course, to the classic “take a picture with a foreigner” phenomenon.

I can’t say I really understand the impulse behind it. Pictures with celebrities or people in anthropomorphic animal suits, sure, who doesn’t enjoy that? But just a random person of the street who – gasp! – is not Chinese? Nope, don’t get it. And the thing is, the natural tendency to explain this away as being in a part of China with less exposure to foreigners doesn’t really work.

When Lancelot was in town, he and I posed with two military guys down at the Confucian temple and with two couples (taking turns, so everyone could be in a shot) in a restaurant. Granted, Nanjing is not exactly down in the countryside, far from the reaches of civilization, but there are not so many foreigners here that they aren’t a little unusual outside the universities, and there were two of us out at once. But the first time this ever happened to me was in Taiwan, and in January, it even happened in Hong Kong (while mountain climbing – we got to the top of the mountain and were surprised to see cows, some guys behind us got there and were surprised to see foreigners. When they asked for a picture, I reached for their camera to take one of them, but before I got there one of the guys had bounded to my side and slung an arm around my shoulders while the other snapped the picture). I guess this – like the shouts of “hello!!” from strangers when I bicycle by and marriage proposals in whatever form they take – is just my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a taste of celebrity.

On a side note, I’m currently reading the worst book on the overseas Chinese ever written. I grant that I have not read everything ever written on the Chinese diaspora, but this book is so bad that I’m still willing to make this claim. Naturally, it was an international best-seller, which is what happens when people other than historians write history books (though that is, perhaps, a topic for another time). So, what makes it so bad? Writing about the campaign that drove the Dutch from the isle of Formosa : “Victory on Taiwan was sweet and sour.” No, dearheart, victory on Taiwan may be bittersweet, but it is not sweet and sour, as if it was so much battered and deep-fried pork. What concerns me is that I’m sure he specifically selected this phrase for its “Chinese flair.”

Other bizarre examples of overly-vivid and astoundingly out-of-place imagery include the line, “virtue was kicked off like tight ballet shoes” (the context of that one is immaterial, as there should be no ballet shoes making appearances in this book for any reason) and perhaps my favorite, “Indonesians are like tiny plankton in a warm sea where the great whales bathe. They find it reassuring that the biggest whales – President Suharto’s family and friends – swallow nearly everything, after running it through their krill strainers.” Bonus points if you can determine what the “krill strainers” represent in that overly ambitious simile. It starts a chapter (suitably titled, “Where the Whales Play”), and nothing seems to follow it by way of explanation. Of course, what the book lacks in literary merit and historical accuracy (the author has annoying tendency to make some sort of broad generalization about life in ancient China and then state, “and the overseas Chinese are still like that today” at least twice a chapter) it more than makes up for in unintended laughs, so I continue to read on.

Best to all, Merry

Epilogue: Uff da. I was just about to send this when, you guessed it, the doorbell rang. My neighbor asked me what I had for dinner, and sensing her dissatisfaction as I started to explain the fried rice I’d made, I just kept talking until she was satisfied. Being satisfied, however, did not stop her from making me a bowl of sweet black sesame soup, cutting up a pineapple, and boiling a chopped lotus root for me to munch. She also brought candied dried plums, tea eggs, pea pods, and put a package of frozen won tons in my freezer. Lunch for tomorrow, she said. And for a few days after that, I daresay.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

The Korean soap opera theory of everything

2005-03-16T12:38:00.000-06:00

Korean soap operas... er, make that "Mandarin Pronunciation Listening Comprehension Exercises".

I’m beginning to think that what there really needs to be is a “Korean soap opera theory of everything.”

Granted, infiltration of South Korean soap operas into North Korean VCRs (by way of China) is only part of the information revolution that shows that in the brave new world of high technology, it is no longer possible to control what news and images of the outside world get into a closed state like North Korea. But Korean soap operas mean so much more than that.
The combination of complicated and angst-ridden story lines; good-looking, kind and appropriately filial young men; and (in the ones I watch anyway) sticky-sweet happy endings have made Korean prime-time soaps the rage across East Asia.

When living in Taiwan, it was debates over Kim Jae Won versus Kim Rae Won in “In Love with Red Bean Girl”: each faction had its own arguments, its own sense of the merits (Kim Rae Won, the poor seal trainer, was a fiercely loyal friend whose devotion, and highlighted hair, earned rightful praise. Kim Jae Won was the amusement park boss’s son, rich but unspoiled, and debonair in his western-style suits). Before I came to China, a friend in the US told me that whatever else I do when I’m here, I need to pick up a copy of “Winter Sonata” and watch it (he made, interestingly enough, no recommendations for Chinese soaps at all). I’ve seen parts of ROK soaps, broadcasted with English subtitles, in Singapore. I’ve heard of them sweeping through the Philippines and Thailand. Soon there will be no place in Asia yet untouched by the colorful productions.

Divided states, one side developed and democratic, the other communist and closed, have a history of tipping under the weight of cultural onslaught. There is Germany, of course. In China, anything Taiwanese is popular – music, movies, and soap operas, of course, but everything from coffee shops to hot dogs advertise as being “Taiwanese style” and pull in better business as a result. This sparks interest in the free society – freedom makes for more creativity, which in turn makes better television. The news that South Korean soaps are now reaching homes in North Korea should come as no surprise – no one can escape the tide of history forever.

The key now, of course, is to ensure that they continue to be a force for good. Beyond their great revolutionary potential in the DPRK, reports have hit the AP wires of middle-aged Japanese women swooning over Winter Sonata star Bae Yong-joon (who is, incidentally, also prominently featured in my 2005 Dynamic Korea calendar issued by the Korean Embassy in Washington), and of the rise of dating services that promise to introduce Japanese women to eligible Korean men. Think, if you will, about the deep historical wounds that always kept Korea and Japan at odds. With cultural exchange, and soap-opera-driven widespread intermarriage, we could be seeing a whole new era of positive Northeast Asian relations.

Last year marked a new era in Chinese television production when the state-run CCTV collaborated with KBS to create the first ever joint Chinese-Korean soap opera, set mostly in Beijing (but, as is always the case with the soaps set outside of Korea, with a few gratuitous trips back to Korea to add conflict and confusion) and centering on the Korean diaspora. Conveniently, most characters were bi-lingual for one reason or another, and the free-wheeling codeswitching only added to the delight of seeing Chinese and Korean young people work so closely together for mutual good.

The one place where the Korean soap operas threaten the peace and harmony in the region is in the area of trade – Korea is exporting such great volumes of its cultural products that Taiwan and China are starting to protest and call for parity. The problem, of course, is that unless it is a Taiwanese soap staring F4, no one in Korea is particularly interested in the Chinese productions. But even this can have a positive effect on the region. The Chinese people will not stand for a cut-off of their beloved soaps – every population has its breaking point, and sometimes one suspects that this is it -- so dialogue and compromise are necessary.

Perhaps “Romance,” or “Sweet 18,” or yes, even “Lovers in Paris” might not conquer the world. Asia is enough. To be a force for good in a region this complex and divided is enough. A unifying factor, a source of agreement, a movement we can each, in our own way, get behind. An example of the power of pop culture to infiltrate where governments and high politics cannot. That is what the Korean soap opera is to the world. We can only hope that this important work will continue.

Fortunately, I'm Easily Amused

2005-03-04T12:56:00.000-06:00

Last fall when the exigencies of typhoon season caused me to spend the better part of a night and a day in the Tokyo airport Terminal Two transit lounge, I met an American businessman who’d been living in China for more than 20 years. I asked him if he had any handy tips for successful living in China. He replied that in order to live in this land and like it, you need two things, equally important: a) some command of Mandarin Chinese, and b) a sense of humor.

I think he’s right: if all you’ve got is the former, prepare to be miserable, and if all you’ve got is the latter, prepare to be hysterical.

I’ve written before about the importance of speaking Chinese in facilitating just about every aspect of life here. So now I’d like to point out a few key moments when the sense of humor is of greater – even paramount – importance. In no particular order, times in which I feel it is vital to choose to be amused:

1. The first time (and, for that matter, all subsequent times) you are accidentally spat on. This is almost never intentional, at least in my experience, which I base on the fact that when I’ve been spat on it has never once been preceded by a cry of “big-nosed foreign devil!” or “running-dog capitalist!” or any other similar epithet. The spitter was also not even aware that he’d hit someone.
I don’t think I’ve ever even been spit on as a pedestrian: this is strictly a biking issue. The problem is simple: Chinese people spit a lot. Sometimes they look where they are spitting. Sometimes they do not. When they are on bicycles and you are in the midst of the pack in rush hour, sooner or later someone will be loosing some saliva at the exact moment you are trying to pass them. It is an inevitable fact of life, and the sooner one accepts this with grace and good humor, the happier one will be. But I suspect it will become tougher to take when we enter short-sleeves season.

2. When the archives presents you with the “finding aid” (a list) for ordering files from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it consists of a list of 3,594 files dating between 1912 and 1949 from all geographic regions, and (this is the kicker) in no particular order. That is a “you know you’re in China when…” moment. File 564 is a map of India, 565 contains the expense reports for the Chinese Embassy in Portugal, 566 is about World War II displaced persons, 567 is about the US army’s use of the Burma Road… and so on. I don’t care how many thousands of years of culture, philosophy and invention China has under its belt. No civilization can truly be called great that cannot grasp the concept and utility of an index.

3. When you trip over a monkey on your way into the grocery store. Perhaps you wonder how I could possibly trip over a monkey while entering my local supermarket. The answer is simple: I didn’t see him. Thanks to the magic of laser technology I now have better than 20/20 vision, so this just might require more explanation. If not, humor me.

I went to the grocery store to pick up a few pre-Chinese New Year provisions (specifically, frozen dumplings for New Year’s Eve and frozen tangyuan for New Year’s morning). Outside the grocery store was the usual chaos of independent sellers – people who bring a few selections of vegetables in baskets or some fresh chicken (which is to say, alive and walking around) and sell them for prices that undercut the chain store. The combination of tubs of swimming fish and eel, clucking birds, and chatting merchants all crowding the sidewalks in front of the store entrance makes for a bit of an obstacle course for a shopper intent on making her purchases from among things reassuringly packed in plastic and Styrofoam and stacked under neon lights rather than on the ground. (Actually, I’m not against the market-style selling – but I am loyal to my own vegetable seller, who operates her stand closer to my house, so my grocery store purchases involve only important items like frozen foods and Cheerios.) The commotion is distracting, and it takes some effort to pick a path through the hubbub to get to the entrance. Just as I approached the door, I tripped over a large dog on a chain. As I righted myself, I looked into its eyes only to discover that it wasn’t a dog, it was a monkey. Sitting, he came up past my knees. He was wearing a little hat and a vest, and chained to an elderly, toothless man who lacked only an organ to grind to complete the look. The monkey did, however, have a tiny little bicycle. Perhaps all Chinese monkeys bicycle.
The man must have thought it was his lucky day, being stumbled over (or, more accurately, being tripped over by) a foreigner on this random Saturday, because he immediately grabbed the little bike and prodded the monkey into action. As far as action goes, however, I’ve been more impressed. The monkey didn’t even move when I hit it as I tripped – Complacency, thy name is Supermarket Entertainment Monkey.
I went into the store, and I got the impression that the man had spent the whole time I was shopping trying to work up a Monkey Extravaganza for my exit. When I came out, however, the monkey was on the other side of the door. I gave him a few kuai for getting the monkey to move, as I was beginning to suspect that to be a feat that resembled a force of nature. Within a few days, the monkey and his handler had moved on – perhaps to more Monkey-friendly audiences in other parts of the province. I was sorry not to have gotten a picture of him, but when was the last time you took your camera to the grocery store, just in case there was a live animal performance? Thought so.

4. When faced with a squat toilet on a moving train. I refuse to elaborate, other than to say, “tricky.” Actually, the public facilities in China are full of interesting challenges for foreigners – not least of which is getting over personal hang-ups about having doors on stalls and little things like that -- but these are not the sort of things that, I daresay, you want me to elaborate on. Just trust me on this.

5. When buying designer clothes in a street market. Last weekend, I accompanied Lancelot and some of his friends to a huge clothing market in Shanghai to buy some new shirts (apparently, he has a hard time finding shirts in Korea that are big enough). The market we went to was a multi-building, multi-story affair packed tight with merchant stalls selling every kind of clothing from sparkly socks to pin-stripe suits. It had absolutely everything you could possibly want, except for shirts with sleeves long enough for a (really) tall foreigner. The problem with these markets, really, is that the merchants can take one look at you and know that they don’t have your size. You can pick up a shirt and know for certain that they aren’t going to have your size. Everyone is completely and totally aware that there is no chance of you buying something there that will ever, ever fit you. But they will always try to sell it to you anyway. So you will find yourself the victim of mile-a-minute descriptions of price, color and quality, ending with you finding yourself energetically debating the merits of the shirt that, if actually tried on, would leave your wrists uncomfortably exposed to the elements and your shoulders caged into a rather limited range of motion.
I’ve done it over a variety of items, ranging from clothing to imitation antique Mao propaganda posters – and I’m always deep into the discussion before I start to wonder how it all started when I have absolutely no intention of buying anything. Worse yet, sometimes I end up making the purchase, because having spent twenty minutes haggling with the seller in a marvelous exercise in Chinese conversation and brought the already-low price down a sliver more, I feel bad walking away. I then trudge home, slightly disgruntled, with my totally extraneous new purple plastic Winnie-the-Pooh key case or magazine about the science of space travel filled with the knowledge that I will never see that 83 cents again and will likely not even bother bringing my new purchase home from China. I don’t have any retro Chinese Communist Party posters yet, but I had a very, very narrow escape with an English version of Mao’s Little Red Book. And it is an absolute miracle that I managed to emerge from Chinese New Year chicken-free. I’d ship all my “guilt purchases” home, but they are never, frankly, worth the price of postage; their only value is the slightly bitter laugh I get at my own expense for being so easily taken.
Ahem. Back to the matter at hand: Lancelot did not find any shirts of appropriate size at said market. He’s done his shopping in Shanghai before, however, so we split up so I could go get lost in the bookstores and he could head off to a longer-sleeved market. Later we sat down and compared purchases. I had hit the classic movie DVD section hard, finding such treasures as To Be or Not To Be and His Girl Friday, which sell all over China for anywhere from $1 to $1.50. Lancelot, on the other hand, scored really big. He had purchased a dozen button-down shirts in a veritable rainbow of colors and patterns, each sporting an A-list brand name and a rock-bottom price. As he was removing the packaging and refolding the shirts, however, he started reading the tag off his $5 Armani shirt. I had the privilege to see Lancelot doubled over in a fit of what I am afraid can only be described as the giggles. Having read it myself, I think the tag opens the door to the possibility, however remote, that the shirt in question was not actually a genuine Armani product. At least, I’ve never heard of that great Armani slogan, “The Best High Fashionable.” (But then, Giorgio Aramani would have been a non-native speaker of English….) The tag goes on to explain just what makes an Armani shirt so special:

“This garment has been manufsctued with dye tissue, withindaco’ colorants and/or with dewashable colorans.It has undergone a specific process of industrial washing which gives the garm ent a washed out or ‘owrn’ look, with worm out patches and decoloration on seevral pieces of the garment, this process of making the tabric appear worn out.continues with the nex washing without olwering the original quality of the garment.” This informative treatise is followed by the rather flamboyantly titled, “Wash away dirt: the elucidation,” which instructs the owner, “Do not bleach. Do not wrench. Do not channeling machine dry.” I suspect these precautions are necessary to protect the “owrn” look of the garment.

Amusing Chinglish aside, there are some ways in which just traveling together requires both Lancelot and me to sharpen our senses of humor. We have very, very different styles of doing things, rooted in that fundamental difference between human beings who are planners and those who are, let’s be frank, headstrong and disorganized (gee, which one am I?). Originally, I had planed to take the train on Sunday to Shanghai to meet up with Lancelot, who’d already been there a few days. He called Friday and explained that we’d being going on an outing with some friends of his on Sunday, so in order to get an early start, do I think I could come on Saturday evening?

My response: silence.

Lancelot: Um, Saturday? Okay?

Me: But I was planning on coming on Sunday.

Lancelot: Yeah, I know, but tomorrow would be better.

Me: But Sunday…

Lancelot: Did you already buy a train ticket for Sunday?

Me: No.

Lancelot: Do you have something going on that you can’t come until Sunday?

Me: No.

Lancelot: Is it a problem to come on Sunday?

Me: No.

Lancelot: So…

Me: That wasn’t the plan. Now I have to buy a ticket tomorrow morning.

Lancelot: Can you buy a ticket tomorrow morning?

Me: Yes. But that wasn’t the plan.

I got over it, of course, and bought a train ticket on Saturday morning and took a train Saturday afternoon and it was all fine. But a similar issue came up a few days later when we tried to split up and meet back later after I had an appointment. The problem was that I didn’t know when the appointment would end. But how we each suggested alternatives to deal with the issue of meeting up reveals much about each of our personalities. Lancelot’s plan: After the appointment, head over to the subway stop at I think it’s called Shanxi or something like that anyway just a stop past the one you’re at and there on the main road there I think it’s called Wa-hai Road there is a Starbucks a block or two in one direction or the other from the subway stop and I’ll see you there around then. My plan: I don’t do “somewhere there is a Starbucks.” There must be a definite time and a definite place. I will meet you at 7:30 p.m., which is safely after the longest my appointment could take, at the number one exit from the Shanxi subway station.
The problem with this kind of argument is that we were each convinced that the other was being completely and utterly unreasonable, and that can make it hard to communicate. Just imagine how irked I was when I went over the Shanxi road that night and found that the Starbucks he had referred to really was as easy to find as advertised. What’s more, it would have been a nicer place to wait than the number one exit of the subway (my plan had won the day, just because I’m more ornery about these things – part of being the easygoing one is that Lancelot more easily surrenders). At the same time, I will maintain forever that it is quite reasonable to want to be specific when in a city neither person knows all that well. So there.

6. Queuing, anytime, anywhere in China. If you don’t choose to find it funny that no one around you seems to understand the purpose and principle of lining up, you will very likely deck someone, and then you’ll end up in the police station as the foreigner who started an altercation over what is simply a cultural difference. This is one area of life in China in which you absolutely must adapt – otherwise you will simply wait forever, because there will never, ever be no one else in line. Basically, there is someone in front helping everyone at his or her leisure. Everyone else is in a terrible hurry. This means that waiting in a line is actually a contact sport. There is a little shoving, some careful maneuvering, snap assessments of other waiting customers’ personalities, and implementation of strategy. A personal favorite tactic is the feint, where you look to all the world like you are not paying attention, but then when someone else starts to make their move, snap to and cut them off at the pass. This can be accompanied by a triumphant look and an exclamation of, “Aha!” which, I assure you, is readily understood even if not easily translated. This took some time to learn. At first, when I was cut in front of in lines I suspected that I just wasn’t queuing convincingly – I failed to look like I wanted to reach the front. More recently, however, I’ve learned that I have to actively protect my place in line, or it will be taken from me.
Incidentally, the queuing problem also manifests itself in traffic, leading one to suspect that although they drive on the right in Taiwan and on the left in Hong Kong, in China they drive on whatever side is most convenient at the moment. This can be a bit disconcerting, however, and I’ve at times stopped dead on my bike to watch in horror at what, until the very last minute, has all the makings of a head-on collision.

A Final Comment on a Recurring Theme: Cows in Daily Life

So I was working through a stack of documents the other day, listening to an older Jay Chou album that I picked up at random one afternoon. There are a few songs on it I really like, one of which, “Rice Fields,” I couldn’t understand at all. Not a single word – well, frequently I can’t understand dear Jay when he sings, as it seems to be against the grain in the international world of R&B to enunciate – but this one had a sort of soaring, chanted chorus that I found rather intriguing. I got out the Chinese lyrics, and after about 10 minutes, was left thinking, “what the….” I ultimately went to the Fundamental Source From Which All Knowledge Flows, or Google, in search of English lyrics. (I could write a sonnet on the many uses of Google in daily life, and perhaps one of these days I will. It saved me on a research question the other day by spitting up the circa 1940 exchange rates for British pounds and Hong Kong dollars. In 30 seconds.). Anyway, I pulled up the lyrics and realized it’s not just me, the chorus of this song is, in fact, genuinely, objectively bizarre:

Hoi Ya E Ya, Oh, that Lu Wan
Na E Na Ya Hei wo~ Ah, my dear cows!
Hoi Ya E Ya, Oh, that Lu Wan
Na E Na Ya Hei wo~ Where did they run off to...

Bizarre, but fun. How much do you have to love a song that repeats, over and over, “ah, my dear cows”? How hard is it to take a song seriously as a “protect the environment from human destruction” plea when it stops periodically to say, “ah, my dear cows”? Questions for the ages, I guess. By the way, though, that is the new Official Theme Song of all future Hong Kong hiking excursions and cross-Wisconsin road-trips. Just so everyone knows.

Best to all (and doubly so to Lancelot, who is heavily imposed-upon in this installment).

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

Dr. Suny and I

2005-02-13T20:51:00.000-06:00

There are large booms and great flashes of light going off just outside my window at irregular intervals. I jump a foot each time one starts up, thinking “air raid!!!”, though having never lived through an air raid, how would I know? They are, of course, just fireworks. Lots, and lots, and lots of fireworks. Which in turn, keep setting off car alarms. As soon as the cars finally give up on the notion that they are being stolen, broken into, or otherwise abused, another round starts up and there it all goes again. Yes, it’s a laugh-a-minute here in the lunar new year.

I hope that everyone is living up the two-week spectacle that is Chinese New Year… the occasion is marked most noticeably here – beyond the endless fireworks late into the night every night - by empty streets and closed shops, TV variety shows with bad music and astoundingly complex choreography performed by a few thousand dancers in elaborate feathery costumes (this is the year of the chicken/rooster). The streets are crowded with vendors hawking good fortune for the coming months, often in the form of cuddly stuffed chickens (with, in one case, frightening light-up red eyes that gave one the impression that this plaything might actually be demon-possessed) (why stuffed demonic attack birds are considered auspicious is beyond me, aside from the fact that the color red, when not signaling spirit possession, is lucky).

My goal for the week was to get a lot more work done than I actually ended up doing, which is very often the case on vacations and school breaks (a difficulty to which I’m sure many of you can relate). Well, technically, I still have two days to get it all done before the archives reopen on Wednesday, but may I just take a moment to say, HAH! Part of the problem was a new Korean soap opera (“Sweet 18,” for anyone who keeps up on these things).

Why these are so addictive is hard to explain to anyone who has never watched one, but they really, really are. It doesn’t matter that you are confident from the outset that two leads will get together in the end, or that before they do there will be a few car accidents; a fire; a fight; a case of amnesia; a few drunken antics; a chase sequence involving a few characters, a Matter of Life and Death, and an (often exotic) animal; maybe a death; and certainly several tear-filled confrontations in posh Seoul coffee shops. The question becomes specific to the plot at hand: but who exactly will the gangsters kidnap? How will the male lead be saved from the bribery frame-up? At least this one did not pose the incest conundrum, where the male and female lead are suspected erroneously of being half-siblings (which I’ve now seen several times and never fails to disturb me) and has a few rather amusing sequences involving an elderly man in traditional Korean dress and a karaoke bar.

The much better distraction was the visit of my friend Lancelot (down from Korea, though not himself much of a Korean soap opera fan) (hard to say why, really, given the above). Upon his arrival in Nanjing last week, this was officially the fourth country we have met up in -- the others being the US, Korea and Taiwan -- without traveling together to any of them. We celebrated this unique accomplishment with dinner on Hunan Road (a popular shopping/dining district). I was unimpressed with much of the restaurant we chose, but I have to say, I was even more unimpressed with my Chinese when I accidentally misled us into ordering snake meat instead of shellfish (er, whoops). When the serving plate arrived, it was obvious from the first glance at the scaly black and white skin what manner of beast had been sectioned and roasted for our dining pleasure, and let me just say, no meat should ever arrive at your table looking that much like the original animal. At that moment, I remembered what character I had misread (too late, too late).

Chalking it up to one of those “what doesn’t kill you will make a good story” life experiences, we each took a large piece of snake in hand (cheers!) and bit down. In case anyone is harboring a life-long dream of sampling this delicacy, let me tell you that snake is one of those things like snails, sunflower seeds, and whole artichokes that is not worth the kind of effort that goes into eating it. After twenty minutes struggling with leathery skin and a truly astounding number of tiny, sliver-like bones, I’m not even sure I ever got enough of the meat to tell you what it tasted like, other than “creepy.” Fortunately, we later washed down the snake taste (and, to be honest, almost all of the memory) with a bottle of Korean ginseng wine (and along the way, learned something: when sampling exotic Asian “wines” for the first time, check the proof first. If it happens to be, say, 35% alcohol by volume, do not finish the bottle. Good lesson).

Lancelot, much to our dismay, arrived in Nanjing just in time to experience some of the worst weather we’ve had all winter. When it’s not cold and rainy, it’s freezing and snowy. We made an almost half-hearted trek down to the city’s Confucian temple on (Chinese) New Year’s Day, where we browsed the large rooster-themed lanterns and found a nice, heated restaurant for dinner, but I think our interest in wandering the city and looking at fireworks was somewhat offset by our general desire not to die of exposure on the first day of the New Year. So when Friday turned out to be miraculously sunny and around 40, we took advantage and headed off to the most famous tourist attraction in the City of Nanjing (and, likely, all of Jiangsu Province): the final resting place of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.

Well, first we went out for lunch to work up some energy for the mountain trek to the grand memorial. This time, I won the toss and we went for Korean food. It is the great irony of our lives and our friendship that although Lancelot lives in Seoul, he far prefers Chinese food to any Korean culinary creation, whereas I live in Nanjing and would take Korean food over Chinese any day of the week. I ordered my winter soul-food favorite (no, no Seoul-food puns here, not me, nope, wouldn’t think of it), bibimbap without meat, while Lancelot got some manner of fowl, defeathered and disembowled and floating in soup (ok, so I’m not equally enthralled with all varieties of Korean cooking), with a side order of kimchi pancake for both of us. When the food came, my stone-pot covered rice had meat on it, which I pointed out to the waitress. She admitted she forgot about the meat.

What followed was like one of those commercials demonstrating the opposite of good customer service. The girl grabbed my spoon, pushed the egg to the side, and started scraping the meat off the top of the rice. I tried to protest, claiming total vegetarianism (a lie; after all, I was picking snake meat out of a web of skin and bones just days before. But, of course, as most of you realize, I am generally a hometown vegetarian and, of necessity, a flexible traveler). (On this issue, by the way, what kind of “meat” is snake, or, for that matter any kind of lizard, turtle, snail or frog? Are any of these partly aquatic animals considered “seafood?” Is there a special term for meat derived from cold-blooded creatures or insects? Perhaps I am a lacto-ovo-pesco-serpo vegetarian….) She ignored me, continuing to scrape off the meat and dump it into the spicy sauce (she did bring me a new dish of sauce), and when it was down to just little crumbles, she pushed the pot across to me and told me to enjoy.

Out of revenge, I went to the women’s restroom after lunch and tore the door to the stall off its hinges in a fit of temper. “That’ll show them,” I thought maliciously. I suppose one could argue that the door – precariously attached to the wall with well-rusted fastenings – simply fell off of its hinges after I spent too long confusedly pushing on it with complete and total disregard for the fact that it opened by pulling. I prefer the previous version. Having completed my property destruction and eaten all of the free watermelon they had provided as an apology for the confusion, we took off for the mountain park and Fun with Dead National Figures.

The approach to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen is a majestic, tree-lined avenue that ends in a large gateway in white marble with blue tiles that bears a striking resemblance to the gateway marking the entrance to the Chiang Kai-shek memorial in Taipei (unsurprising, as the white and blue motif is supposed to represent the colors of the Nationalist Party flag). There is a small room with an engraved slab noting the greatness of the first Republican (this term has a, er, different meaning in China than it does in the US, mind you) president, and from there it is up a massive marble staircase to the hilltop mausoleum. Inside, there is first a seated statue of Sun surrounded by engravings of the texts of some of his most famous writings, and two signs for the visitors that command: “Silence!” and “Salute!” We adhered to the former (mostly), but noticing the failure of everyone around us to snap-to, disregarded the latter.

From there the crowd tightened up, and soon we were shuffling forward into the crypt, pressed hard into the people around us. There was nowhere to go but forward, so forward we went. All of the mosh-pit-like pushing and shoving led us into a circular room that held the coffin, which was covered with a marble statue of a prostrate Dr. Sun (no waxy dead bodies lying in state in perpetuity, a treatment apparently reserved exclusively for communist dictators). The whole thing was a remarkably grand and imperial way to bury a Republican president: so exactly and precisely the opposite of everything that Dr. Sun, when alive, would have requested.

Back out in the fresh mountain air, we strolled past an array of souvenir stands that were hawking everything from vacuum-packed pressed duck to Minnie Mouse parasols. The latter really speaks volumes about New China, I think. East meets west in new and bizarre ways… you half expect to see classic images of the Chairman in his Mao suit and a pair of Disney mouse ears (It’s Communist Revolutionary Mickey!). Now that I’d pay to have on an umbrella.

Oh, and in the spirit of Communist Revolutionary Mickey, East-Meets-West, and Bourgeois Capitalist Excess meets Proletarian Socialist Utilitarianism, I recently picked up a new music album, the marvelous 2 disc “China’s Rock and Roll Vanguard.” 32 total tracks of hard rock renditions of old classics, like “Beijing that Good Night” and “The Internationale” along with new favorites like “The Long March newly on the road to rock and roll” and “In the end the guitar rises like a tommy gun.” My personal favorite is “Socialism is Good” – head-banger edition!! If anyone is interested, I’ll send the music file on request (takes about 3 MB, which I won’t do to your email accounts unsolicited but would be happy to provide to the curious). Be prepared to dance.

It was late afternoon when we left the Dr. Suny Af-sen Marsoleum (the English spelling of which we learned from the side of the mountaintop “sightseeing coach”). I think this one is number one on my favorite list of English spelling mistakes I’ve seen here, in part because whether or not one can spell “mausoleum” – I’m sure some Americans can’t either – one should be able to come up with a more accurate Romanization of the father of one’s country. Of course, the problem doesn’t end with spelling mistakes; there is a also the problem of misused English. I smile every time I pass a restaurant that advertises “spicy chafing dish” as among its specialties. I had a small, private chuckle on the plane down to Shenzen when I noticed that my noodles were served with a package of “Aviation Pickles.” For weeks I only read the English on the sign on Beijing West Road that reads “Take Care of Chest Vocational Industry” and assumed it was some sort of heart-and-lungs medical clinic. When I paused long enough to look at the Chinese, however, it proved to house safety-deposit boxes. But Dr. Suny Af-sen will always hold a dear place in my heart.

With what was left of the day, we went on to the Linggu pagoda and climbed up the long circular staircase to the eighth level and panoramic view of the countryside (this struck me as bad planning on the part of the Linggu Temple Buddhists. Surely in the past some young monk has rushed up that tightly-wound staircase only to reach the top and in his dizziness fall over the side and plummet to his death in the forest below). From there we started the walk down the mountain, and lacking the time to visit the Ming tombs, hopped on a random bus with no sense of where it was going (other than down) and returned to the city. It took us a long time to find a restaurant that night, as Lancelot was insisting on finding a place with pictures of everything on the menu (I suspect he was put off by my snake-ordering skills earlier and in no mood to trust me even when I swear I know what’s coming).

Hmm, I still have a monkey story to tell (and who doesn’t enjoy a good monkey story), but I think I’ll put that off for the next email given the length of this one already. When writing in the serial style, it is always important to leave your audience with a cliff-hanger, right?

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

Coming in from the cold.......

2005-02-01T13:40:00.000-06:00

…well, technically I’m now already back in the frozen tundra that is my apartment (the weather outside is pretty nice, though, in the low 40s in the afternoon). The bright side is that I’m saving electricity by turning off my refrigerator – the kitchen is colder than inside the fridge anyway. The down side is that this state of affairs breeds laziness: why bother putting leftover soup in Tupperware, cleaning the pan, then a day later putting it back in the pan for reheating, cleaning the Tupperware and rewashing the pan, when you can just leave the soup in the original pan on the counter, no worries of spoiling?

Actually, all of the unheated rooms in my apartment are getting a bit cluttered and dusty, because I just can’t stand to stay in them long enough to really pick things up. There is nothing unfortunate growing in my kitchen mind you – it’s not as bad as all that – but the whole place could use a thorough scrub down that I daresay will not happen until the weather is warmer. I can’t help but wonder if this doesn’t shed some light on the origin of the phrase “spring cleaning.”

My trip to Hong Kong and Macau was mostly fun and games, with a bit of conferencing thrown in. The trip down was a bit of a headache – to save money, I flew from Nanjing to Shenzhen, and then took a cab to the border crossing at Lo Wu, walked the border, then took a train to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, then a cab to the university guest house where I spent the first week. For two weeks of traveling within what is nominally “all one China,” I spent a lot of time waiting in immigration lines (and filled two pages of my passport with stamps for leaving China, entering Hong Kong, leaving Hong Kong, entering Macau, leaving Macau, entering Hong Kong, leaving Hong Kong, entering China… each of these is a separate line with its own forms and formalities). Not only are the entry and exit procedures governed separately, but each territory continues to have its own currency. I left Nanjing with renminbi (China’s currency) and US dollars, figuring I’d get some Hong Kong dollars at either airport or at the border crossing – I’d heard the Shenzhen side sports a train station, bus station, and shopping center with banks, so no worries, right?

I think that what makes China at times both incredibly fascinating and interminably infuriating is that things you can count on anywhere else in the world – like having a currency exchange counter at an international airport or a bank situated ten feet from an international border crossing – are simply not true here. My requests to change renminbi for Hong Kong dollars at the airport, at the train station, and at the bank all earned me blank looks. If I have some Hong Kong dollars – or, better yet, US dollars – they’d be happy to take them off my hands and supply me with renminbi. But replace renminbi for a foreign currency in use on the other side of this wall? Forget it. I finally changed a hundred renminbi with a watch/cell phone/Louis Vuitton suitcase (yeah, right) salesman, but I kept it at a hundred because I had a sneaking suspicion that the Hong Kong dollars he gave me might only be as genuine as the LV logo luggage lining his shop walls.

The border crossing itself is what sparked the whole “coming in from the cold” analogy. Granted, China is open. The Chinese Communist Party is now recruiting capitalists for membership (er, and Long Live the Proletarian Businessman!). We are no longer in a Cold War, and anyway, Hong Kong is no longer the Last Stand of British Imperialism in Asia, but a Special Administrative Region of China, like Tibet and all the other SARs (hmmm, perhaps an unfortunate acronym, but proof that proper capitalization matters).

Shenzhen itself is a Special Economic Zone, where even the last vestiges of a socialist economy no longer apply. It is, instead, a testament to the sort of garishness that comes from overnight modernization – with no time gradually to build up the infrastructure and sense of superiority inherent to the sleek sophistication of New York or London, it is instead a jumble of glass and metal skyscrapers, cement block laundry-adorned apartment high-rises, neon signs promising future riches and overworked factories producing dense smog. Add to the mix a few international hotels, open-air markets, the occasional out of place bit of classical Chinese architecture, and one decommissioned-Russian-aircraft-carrier-turned-tourist-theme-park ( www.minskworld.com No time to go this time around, but the advertised singing and dancing performances by the Russian Navy seem worth a special trip…), and you have Shenzhen. The scene at the border crossing demonstrates the frenzied sense of urgency in the place – hundreds of small stands selling every possible thing, people pulling on your arms to come in and buy, other people pulling on your suitcase hoping to annoy you into giving them tips, offers for cabs and train tickets, souvenirs and calling cards.

Two immigration lines later, you emerge in the Hong Kong Lo Wu Train Station, which has the quiet aloofness of a suburban shopping mall. Sure, you can buy things, but look yourself and then take them to the cash register. No spitting or shouting, no selling bread off a cart or sweaters off your bicycle. Hong Kong has its share of hawkers and street merchants – a walk down Nathan Road at dinnertime will convince you that every single Indian restaurant in Asia has a guy there trying to get you to take a menu (take one and you’re deemed an easy target – and will be showered with paper for the next three blocks). A lot of people I know claim to hate Hong Kong for being too much the generically international city center – go down to Central on Hong Kong island, and you are in Anywhere, Capitalist World. As it is, I admit I like it less for its own uniqueness and more for being a near perfect mix of all the things I love about both Taipei and London. Up-market cafes and Marks and Spencer in the shopping malls, and baozi and tangyuan on the street in the night markets. Plus all the Chinese is in traditional characters, which I greeted as old friends after suffering through a few months of simplified characters on the mainland.

What brought me to Hong Kong was a pair of back-to-back conferences. The first one was a graduate student conference on Modern China – Ph.D. candidates from all over the world were presenting papers on various aspects of recent Chinese politics, economics, and society. It was dominated by sociologists, and let me to take the opportunity to say – at the risk of offending anyone with a bent for the field – that I don’t really get sociological research.

The point, it seems, is to collect a load of raw data and then perform an endless series of complex statistical analyses designed to prove statements that should be empirically obvious. For example, there was the paper demonstrating that “people with parents in the CCP are more likely to join than people with no family relations who are party members” and the one asserting that “people with close relatives abroad are more likely to receive remittances than people without relatives abroad” (and here I always thought remitters were just picking names at random out of the phone book).

The real prize, of course, goes to the 25 page treatise making the bold claim that “the Chinese Communist Party survived because the Chinese Communist Party survived.” I’m not sure I could expand that statement to fill a page, much less 25 (with charts!) but I have to say, hats off to the fellow who did and thereby reached new heights of academic frivolity. There were, of course, a number of excellent papers and interesting people… I just don’t seem to have the wherewithal to endure the lesser offerings.

A weekend in Hong Kong – especially in the winter – is made for hiking. On Saturday, the organizers of Conference One took all of us on an easy stroll through a mountain park in the New Territories; the ease of the “hike” is demonstrated by the fact that half of the Chinese students joined us straight form the library and completed the walk sporting their laptops. Scoffing at the elementary level of the venture (“hah, and they call that hiking”), three of us set off on Sunday for a five-hour trek through the wilds of Sai Kung peninsula. After three trains, two mini-buses, and a taxi (impressively complicated given how small Hong Kong is… on the way back we gave up on this unintentionally ascetic route and took one bus straight back to the original train).

Then an hour-long trek uphill, and it was time to begin the real hike. We scaled the side of a mountain on all fours, disregarding warning signs and keeping our eyes on the summit. When at long last, after arduous climbing, stopping frequently for rest, water, and mildly concerned discussions that if it was equally steep on the other side we were not quite certain how to get down (other than sliding, of course, which takes with it its own inherent dangers), we reached the top, ready to be rewarded with picturesque panoramas and fresh mountain air. What we found was… cows.

There was a small herd of mountain cows (mountain cows?) not only on top of the mountain, but lazing across the path, blocking our way. Here’s what bothered me: it took me about an hour and a half to reach these heights, often feeling at risk of losing my balance and tumbling back down again. The fact that the cows had done it first, and, truth be told, did not seem the least bit concerned about steep slopes, narrow paths, or dizzying heights, dug a bit into my overall sense of accomplishment.

Really, I had done no more than to experience a bit of your average Hong Kong mountain cow’s daily existence. I’m not going to lie to you: it stung. The way down proved to be much less steep, though we lost the path a few times to venture through waist-high bush (at which point Graeme started telling snake stories, which was, to say the least, unhelpful).

On Monday I packed up and journeyed all of four stops down the light rail to the City University of Hong Kong for Conference Two, the China/Taiwan/Hong Kong Fulbright Research Forum. The conference planners had told us to go to Kowloon Tong and take a cab to the international house at 32 Renfrew Road, but didn’t give us either the characters or the Cantonese for the address, which means I had quite a time trying to get a cab. After asking about five people if they knew the road – which earned me several compliments on my Mandarin, fat lot of good that was doing me, but no better sense of where I was going – I went into the subway, found an area map and copied down the characters for the address myself. It was an odd feeling to be in a Chinese-British city, able to speak Mandarin and English, and have no way of communicating with people without resorting to written characters, but I encountered so many problems with this that I bought a Cantonese book and CD to work up some basic phrases before I head down to Guangdong province next summer. Yeah, I’ll let you know how that goes.

The conference itself was uneventful – no papers, and not much of an agenda, just lots of talk about research, a few truly random documentary films, and two Chinese banquets. When the conference ended, about half of us were off to the ferry docks for a 24 hour “study tour” of Macau before heading back to Hong Kong and through Shenzhen, then back to Nanjing.

Macau is a minor city, strategically unimportant, and in many ways, inherently fascinating. It was taken over by the Portuguese in 1557, and handed back to 1999, which would make it the longest running colony in Asia except that it loses out on a technicality – there was never any formal statement declaring it a colony. The Portuguese just sort of settled in, built some forts and, I suppose, after a few hundred years of not causing much trouble, their control over the territory was accepted as a something of a fait accompli, at least until Hong Kong was set to revert back to China in 1997 and the Chinese government started getting a bit restless about getting the Europeans out once and for all.

The Portuguese are generally not well known for energetic, impressive imperial accomplishments. A few hundred years of roaming the world and securing such territories as Brazil, Mozambique, Timor and Goa did little more than wreck general havoc and complicate matters for present-day phrase-book-toting tourists who go wandering around the world and suddenly encounter a pocket of Portuguese speakers in an area otherwise dominated by English, Spanish, Chinese, or some other local language. Growing up alongside of Hong Kong – and having a nearly 300-year head-start on the British colony there – you’d expect Macau to be something along the same lines; in fact, Macau is Hong Kong’s country cousin, with a broken-down economy driven almost entirely by revenues from casinos populated by Hong Kongers on weekend holidays. Even the Macau Tourist Bureau’s claim to be the “Monte Carlo of the East” comes off as little more than big talking and wishful thinking.

Something must have gone wrong in the “study tour” planning, because on arrival in Macau, they packed all of us and our luggage into a decrepit old school bus and took us on a bus tour of… well, I’m not actually sure what the tour was of. We went around the convention center twice and passed four casinos, crossed a few bridges in both directions and finally, having killed an hour or so (which I suspect was the true motivation behind the drive), pulled up to the Choc Van Conference center, which is a church conference facility on a reasonably remote island. They brought in dinner and a few large magnums of Portuguese wine, no doubt an attempt to keep us locked in the cloister and out of trouble. As one guy pointed out to the trip planner, however, if you bring 30 or so 20-somethings to Macau for one night, you must expect that whatever else they do, they will go out. We piled into a fleet of taxis and headed off for the bridge connecting us to civilization.

Upon arrival at one of Macau’s most famous casinos, the Lisbona, we immediately lost someone and spent the next 45 minutes forming search parties and fanning out to locate her (when I got back to the rendezvous point, however, I admit I was not impressed with the quality of the fanning, as about a dozen guys who were designated fan components spent the entire time clustered around a black jack table). With absolutely no “public health” statutes against indoor smoking and very low ceilings, the air was nearly blue with thick smoke and I was not enthusiastic about sticking around. Two guys felt the same way, so the three of us headed out to walk around a bit, promising to meet the others at the “Green Spot” (a bar/jazz lounge) a little later.

I should have realized we were in trouble when I asked Jonathan if he knew how to get there, and he said, “Sure, we just go out and turn left and go a few blocks,” while pointing emphatically to the right. Uh, which left, buddy? After a nice stroll and some ice cream, we struck out in a likely direction and started looking for signs of the bar. None came, however, so we circled back and checked the casino to see if the others were still there. They weren’t, so we went into the ritzy attached hotel and asked for directions. After an extended conversation with the porter, he wrote down the characters for the bar and walked us out and put us in a cab, telling the driver in Cantonese where to take us. The driver drove us around in two large circles and then came to a stop about a half mile away from the casino (its neon lights still visible) in front of not one but two seedy-looking karaoke bars. The Chinese name of the one on the right had a character similar to the one the porter had written down, but (sadly) it was not the same character. It was clear that the taxi had brought us to the wrong place, so we considered what to do.

When the two guys just stood on the street looking apprehensively at the karaoke bar and looking generally intimidated, I decided to take matters into my own hands and walked in to ask for directions. Upon my entrance, all activity in the bar stopped as everyone stared at the Random Foreigner. After a quick conversation with a waitress, she directed me to the seedy karaoke bar next door. Going out, I discovered the second bar was named “Queens,” which, to a non-native speaker of English, could possibly be mistaken for the “green” in “green spot.” Seeing the boys were determined to continue to be useless, I went into the second bar and repeated my performance, once again bringing all spirit and song to a grinding halt. This time, the waitress and bartender actually knew they didn’t have a clue what bar I was looking for and directed us to the nearby Mandarin Oriental hotel to ask again.

On our second 5-star hotel we learned an important piece of information: the Green Spot closed down a year ago. But it used to be in the lobby of the Emperor Hotel, and there is a new bar there now. Calling it the last hurrah before we gave up, we walked down the street to our third hotel. At this one, we struck gold in the form of a single location that could bring together all the themes of the evening: high class lodgings with marble lobbies and snobby porters, smoke filled casino halls, and… a seedy karaoke bar. Really. Located in the lobby of the Emperor hotel is one “Moulin Rouge Karaoke Club,” with appropriately seamy red lighting.

Walking into this one, I started to suspect that there is not a single karaoke singer in Macau serious enough about his art to carry on through the appearance of a Random Foreigner. I can’t help but think that in Korea, things would be different. We walked out again, found a quiet pub with outdoor seating, and ordered three pints of Guinness. We felt we’d earned it. After the long cab ride home (all the while wondering what wild and fascinating pursuits the others were up to), we discovered that everyone else, far wiser than we, had given up long before and was sound asleep. But they missed out on all the karaoke, and I know that, secretly, they’re a little bit sorry.

The second day of the study tour consisted of a panel of professors whom I began to suspect did not actually know as much about Macau as advertised, and a tour a few proposed UNESCO World Heritage sites. One involved us standing outside a big construction zone with scaffolding and barriers, being informed that there was a marvelous building very indicative of 19^th century Macanese life hidden somewhere within. The highlight of the whole tour was afternoon tea before heading for the ferry back to Hong Kong, which is a bit unfortunate, but it was in all a useful reminder of the hazards of undertaking any sort of group travel tour.

After two weeks conferencing (which generally means all day in meetings, all night out playing with fellow conferencers), I was looking forward to heading home to relax a bit. I came back to found that it had once again snowed in my absence, that my package of tangyuan had stayed frozen in spite of my having unplugged the freezer, and that my favorite Taiwanese band had actually come to Nanjing while I was gone, but now that I was back, they were off to Hong Kong. It’s the sort of discovery that will try any fan’s soul, but overall the two weeks in the south were mostly worth whatever lost opportunities there were here. Mostly.

Frozen once more.

With A Banjo On My Knee

2005-01-07T17:30:00.000-06:00

1/7/05

It’s really never a dull moment around here. After a relaxing flight on a half-empty plane (the advantages, I guess, of traveling on New Year’s Day – I had three seats to myself to stretch out across and when I asked for a Bloody Mary at the beginning of the flight, the kindly flight attendant replied, “Here, honey, have two”), I got back to China Sunday night and found myself settled into my Shanghai hotel ahead of schedule. The next morning I got up and took off for the train station to head back to Nanjing, pretty satisfied with my nice, smooth trip. And that’s where the trouble started.

I didn’t realize it, but the Monday after New Year’s Day was a holiday in China. Normally, it is wise to keep very close tabs on Chinese holidays when traveling, because the sheer size of the Chinese population means that any when day half or more of the workers are off work, the domestic transportation system is in danger of being overwhelmed. Monday was a bank holiday in much of the world, so I really have no excuse for not checking this more carefully. When I arrived at the train station, it was packed. (See notes on “packed” in the Chinese context in previous messages.) (here are a few helpful hints: college fraternity-get-on-the-news-and-in-the-Guiness-Book-of-Records-phone-booth-cramming-packed, Beatles concert in 1964 packed; OK, on with the narrative). After fighting my way through a solid wall of people, running my suitcase over countless toes in the process (and having my own toes trampled in return), I got into a long line for a ticket. Just as I finally got up to the window, the announcement came: all tickets to Nanjing and a half dozen other cities were sold out for the rest of the day.

It seemed like the perfect opportunity to test out a theory of mine: whenever down on your luck in China, just find a public place, assume a Lost Foreigner pose, and some enterprising capitalist will show up momentarily to make a little money off of helping you out. Either that or they’ll try to sell you a fake designer bag. Needless to say, I was hoping for the former.

I stumbled out of the ticket office and stopped dead outside the train station with my luggage, assumed what I hoped was a properly pathetic expression, and started to count to myself. “1…2…3…4…” “You go Suzhou? Wuhan?” Bingo. “Nanjing,” I answered. “Oh, Nanjing,” he replied, “Just a minute.” He called a friend over, and told her that I wanted to go to Nanjing. She looked me up and down, and then suggested in English, “Bus. You take bus, I show you.” She then took off at breakneck speed, with me struggling to keep up behind her with my assorted bags and 53-pound suitcase (Christmas cheer is heavy).

When we had cleared the crowd at the train station, I saw an opportunity to ask a few vital questions, like whether there were buses today, how long they take to get to Nanjing, etc. I wanted to establish a good dialogue in Chinese before I asked the price, because that way if she tried to buy my ticket for me at the bus station, she knew I’d know if she overcharged me. This worked like a charm, because when we got there she did indeed buy my ticket for me, but was completely up front about the real, posted price, and her hopes that I would give her an additional 10 yuan (about $1.25) for helping out. This I was more than happy to do: I would have never found the bus station myself. She hauled my suitcase up the steps herself (embarrassing, as she was a foot shorter than me and half my size), shoved me forward into a crowded waiting room with my ticket in hand, and told me the bus would leave in an hour and that they’d call me. She must have talked to the bus station manager about me, because a half an hour later he shouted through the waiting room in Chinese, “Hey, anybody remember where the foreigner is going?”

When he called the Nanjing bus, I stood up quickly. This shocked everyone in the waiting room. (Really, though, even if I didn’t speak Chinese, I should at least recognize the name of the city I was traveling to.) Out back he loaded me and, I kid you not, 20 other people into a van (a van!), along with our luggage, which was wedged in to the ceiling everywhere but around the driver’s head. 3 and ½ hours to Nanjing like this? But I had no way off, either, as there were 10 people and about 12 large suitcases blocking my access to the doors. Pressed into the girl next to me with my face buried in a large tote bag and my arms glued in unnatural positions (one across my chest, as if I wanted to be prepared in case the national anthem should suddenly start up, and the other smashed between my thigh and my backpack), there was not much choice in the matter.

Imagine my relief when, ten minutes later, we pulled into a larger bus station. Someone outside opened the side doors of the van, and a few suitcases and people sprung out like a jack-in-the-box gone mad. The rest of us un-wedged ourselves from our neighbors and followed our Liberator to Gate 11, where the real bus was waiting. We stowed our luggage in the undercarriage and boarded a coach bus with other Nanjing-bound passengers. The bus was full – a person in every seat – but comfortable. Then, of course, the bus drove off to yet another bus station and picked up more passengers. I’m still not exactly sure about the details of the argument that followed, but it seemed there was some kind of rule that everyone must be sitting in some way, shape or form – but not actually in the aisle – before the bus could move. With all the seats already full, however, some creativity was required.

When we finally hit the highway a half an hour later, there were three people crouched on the steps leading down to the side door, a woman in the (non-operational) toilet sitting on a shoe box, and others balancing on seat arms, including one women who was half on the arm of my seat and half on my right thigh. I did what anyone would do in that situation: I whipped out a crocheting project and addressed the women on my lap, “Bit chilly today, isn’t it?” I had a long, pleasant chat with the people around me (including a few arm-sitters from neighboring seats), mostly about how it was that I could speak Chinese and where I learned to crochet (which the teenaged girl next to me pronounced “so cool,” which I assume was because I am young and a westerner – when the elderly Chinese women knit on the side of the street and sell their wares for spending money, it is not nearly so cool).

By the time I was back in Nanjing hauling my suitcase up the three flights to my apartment (hands down the worst part of the trip), it had been more than eight hours since I had left my hotel in Shanghai. (The train from Shanghai to Nanjing takes only two. Hours, that is.) Back in my apartment, I soon discovered that the one thing I will miss the most about the US this winter is central heating. It wasn’t cold outside – in the 40s, which is nice, outside. Inside it felt like a meat locker. I have a wall combo heat-cool unit in my bedroom, which I turned on to its highest setting and soon discovered that while it made the bedroom warmer than the rest of the apartment, it wasn’t really what you’d call cozy. And, of course, every time I left my room it was a mad dash for whatever I needed, then quick back into my room, where I’d shiver for about five minutes while wrapping myself in blankets. The thing to get, I thought, was a space heater.

I journeyed to CE Mart and purchased a small plastic heater with an unrecognizable Shanghai brand name and brought it home. I got it out of the box and set it up, plugged it in and turned it on. The force of the fan on the heater caused the whole thing to move and shake, but I could feel it: heat, sweet heat. Happy to the core of my very being, I went out to the kitchen to make a cup of hot tea. Then I heard a ‘thunk’ from my room and quickly walked back in. In its shaking and shimmying, the heater had knocked itself over. I walked closer and discovered that what the space heater lacked in quality, it more than made up for in dramatic flair: it had burst into flames. Fortunately for me, having set my toaster oven on fire a few years back in an unfortunate krumkake-toasting experiment gone awry, I knew exactly what to do. I got it unplugged and before I could move it or smother the fire, the plastic casing had choked the fire out. Crisis averted.

Proving that I am either remarkably stupid or hell-bent on destruction, I went out and bought a new space heater the very next day. This time, however, I went to Wal-Mart and had a long discussion with the salesperson about what I look for in a space heater. (“I want one that will not spontaneously combust. Got any like that?”) I finally bought a Singfung brand “Taiwanese style” space heater. I chose to ignore the dubious wisdom of trusting the expertise of a sub-tropical island in heater design, and went instead with the logic that I had had a space heater in Taiwan (only necessary for a few weeks out of the winter, but in those few weeks, very necessary), and it did not once emit flames of any size, which is really all I ask. My, but my standards have fallen.

So I’m in Nanjing, my heater works, no problems right? Well… in my enthusiasm over the wall heater, the space heater, and the hot water heater yesterday, I blew a fuse. As it turns out, every outlet in the entire apartment is on a single circuit. After a quick search, I found the fuse box and saw the flashing red light: yup, blown all right. I’ve never actually changed a fuse before, but pulling out the old fuse it was obvious what to do. But where does one buy a fuse in Nanjing at 8 pm? The big CE Mart and Wal-mart stores are quite far away; the grocery stores stock lightbulbs, underwear, and electric lint removers, but not fuses. The thing to do was to ask someone, so I wandered into a electronics repair shop. I had checked my dictionary for “fuse,” but didn’t find the definition I was looking for: they were all about the thing you light to set off fireworks or a bomb. No problem, I thought. I’ll just describe it. Yeah. Go right now, go to someone next to you and, without using the word fuse or circuit (which I didn’t know in Chinese), try to get them guess “fuse.”

My explanation went something like this: “The electricity in my apartment is divided in two: one for the lights, one for the outlets. I had too many things going at once, used too much electricity at one time, and now the outlets don’t work. I need to replace the thing in the box on the wall to make them work again.” I must have gotten a little off and given the man in the shop the wrong idea, though, because it ended with him rather urgently telling me to get an electrician, right now, and do I want him to help me call? He kept looking nervously in the direction of my apartment complex, like he was expecting to see an explosion from that direction at any minute. I swore to him this wasn’t necessary, apologized for bothering him, and left.

After a few other false starts, I went to the handy security guards at the entrance to my apartment complex. When I moved in they told me that if I ever needed anything, I shouldn’t hesitate to ask. I’ve only taken them up on this once before, when I needed help opening a particularly stubborn jar of fruit (hey, they said anything). My reason for stopping there was simple: there was a visible fuse box on the wall of the guardhouse, so if I ran into trouble I could point to it before they panicked and called the fire department. I needn’t have worried, though, because they caught on right away and brought me to a handy stand about 10 feet from the apartment driveway that sells 10 kilo bags of rice, cigarettes, batteries, and, apparently, fuses. I’m proud to say I only shocked myself once getting the new fuse in. And most importantly, my heat was restored (the real reason I was determined to get the fuse changed that night). Oh – and the Chinese for fuse (in case it ever comes up) is baoxiansi.

One more and then I’m done, I promise. With Chinese New Year just around the corner (February 9), the New Year decorations are in the stores and the songs blaring over the loudspeakers. In the grocery store the other day, I heard a song that wished everyone prosperity and happiness (gongxi ni, zhufu ni) to the tune of “Oh! Susanna.” Mention Susanna, banjoes, or Alabama to anyone here, though, and they’ll give you a blank look: it’s an old traditional Chinese song. I’ve been told in the past that there is also a traditional Korean song that is sung to the same tune (I wondered why it was the ring tone on a soap opera character’s cell phone and was told that what I was hearing is not “Oh! Susanna” at all, but a Korean folk song. Coulda fooled me).

This has got me thinking: is this the common thread for all humanity? The one thing that ties it all together? Could it be that every culture on earth has its own “Oh! Susanna”? So this is what I ask of all of you: ask around. You all travel or know people from far away, or both. Let’s see how many world cultures have adopted this melody.

Copyright 2005 by Meredith Oyen

Licensed to Cycle

2004-12-16T08:25:00.000-06:00

12/04

Last week I finally broke down and bought a bicycle.

Hmm, I think I’ll just wait a minute for everyone out there who has seen me ride a bike to stop laughing….

Actually, it is not so much bicycles in particular as anything involving wheels. I still have roller skating scars on my knees. There was one (and only one) childhood incident involving a go-cart and an overly steep driveway. My Great Rollerblading Adventure involved me careening down a hill yelling “I don’t have any braaaaaaaaaaaaaakes…..” and crashing, finally, into a tent-pitching demonstration (imagine their terror as I approached), never to blade again.

And don’t even get me started on driving (though I will insist forever that Suburbans are dangerously top-heavy. You tap them in just the slightest way with a small subcompact sedan and wham! suddenly you’re staring at the undercarriage and all four wheels, waiting for the cops to come fill out the accident report and wishing your drivers’ license was actually on you, not in the purse you’re driving downtown to pick up because you forgot it the day before).

Bicycles are no exception to this sordid history. I just don’t steer well. Coming up on a turn, I usually take the path of a tractor-trailer. Ninety degrees, hugging the curb? Forget it.

Aside from the steering issue, I’m a nervous biker. Cycling anywhere but a designated bike path in a park with absolutely no one else on it, I tend to try to brake for anything. Sometimes I find myself hitting the brakes even while trying to pedal (it is, of course, much harder this way, but safety first, you know). Trying to get going from a dead stop usually takes four or five toe taps on the pavement, varying sides, while I work up some momentum to keep my balance.

When I first moved to Washington DC in 1999, I was talked into the idea that I might cycle around town a bit, terrifying traffic patterns aside, so I brought my bike and chained it to the back deck of my house. When I was moving out of the house in 2002, we had to cut the lock off because I couldn’t remember the combination: it had, after all, been three years. The by-then-rusty bicycle was eventually donated to whatever neighborhood thief was kindhearted enough to relieve me of it when I left it standing appealingly on the curb, lockless and hopeful. Given this state of affairs, it should surprise no one that I’ve lived in China for two months without attempting to acquire my own set of wheels.

So what made me break down, finally? It was the archives. The Number Two Historical Archive is just too far away. I can take the bus, but it’s always so packed with people when I’m going and coming home (at rush hours) that I’m always hesitant to try to squeeze myself in (do not think bus packing in any local American city; think, instead, packed in a Tokyo subway at rush hour, or a college fraternity get-on-the-news-and-in-the-Guiness-Book-of-Records-Volkswagen-cramming stunt, with bodies twisted about in all directions. Clown car-packed. Beatles concert in 1964 packed. Then you’ll know what I mean).

For a while, I just took a cab there. A cab to the archives from the major thoroughfare closest to my house runs around $1.50. It didn’t feel like a major extravagance. My problem, though, is that it would take me forever to hail a cab. When I undeniably need to take a cab – let’s say, when I have luggage and am going to a nearby airport or train station, it’s late at night and unsafe, I have no clue where I am or where I’m going – I can throw out my arm as well as the next person. When I feel that there are other options, however (like a bus I could be taking), my cab-hailing wave is remarkably unconvincing.

In Taiwan I never had a problem getting cabs – in Taipei, at least, there are more cabs than people willing to pay for them, and being a foreigner to boot, if I happened to reach up and scratch my nose while walking down the street, three taxis would come to a screeching halt in front of me. Although I am still undeniably a foreigner, in China cabs are so cheap and the people going places so plentiful you can sometimes wait quite a while for an empty car to appear. Add to this a half-hearted wave, slightly guilty in expression, and I can wait a long time for the right taxi to come along and catch my eye. Sometimes I’d walk either to or from the archives, but it’s far – the walk takes about an hour and a half. As much as I appreciate the exercise (the idea of fresh air is immaterial – not only do I get an ample supply of air on my two and a half hour lunch break, but the air in Nanjing is so polluted you’d have to climb a mountain or wear an oxygen mask to get to fresh stuff), it’s a long time to hike through this urban jungle and I have plenty of ways I could use that time.

Hence the bicycle. Having decided to buy it, however, my first problem was where.

There are something like 300 million bicycles in China – and that figure is a few years old. Parked bicycles line the sidewalks. People on bicycles clog up the traffic and turn lanes. There are covered bicycle parking zones in front of stores, offices, and apartment buildings. There are literally bicycles everywhere you look. But they’re not for sale. Where, I wondered, do all these bicycles come from? I started going into every store I came upon – no luck. I found scooters and motorbikes, but not regular bikes. Actually, I think I found just about one of everything known to man (and a few things previously unknown to me), but no bikes. I began to wonder if the moment I decided to buy one, all the bicycle sellers packed up and left Nanjing (not unlike Chinese restaurants in Trondheim, Norway, which are everywhere when you are wandering around visiting museums in the afternoon, but suddenly disappear when it’s 7 pm and you’re looking for something stir-fried).

Frustrated, I started asking everyone I met. I got a lot of suggestions (mostly for a mysterious place on Shanxi Road that seems only to exist when people other than me are looking for it), but was finally, fortunately, directed to CE Mart. This place is a lot like Wal-mart, but a Chinese version. (Why didn’t I just go to Wal-mart, anyway? They only had fancy bikes. I wanted your basic, utilitarian, classic Chinese bike. Plus, their bikes didn’t have baskets. I felt I must have a basket.) CE Mart has everything, from inflatable life-size Santas (Christmas has arrived in China, and in a big, inflatable way) to imported canned peas.

I walked in on a Sunday afternoon, and immediately walked out again. There were just so many people inside (see notes on “packed,” above), and, of course, being a bit of an exotica myself, every time I go into a store like this one, a few people start to follow me around to see what I buy. Basically, I was intimidated out of it. I left, walked around the block (all the while scolding myself for my shopping cowardice), and returned to the heart of the action. Steeling my nerves and readying for battle, I marched into the bicycle department and picked out the cheapest model. (I’m only here for another six months, really, so no point in buying something that cries out to be stolen) (I also can’t work the gears on multiple-speed bikes. My old ten-speed had nine wasted gear options.) Once I actually started talking to the friendly bicycle sellers, the rest was a breeze. They tightened all the bolts to get it ready to ride, attached my extra-large basket, and helped me pick out a lock (here you only put a lock around the back wheel to keep it from moving. There are so many bicycles, there is no point in chaining it to anything). After I had made my purchase ($29, inclusive) they sent me down to the service desk to register my vehicle and get a number plate for it (a theft deterrent. Lots of foreigners don’t bother registering. They also buy new bikes frequently). I handed over my residence permit, and a few minutes later the attendant handed it back with something else: it was a little, green plastic folder with gold characters embossed on the front. It read, “Bicycle drivers’ license.” I opened the folder and found a license with my name and address, the model of my bike and plate number inside. I’m officially Licensed to Cycle by the City of Nanjing. All I could think was: “good thing there wasn’t a road test.” This woman has no idea what she has now unleashed on the unsuspecting population.

I’m doing okay, so far. It’s actually much safer to bike here than in any American city, because there are designated bike lanes that are separated from the car lanes by metal barriers. Every time you make a left turn, there are 20 other bicycles with you, so there are no worries about being the lone cyclist cutting through traffic.

The trickiest intersection is actually this tiny little three-way near my apartment. One day I ventured out and came upon total gridlock. Taking in the scene, I noticed about 10 cars, two buses, 25 bicycles and motorbikes, two large wheelbarrows, and a backhoe. Everything single one of these, uh, “vehicles” was facing a different direction, impossible as that may seem. I sat for about twenty minutes, spellbound, watching this mess sort itself out before I bravely peddled forward.

Even so, I brake a lot. I have an embarrassing time getting going sometimes, doing my little toe-tapping dance to get up and get myself balanced. And my legs are sore from the unexpected development of now riding for a minimum of an hour and a half a day (45 minutes each way, to the archives and back, though I have started to ride out for lunch now too). But deep in my heart I think this is the practice I need to become a confident cyclist, so that one day in the future, I can bike in the US without fear (cue uplifting music). I’m not ready to take on some of the more interesting bicycling challenges I’ve witnessed on the Nanjing streets, however, like carting around a bundle of 8-foot plastic tubing or pulling a large plastic Christmas tree (decorated, oddly, with a great many small, green foil Christmas trees) on a cart.

Today as I pulled into my apartment complex, a man with a wide, leather easy chair strapped to the flat cover above his back wheel pulled in behind me. I’m in the presence of cycling greatness here, and I am awed.

News roundup:
In the “I can’t believe that’s legit” category: I saw a couple of kids playing Chinese jump-rope today (the stretchy kind, that goes around two people’s ankles while the third person jumps in and out). I had no idea that it was actually Chinese. I always thought of it in the same terms as “Chinese fire drills” and such.

In the “At least I have options” category: a construction worker told me I’m pretty and asked me to marry him while I was heading to the grocery store (on foot). That brings my lifetime total number of marriage proposals up to two: him and the steamed bread salesman outside the Technology Building subway stop in Taiwan. A difficult choice, but the steamed bread man has a slight edge: he was willing to emigrate to the US.

In the “Torture through pop music” category: a no-name band from Denmark has discovered the ultimate way to have a hit song in China. They wrote English lyrics to a very famous, hugely popular Chinese song (“Wenbie,” most recently recorded by Jacky Cheung, for anyone into Mandopop). I sat in a coffee shop last week and listened to the song play over and over for an hour and a half. I finally asked the waitress why we were listening to the same song time and again. “Oh,” she gushed, “It’s on ‘repeat.’” Can’t argue with that. But walk ten feet in any direction in China and you’ll hear it (if anyone is curious, I can email the MP3s of the original and the new version. But it is torturous, so don’t say you weren’t warned).

And in the “I can barely wait” category: I’ll be home Monday for Christmas.

Copyright 2004 by Meredith Oyen

God Bless The People's Liberation Army

2004-12-07T10:38:00.000-06:00

Chapter subtitle: Thanksgiving Alone, Or Adventures With Mashed Potatoes

Merry Oyen 12/04

Last night’s Old Red Movie featured a portly, jovial Mao Ze-dong in a run-down hut, little to eat but joy all around, offering pencils as gifts to his children late in December, 1948. The scene then cut to a cold, sour Chiang Kai-shek lounging about before a fire in a massive mansion, with elaborate garlands and lights lining the room and a feast laid out on a table, all alone. At the moment when the piped refrain – in English, no less – of “Silent Night” became audible, it dawned on me: this is no ordinary Old Red Movie, it’s an Old Red Christmas Movie! It’s perfect, too: Chiang Kai-shek as the surly Scrooge with every material thing at his fingertips but no true interest in the masses, Mao Ze-dong as Cratchit, the man who has nothing but a desire to live in a world where everyone is warm and well-fed. I half expected Mao’s little daughter to stare joyfully into the camera, clutching her pencil, and cry, “God bless us and the People’s Liberation Army, every one!!” Of course, the whole thing did not end with the Generalissimo experiencing a change of heart (where are the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future when you need them?), but in Mao’s final speech to the masses, his demeanor did bear a striking resemblance to that of a certain right jolly old elf. I tell you, there is nothing like a little communist propaganda to put you in the holiday spirit.

The only other sign of Christmas around here is the fact that suddenly it seems that every cell phone in China has switched its ring-tone simultaneously to “Jingle Bells.” Perhaps there was a memo, and I missed it. Do you have any idea how many cell phones there are in China? Every where I go, every hour of the day, I hear small, tinny bells proclaiming, “da da dum, da da dum, da da dum da duuummmm….” Sometimes I sing along, which so far amuses adults and seems to frighten small children, the latter of which is not really in the spirit of the season, so I might need to refrain in the future. We’ll see.

About recent holidays: Thanksgiving was lovely. The big talk to the Nanjing University grad students association was moved to Friday, so the general topic of Thanksgiving was off the holiday agenda (it went fine, by the way. We American panelists were a little boring, though, so nothing much to report on it). I was, however, busy writing a paper for a conference that was due right after Thanksgiving, so I didn’t venture out much. I decided instead to stay in and have a traditional holiday meal of mashed potatoes, stir-fried green beans, and Tsing-Tao Beer. (I know, I know, some of you are thinking, Tsing-Tao Beer? The pilgrims didn’t drink beer! But in fact, the pilgrims, puritanical tendencies aside, did drink beer, as did everyone in those days. But aha, you think, where would they get Chinese beer in the 1620s? Impossible! May I be so bold as to point out, however, that it was not impossible for there to have been Chinese people at the first Thanksgiving. Improbable, yes. But not impossible: thanks to the trans-Pacific Spanish Galleon Trade, Chinese laborers were living in Peru by 1613, and in Mexico not long thereafter, and having traveled that far, it would not be unworkable for such intrepid souls to have made their way up to the Massachusetts Bay area in time for that first Thanksgiving. “But,” you continue, skeptically, “Tsing-tao???” Ah. Therein lies the real problem. The brewery at the German concession of Tsing-Tao, China was not established until 1903. So perhaps my meal was not altogether authentic. Of course, if you were going to start shooting holes in the whole thing, a faster approach would have been to start with the potatoes, which were not yet grown in North America at that time. Let’s hear three cheers for green beans….)

I had a bit of a time with those mashed potatoes, actually. I had them all peeled, cubed, and cooked – i.e. ready to mash – when I suddenly looked around my kitchen and wondered what I’d be using to mash them. My kitchen utensils are limited to: one spatula, one vegetable peeler, and about eight pairs of chopsticks. Tricky. I went with the spatula, say what you will, but although they were rather lumpy, they were still some awfully fine tasting ‘taters.

It might sound a little grim, me in my apartment eating mashed potatoes and drinking beer over a stack of documents and a paper draft, but I assure you, it was nothing of the sort. Beyond the Great Comfort that is the knowledge that I will be home for Christmas, there is also the Inescapable Truth that I have a great deal to be thankful for, whatever the circumstances of my holiday. I started making a list, in fact (as many of us are prone to do this time of year), and found that I ran out of time before I ran out of ideas, which is a blessing in and of itself. And, of course, at the top of the list were all of you friends and relatives (in some cases, even the same people in both categories!). Well, to be perfectly honest, at the very top of the list were “black sesame filled glutinous rice balls,” (a.k.a. hei zima tang yuan) which is what I was eating at the time, but the list was in no particular order, especially not in order of priority.
In other news, I got started at the Number Two Historical Archive this week. My first day there was a mere two hours, and consisted of me applying for admission and looking at some of the document catalogues.

It was, frankly, two of the most stressful hours I’ve had in grad school, second only, I think, to my PhD oral comprehensive exam 18 months ago. It’s hard to explain, actually, why it was so stressful. Certainly it is not because they refused my entrance, because they didn’t: I’m in. It also wasn’t because they aren’t letting me see the documents I want; again, they are. Really, I think most historians would scoff and say, “You think that’s tricky? Let me tell you about the time I was in [insert third-world capital with an authoritarian government here] and took gunfire in my quest for historical truths….”

Okay, maybe not, but historians, like all professionals, have their share of “war stories,” and most of them involve wrestling documents out of bureaucrats’ hands but leave you with a mental image of a grand adventure like something out of Indiana Jones (er, not that I would know really. I’ll see those movies someday, after Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and all the other pop culture classics I’m delinquent on getting around to watching as I re-read Jane Austen for the 11th time). My Number Two archives introduction would impress no one in such circles.

It began with an examination of my credentials.

On their website and publications, they state very clearly that they require every researcher to come with a letter of introduction from their local work unit (in my case, Nanjing University, where I’m affiliated for the year), their ID card or passport, and a general statement of some kind about their research topic. Before I went, I met with some professors at Nanjing University and asked what I needed to get in; they told me I would need a letter of introduction, my passport, and a statement of my research topic.

So, off I went, with a letter of introduction, my passport, and a statement of research. I went into the office where they manage archive admissions, sat down opposite to a busy man who thought he spoke English (after a few false starts, we switched to Chinese), and there I remained for about an hour. He showed me other people’s applications. I pointed out that I was carrying all the same credentials they were. He asked what university I was from. I told him Georgetown. He was forced to acknowledge that he had heard of it. He told me that a researcher from Harvard came, and she brought a letter of recommendation from the President of her university. I said how nice for her. He said I should bring a letter of recommendation, either from Nanjing or Georgetown. I said I had a letter of introduction, and pointed out the place where the archive rules said that introductory letters, but not recommendation letters, were required. He said it would be clearer with a recommendation. I asked what would be clearer. He said that he thought my discussion of what I wanted to study was too vague. I said my topic was large, but that I had all year as I’d be in China until next summer.

He said that gave him something to think about, and he left the room for a little while, apparently to ponder this strange fact. (Actually, the statement was awfully vague, but intentionally so. I’ve heard a lot of stories about this archive, and they often included people getting refused documents not because they were classified, but because they didn’t mention the possibility that they might one day want to see them the first time they applied for admission.) It all ended, rather unceremoniously, with him guiding me up to the research room and dumping me on the staff there. My application was, of course, accepted exactly the way I had submitted it.

I spent the second hour I was at the archives looking through the catalogs. I spent fifty minutes on the first one, panicking. I discovered upon opening it that I could not read a word inside. It might as well have been in Manchu, for all the good staring at it was doing me. How was I going to figure out what documents to order, much less read them? Finally I set it aside and opened up the second volume. Here the characters were in small, neat calligraphy – I could read every word. Whew. I’ll figure out what to do about that first volume later; the important thing is that I’ve at least got somewhere to start.

By the time I left that first day, I never wanted to go back. But back I was the next morning, ready and waiting when they opened at 8:30. This is when I discovered that first day anxiety aside, working at this archive will never be a truly grueling experience. That is because they are open from 8:30 to 11:30, then close for lunch for two and a half hours, finally reopening at 2, but only until 4:30, when they shut down for the night. This schedule keeps up five days a week, except that they close for the afternoon on the last Friday of every month, apparently to give their poor, overworked staff a much needed breather. If I had serious time constraints on my research, I’d be cursing these hours (by contrast, the US National Archives is open 60 hours a week), but as it is I’m in no hurry and can afford to find them amusing. My greatest concern is that I’ll get used to them, so that next year when I’m back home I’ll be insisting on a two and a half hour lunch, and what, me work after 4:30? Ridiculous.

With a hearty “Bah Humbug, The East Is Red” to all,

Merry

Copyright 2004 by Meredith Oyen

Ducktales- Jellied Webs and Dark Tofu

2004-12-07T10:32:00.000-06:00

Filed 11/15/0o4

Next week I’ll be giving a presentation at a meeting of the Nanjing University Graduate Students Association comparing my life in the US with my life in China.

So far, I think it’ll be a bit dull.
My life in the US: read historic archival documents.
My life in China: read historic archival documents.

I’m trying to come up with some ways to spice it up, but so far, I’m not coming up with much. The presentation itself is on Thanksgiving Day; when I pointed this out to the organizers (there are two other Americans presenting, I just thought they should be aware of this), they said, “Oh, so you can talk about that holiday, then.”

Yeah, okay. Really, it’s not like I had other plans for Thanksgiving. I’ll make some mashed potatoes just because I can, and also because I think that is the only Thanksgiving staple I’d be able to put together in my kitchen. If it is possible to bake a pumpkin pie with a bamboo steamer and a wok, I certainly don’t know how to do it. (Ah, where’s Martha when you need her? Jail.) Actually, I can’t think of anyplace nearby (meaning closer than Shanghai) that sells pumpkin anyway.

To thank me in advance for my presentation (excellent thinking, in my mind, because they may not want to thank me anymore after I make it) two of the organizers took me out to dinner the other night. We went in a local restaurant, and we just sat around chatting over our dishes (spicy tofu, some assorted Chinese greens, a sort of egg omelet, spicy fish, and a mushroom and chicken soup). That place must not get a lot of foreigners, though, because when we were getting ready to leave they told us to hang on, they were going to give us a special Nanjing dish free of charge.

When the dish came, it consisted of some transparent noodles, bean sprouts, an unidentified but very clearly gray meat, and some “hei dofu”, that is, dark colored tofu. Actually, in the US you don’t see a lot of dark tofu, but I’m used to it from Taiwan, where it can be had in spades. I remember when I first tried it in Taipei a few years back; after I got over the initial disappointment that it was not, as I had hoped, made from chocolate soy milk, I thought it was fine. (For chocolate flavored soy treats, one must visit a “douhua” stand. Just so you know.) Tastes just like regular white tofu, actually, which is to say, it tastes like nothing.

My two dinner companions praised the choice of dish, called it “very special”, and insisted I attack it all alone. I was already pretty full, but in the interest of politeness, I picked up my chopsticks and got to work. The noodles turned out to be made from yams, only they had this kind of noodle made from mung beans, so that was new. We had a reasonably dull conversation about the bean sprouts while I tried to practice being both polite and vegetarian by picking around the scary gray meat, and ate several pieces of tofu.

Watching me reach for another piece, one of my friends said, “How do you like the yaxie?” I wasn’t clear what she was referring to, so she pointed to the tofu, “The yaxie. It’s special in Nanjing. Do you like it?” At this point, I was wracking my brain for any kind of tofu product that contains a word sounding like ya or xie, and sadly, coming up empty. With a heavy heart, I finally asked how “yaxie” was translated into English. “Oh you know,” she answered, “duck blood.”

I’d been eating congealed duck blood, thinking it “safer” than the gray meat.

I put down my chopsticks and tried very, very hard to sound natural as I announced I had eaten so much already, I really couldn’t eat another bite. Really.

My new friends weren’t fooled. What evolved was one of those classic conversations where there is clearly a cultural gap that cannot be breached.

“But you were eating the duck blood, you like it.”

“No, I liked it when it was tofu.”

“But it wasn’t ever tofu, it was always duck blood.”

“But when I thought it was tofu, it tasted like tofu. When I knew it was duck blood, it tasted like blood.”

“It didn’t change, it tastes the same.”

“Yes, but now I can taste the blood.”

“But it was blood before.”

“But then it was blood disguised as tofu, so I couldn’t taste it.”

“It was never disguised, it was always just duck blood.”

“No, but I didn’t know it was blood.”

“But it was still blood.”

“I just can’t eat blood.”

“But you were eating blood.”

“Yes, but that was because it was tofu.”

(pause)

“Blood is not tofu.”

“No. That’s the problem.”

“It wasn’t a problem when you were eating it.’

“It was a problem, I just didn’t know it yet.”

It finally ended with me teaching them that famous English idiom, “ignorance is bliss”, which I translated into Chinese as, “It’s better not to know what you’re eating.”

Along the way, I did accidentally get a bite of the gray meat, which turned out to be Nanjing’s other famous delicacy, pressed duck. I’m not sure what it is with duck in China; I sense that every current or former Chinese capital gets a part of the bird to cook in it’s own unique way. Beijing is famous, of course, for Peking roast duck. Nanjing has both the duck blood and the pressed duck. I wonder if Hangzhou and Chang¡’an do anything special with bills or feet (jellied duck’s web, anyone?) “So, how is the famous pressed duck?” “Awful. Tastes like death; there’s a reason I was so enthusiastic about the ‘tofu.’”

That said, it is sold in marvelous vacuum packed bags, so I’ll be sure to bring a bag home at Christmas. We can put it out on the table at Grandma’s next to the meatballs, and not warn anyone not on this list what it is. Who knows, maybe the realization of being deprived of vital knowledge (like how bad pressed duck is) will gain me a few new “subscribers.”

Actually, what I was thinking about on the walk home from the restaurant was whether there was some sort of Chinese version of Better Homes and Gardens or Women’s Day that prints up classic recipes just like mom used to make. I was trying to picture how the Nanjing Congealed Duck’s Blood story would go:

“Now that the weather has turned cool again, it’s time for some good, old-fashioned congealed ducks blood. Drain the blood from two adult ducks, add gelatin (or, if there’s none available, simply pull the cartilage from one medium-sized cow knee), and set up on your stove to simmer. As the marvelous slaughterhouse-like aroma fills the air, let it take you back to all those childhood memories of being sent down to the countryside to Learn From The Peasants!

All day today (er, before now), I’ve been trying to get my mind off of the “duck blood incident.” My method for doing this is to read 1950s era US Information Agency (USIA) documents on how American propaganda was going to win the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia for the Free World.

As I was reading today, I happened upon what I thought was an idea with real promise. In 1953, the some bright, young American Public Affairs Officers set up a thriving book club in Vietnam and Cambodia. The idea was that by using the informal, congenial atmosphere of a discussion group and interesting but clearly anti-communist novels, they could somehow Win Indochina For The West. The real pity is that we never got to see how this, the peaceful solution, would work out; a year leader the French would go down not quite in a blaze of glory in Dien Bien Phu and the real mess would start to heat up.

My thought is this: with all the clamoring for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, why not revive this bright idea? Okay, clearly we are militarily entangled, but that doesn’t prevent us from working on a parallel, more peaceful approach. Its just the sort of the thing my old roommate Dana, the highly confrontational peace studies student who couldn’t get along with anybody, would be out advocating. Just in case I’ve got something here, I say we send Oprah to Iraq and Afghanistan, wearing a flak jacket, with a couple thousand copies of “Tuesdays with Morrie.” It can’t hurt, anyway.

I leave you all with this, my thought for the day: “A Weasel Bit a Sick Duck”- Ancient Chinese Proverb meaning (essentially) when it rains, it pours

Two days later:
In a particularly fine example of “a weasel biting a sick duck”, my friend Matt now writes from Taipei to say that neither he nor anyone he knows has ever heard of “dark tofu.”

A Cross-Straits Investigation (mostly involving people in both Taiwan and China using “google” simultaneously, but requiring some basic fieldwork over on the Free China side) has revealed this: there is, in fact, a dark version of dried tofu (hei dou gan), which I ate with some frequency in Taipei. Odds are, however, that when it was not dried, but closer to the consistency of regular tofu, it was a duck blood product.

I had just always assumed, because dark soy milk and dark dried tofu do exist, that dark tofu was also a regular occurrence. I’d also learned early on at the hot pot restaurant to avoid the pig blood with rice cakes, and likely just assumed that all animal blood products looked alike and were therefore equally easily identifiable.

Obviously not so- essentially, this means that I’ve probably eaten the equivalent of the lifeblood of a good four or five ducks already, always (before now) none the wiser. If so, let me say this: it’s not bad in soup.

On the bright side, however, I’ve learned that duck blood is quite rich in vitamins.

That’s good; I’d hate to think I’d consumed all that duck blood and gotten absolutely no nutritional value from it, only so many empty calories.
So enough with the scary food stories.

Copyright 2004 by Meredith Oyen

How Democracy Will Overtake China

2004-11-06T15:45:00.000-06:00

Ever since arriving in China, my allergies have been really bad. Every day, my head is so stuffed up I feel like I live in an alternate universe. My sneezing could set world records for both strength and volume. My throat is permanently scratchy. I’ve alternated between Claritin and cold medications – just in case – but to no avail: it seems I can stifle the symptoms, but not eliminate them. Then, of course, today I was sitting on the end of my couch getting some work done, when my eyes strayed to the area under my bed. Illuminated in the daylight I saw a collection of Harvey-sized dust-bunnies. “Aha!” I exclaimed, to no one in particular, and then set out for the broom. I suspect this effort will have a positive effect on the level of in-house allergy suffering I endure.

As I write, I am having a nice (a term I use very, very loosely) glass of “Great Wall Dry Red Wine” and channel surfing through Chinese state-run television. Hmmm, what’s on now.…

There is the “100 Nights of Red Classics” movie marathon, which each evening shows a different old film about the valiant efforts of the People’s Liberation Army to overcome despotic landlords and the corrupt Guomindang officials to finally free the peasants and workers, who all then cheerfully work together for the glory of the new China and the Communist Party. As enlightening as these pictures are, once you are, oh, twenty or thirty nights in, they start to lose some of their freshness and originality. So on to other options.

I’ve learned – the hard way – that no matter what time of the day or night, there is always a televised version of a Chinese opera being broadcast. Sometimes these are classic Beijing operas, sometimes they pick up local area operatic traditions, and once – just once – it was a Cultural Revolution era model opera. Which, of course, makes me think of “Ambassador Duke” in China:

Chinese host: “This opera is about a peasant…”
Duke: “Who frees himself from the chains of a despotic landlord with the help of the communist party, after which the skies ring in praise of Chairman Mao?”
Chinese man (horrified): “You’ve already seen it!”
Duke: “No, no, lucky guess. Lead the way.” (Yes, I can recite Doonesbury cartoons off the top of my head. But really, only that series. It’s the classic, “Young Chu-ming, don’t you know there are starving children in West Virginia who’d give anything for some jellied duck’s web?” series. Someday I fully intend to use it to teach that era of US-Chinese relations.)

Aside from Red Classics and Model Operas, there are other movies on. Lots of westerns, actually – a total fascination with American cowboys ends up getting mixed into the frontiers of Chinese territory, namely, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. The result is a bizarrely unique cultural product that strives to answer that age old question, “What would happen if John Wayne was pitted against Genghis Khan?” Then, of course, lots of American movies, all dubbed in Chinese: Julia Roberts with a high, screechy voice emoting, “Keshi, wo haishi hen ai ni de!” There is also almost always a dubbed Disney movie or cartoon on, which leads one to suspect that the televison stations do not pay close attention to copyright provisions.

Then, of course, there are the reality TV series. This, I truly believe, is the opening through which democracy will come to China. There are all these series – equivalents of American Idol, Fear Factor, and the one with the race, whatever it was called – and all include a climactic moment when the viewing audience is called upon to pick up their cell phones and text message their vote for the winners and losers. The screen shows an ongoing tally of votes, and little moments where each contestant campaigns for his or her own victory. I suspect that the people will ultimately become so accustomed to voting for absolutely everything on TV, that one day a rebellion of habitual cell-phone voters will be watching the news and think, “But wait! We voted for Miss China! We voted for the new Chinese R&B star! We voted on the challenges to be given to contestant twelve! Why didn’t we vote on the guy that leads us?” Just wait. I, like many of you, have lamented the absolutely moronic nature of reality TV when it staged its coup taking over the US primetime line-up. But when the fundamentally democratic roots of reality TV enters authoritarian third world societies, there will be a new cultural revolution. And to think, it all started with Survivor. Still never seen it.

Then, of course, there is Chinese music television. Every day MTV China (not to be confused with MTV Chinese, which broadcasts to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, but not the mainland) is on for exactly two hours. One hour is of Chinese language videos – thankfully, most of these are from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore. It is hard to explain in words just how bad Chinese mainland pop music is. Too many years of hit records called “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China,” I guess, but the music is so unoriginal it genuinely sounds computer generated. (Yes, even more so than American mainstream pop. Scary.) It is also all slow and overly whiney. Thank goodness for Taiwanese rock…. (New Mayday album out this week)  The other hour is called, “Study English with MTV.” In this fine program, a host introduces the helpful, idiomatic, everyday English expressions that are used in the latest Madonna or Lenny Kravitz songs, then shows the corresponding videos with Chinese subtitles.

The local Jiangsu Province station shows some Korean soap operas, but always with an annoying host that breaks in periodically to tell you what is going to happen right before it happens and give you the impression that whatever stupid mess the main characters have gotten themselves into, it never would’ve happened to Chinese people. Common to all televised soap operas – Korean or Chinese – is the tendency to break for commercials at really jarring moments. By this I mean mid-sentence. The female lead will be saying, “I just came from the doctor. He said that I’m…” Enter shampoo commercial, followed by restaurant commercial, followed by previews for the next three shows on, a replay of the exact same shampoo commercial we just saw, and then, before you even realize the commercial is over, “…your half-sister. The bloodtest confirms it.”

(Whoops, Old Red Classic number 43 has apparently ended: the Nationalist general just surrendered to the triumphant PLA, and the province has been made safe for communism. Time to change the channel.)

I bet that most of you without the benefit of Chinese state television do not realize that the world Ping-Pong championships were last week. China won. The 2004 Olympics are being replayed – that is, all the moments of Chinese athletes in triumph – with lots of ads for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I’m happy to report that preparations are way, way ahead of schedule. The picture couldn’t be rosier. Cell phone text message voting on the mascot will take place early next year. The good money’s on Sun Wu Kong (The Monkey King from Chinese Tang Dynasty classic A Journey to the West); a panda bear would just be too cliché.

Alright. If I don’t stop soon, you will all start to think that all I ever do is watch television. Not true – in spite of all of these colorful options, I am not glued to my set. I’m not really sure why I just wrote a long email about Chinese TV, except that it is what I am experiencing at the moment, and I wanted to share it with all of you. Ahem. Oooh, gotta go. There’s a special on about a Tibetan singer who’s going to sing her 2002 hit single, “Long Live China".

Copyright 2004 by Meredith Oyen

The End (in Taipei)

2004-08-25T13:40:00.000-05:00

This has been a week of rip-roaring good times. Literally. Typhoon Aere slammed into North Taiwan on Tuesday, and we were shut down and largely housebound for two days.

Taipei got off easy - a couple feet of rain, some 1000 downed trees, assorted downed powerlines, and only limited flooding. Elsewhere in the north disasters abound. Our house was in a bit of a "typhoon day" holiday mood, and so we broke out the lychee rice wine and sat around telling travel stories all Tuesday afternoon. Nobody got any sleep that night, though, when the full force of the storm him. In addition to the howling wind and rain, everytime a gust of wind slammed into the cars parked on the streets below, their anti-theft alarms would go off. Like, every fifteen minutes. So annoying.

Yesterday things started to open up again, though I learned just how serious the storm was when I went out in search of tapioca bead milk tea, and found none of t he ubiquitous tea stands open. By evening things were mostly back to normal, however, with the exception of a great deal of perfectly random debris - and hundreds of abandoned broken umbrellas - littering the ground. This sort of amuses me: why bother with an umbrella in typhoon force winds?

I leave Taiwan tomorrow, so today I am trying to get in all those last minute tasks, and setting myself up for failure. There is no way I can possibly eat all of my favorite foods one last time; there are just not enough hours in a day. Of course, some of these things will be found in Nanjing, but it is hard to know what is universally Chinese and what is just Taiwanese. Sorting this out provides difficulties when I ask my nationalistic Taiwanese friends, who are convinced that everything is Taiwanese and they couldn't possibly have the same kind of stinky tofu and red bean cakes on the mainland. Tonight, just to be sure we cover it all, the plan is to eat our way through a night market, which they really don't have on the mainland.

The research is getting all wrapped up, with the exception of the Saga of the Closed Guomindang Archives, which is an epic length story and, unfortunately, not even the least bit interesting. Basically, I'm seeking out a local research assistant to go in and check the files that were closed for "straightening" - at least, that is how the Chinese translates. Who knows what kinds of secret plots were being hatched in the upper levels of the Nationalist Party this year - more assassination plots against Chen Shui-bian? (Not likely; for those of you not following the bizarre Taiwanese presidential election last March, everyone thinks Chen himself was responsible for the bullet that grazed his stomach and caused such "injuries" that he walked, unsupported, into the hospital for treatment. But the attempt was enough to get him re-elected on the sympathy vote.)

I've never claimed an opinion on what party is best for Taiwan, but the Guomindang has annoyed me so much that I'm tempted to take my friend Yu-wen up on her offer of an "A Bian" (a nickname for Chen) baseball hat. Of course, wear that on the mainland and you can count on being arrested as a Taiwan separatist....

On Research

2004-08-05T13:31:00.000-05:00

Day after day, the most important thing I do in Taipei is head off to the archives. Unlike the US or the UK, there is no centrally located archive that houses all the documents generated by the various branches of government. The Academia Historica (in Xindian) - which is a bizzare latin translation of Chinese that actually means "National History Center" - houses a fair amount of stuff, but with some odd exceptions. For example, half of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) records are there, whereas the other half are up in Beitou at MOFA's own archive center. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the divisions; I have one file, for example, for which part one is in Beitou and part two is in Xindian. What annoys me about this is not the travel or separate locations - after all, that's just a pleasant change of scenery - but the fact that I'm allowed to copy anything I want in Xindian and nothing at all in Beitou. Argh.

Actually, I'm discovering that the Academia Historica is really not at all well known around Taipei. I was approached at random on the street by a retired man hoping to speak some English (a not uncommon occurence), and he asked me what I was doing in Taipei. I explained about going down to Xindian everyday - and again in Chinese when he seemed skeptical - and watched him think this over. Finally he turned to me and said, "No, I'm quite certain there is no such place, and certainly not in Xindian." He offered to help me figure out where the archives actually are, since they are clearly not in Xindian, and looked at me like I was nuts as I reiterated that not only did the Academia Historica exist, but that I was quite certain it was in Xindian, having just come from there. He finally walked away, shaking his head, as if to say, "This poor crazy American, traveling out to Xindian everyday, when we all know there's nothing there...." Of course, even my friend Yuwen had to be convinced - she knew of the branch museum in Ximen ding, but was shocked to learn of the main location. I suppose one could make the comparison that not everyone in the world knows where the US National Archvies are, but at least I suspect that they believe that yes, Virginia, there really is an Archive.

Really, though, it is not a terribly popular destination. I have had more than one bus driver become concerned on my account - the Academia Historica is actually the very last stop of the 647 and 650 buses out of the city, and as such I'm usually the only one on the bus for the last ten minutes before we get there. I find that the bus driver is usually looking nervously in the mirror back at me, no doubt thinking, "Where is she going? When was she supposed to get off? And what do I do with her when I reach the end and have to go put the bus in the garage???"

In Beitou, the work of my day is to sort through the files and hand copy anything that is important or potentially relevant. This is a pretty slow business - I sometimes spend all day on a single file or - a few times - on a single document, if it is long and hand-written. In the 1950s, typing Chinese was not really an option - things were either printed using press-style movable type (which any Chinese person will tell you, they invented long before Guttenberg), or handwritten. If they are handwritten, they might be scrawled with a pen, or created using a maobi (brush and ink). If the latter, they could be running script - at which point I just give up all hope of ever knowing what they say - or they could be painted in a standard calligraphy that is so lovely and readable, that I become tempted to copy things just because they are pretty. Handcopying such documents involves a certain level of guess work and - let's face it - artistry, as I try to copy the form of characters I can't recognize and can't locate in my dictionary to ask people later. The secretary in charge of researchers in Beitou (i.e. usually just me) does very little except read the newspaper, doze and, oddly, study his Chinese-Spanish dictionary, so sometimes I carrry files out to him and ask him to guess what the character in question is. Once I managed to stump not only him, but the whole office as well, which made me feel better - it's not just me, nobody can read this stuff.

In Xindian, of course, if I suspect something is important and I can't read it, I just head to the copy machine. The down side of Xindian is that unlike Beitou, all researchers must wear surgical masks and latex gloves while handling files. It is ridiculously hot in the research room - so far their claims to being air-conditioned appear to be purely hypothetical - and I find this ridiculously uncomfortable. Plus, if I want to take a little break, it can take forever to get the gloves peeled off my sweaty hands and then, worse yet, reapplied. Of course, on the bright side, when flipping through my copies, I don't have to worry about getting paper cuts.

Research is, of course, not without its entertaining moments. The Hong Kong refugee crisis in the 1950s and early 1960s has been unexpectedly fruitful in this respect. It started in London's Public Record Office, where I read dozens upon dozens of files on the refugees and what the Hong Kong and British colonial government can do besides send them back to China. It was a Real Crisis, everyone agreed, as the population swelled to many times its original number, and (as time wore on), it was acknowledged that a certain percentage of these people were destitute and starving. Some sort of definite action was needed. At this point, the British Defense (well, defence) Department stepped up to the plate, and wrote to the Governor of Hong Kong to say (paraphrased), "Look, we want to help. Here we have some 40,000 pairs of women's woollen underwear left over from World War II. We'll send them to you." Now, aside from the obvious question of what exactly would lead the British army to stock women's woollen underwear in such quantities, there is the minor point that such things might not be terribly useful in a sub-tropical climate where the temperature rarely falls below 60 degrees. This is, perhaps, evidence that it is NOT always merely the thought that counts.

Not that things are only amusing from the western angle, though. Radio Free China worked up a popular radio program for the refugees in Hong Kong and the people of Southeast Asia which consisted mostly of Elvis tunes (whose name is for unknown reasons - maybe the sideburns? - translated into Chinese as "maowang" or "Cat King") and anti-communist jokes. An example:

One day in the Canton People's Collective Prison three detainees chatted about what they did to get arrested.

"I came to work late," said the first, "and they accused me of absenteeism."

"I came to work early," explained the second, "And they accused me of spying."

The third looked on sadly. "I came to work on time," he said, "and they accused me of having a capitalist watch!" (ba dum ching!)

Ultimately, however, such humor was thought to be, perhaps, inappropriate for refugees, whose families may have been killed or sent to far-away work camps in the anti-rightist campaigns, and the broadcasts were thereafter directed only to Southeast Asia.

Of course, most often the humor is entirely unintentional. Still on the subject of refugees, the ROC police was investigating visa applicants for the US Refugee Relief Program. They wanted to send a report on one applicant to the US embassy, but couldn't seem to come up with the proper English phrasing. The first draft said, "subject committed a thief." This must not have seemed right, because the writer crossed this out and wrote, "he was convicted being burglar." This, too, must have been recognized as a bit off, as it was also crossed out and ultimately replaced with, "he had a burgle."

One more, and then I'll stop, I promise (perhaps not everyone finds these things as much fun as I do, but after a long day in the archives, you'd be surprised how hard you can laugh at such things!). I came across a US immigration report about a handful of Chinese seamen who jumped ship in the US and were arrested in New York for overstaying their landing visas. Upon arrest, all claimed that they had wanted to return to their ships on time, but had gotten lost on the New York subway and by the time they returned to the docks, their ships had sailed. Okay, it's unlikely, but maybe. One sailor, however, actually jumped ship in San Francisco, made his way across the USA and then found himself hopelessly lost in the New York subway. Um, whoops.

A major challenge of reading these documents is recognizing proper nouns when they come up. Unlike Japanese, which created a romanization alphabet specifically for foreign words to help readers identify proper nouns and concepts from other languages, Chinese simply picks a set of characters that gives the closest approximation of the word's original sound. This means one can be reading along and suddenly, in the midst of a sentence about Chinese military alliances, you get a phrase that means, "subdue the neighborhood of mother's forest." Is this a strange idiom from an ancient Chinese folktale? Nope - read out loud, those characters are "ke li mou lin" -- i.e. the Kremlin. Of course, every now and then, just to throw you off, they translate by meaning instead of sound. I spent some quality time working on what city in New York sounds like "shui niu" before realizing that those t wo characters - literally "water cow" - referred to Buffalo.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that all I ever do is research. And since we are on the subject of water... Sunday I spent most of the afternoon and evening in Damshui with friends. Damshui is a town on the north shore with a river cutting through its center, and the last stop on the metro line out of Taipei. It is most famous as a destination for young couples, who head up there to stroll along the left bank (called the left bank in emulation of Paris, though it could not possibly look less like the left bank of the River Seine). When I took my dad there last summer, we followed my tourist guide to Damshui and went to see the Hong Mao Cheng (Red Body-Hair Fort, named for the odd-looking westerners who built it in the 17th century). Since then, many Taiwanese have informed me that the place is - though admittedly historic - mostly open to fool foreign tourists.

The real Damshui - as with much of Taipei - is found in the night life. We drove up to the Left Bank and almost immediately got in line for a boat to head to the other side of the river, where all the action is. When we got in this line, there were, oh, about 400-500 people ahead of us. It must say something about the American ability to queue that I don't think it would ever occur to me to hop in the back of a line of 500 people. Left to my own devices, I might just get back in the car and drive across the bridge. While in line, the pastime of choice is to eat. The food stands serving the boat line would give the Minnesota State Fair a run for its money - anything you want, and all on a stick. We sampled fish balls, shrimp cake, and stinky tofu with marinated cabbage (all washed down with some cold passionfruit green tea) before reaching the front of the line. Finally arriving at our destination, I was surprised to l earn after all the snacks that the major goal was to find somewhere to eat. But as anyone who has ever lived in Asia understands very well, my friends swore that without some rice, they couldn't possibly feel full.

The big attraction on the north coast is, of course, the seafood, so we went to a restaurant for some fresh fish. By fresh, I mean we stood outside at the line of tanks containing swimming fish, shrimp, and crabs, and picked out which ones we wanted to eat and how we wanted them cooked. We then watched as the owner reached into the tank, grabbed one of our selections by the tail, and threw it onto the floor at our feet. He picked up a big stick and wacked the fish's head. I looked down. Yup, he was dead all right. Nothing like a "floor show" (yuk, yuk) to work up an appetite. Our meal consisted of that unfortunate fish, some battered shrimp, crab legs (the Taiwanese way to eat crab, apparently, is to hold the shell in one hand, and use your chopsticks to pick out pieces of meat with the other - tricky on the first, oh, 20 tries), and a real delicacy, spicy fried fish skin. Yuwen explained to me that we Americans waste the skin - we tend to throw it away, along with the eyes and other tasty bits - when really, it is the best part. After a quick taste I decided to maintain my wasteful American ways.

After dinner we strolled along the pier and played arcade style games until the departure of the last boat for the Left Bank. Damshui is the only place near Taipei where you can buy engagement cakes (given to friends and family when plans to marry are announced), and a few of our friends were called upon by family members to buy some (not because someone was getting married, but because they're really really good and it'd been a long time since the family had had a wedding), so we crowded into a few stores and sampled the wares, and watched people point at me and wonder what I was doing there. One little kid actually said, "Look mom, a foreigner!" To which I replied, "Yes, a foreigner, imagine that." And watched the shocked expressions as they realized that at least a few of us can speak Chinese.

This weekend's destination: Zhonghe. Actually, I have no clue what is interesting about Zhonghe - as far as I know, absolutely nothing - but I'll let you know when it proves otherwise.

.......Tidings of Comfort and Joy (happy July)

2004-07-27T13:25:00.000-05:00

I'm in an internet cafe, listening to a sappy Mandarin love song that is, oddly, to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas." Now I'll be wandering around all day humming, "oh tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy...."

Last week I went to see "shi mian mai fu" - a moving with the English title, "The House of Flying Daggers," which is so not a direct translation. It is the latest Zhang Yimou flick to assail East Asia (for the uninitiated, he's the director of Hero, which he made specifically to please audiences on both sides of straits and the Pacific - Jet Li in a classic Chinese Qin dynasty story - and which was uniformly declared around the world, by everyone except for pretentious US film critics, to be a terrible movie).

I don't know how many classic mainland Chinese movies everyone has seen, but there are certain conventions. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon sort of explifies these conventions done reasonably well - it begins with a declaration of what dynasty the story is from and a claim that it is all completely true. Then they introduce some sort of martial arts school from somewhere obscure with specific talents that is either working for or against the government (depending on whether the government in question is thought to be good or bad). From there it spirals into a totally ridiculous plot with lots of beautifully correographed fighting, a love story that ends tragically, and at least one sequence that involves a large group of people suspended high in the air in a bamboo grove.

In yet another ill-fated attempt to appeal to all of Greater China, Zhang picked a lead actress from the mainland (Zhang Ziyi, no relation to the director, also star of Crouching Tiger and, of course, Hero), the Cantonese actor par excellence from Hong Kong Andy Lau (whom I loved in "Needing You" and less so in "Magic Kitchen," - which was not about him, but a showcase for F4 hunk Jerry Yan - but this is a bit of a stretch for him), and seriously handsome Taiwanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro (whose father is Japanese, hence the name).

I'm told that this time, at least, mainlanders loved this movie - found it (and I quote) "very moving." Taiwanese, by contrast, laughed themselves silly. Bear in mind, it is a drama. The cross-straits cultural gap widens, it seems, but, I admit, I giggled and snorted right along with Taiwan. My absolute favorite scene was right at the end, when the two men are fighting (literally) over the girl, whom one has already killed with a dagger through the heart. After about ten minutes of fighting during an unexplained summer snow storm (hey, these things happen), this poor girl pops up out of the snow and starts to talk. She's done for, and we all know it, but it seems that much like the average opera diva, she can't just die and be done with it. She still has things she needs to say, and, more importantly, a dagger to pull out of her heart and threaten someone else with. Ridiculous? Yup. Unbelievable? Sure, but the movie crossed that line in the first ten minutes. Completely fun? Absolutely - and therefore I recommend it very highly for anyone in the mood for a good time and an entertaining two and a half hours.

On the subject of cultural differences...

I was watching an MTV "behind the music" style documentary on my favorite Taiwanese Rock band, Mayday (the ones who split up for two years to go do their mandatory military service, and are now back, and going strong), and was amused by the section on their farewell concert (the "gee you're in the army now" send-off concert) from 2001. Chen Shui-bian (the President of Taiwan) attended, and the band's lead singer commented reflectively that that was the kind of event that he felt would "bring honor to his ancestors."

And about Taiwanese leaders....

The other day I tried to tell my friend Yu-Wen that I was really in the mood for some potatoes - I don't know why, but they are very hard to come by in Taiwan and occassionally I get a sort of craving. Chinese is a very direct language, so what I actually needed to say is that I feel like eating some potatoes (ma-ling-shu). Completely accidently, what I said was that I feel like eating Ma Ying-jiu, i.e. the Mayor of Taipei. Now granted, all the girls think he's dreamy (really!), but I've never counted myself among them. Now, of course, I'm in for it for the rest of the summer.

Other plans for the present: every day at the archives, evenings in class, feeling pretty warm generally, off for some hot pot on Friday. Not much else here.

The Central Role of Ice Cream in Life

2004-07-18T13:12:00.000-05:00

Current Favorite Thing About Taipei: The sign on Xinglong Road that says "Pot Plant Auction Today!" (Yes, I know they mean potted plants and not marijuana, but it makes me giggle anyway.)

Current Least Favorite Thing About Taipei: The woman in the Foreign Ministry archives who mops the carpet. Taking a regular rope mop to carpet does nothing to clean it, but it does make an irritating noise and take a ridiculously long time.

It's funny, normally I wouldn't think of myself as a terribly dumb person, but this past week has given me some food for thought. I do the most idiotic things sometimes, whether that is wearing three-quarter-length pants (capris) and flip-flops every day and then marveling at the fact that my feet have tanned to a lovely golden brown whereas my knees are still pasty white, or deciding, oddly, to go ahead and eat an overripe mango with my hands on my lunch hour, despite the high winds and the absence of any kind of knife or other necessary "fruit tools." By the time I finished, I was covered with a thin film of mango juice, running down my arms and dotting my nose, and the sticky sap was streaked through my hair. As I walked back to the archives to wash up, I wondered vaguely if the effect would be to give me highlights, like lemon juice. I'll let you know.

Really, though, the highlight was Wednesday. In general, I have come to the conclusion that there are really only two kinds of problems or difficulties: the kind that require time and energy to sort out and work through, and the kind that can be solved by ice cream. Sometimes it is difficult to determine which category a particular trial fits into; you might eat several pints of Peppermint Bon Bon before determining that the issue requires more than that, or spend days moping and wailing and feeling low, not realizing that all you really need is a trip to Dairy Queen. As a child, your parents help you divide your problems into their proper categories: this one needs to be talked out, this one requires a scoop of chocolate chip and then early to bed. A huge part of being an adult, I truly believe, is learning to do this for yourself. Learning to ask yourself: "am I really unhappy about this, in some sort of deep all-encompassing way, or is it time to go to the grocery store (or, of course, the local 7-Eleven)?" can be very, very difficult.

Last Wednesday I had an opportunity to put this concept to work. I had a really, really lousy day, by any standards. I'd trekked all the way out to the Academia Historica in Xindian - a trip that involves a bus that rarely comes - only to arrive and discover that I left my passport at home, and the passport was required to enter the building. I caught sight of the bus back to town leaving, but only to miss it; so I began a forced march in the midday heat back to the closest MRT station, about a 40 minute walk. Returning home with mild heatstroke, I had a headache and had to lie down and rest for a while. Then I took off for a library, only to get there all of 15 minutes before they closed (ridiculously early for a university library, summer or not). After my evening class, I walked to Gongguan and hopped the 236 back home - at least, I thought it was the 236. However, as I was soon to discover, simply declaring a 253 bus to be a 236 does not make it so, and I found myself in a brand new neighborhood, lost and a bit bewildered as I jumped off the bus. Had I not panicked and simply stayed on the bus, it would have circled around to my neighborhood, but I didn't know that then. Vaguely aware of where I was and unaware of any other buses that would take me the direction I wanted to go, I set off (again!) walking home, this time about 30 minutes.

At this point, however, I started to see the humor in the situation - I've never taken the wrong bus anywhere in Taiwan, how did I manage it on the one route that I ride every single day? Really, it was impressively stupid. But still, I realized, deserving of ice cream. Without ice cream, I was having a terrible day and walking home against my intentions in the heat, and still suffering a bit of a headache, and you can just add this day to all the other research issues that have come up here in Taiwan.... But with ice cream, the day was over, tomorrow I could try again, everyone in Taiwan would be amused at my 253 bus story, and I was not trudging home so much as out for a pleasant evening walk in the direction of my apartment with a special treat in hand, which I wouldn't be allowed to eat on the bus anyway, so all's well that ends (full stop).

For anyone out there with a great deal of time on their hands, or reason to procrastinate, what follows are some of my observations on Singapore. I seem to be working backward through the summer even as time is moving forward...

One Zongzi Too Many

2004-07-08T13:01:00.000-05:00

So it's been nearly four weeks since my return to Taipei, and just 10 months after I left. I moved right back into my old room, and the combination of this and the fact that I'd been traveling pretty constantly for more than a month, meant that my first thought when I woke up that first morning in Taiwan was, where am I?? and then, having located myself, found I was unsure whether I had ever actually left, or had simply dreamed the last year. Upon contemplation, I was hoping that I hadn't dreamed it, because I didn't want to have to redo all those visits to and research at the National Archives. (editor note, added later in light of subsequent events) Be assured that procedures at the Archives applicable to lowly Georgetown history students are a bit different than they are for Sandy Berger. Our pants aren't as roomy, for one thing.

In fact, the time has really passed (as I'm sure you're all aware), and I am really back on my old stomping grounds. I even went back to my old school to register for night classes, two evenings of Chinese a week to supplement my days in the archives. Actually, it was there that I discovered that all is not the same, really: my Chinese has fallen off a bit, and requires some serious attention. You might ask what clued me in. Well, I suppose the moment was when I was about to fill out the school's registration form, and I looked across the desk and very politely asked the young women behind it if I could please borrow her nose.

The Mandarin word for pen is bi, and the word for nose is bi zi. By sliding that extra zi sound on the end, I turned a simple request into a ridiculous one. After all, everyone in Taiwan thinks I have such a pretty nose - so high - so what on earth would I want hers for?

I'm already pretty settled into a return here: days at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, evenings classes, homework, and roaming around Taipei nostalgically sampling all of my favorite foods. I've been back to our favorite Korean place, along with the best Buddhist Vegetarian Cafeteria in Gongguan, the noodle place across from church, and, of course, an all-you-can-eat hot pot restaurant. You gotta love Taiwan - it's 99 degrees every day, and we're going out for hot pot.

I arrived, this time, just ahead of Dragon Boat Festival, which means that I was just in time to eat zongzi, sticky rice, meat, and vegetables pressed into large triangular shapes the size of your fist and wrapped in bamboo leaves. To be perfectly honest, at this point I suspect I've had one zongzi too many. It is common to give them away to friends and acquaintances, and I've received a great many, not only from my friends, but even from the ladies at the archives, who heated them up and gave them to me to eat while reading (so much for document preservation, I guess. Full of festival spirit, they came around the reading room later with chocolates). I brought a zongzi with me for lunch yesterday, but when the moment came, I found I just couldn't face it.

Just when I got all settled in, however, it was off to Washington for the Fulbright orientation. I'm still just about the most tired I have ever been in my life - I'd just started adjusting to DC time, when suddenly there I was, back on a plane heading west once more. Interestingly, I had the same crew on my Tokyo-NY and NY-Tokyo flights, and they remembered me (not that I'm so interesting one must remember me out of a passenger list of 400... I think the fact that 95% of the people on the plane both ways were Asian worked in my favor) and greeted me like an old friend (well, for New Yorkers anyway. What I actually got was, "What, going back so soon? Don't you like your country?") In general I think that the US-based crews of these Northwest trans-Pacific flights much prefer Americans to Asians - some effort at training them in cultural understanding is badly needed - and whenever I fly these routes I'm always uncomfortably made into an insider in all the complaints about the other passengers. As unfortunate as this is, there are perks: on the flight from Tokyo to Taipei, the American flight attendant supplied me (in coach, of course) with a personal DVD player and my pick of movies because I looked so tired, he thought I might want a low-energy way to pass the time.

My biggest complaint about these flights, aside from flight attendants who are mean to everyone but me, is the food. I know that complaining about airline food is, by now, somewhat cliche, but I have my own specific complaint: Northwest (and many other airlines) have no concept of vegetarianism. I always order the lacto-ovo vegetarian meal, and this can have really surprising consequences. On one flight, I was served a meatless pasta and bread - all fine - but was denied the salad given everyone else on the flight. Sometimes they give me the salad, but no dressing - I'm a vegetarian, Ranch is clearly out. For breakfast I am almost always given oatmeal and peaches with a side of rolls and melons - i.e. starch and fruit with some more starch and fruit. At "snack time," it's more bread like the rest of the passengers, but unlike everyone else, no Twix bar, which is apparently not vegetarian. On flights in and out of Tokyo I am inevitably denied the standard desert in favor of a Japanese cherry gelatin (which if it really is gelatin, is less vegetarian than the chocolate cookies my neighbor eats while I watch with envy). I once nearly tackled a flight attendant in order to demand that I be given ice cream like everyone else. One of my favorites will always be the British Airways flight on which my vegetarian meal was the exact same cheese sandwhich everyone else got - except it did not come with water and a Kit-Kat. On Northwest, everyone is served a beverage with dinner - but not vegetarians, we apparently do not take in liquids. I'm sure red wine and diet coke are inherently carnivorous anyway.

Once freed from the enforced diet of eating special meals on flights, however, life got better, though I had a genuinely bizarre experience on Wednesday. So bizarre, in fact, that I'm still not sure what to make of it. Wednesday night I left the archives and headed off for my Chinese class. I was dead tired (jet lag times twenty), but the Starbucks was much too far away and I just wasn't up for sticky sweet Taiwan coffee. I stopped in 7-11 to buy Diet Coke, but discovered they only had regular. No matter, I thought, I'll just walk up the street in search of the next convenience store. Generally this works - in any Taiwan city, you can throw an NT dollar in any direction and hit a 7-11, Happy Mart, Family Mart, etc. This is why I suspect that for about a half an hour that Wednesday evening, I actually entered the Twilight Zone. I walked and walked and walked - twice as far as the Starbucks and back again - and did not see the familiar lights of any one of these chains. I was apparently too tired to make the rational choice to just buy regular coke and forget it, so I walked and walked, and walked. It took more than a half an hour before I finally saw the familiar red, orange, and green stripes of the 7-11 shining in the distance. A good thing, too, as the situation was starting to freak me out - where did all the 7-11s go?

This was an impossible task - a feat worthy of Hercules - to walk 30 minutes without finding a convenience store, and yet there I was. When I finally happened upon the store, I burst in and dashed throught the aisles, grabbing a diet coke and holding it aloft like the Holy Grail. It was only as I paid for it that the feeling came: that deep, personal embarrassment that comes of having gone to ridiculous lengths for the sake of something utterly unimportant with the sort of single-minded determination that can only be an e arly sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Today I'm not going to play around. I'm going to start at the Starbucks - it's safer.

Hot Rain in Singapore

2004-06-10T13:21:00.000-05:00

Really, all I did in Singapore is sweat and shop for souvenirs. And really, at that point, what are they souvenirs of, actually? All the good times I spent shopping for souvenirs in Singapore?

Actually, I did do a few of the requisite tourist activities, like visit museums (the Museum of Asian Civilizations is particularly recommended, though I visited the day I got in, after not sleeping at all on the flight in from London, so I dozed on their benches in between exhibits), and take the cable car up to the top of the unimpressively situated Mount Flaber (I suspect that after a week and a half of Norwegian fjords, I was particularly critical of these kinds of overgrown hills claiming mountain status), where, per my guidebook's suggestion, I sipped an overpriced Guinness and squinted at some of the islands of Indonesia, visible off in the distance. Actually, then, without any effort whatsoever - I was, after all, drinking Guinness - I picked up an Irishman. He was attempting to down the local brew, Tiger Beer, and admired my better judgement. I eventually left the Irishman on top of the mountain, however, and returned to sweating at street level.

Singapore is actually a really fascinating place to walk around, aside from the fact that the entire city feels like it was built inside the world's largest sauna, and that it is now monsoon season, so there were at times no umbrellas large or strong enough to do much good (the only real solution for venturing out on one day was to wrap your entire body in saran wrap, which, quite apart from its other impracticalities, would have been much too hot. Unlike Taiwan, where rain brings at least a brief respite from the heat, Singapore in the rain is just as hot as ever, but wet, too).

What makes it so fascinating is that it is the ultimate multicultural, multiethnic society. A Singaporean might be Chinese - as the majority are - but he or she might also be Malaysian, Indian, Indonesia, Arab, or British. There are four national languages, all equal: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. Each ethnicity has its own neighborhood; my hotel was situated in Little India, an area replete with sari shops and Hindu temples, but it was only a short walk north of Arab Street, where kabobs (alas, no Viking Kabobs here - not quite that multicultural) and mosques dominate, and women walk around in the heat in long sleeves, long skirts, and head scarves. I saw many men from the Middle East, but most of the women I saw so dressed were clearly Indonesian, so there those cultures meet in a sort of Islamic fusion.

To the west is what must be one of the largest Chinatowns in the world outside of China, though it is now - much like those in New York and San Francisco - home to a maze of tourist shops and restaurants, a few temples and native place or surname organization headquarters, and not really a dwelling place for many. As an American tourist (I'm not sure if they could tell instantly that I was American and a tourist, or if they simply figure all foreigners are American tourists, but either way), I was mobbed everywhere I went by people trying to sell me silk purses, jade wall-hangings, and the National Costume of Singapore, oddly exactly the same thing the flight attendants wear on Singapore Airlines. (About Singapore Air... they are famously strict about the physical attributes of their flight attendants. Women have to be under a certain age and weight, and are given lessons in hair and make-up along with airplane safety features. They were, in fac t, so beautiful - some of the most beautiful women I've ever seen anywhere - that I couldn't stop staring, myself. I'm sure at least one caught me checking her out, and perhaps got the wrong idea, but there was really nothing I could do. Really impressive.) I was eternally amused by how many shop owners in Chinatown were Indian, and how many in Little India were Chinese. The principle of "the grass is always greener", illustrated.

In the south of the city, just below the impressive highrise banks and companies (which, of course, towered over the humble Mount Flaber) is what is called the Colonial Center. Singapore must be one of the only former European colonies in the world that not only does not revile its original founder and oppressor, but actually celebrates him. There is a Raffles Place, Raffles shopping district, Raffles commercial square, and in the center of it all, large statue of Sir Raffles himself. The well-to-do fly Raffles Class in and out of the city-state on Singapore Air, and the museums all begin with a celebration of the great foresight of the man for plotting the straits colony. Given the fact that there had long been a community where Singapore is, perfectly positioned to harass straits traders and control the south seas, this strikes me less as foresight and more as opportunism, but to each there own. The only thing, really, not named after Raffles is the National drink, the Singapore Sling. But that, of course, was invented in the bar of the Raffles Hotel.

The national "mascot" of Singapore - as the dragon is to China, I suppose - is the Merlion ,which is, as the name implies, a lion on top with a mermaid-like tail and fin. This most auspicious and remarkable of creatures has its roots in ancient Singaporean history, that is, the meeting of the Chamber of Commerce when he was invented to stamp on souvenir key chains.

After three days, having opened my sweat glands in preparation for Taiwan in the summertime, it was time to go. Four more hours on Singapore Air ogling the flight attendants - really, so amazing - and I was back in Taipei.

ETC., ETC.

2003-08-03T13:26:00.000-05:00

8/3/03

As I was walking through the Gongguan night market on my way to the bus stop, it occurred to me that at this time next week I'd be on a plane. This led to a series of deep musings about leaving, the transitory nature of life, and the size of the world. Of course, then it occurred to me that today is Sunday and my flight home is next week Monday, so actually at that time next week I'd not only still be in Taiwan, but very likely walking my dad through the Gongguan night market. This shattered the reflective mood for me, of course, and goes to show how in-depth ponderings can be completely ruined by bad math.

I'm busy packing up these days, and I've noticed that I seem to be bringing home more things from Korea than from Taiwan. So far, the list includes: a Korean World Cup Soccer t-shirt (a gift), an elaborate wall hanging (also a gift), a series of souvenirs from Seoul, a six pack of Kimchi-flavored instant noodles (gift, of course, but one causing some packing concerns: where can I put them that they won't become kimchi-flavored dust by the time I get home?), "My Sassy Girl" - both the movie (in Korean with Chinese subtitles) and the soundtrack (mostly Korean), "Red Bean Girl in Love" - a thirteen hour Korean soap opera dubbed in Chinese on VCD (I admit I went out and bought this - looked a long time for it too. But it stars my absolute favorite male Korean soap star, Jin Zai Yuan), a small collection of Jin Zai Yuan photos, posters, and a calendar (all gifts from Korean and Taiwanese friends who claim I'm the first American ever to have a crush on a Korean soap star, which I just don't believe. The problem, as I see it, is that most Americans have never watched Korean soaps, and we don't really get Korean TV in the US anywhere outside of the C.I.A. headquarters), a small bag of extra spicy Korean hot pepper paste (gift), and two large bags of extra spicy Korean hot pepper powder.

Actually, that last item has me a bit worried. Does a pound and a half of hot pepper paste belong in my checked luggage or my carry on? Either way, it looks a little weird... I don't want the American customs officials suspecting me of smuggling exotic drugs (or the common kind, just dyed red to throw them off). Everyone here has been joking that one look at all the hot pepper and the US Customs people will be convinced I'm coming from Korea... I just don't have the heart to tell them that no one in the US knows to associate Korea with hot peppers, and will more likely think it's all up from Mexico (thereby doubling the drug smuggling suspicions... ). If anyone has any sage advice on this issue, I could use it.

Actually, I've spent so much time hanging out with Koreans lately I sometimes forget that I'm still in Taiwan, myself. It seems, on occasion, that I simply dreamed that flight home from Seoul in May. My new experience has led me to add to my past understanding of Korean culture, particularly Korean drinking culture, which is (as mentioned in past messages), impressively elaborate. For instance, I had though that the drunken singing and dancing was somewhat restricted to Karaoke situations, but I learned on an all-day cook-out excursion that this is not the case. Anywhere there is alcohol and drinking Korean men, there will be singing, whether this is crowed springs at Wulai or a Hsintian road-side restaurant, where the unfortunate non-Korean patrons find themselves shoveling in their food in order to save themselves from sitting through the full performance. Music and a microphone in an established Karaoke establishment are, it turns out, simply added pluses, but completely extraneous when the spirit to sing moves in their tipsy hearts.

Actually, the Korean definition of "cook out" also proved to be closer to Taiwan than the US, as it included frying meat in frying pans on portable butane gas burners, accompanied by rice and, of course, lots of hot pepper paste. "Korean-style" also means wrapping up grilled meat in leaves of lettuce (with pepper paste), and eating the "sandwiches" that result. Not, of course, liking meat, my friend Kailang gave me a hand by rescuing random mushrooms and carrots from the frying pans and depositing them in my rice bowl. Flat ground for cooking out is also apparently too easy, because our chosen site was literally in the wilderness in the side of the mountain. I had to answer Kailang's phone at one point because he was ten feet away.... straight up, and there was just no way to get there. There is nothing like balancing on a rock in 100 degree heat and licking the hot sauce off your disposable chopsticks to give you that "summer barbeque feeling."

Mid afternoon it started to rain, and for about an hour and a half I was grateful for the male chauvinism that is inherent in Korean culture. Not only were all hats and umbrellas immediately handed over to the girls present (about six of us altogether with about 20 guys. We included one Korean wife, one Japanese wife - a very special relationship, for those of you up on East Asian history, three Taiwanese girlfriends, and me, the "guest" of one of the Korean guys), but when it was decided the rain wasn't going to let up, we were led back over a stream and to a shelter so that the men could do all the cleaning up and carting of cooking implements back to the car. There were not enough umbrellas, so I wore a rather large sombrero that sheltered not only me but one person on either side of me - laugh all you want, but I've started to think of these hats as a reasonably useful purchase. Of course, as soon as the rain stopped, all that male ego immediately started to drive me nuts again :)

All of these Korean adventures and Korean souvenirs aside, however, I really am still in Taiwan. Most of my time is taken up by finishing research tasks and getting ready to go, but I'm delighted to note that even after a year here I continue to make new discoveries about this island. For instance, for 12 months I had not been aware that there is a well posted warning at most subway entrances in Taipei informing the MRT-riding public that they are not permitted to wear ice skates in the station or on the train.

In-line skates are also forbidden, but I can't help but wonder about the ice skates. Has it really been such a problem in the past that they feel the need to post a sign? Given the fact that a great many of Taiwanese have never seen ice outside of their beer glasses (unfortunate but common habit in Taipei bars), where are they getting the idea to roam around town in ice skates? Where do you even buy ice skates in Taiwan? This is not a standard night market purchase, and usually anything worth having can be found in a night market. I'm starting to wonder if maybe Taipei didn't lift it's regulations from another city and not bother adjusting for the local climate.

If the government workers in the transportation department are a bit too busy to write their own subway ridership regulations, however, I can't help but think they could delegate the task to another government bureau with maybe a little less to do. An excellent candidate, in my opinion, would be the R.O.C. Commission for Tibetan and Mongolian Affairs. If you think your federal or state government is overladen with extraneous committees, they've got nothing on these guys. A remnant from the days when the government of Taiwan was still claiming to be the government of all of China, the office is a mirror for a similar bureau in the government of the People's Republic of China. But while the PRC government is actually exercising day-to-day control over both Tibet and Inner Mongolia, Taiwan has very little to say or do re Tibetan policy. Mostly, the bureau is in charge of the entrance visas for Tibetan and Mongolian nationals (who, of course, are rarely issued exit permits by the PRC, meaning for light consular paperwork in this bureau) and runs a small museum dedicated to these two unique cultures.

The saddest part of this, I think, is that if the ROC did finally admit that this commission is, in fact, a dinosaur and about as useless as anything in the world of government bureaucracy can be and close it down, China would protest or fire a few missiles. As much as China detests Taiwan's claims to Mainland China, it is better than releasing all claims and claiming independence. But the next time any one of you is exercising some self-pity and complaining about your job being worthless or meaningless or making no major contribution to the Grand Scheme of Things, just think about this poor commissioner and the dozen or so people on his staff. If they get outta bed every morning and go to work, so can we all.

Just in the nick of time, I finally got down the east coast of Taiwan to visit the lovely coast side city of Hualian. Hualian is a well-known gateway to Taroko Gorge, i.e. the Most Famous Tourist Attraction in Taiwan. If you've never been to the gorge, you've never been to Taiwan.... or so the Hualian bureau of tourism likes to claim. So last Sunday and Monday Yuwen and I took off for a quick two day adventure.

We checked into our Guomindang (the dominant political party) established "hotel", and immediately decided that they were not accustomed to having foreign guests. My reason for suggesting this is that the three women behind the counter stared at me, stared and stared and stared. Finally, one of them spoke: she asked Yuwen to tell me that I have a "very beautiful nose." In my entire life, I have never give much thought to my nose, so I admit I was startled but quickly thanked her myself. This, of course, earned me all sorts of praise for my Chinese, but the topic quickly reverted back to my nose, which was "so high," and "so narrow." Uncomfortable, we got out of there and headed over to the bus station to wait for a bus to take us into the gorge. Sitting at the bus stop - about an hour and a half later, having stopped for lunch - an elderly man came right up to me, looked me over, and then said (in Chinese - he just assumed I understood), "You have a very pretty nose."

The first comment was random, but after the second I couldn't help but start to think that maybe I've got something here. I've never thought of my nose as my best feature, but perhaps I should start. Of course, all week since then Yuwen has been teasing me relentlessly about my nose. She even convinced a merchant at the Jade Market Saturday to give me a slightly cheaper price on a piece of Jade on account of my "lovely nose."

Monday morning we took the public bus up to Tianhsian, a common starting place for exploring Taroko Gorge. We looked in vain for the variety of hiking paths that apparently start up there, and, giving up, decided to walk the highway. Being a tiny road, often wide enough for only one car, that is cut into the side of a mountain high above the gorge, the walk along the highway was filled with spectacular scenery, and we ended up feeling smarter than we had any right to. We were so entranced by our surroundings that we walked to whole way fromTianhsian to Taroko park entrance - about 23 kilometers (14 miles) not counting the side paths we were constantly exploring. Given the heat in Taiwan in late July, not to mention the distance, it should not, perhaps, be surprising that we were the only ones out walking the highway, but we enjoyed ourselves anyway. Neither of us had ever walked through a highway tunnel before - driven, of course, but never walked - so we kept count each time we reached a new one. We walked a total of 29. Because walking into a tunnel was like walking into natural air conditioning, the fact that they lacked fabulous scenery did not prevent the tunnels from becoming a favorite part of the trip.

Back in Taipei last week, Yuwen and I had one other adventure. We heard about a bar advertising that on Friday it would have "live music," and curious about what kind of sound it'd be, we went. It turned out to be a band of five middle-aged guys and one gal, singing a bizarre assortment of classic rock, country-western and easy-listening hits from the late 1970s (think Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder) in English. You haven't lived until you've heard "The Girl from Ipanema" sung live with an affected twang and a thick Chinese accent. They sang one Chinese song all night, at my request, and mostly because they wanted to reward me for being able not only to speak Chinese, but write out my request in Characters that were, "prettier that theirs."

Okay, don't even tell me about all the spelling errors and split infinitives in this message. I'll improve my English once I get back home.

Copyright 2004 by Meredith Oyen