The Great Wall, The X-Files, and a Race

Another pleasant weekend. On Friday, Lili, Bai Kunning and I went to the Korean place for lunch, followed by a trip to the bootleg DVD store where I bought the first X-Men movie and season 2 of the X-Files. So much dorky X-Ness! So exciting! As it turns out at least two of my 7 X-Files CDs are no good, so they will have to be returned (this often happens - you get what you pay for, I guess), but that still leaves so much X-Files goodness. I think I'm developing a problem - I just keep watching one after another until I'm so spooked I'm afraid to leave my room. Part of the problem is that I keep thinking “That was so scary -I’d better watch another one to calm myself down.” This strategy: not so smart.

After my afternoon of X-Dorkness, Lili and I joined a group of mostly fourth-year students and a couple of their teachers for Karaoke. This was a lot of fun, although the teachers made us sing a lot of Chinese songs with extremely fast subtitles, many of which were in traditional characters. We all knew the words to “Dui mian de nuhai kan guo lai,” however (my family knows this as “the Chinese harmonica song). The only other time I'd ever sung karaoke was at my uncle Greg's wedding. This was not like that - it wasn't one person onstage singing by himself: everyone sang together from the couches in a small private room.

I enjoy spending time with boys - it’s still fairly novel for me and I'm sure I am learning valuable social skills most people pick up when they are fourteen. However there are times when one wonders whose idea it was to let college boys wander free. We're in a country where not only can anybody at all drink in bars, but beer and even baijiu are available in the campus convenience store. Friday was the 21st birthday of one of the boys present, and he decided it would be a good idea to have 21 drinks - fortunately over the course of the day, not all at once, but nevertheless there was much vomiting. He at least made it to the bathroom - another boy, after too much baijiu (how much is too much, you ask? ANY BAIJIU IS TOO MUCH BAIJIU) threw up right in front of everybody in the karaoke room. Fortunately the teachers had already left, but still it was highly gross. Why on earth do you need to drink to that point? It can't possibly be pleasant. Then the vomity boy asked for a breath mint and when Lili gave him one he attempted to kiss her. EW. EW, vomity boy, that is not okay.

Another good way for boys to not endear themselves to me is to make a constant effort to ensure that no one thinks they are girls or, god forbid, homosexuals. There is something so funny and yet so pathetic about a boy who makes a big scene when people are singing a Chinese pop song, saying that the men in that group are all gay and he, the boy who is making the scene, is a MAN. A REAL MAN. “Are you a man?” I asked him at one point. “Because it is so hard to tell.” And then when somebody chose “Bye Bye Bye” by N*Sync, he was all over it, dancing and singing and it's just so stupid.

On the way home, two of the boys, strapping Yale men, decided to race back to the dorm, so I raced too. I got off to a good start, but the first boy caught up to me and said, "Do you run cross country or something?"

"No," I said.

"I'm a bit worried. I think you might win."

"No," I said again. He passed me, but I kept running steadily. The second boy caught up to me, but eventually I left him behind and overtook the first boy again. "You win," he panted. I left him behind and kept running. When I got to the dorm I found the second boy waiting for me in a cab."I win," he said. "Didn't I win?" he addressed the cab driver, who nodded. "Can I borrow 11 kuai?" he asked, turning back to me.
"Sorry," I said, "my wallet's in my bag - I gave it to Hesin to hold. I only have 2 mao." (a mao is 1/10 of a kuai.)
"Oh," he said.
"I guess you'll just have to wait for the others to catch up," I said. "In the meantime, the race is to the dorm. Bye." And I ran off, feeling a little bad for leaving him, but after all I couldn't have been much help under the circs.

So I won the race, which just goes to show that having to be in Special Gym in middle school is no indication of anything.

On Saturday we went to the Great Wall, which was extremely beautiful. It’s higher than you might think, and surrounded by mountains - quite a sight. We climbed up many steps to the top, then climbed many more steps, then finally climbed down and had a lunch of fried pancakes - not half bad. I don't know why I have so much more to say about Karaoke and the X-Files than about climbing the Great Wall, which is something I'll remember all my life and whatnot, but after all it is just a wall - we climbed it, and it was nifty, and that's sort of that. That evening Lili and I went out for a dinner of chuanr - stuff on sticks. Very spicy, very sketchy, and very inexpensive, it reminded us of our time in Sichuan, where we ate a lot of delicious chuanr. They had many different kinds of tofu - tofu pi, which is a flat, rough sheet of tofu; soft tofu, hard tofu; also many types of vegetables and non-chicken eggs. On our way back we bought sweet sticky rice on sticks from a street vendor - always a nice treat. If you ever come to China, buy food from street vendors. But don't do it right away; wait a couple of weeks until your stomach is absolutely indestructable. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and the cheapest, dirtiest restaurants are often the most delicious. That's where you'll find the dog.

Circumlocution

Me: Sometimes in the summer, my father and senior younger sister and I get up and ride our bicycles in the clear early morning. We often ride very long ... um, very long ... [hand gestures meant to indicate "distance"]
Lu laoshi: Oh! I know! You ride the American bicycles that three people can ride all at once, yes? I have seen this on television!
Me: Um, no.

Me: ... but actually it's the ... oh, what's the word, you know, like big and little, far and near, tall and ... something...
Lu laoshi: Short?
Me: Yes!
Lu laoshi: Opposite!
Me: Right! Opposite! (pause) What was I talking about?

Today I felt that if I even so much as looked at a baozi or a dacong bing I would throw up, so my roommate, Lili, Tian Kangrei and I went out for Italian food. Oh it was so wonderful! It was clean and it didn't smell like smoke and I bet you a mao that the bathroom stalls even had doors, although I didn't check. (How much effort would it be, China, to put doors on your bathroom stalls?) I had penne, cooked perfectly, with tomato sauce, garlic, basil and red peppers. "Please bring bread," my roommate said to the fuwuyuan.
"Oh my god, they have bread?!" I said. They did. It was warm, and contained yeast. I was almost reduced to tears by the beauty of it all.

After lunch we had Magnum bars and then I read some Anna Karenina and took a nap. I was woken up by the mailroom calling to tell me I had a package, which was surprisingly not from my mum but my dear Aunt Claudia and her family. So that was nice. Then I went to the gym.

Today's lesson was about "taking a morning stroll" and included much useful vocabulary like "to take one's pet bird for a walk in a quiet place" which is just two characters in Chinese, which indubitably tells you something or other. Something about birds. So tomorrow our Language Culture Practicum is to go to the park in the morning and watch people do their crazy Chinese park activities like disco dancing and Tai Ji sword dances. That should be pleasant - I love Chinese parks. Saturday we're going to the Great Wall, so if I can I'll be posting pictures by and by.

Thanks for the encouraging response to my last post. As a rule I try to keep all angst in my paper journal, but not every laowai day is corn flavored ice cream bars and sunflower seeds.

Trapped

Before I came to China, my greatest fear was that once I got here I would feel trapped. It wasn't a very practical fear - China is a very large country, not a little box- but it was a realistic one, and it has proved somewhat accurate. I didn't realize, though, the extent to which I would be trapped in my own mind - the effect of day after day unable to express myself out loud. Today I learned the word for "arm" - I will no longer have to refer to my arm as "this thing." I've been studying Chinese since I was 16! Not knowing the word for arm! Yesterday the woman who hands me my towel at the gym spent a good two minutes trying to get me to pronounce my own name correctly! Four years! I CANNOT SAY MY NAME! I'm not sure you can imagine how frustrating this is. Plus I frequently don't have internet in my room (I'm in a stupid internet bar at the moment, where apparently playing music without headphones is de rigeur and no matter how much I speak Chinese to the staff, they insist on responding in English), which makes me feel even more trapped and isolated.

In addition, I am trapped in my schedule - this whole Chinese all day every day thing is really taking its toll, especially since I am still unsure why I'm doing it in the first place. Yes, so I learned the word for "arm" today, that will be handy ... until I return to America. I feel like a hamster in a hamster wheel - studying Chinese just for the sake of studying more Chinese. And it does get easier in a way, but it doesn't get a whole lot more meaningful.

My father sent me an email yesterday asking about the food - he said he'd heard the poor-quality food here was really good and "he knows I'm really enjoying the food." It made me want to cry. Lunch today was a heavy, greasy bread made with flour, water, and egg. I want a plate of spaghetti and tomato sauce (not now, because the stupid bread is still in my stomach and I feel bogged down and ill, but, you know, someday). I want a sandwich. I want a fajita. Chinese food is all Chinese - how do they stand it? I've been to almost every restaurant in the vicinity. I've eaten every tofu dish they have. I'm so sick of bok choy with mushrooms and sauteed eggplant I could weep.

I know I'm learning as much from the bad times as the good, and the good times are still pretty thick on the ground. On the whole, I think I'm happier here than I have been in years, and the problems I have here are just slightly different versions of the problems I have in the States- there's nothing new, really. Five months from today I'm going home. Five months is not a long time.

Despite A Total Lack of Demand - More Recipes!

Today we had Chinese Lunch Table, i.e., free lunch at a restaurant with our teachers. We went to Piaoliang Beizi ("Pretty Cup": not its real name) and when the teachers asked us what we wanted, I suggested a mushroom dish that's very good there. Only instead of "mushroom" (mo GU), I said "magic" (mo SHU). Everyone was very confused.

So here are three recipes from today's cooking class. None of them are magic, but they are pretty good anyway.

Baby Tofu and Eggs

Take some eggs and a bit of salt and beat them very well in one direction. Heat up about three tablespoons of oil (all measurements are completely made up - try it and let me know, eh?) in your wok that I told you last time you need to have. Get it nice and hot. Toss in your eggs and swirl them around in the wok for about a minute, until they are clearly not raw: not translucent, but still in more or less one piece and fairly moist and quite soft. Remove from wok and put on a plate. Add a bit more oil to the wok and once it's quite hot toss in some finely chopped ginger, followed in short order by a package of very soft tofu. Mix it around until it's like scrambled eggs and add some di san xian (ask me nice and I'll mail you some) and some diced scallions.
It might interest you to know that I just totally forgot the English for "scallion" and had to look it up in my Chinese/English dictionary. This concerns me. Anyway, once you've scrambled well your tofu (oh god it's happening to my grammar, too), toss those eggs back in and add a bit of hot sauce - not Tabasco, though - but I can't think of any other kind of hot sauce you have in America. Do other families besides mine use another kind of hot sauce? I guess you can make do with Tabasco for the time being but if you can find something a bit less smoky tasting that would be best. Mix it all up until it looks quite unappetizing and put it on a plate to serve. Garnish with some more chopped up "scallions" and perhaps some chopped hot red peppers if you've any that aren't too dusty. It's better than it looks.

Da Cong Bing (Scallion Cake)

Okay. So of course our cooking instructions are given in Chinese, so I am not too sure about the repeatability of this one, because when I asked whether the yellow flour was corn, our teacher said no, it was "corn" (in English), which is different from corn because it's smaller, but it's not small corn. However, I can't think of any other sort of flour that's yellow, so we're going with corn. Also, I'm assuming you don't have any special greyish flour from Tibet, and I think semolina's too heavy, so let's try a mix of whole wheat and white flour. Still with me? Good.

In a smallish bowl, combine two parts white/wheat flour and one part "corn" flour (like you'd use for cornbread), two eggs, and a bit of water. Stir in one direction, adding flour or water as necessary, until there are no lumps and it's about the consistancy of pancake batter. Add some chopped scallions and mix well. Heat up about three tablespoons of oil in your wok and swirl it around until all surfaces of the wok are covered. Pour some batter into the wok (maybe a quarter of a cup - it's hard to work with when there's too much) and swirl it around until it's like a thick crepe. You can use your spoon to spread it if you need to. After a bit, flip it over - both sides should be lightly browned. Serve hot.

Fried Cabbage

Wash some white cabbage and chop it into bite-size chunks. Heat up some oil in your wok (a bit more this time) and get it plenty hot. Toss in your cabbage, add a bit of di san xian and some hot sauce (see above) and cook until cooked, yet still crisp. I will ordinarily not eat cabbage but this is actually pretty good.

Sweeping the Dirt

Yesterday ACC arranged for us to go see a "Chinese Play" - actually it was "The Playboy of the Western World" by JM Synge, translated into Chinese and set in Beijing. It was very odd, and obviously I didn't understand most of what they were saying, but thanks to the English plot summary handed out at the door I was able to follow most of the plot. It concerns a man who turns up at a beauty parlor (I think in the original, Irish version it was a bar) claiming to have killed his father, which everybody thinks is very exciting and they decide to let him hide out there and all the women try to seduce him. The best part was when the four women in go-go boots and miniskirts started dancing spastically to Chinese pop music and pouring beer on the playboy. I have no idea what that was all about, but it struck me as very Asian.

When I got home, I dined on Convenient Noodles and crackers and started watching a Jeeves and Wooster, but then Lili came by and my roommate, who had been watching a movie, said we had to listen for a minute and unplugged her headphones. "Please don't," I said, but I think she thought I was kidding, and before I knew it we were watching Scary Movie 2, which is a spoof on horror movies, and which I do not think anyone reading this would enjoy. It was extremely excessive and gross, and I didn't understand any of the references (except one which I think was a reference to The Canterbury Ghost - is that possible?) but somehow I found myself laughing from time to time. A sort of "I can't believe this is happening" sort of laughter.

Then we watched a very strange movie called Palindromes, which significantly messed with my head. It was rather intense and had some very upsetting subject matter, but it was interestingly done. The main character was played by about ten different actresses of different ages and races. Sometimes she was a very large black woman, sometimes a skinny white girl with long red hair, etc. This was not as confusing as I expected it to be.

This morning I went to the gym. I'm trying to get back in my routine, which was thrown off by our trip to Sichuan and the midterm before that. As I ran on the treadmill I listened to Dressy Bessy and watched about half a dozen women in blue jackets sweeping the dirt outside. This is very Chinese. People sweep the dirt all the time. I saw a woman sweeping the dirt on Mt Emei, which was even stranger, somehow, than sweeping city dirt. When you sweep the dirt, how can you tell when you're done? There's not going to be any less of it. Perhaps it's simply meant to serve as an extremely obvious metaphor for life.

Losing

Hello. I am in China. There are many people in China, many many, but there are also many people who are elsewhere, people who mean a lot to me, or who did once, or who could have, almost. People come and go so quickly at this age. Firstyears start college, seniors graduate, juniors go abroad. I am twenty years old and I have lost so many people already.

A good thing to do under these circumstances is to listen to a lot of Stars.

Today Lili and I went to Mai Hou (so called because it is behind (houmian) Mai Dang Lao (McDonalds) – several of the local restaurants have nicknames like that) and had scrambled eggs with tomatoes (the best in town), homestyle tofu, and because Lili thought I needed cheering up (see above) sweet little disks of some sort of gooey substance, possibly bean paste or pumpkin. The conversation kind of went like this:

Me: He’s gone. He’s never coming back.

Lili: Yes, it’s very sad.

Me: I don’t understand! How can he not be coming back?

Lili: These things happen.

Me: He didn’t even say goodbye! I am very sad!

Lili: It is okay to be sad.

Me: He’s never coming back. I do not understand.

It was probably extremely boring for her but she’s a good friend like that. However, to put it in perspective, this week’s movie class is To Live, which you should absolutely see even though it will tear your heart out. I don’t think any movie has ever given me a better understanding of Chinese history. And then to cheer yourself up you should watch Needing You with Andy Lao, Hong Kong’s dreamiest actor. You have your orders, get to it.

Don't Make the Pandas Angry

Hello, lI am back. Sichuan was absolutely breathtaking – by far the most beautiful place I have ever seen. The train ride was very pleasant – we had sleeper booths, which was kind of nifty. I was on top, and climbed up and down so much my classmates kept calling me “monkey.” We kind of all had monkeys on the brain, since we’d been warned about the wild monkeys of Emei Shan, who will steal your glasses and camera and rummage through your bag looking for food. I passed a very pleasant thirty-odd hours reading What Maisie Knew, looking at the beautiful and varied Chinese countryside, listening to music, and sleeping. Here are some things you can buy on the train from Beijing to Sichuan:
· Very spicy ramen noodles
· Fireproof socks
· Toothpaste
· Playing cards
· Musical gyroscopes
· Hard boiled eggs
Our hotel in Chengdu was very nice, with extremely comfortable beds. Our first day, we went to Dujiangyan, a very large, very old irrigation facility. The weather was wonderful, and we wandered around in t-shirts, eating ice cream and taking pictures. After lunch, we went to Qingsheng Shan, a sacred Taoist mountain. Most people took the cable car up, but I and about ten other people went on foot, passing other hikers and pilgrims and the occasional shrine or temple. Sichuan is famous for its fog, so the view from the top wasn’t too spectacular, but it was very beautiful anyway.

The following day, we went to Leshan to see the giant Buddha. It is indeed a very large Buddha, far and away the largest I have ever seen. That evening we went out for xiao chi, which is supposed to be a Sichuanese specialty, but I was disappointed that none of it was very spicy. Sichuan food is famous for spiciness, but our tour guides had arranged all our meals to not be spicy, and it was a little vexing.

Third day, third mountain – Emei Shan, one of China’s most important Buddhist mountains. A group of people went all the way to the top, but I didn’t – I didn’t have the right equipment or anything. Emei Shan was very beautiful and sacred and full of wild monkeys. “Do not touch him! Do not touch him!” a monkey-staff person told me.

“I am really, really not going to touch him,” I replied.

At the base of Emei Shan we had a really horrible lunch of flavorless, slimy tofu cubes, bitter greens, and fish that had seen better days. To make up for it, that evening a large group of people went to a Tex-Mex restaurant in Chengdu: Peter’s. It was quite expensive, as foreign food tends to be in China, but it was well worth it. Fajitas, nachos, half a strawberry margarita – I am aware that I am in China but I still have another six months of mapo dofu and xihongshi chao jidan, one night of Tex-Mex isn’t going to kill me.

The next day Lili, Kangrei and I went to see the giant pandas. They were extremely cute, so cute one can almost forgive them for their stubbon refusal to thrive – they will only mate once a year, they rarely mate in captivity, of China’s hundreds of types of bamboo they will only eat a couple, and if she gives birth to twins, the mother will generally kill one of them. This is not good planning, pandas. That evening we went to what the hotel staff claimed was the most authentic Sichuanese restaurant available. I am in no position to doubt it – we had slippery black noodles that burned my throat and set my ears on fire, shrimp chuan, mapo dofu, sweet and hot tofu, and all of it was so hot I had to slowly sip corn-flavored yogurt beverage and rice, and the tears poured down my cheeks. It was great.

Thursday I went by myself to Wenshu Yuan, an ancient but still active Buddhist monastary in the center of Chengdu. It was very lovely and quiet and peaceful. There were middle aged women doing tai qi, worshipers chanting and burning incense, and monks (both male and female) with their shaved heads and brown and yellow robes. I spent a long time there, drinking green tea and writing in my journal, and had lunch in their vegetarian restaurant. The Chinese are masters of fake meat – I had pea leaves (which made me miss my mother) and a strange dish consisting of onions, cucumber, and fake meat ranging from odd looking but realistically-textured fake shrimp to what I could absolutely swear was roast duck skin, complete with fat, to completely unidentifiable reddish, spongelike cubes. Very strange. That evening I went with a large group of ACC students to a rather fancy Sichuanese restaurant, which was great fun, since my roommate was there and she is one of the world’s funniest people. She is the sort of person, moreover, who inspires those around her to unusual levels of funniness, so it was a very merry meal.

Yesterday, our last day in Sichuan, Lili and I visited the home of ancient Chinese poetess Xue Tao, where we looked at bamboo and accidentally ordered the world’s most expensive tea. We sat with our tea and talked for a very long time to get our money’s worth out of these tea leaves, which were good, but tea is tea, really. Then we returned to the neighborhood of our hotel and bought incredibly, almost fatally spicy tofu kebobs from a street vendor and made friends with a Chinese girl who showed us the way to the post office.

So that was Sichuan. I’m sick now, so I think I’ll be taking it easy for awhile, but apart from that I feel great – very rested and centered and ready to return to the mammoth task of learning this peculiar language.