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 03

We spent today setting up our studio spaces and buying cell phones. I have 50 Yuan on my new phone. How many minutes is that? No idea. Absolutely none. Nobody else knows either. So we're just waiting until we run out to see approximately how long 50 Yuan gives us. But I am now the proud new owner of a Motorola C118. It cost 90 Yuan, which is a bit over $10. Then another 50 Yuan for a sim card (with the minutes on it), and I was good to go. This is apparently how Chinese people get their phones. No contracts, no credit cards, just good old fashioned cash for goods. Here's how it works: You walk into the first room of the electronics store where they sell sim cards. They flip open a binder with pages and pages of phone numbers written on it with prices next to them. The prices are all different, not for how many minutes are associated with the card, but for how lucky the digits in the number are. So, and I'm completely serious here, I saw a number on one page that ended in 8808, and it was 1300 Yuan. That's almost $200. I took one that ended in 1536 (it was the cheapest one not taken on the first page, and it's similar to my grandparents’ address), and it cost $50 Yuan. It had $50 Yuan worth of minutes on it. The 8808 number also had $50 Yuan on it. No difference but whether or not you get hit by a bus in the near future. Actually, it’s not a bad deal. But I’m just going to take my chances.
--Getting hit by a bus is not all that farfetched. I can’t believe what I’m seeing when I’m in a cab or walking on the street. There is an obvious pecking order strictly related to size on Chinese streets. Buses rule like iron-fisted lions. If a bus is coming your way, I don’t care if you are rolling around in a Sherman tank, you get your butt up on the sidewalk. Cabs occupy the next rung down, and will literally push people on scooters and bicycles out from in front of them with their bumpers. Next come all kinds of the teensiest little ‘cars’ that ever did putt. They are shaped exactly like cars back home, but at two-thirds scale. My favorite automobile on the road is a minivan (and I mean that so very literally) that looks like those 80s Mitsubishi box-vans with the little wheels, but they are so small that only two people can fit side to side in the seats. Just a driver and passenger shoulder to shoulder up front, and two similar seats in back. The wheels look like they came from a 1960s Mini Cooper. I can’t tell you how hilarious it is to find one of these things rolling up on you at 50km/hr, horn blaring like a stuck pig, 4 feet wide, 5 feet tall, weaving between the bicycles with a bus complex, expecting the cab you’re in to just hop out of the way. Sorry, little dude, we eat you for breakfast. Go find a sidewalk to play on. Before I came here I thought it might be a good idea to pick up a cheap bicycle just to get around town. Now I’m not so sure. Even though there are tons of bikes on the streets at all times, I think the idea of being ended by one of these ovens on wheels would just be too embarrassing to handle. I heard that if you are run over by a car that you could otherwise pat on the head and read a bedtime story to, you are forever relegated to a special in-between place.
--So I hope everyone is doing well. I’m managing to survive. Tomorrow we look for apartments.
*UPDATE*
--Oh man. Dinner was crazy. Think of any vertebrate animal on land or in the ocean, and it probably met its demise for our dinner, whole and smoking. Turtle, crab, duck, fish, pig, rabbit, chicken, tofu. Whole. Smoking. They clearly just grabbed whatever they could find out back, threw it in the fryer, and slapped it down on a plate. I was out to dinner with 6 other people at our professors' favorite restaurant. It came highly recommended. I think they were messing with us. We spent so much time working the tiny bit of meat out from between the myriad bones, shells, and exoskeletons, that by the time it got to our mouths, we'd forgotten why we came to China in the first place. By the way, I'm not quite sure how they did it, but the tofu was the worst dish of the night. It smelled. Exactly. Like dirty pig butt. And I know it smelled. Exactly. Like dirty pig butt, because one of the guys at the table, when attempting to discern what this awful stench emanating from the tofu bowl was, exclaimed, "Oh, I know! I used to own a pig. And that's. EXACTLY. What his butt used to smell like! I knew I recognized that stench!" To the point where we had to continually shift the tofu on the lazy suzan to the one empty spot at our 8 person table, because otherwise the stench would waft past the other non-food on your plate and make the whole thing rear-endy. We tried to wash it down with liquid, but the water we asked for came steaming hot. So we ordered wine, which came even hotter and in a special double-decanter full of boiling water that the hot wine container sat in to keep it nice and hot. The hot fumes from the hot water and the hot wine mixed with the gag-inducing butt-soy stench and the interminable cracking and spitting out of bones, shells, and exoskeletons. I can still smell it, and now I'm both incredibly hungry and incredibly not. 300 Yuan ($40) total for all seven people. What a bargain.
-c