ChinaBlog Day 11

Sorry if the previous post seemed crass and insensitive. I am only just now learning the extent of the damage. At the time I was just writing what I experienced. Now I read it knowing the magnitude of devastation and feel guilty. But this is the story of what happened to me, and all I can write is what I felt at the time given the information I had available, which was pretty much none. I certainly don't want to be making jokes about this disaster. I hope you all understand my intention with yesterday's post. Thanks.
-c

ChinaBlog Day 06

I’ve been in China for 6 days now, and I haven’t really hit that point where I’m struck by just how different this place is, or been enamored specifically by the idea of being on another side of the world. It’s so comfortable here, so giving and safe, inexpensive, frenetic, and alive, that no matter how many people pull me aside on the street to take a picture with me I just can’t feel like a fish out of water. That happens, by the way. Sometimes they giggle over and ask politely for a picture with the giant albino monster from the West, or sometimes I turn around and find a foot long lens in my face. I just continue what I’m doing and let them get their candid shots. Let’s be honest, I do the same thing to them a dozen times a day, when I pass an old woman cooking dumplings on her front doorstep, or find a man sitting in an alley sharpening an ancient butcher knife on a 200 year old whetstone. We’re all learning from each other here. I get to see the way we’re really supposed to interact with this planet, making your own things, never throwing anything away (they don’t sell disposable cups here. You just can’t find them), and tremendous respect for craft and efficiency, not salary and accumulation of useless things. And they get to see what it looks like when the gene pool ambles drunkenly through the forest for a few hundred generations. There’s a reason people from the west keep coming back from here changed. It’s a totally refreshing and natural way of thinking about the purpose of life. Families live in the same house for centuries, and children playing in a narrow, lively alley can know that not just their grandparents, but their ancestors played the same games as children in the same streets. There is such a connection with the past that they literally worship it. Back in the somethingorothers, Jesuit priests came over here to China and were accepted with open arms. The Chinese knew there was a lot to learn from each other. But eventually, the priests were here to convert the Chinese, and insisted that their spiritual focus on ancestors should be pushed aside in favor of the one god system, and the Chinese kept asking if they could just keep the one god to the side as a sort of lightning-throwing, bearded, toga-wearing Fonzie, cool and well respected, but always secondary to family and history. This sticking point got worse, and eventually the Jesuits left disappointed. But imagine if you took the notion that everyone from your family kept on watching and guiding you as you lived your life. These are real, tangible people who you may have known for a time. It just feels so much more powerful than some impossibly large figure twisted and manipulated by millennia of Western men and their selfish power struggles. It’s easy to see why I can leave my computer unattended in an unlocked studio space here and feel completely comfortable going away for hours.
I feel like the main Chinese version of petty theft is trying to get ignorant foreigners to buy cheap knock-offs thinking they’re the real deal. “Zhen de jia de?” is a phrase we were taught on the first day. It means “Real, or fake?” You ask it to the market seller. If they answer, “zhen de,” real, then you know it’s fake. If they answer with a string of swear words, then you know it’s real, and you’ve just insulted them, but you can’t afford it anyway, so just say “dui bu qi,” sorry, and walk away sheepishly. The black market for ‘fakes’ is so pervasive here that the bed sheets in my apartment are covered in the Louis Vuitton logo. And they were probably bought at the corner supermarket. Whatever the back alley copy machines do to leather-stamped wallets of major fashion houses, it doesn’t rip your credit cards from your pocket at gunpoint, and it doesn’t lend itself to a society of fear.
Unless you count the cabbies. The traffic here is completely different from home, no matter what city you live in. There is a strict set of rules on the road, but they have not a lot to do with the laws set forth by the government. Instead, the system is based on efficiency and getting where you need to go as quickly as possible. And it works surprisingly well. There is often not more than three inches between the cars/bikes/people/buses/ovens, but if you really pay attention to what’s not there, you’ll see a city free of dents, accidents, and abnormal levels of turmoil.
Lastly, speaking of abdominal turmoil, we ate from a Pizza Hut last night. It is a little kiosk-sized opening in the surrounding din that, were it not for a gaudy red Formica countertop, might be mistaken for any combination of Kinko’s, Boxes and More, and The UPS Store. We ordered a ‘large’ pizza, which clearly stated on the menu that it was 12’ across. I was impressed. At that size, it would not only break the door frame even if it were removed from the place vertically, it would require a remodel of the entire shop and the ones to either side, which, oddly enough, are a Boxes and More and a UPS Store. We were a little worried that we would not be able to finish the thing off in one night, even with our insistence to the confused man behind the copy machines that we were desperately uninterested in having sea cucumber slivered liberally across our massive pie. But for 72 Yuan, or just over $10, it seemed like the leftovers might be necessary to make this meal worthwhile. Ten minutes later the man emerged triumphantly from the back oven/plotter room and handed us a bag with a tiny, flat box in it. We checked to see that we were still not next door (this looking like the ‘Boxes’ offering, naturally). 72 Yuan later, we had our ‘large’ 12” pizza, which actually measured 12” only if you include the box it came in and the surrounding air rights acquired by the pizza in a string of shady 1980s land deals. We turned the tiny thing on edge and the three of us carefully passed it through the door, more out of a confused sense of dashed expectation than true necessity, and each took a side as we crab-walked our little sauced-up coaster back to the apartment and the sad eyes of all five who live here. We each tweezed ourselves a slice and sucked on it until the nutrients were gone, then stood in the living room staring at each other in silence. Did we just eat something? And so, with an inexplicable craving for sea cucumber, I went to bed.
-c

ChinaBlog Day 01

China. Wow. It’s an actual place. Really! Despite its almost mythical stature in Western culture (look down at your feet…if you had a shovel and an undauntable will, you could dig into my hotel room), I find this place to be utterly real, perhaps more so than my own Los Angeles. Ok, that’s not a fair comparison. But what the Western media has taught me to expect here – povertous people enslaved by their human-rights-abusing masters, oppressive watchtowers and camera banks, extreme government oversight, pollutive, unstoppable masses – have so far been less than pervasive. What I found when I stepped off the plane in Beijing was a gigantic (and I cannot use this word strongly enough), almost completely deserted (and I cannot use these words strongly enough), brand new (again) airport that was as modern, easy to navigate, and efficient as any in the world. But I feel like I’m getting ahead of myself.
--I am in Beijing. It’s located in the armpit of China, if you think of China’s arm as having been stumped by Russia during some previous offensive. Or maybe it is in the neck of China, if you think of China as a pregnant woman with morning sickness and a large backpack, vomiting out Korea. In any case it’s a northern city, about 100 km from the Yellow sea, at about the same latitude as Seoul and Portland. It is cooler and less humid than other parts of China, and when I landed, it was 59 degrees and raining. There. Now you know exactly where I am.
--My trip here actually began the moment I turned in my Thesis Prep book on Friday, April 25th at 4 pm. I then had exactly 6 days and 20 hours to prepare for my flight on Friday, May 2nd at 12 noon. It was not enough time. I had almost completely ignored the fact that I was on a path to the other side of the world until some guy in administration tried to pull the 40-page Thesis manuscript from my sweaty, trembling fingers. Holy crap. I’m going to China. My first step was to go home and stare blankly at an empty suitcase. I knew that in a week’s time, it and another would be filled with everything I needed for two months, perfectly organized, labeled, and folded. I pictured it in my mind, ‘full suitcase, full suitcase, full suitcase’. I went to bed. When I awoke, it was still there in the corner, gaping its massive hole at me like a hungry grouper. Five days later, I owned a couple new pairs of pants, a new shirt, new shoes, a haircut, some travel books, a box of power bars, a cavernous, empty, useless, stupid suitcase, and an incurable sense of foreboding. I went to bed.
--I spent the last day in a kind of utter denial that cannot be deterred, beaten down, redirected, permeated, circumvented, or explained. I tried everything I could to make headway. I called all my credit card companies to tell them I was leaving the country. I went to the AT&T store to make sure I could use my phone on another planet. I washed every article of clothing I own. I went out to lunch with my friend. I stared at my big fish in the corner thinking ‘full suitcase, full suitcase, full suitcase’. Nothing worked. At 11 pm, I finally decided that perhaps the best option was to physically start feeding the monster. By hand.
--All night I worked, folding, packing, folding, and packing. I made a list. I checked things off from it. I was like a Gap employee who moonlights as an elf for Santa. Fold, pack, fold, pack. It was glorious. When the sun finally kissed the nestled dew betwixt the bloomed leaves, I was half done and frantic. But somehow, after a full week of procrastination and a full night of stuffing fish, I had a full suitcase just in time to throw everything into the car and head to the airport.
--The flights (I had a quick first leg to SFO) were uneventful. To a fault. When I boarded the Air China 747 to Beijing, I sat down in my window seat next to a nice couple from Livermore, and fell asleep. 5 hours later, I woke up with a start to find I had missed dinner. The nice couple from Livermore thought I looked so peaceful all snoring and drooly, so they decided not to wake me for the meal. What a nice couple from Livermore. I pulled out my book and began to read, but the story didn’t make any sense after a while, because soon I was the protagonist, and I had to run away from somebody, but my feet wouldn’t move. I awoke with a start, having missed, um, what can only be called dinner. Again. They served dinner at about 5 pm Pacific time. Then served almost the exact same thing at about 10 pm Pacific time. I slept again, but managed to awake with a start as they were serving, you guessed it, dinner. At about 3 am Pacific time. By this point I was so utterly confused that I had to keep opening the window shade to see if it was daylight. It was. ALWAYS. By the time we landed, I had to ask the nice couple from Livermore what day it was, and whether it was morning or evening. They patted me kindly on my greasy, tousled hair and stole my dinner.
--The new airport in Beijing is gigantic (ok, we won’t do this again). But seriously, it’s really huge and empty and easy to get around in. Every sign is in English. No problems whatsoever. I went through customs, easy, found my bags, easy, got in the 3 person line for a taxi, easy, and told the driver where I was going. Hard. I finally had to just give him the map and directions and pray. The hotel I’m staying in is just outside of the 2nd ring road (there being a concentric set of 6 ring roads radiating out from the center of the city, which is where the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square sit peacefully). The driver of the cab finally seemed like he knew where he was going. Eventually he turned off the highway for the clearly-marked exits to the 3th and 2th ring roads, which was close enough for me. After a 100km/h shot across the thirth ring road, and a bone-jarringly sharp right onto the secoth ring road, we were there, in front of the hotel. Win! Like a zombie I checked in and turned toward the elevator, shower, and bed. So badly!
--“Chris! Hey! I’m heading next door to the bar to meet up with the people from Michigan! Come on!” Sigh. That was my friend Linda who found me in the lobby. I was able to convince her that putting my full fishes in my room would be a good first move for me, but was not able to convince her that I needed to sleep. After all, it was only 8 pm. What? I don’t know. I’m still having trouble figuring out what time it is here. At that time, my cell phone said it was 4 am, my watch said it was 11 pm, and my computer said it was Friday. This morning I actually had to go online to find out exactly what time it was in Beijing and LA. It’s not just the time change, it’s also the fact that China does not observe Daylight Savings time. Confusing. I finally realized that if I just change the current Beijing time from am to pm, take three hours off, and make it yesterday, its EASY to figure out what time it is in LA (which is where my body still thinks it is). So even though it’s 9:16 am Sunday here, my fingernails think it’s 6:16 pm Saturday. Nevermind. I went to the bar.
--The Michigan people seem nice. After shooting the breeze in The Christmas Bar, decorated with horribly gaudy amounts of tinsel, lights, and fake palm trees (?), we walked and walked and walked to find a fantastic Shabu-Shabu-ish place where we 13 people absolutely stuffed ourselves for 250 Yuan. That translates to approximately $40. Total. With drinks and everything. And I think it was a kind-of-expensive place. Wow. The walk back from the restaurant was fun. We decided to cut through some very authentic local ‘streets’ that were more like ‘sidewalks’ with ‘cars driving on them’ and ‘people thronging’ in the night. It was a perfect introduction to this place. When we finally returned to the hotel, it was past midnight, and they were all going to go upstairs and get dressed to hit the local bars. I went to bed.
--It’s now 9:30 in the morning and I’ve been awake since 6 am. I think people are going to visit the Forbidden City today, so I’ll tag along. I don’t assume they’ll be up for a few more hours, however. Since I landed yesterday, I’ve just been trying to keep up. I don’t know anything about this place yet, but I already enjoy the pace with which Beijing operates. It is simultaneously bustling and calm, modern and ancient. I can’t wait to really sink my fingernails into China.
-c

Blog Setup

Hey, everyone. I'm heading off to China for two months. I leave in a week, and the first thing I wanted to do was set up a real blog to write about my experiences there. For those of you whom I didn't know two years ago, I did one for my trip to Europe, and it was a lot of fun. You can see it here: http://www.c23.blogs.friendster.com/
I now have exactly seven days to learn Mandarin, find an apartment in Beijing, wax our boat, fix my computer, move out of my school space, pack, and trim my toenails (I heard they're very strict about hygene over there. Or maybe it was papers. I should really get a visa. Anyway.). Shouldn't be a problem. I'll keep you posted as to my progress, no pun intended.
-c