Endings

And it's over. Yesterday was our exam, which I finished in record time (I was, as always, the first out of the room) and then went to get a haircut.

One thing that I will kind of miss is the exchange rate. In America, I would never get my hair cut in a place where they give you a beverage, but in China, I was able to enjoy my coffee and chat with the guy cutting my hair about Chinese and American standards of beauty and it was only about $15. When he had finished, he held up the mirror and I saw that, horror of horrors, I'd been mulletted.

"Um ... oh," I said. "Actually, could you go shorter in the back? The back should definitely not be longer than the front."

He was dubious, but complied, and the final result makes me very happy.

That afternoon was our graduation ceremony, where, among other things, the fourth year teachers described the students and people were supposed to guess who they were. Mine was "This student brilliantly rebutts others' arguments in debate class. Her dream is to discover a new logical proposition and go insane."

After the ceremony, the language pledge ended. My haircut was complimented and I was called "sassy" twice in an hour, which is a new record. We went to Paul and Anders' room and hung around for a bit before the big end-of-semester Beijing Roast Duck dinner, where my roommate and another last-semester student and I chatted quite easily. After dinner, we went back to Anders' room, where we talked for a very long time. It was especially nice to be able to make jokes effortlessly and to hear people's real voices - not to mention our real names. This was especially true because the boys, with the exception of Paul, all had rather odd names: Cedric, Anders, and Bennett.

At one point, a second-year guy I don't know came and proposed a drinking contest with Paul - not something I would recommend, as Paul is built like a linebacker. The other guy threw 3 kuai on the floor and said, "All right, that's 3 mao, 3 mao on the floor." Bennett, Cedric and I exchanged looks - this guy has been in China for two months and has yet to master the monetary system. I watched, fascinated and appalled, as they chugged enormous bottles of Yanjing beer. Paul won, of course, which is good since it was his beer anyway.

After awhile, we managed to get up and go to Houhai, where we bought more cheap beer and wandered around the lake. We found some other classmates, none of whom I knew, sitting on sofas outside a bar and decided to camp out for a bit.

(A person came around selling flowers and tried to get Bennett to buy some. He said no - "Unless you'd like one?" he added, turning to me. I said no thank you and my roommate and I did some possibly-not-too-subtle nudging.)

For everything I'm leaving, I'm getting something new.

Here are lists.

Lost or losing:
Cedric, Anders, Paul, Emily, Ben.
Wang Cheng, Luo Wei, Zao Zao, Namu, Xiaoxue.
Teachers: Xu, Zhu, Li, Li, Mao, Wang, Fan, etc.
Noodles for breakfast, the red hills of Sichuan, corn-flavored ice-cream, beautiful Chinese men, ginkgo trees, zongzi, ridiculous twee pop.

And getting back:
Kep, Jim, Jay, Jill, Kate, Katie Rose, Lisa.
My mum and dad, Caroline, Lillian, my grandparents, and cousins, and aunts and uncles.
Quaker meeting.
Peach pie on my grandparents' deck
Singing along with Lucinda Williams or Paolo Conte or West Side Story
My thesis
My cats
The gravity couch

For everything I lose, I gain something else, I know that. I keep telling myself that. I gave Ben my copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel to read on the plane; on the title page, I wrote one of my favorite parts of They Might Be Giants:

"What's wrong with being Sherlock Holmes? Why, I sometimes wish I were the Scarlet Pimpernel. A fop by day, but in the night, I ride. Is he in Heaven or is he in Hell, that damned elusive Pimpernel? What's that? You want to see the face behind the mask?

"... this is the face."

I no longer have my book, but I have something better - the knowledge that now he has something of mine.

This is the end of this story. On Monday I will go back to America, where I belong. It isn't easy, but it's right.

One Week

I realized last night that I may have become a formalist.

But you in all likelihood do not care about that, so let's move along. I'm running out of time here! (Oh God!)

We will move backwards in time (forward is going quickly enough) unless I forget things and have to skip around.

Lunch today at the Chinese Host Family's house. My Chinese brother Daxin came to the dorm to pick us up. I didn't recognize him, because last time he had hair like a member of an 80's hair band (the 80s are big here) and seemed about eight feet tall. Now, somehow, he's my height, and lovely. I will be frank: I do not know how I am going to readjust to life in a country where beautiful Chinese men are so scarce. Before college, I think I had only ever met three Chinese people, one of whom was my first ever crush, when I was eight (I told you we'd be going back in time).

Daxin got us a cab and we went to his house. The last time I was there was Chinese New Year, in February, but I knew we were close when we passed the enormous rainbow adorning their street.

Conversation was awkward, but it always is, and considering how dreadfully things could have gone, I'd say the afternoon was a success. My Chinese father did not talk about how bad my Chinese used to be; we had a nice lunch, I understood everything they said, and when the silence grew to awkward Daxin turned on the TV. We watched part of my favorite Chinese show, Family Has Children, which is basically the Chinese Brady Bunch, except that there are only three children. But this is China and that's SO MANY CHILDREN - the first time I watched it I was baffled at how they came to have so many children. I assumed they were Taiwanese until I saw the one where the ex-spouses come over for Chinese New Year and there's a mild-mannered custody battle.

Family Has Children is one of the things I'm going to miss.

Last night, one of our teachers, Zhu laoshi, invited all the 4th years over for dinner. Unfortunately only four of us could make it. As we entered her apartment building, I was amazed at how fancy it was - how could she afford a place like this on a teacher's salary, I wondered. We took the elevator up to the 14th floor and it became clear: Zhu laoshi lives in an office.

Their living room is full of cubicles. The dining room contains over thirty plastic-wrapped chairs and a whiteboard. "Where do you sleep?" I asked. "On the sofa," she replied.

The office belongs to her brother's company, and since they're "too busy" to find a house at the moment, they are living there: Zhu laoshi, her brother, and her brother's girlfriend. The latter two prepared a million dishes for us while Zhu laoshi showed us pictures of when she was younger. She is extremely beautiful, but doesn't quite fit the Chinese standard: she's got to be at least 5'10" and therefore often has to wear men's clothing.

She mentioned that when she was younger she always wished she were a boy (and who doesn't?) and showed us pictures of herself with a crew cut. She told us about her grandmother, who had bound feet, and how she met her husband through a matchmaker. Her brother told us about the first time they saw a foreigner, and how their grandmother had shielded her eyes. Could China have come any further in two generations?

We stayed at Zhu laoshi's until almost midnight, being pressed to eat things, and were finally sent home with peaches and sunflower seeds and, in my case, a new understanding of a teacher with whom I have had some issues.

To the orphanage on Friday (see an earlier post), where I was simultaneously delightened and saddened to see several familiar faces. In particular I remembered Wei Kangqin, a two-year old little girl. The last time I came, she had just had her cleft palate surgery, and now she can already sit and crawl by herself. "I remember you, yes I do," I told her softly, patting her back. "You are a very special girl!"

Visiting this particular orphanage is not as depressing as it might be, because these children will almost all be adopted eventually and are in the meantime receiving very good care, but it's certainly sobering.

And now it's only a week. Went to the Silk Market yesterday to get presents for people, and I'm glad to think that I'll never be ripped off there again.

And I'm a formalist! Damn it, how does this happen?

The Roach

The other day when I came into our room, my roommate greeted me and said, "We have a friend." I peeked into the bathroom and saw a roach about the size of a small mouse - I'd say over an inch long, easy. I screamed and jumped about a foot in the air.

"What are we going to do?" I cried, ashamed of myself for being so girly. Small roaches are one thing, but this was the biggest I'd ever seen.

"We could step on it," my roommate suggested feebly, and I gave her a pained look.

"But the scrunch," I said. "And we'd never be able to wear those shoes again. Plus I'm meeting B. and the others in a minute, and I have to go to the bathroom."

My roommate shrugged.

"Okay, I'm going to abandon you for a minute and go buy roach spray," I decided. Then I ran down to the first floor and knocked on B's door, looking as though I were being pursued by assassins.

"Can you help me?" I demanded when he opened the door.

"Of course," he said.

"Can I use your bathroom?"

B. has many faults, but manners are not among them. He didn't even ask why, just agreed. In the interest of returning his courtesy, I returned the to its original position - it is a boys' room, after all.

What a polite fellow: he didn't ask for an explanation, but I felt I owed him one, so I explained about the roach, at which point he offered to kill it for me. I turned him down, though - I have my pride. We went to Fabao and I picked up a Y17 can of Raid.

I went back to my room and stepped inside. I felt a scrunch and looked down.

I had stepped on the roach.

I screamed and ran to the other side of the room. After a moment, I mustered up my courage and sprayed it with Raid until it stopped moving. Then, after several aborted attempts, I managed to scoop it up with a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet. Then I washed my shoe.

Two more weeks.

Simultaneously the coolest and most horrifying thing that has happened to me EVER.

So I've mentioned our blockbuster hit movie, Wang Ba Dan ("If you see only one movie this year made by fourth-year Chinese students, make it this one!"), and how at one point B. and I throw cupfulls of small change on the ground in front of the bus stop to see what would happen. Well, yesterday I found out that this stunt made the papers. I haven't seen it yet myself, but our teachers inform us that it ran something like this: "Two foreigners and someone who looked Chinese threw money on the ground at a bus station. The Chinese citizens present were angry and confused."

We're notorious! I was somewhat horrified when I heard, but our teachers seemed to find it amusing, so I guess it's all right. And here I thought the high point of my film career would be being voted the best of the three films made by the class. We actually made the paper!

I think my work here is just about done.

Race Against Time

Three weeks left and the clock is ticking ... I am running out of deoderant. Lili left me a tube when she went back to the States. It is the brand which claims to be "So effective you could skip a day." I do not quite know how to take this. Are they telling me not to shower? I asked one of my teachers where I could buy deoderant and she said the grocery across the street would have it. She told me the brand name but it was long and I only remembered part of it. Still, I managed to find an object that had several of the characters she'd mentioned and bought it. I took it home and, after removing the foil seal, found an object more like a bright yellow flan than anything else. How to apply it? On my finger? Also, it smelled incredibly strong - it smelled up the whole room.

It was air-freshener.

So I tried again. I swallowed my pride and asked one of the women who work in the cosmetics department where I could find "the thing you put under your arms so you don't stink." She laughed and led me to the product I was after, assuring me that I would not stink at all, and it would be great. I bought it and brought it home. On the outside was a picture of a baby, and although babies don't use deoderant, this is China, where packaging does not necessarily relate to content. In this case, however, it did - it was baby powder. "Snake Gall" baby powder, no less - what does that mean? Is it made of snake gall or is that just the brand name? I do not know, but I worry.

It goes without saying that baby powder is not deoderant, but my options are slim. I use the baby powder, which, combined with my lavendar-scented moisturizer, makes me smell like an old lady. Moreover, everything I own and everything my roommate owns are now covered in baby powder forever, in much the same way that a well-timed glitter bomb could eliminate civilization as we know it.

So there is, as we say in Chinese, no banfa. I will simply have to make do with what I have. And anyway, I still have the air freshener.

Work

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Johnny muses that maybe someday the unions will fix it so that a person can work steadily but still have some time to himself - "now it's work all the time or be a bum," he says. Although the adults closest to me all appear to have some leisure, they are all fairly affluent. Whether or not things have changed for Johnny's class I do not know.

In China, however, things are much as Johnny described them. Chinese people work like maniacs from the time they begin school until retirement. People are so busy that it's quite common to send babies to be raised by their grandparents and children of four or five to boarding school. I was appalled when Zheng Xiaoxue told me she'd boarded at five, and I couldn't quite explain to her why this seemed so wrong. "They have teachers," she pointed out. "It's not like they just play all the time." This was so far from being my objection I thought it best to change the subject.

If you're too busy to raise your own children, you maybe shouldn't be having children. It's not as though there's a population shortage. But the children are busy, too - school days are longer here, and high school students don't do sports or work part-time jobs or have any outside activities the way we do in America. There is simply no time.

One of my teachers told me that her parents don't want her travelling or going out, saying that these things are a waste of time. Children aren't allowed much free play time, either - they are supposed to be studying whenever they're not sleeping. The Chinese have no concept of pleasure or "the pursuit of happiness" as a right that people ought to have.

I wonder why this is. Perhaps it's related to the population - the competition is incredibly fierce, because there are more people than jobs or space in colleges. If this is the case, then when the population is under control (which I believe it will be someday - if anyone can do it it's China) people will be able to take time to breathe.

Wang Ba Dan

Instead of an essay, this weekend the fourth years are making movies. Originally, the assignment was to make a movie about what happens to the characters in Zhang Yimou's worst failure, "Keep Cool," which was this week's movie lesson. But C. got Mao laoshi to change the requirements, and so now we're just making a movie where we act crazy and see what people do.

Really.

Our movie is called Wang Ba Dan, which means "bastard," and was one of last week's vocab words (movie classes often have a lot of rude vocab, which is what I like about them). Me, C, and B dress up in traditional Chinese outfits (the boys' have more or less the same one, only they also have little beanies) and wander around Chaoyang causing trouble. So far I haven't done too much gangstering (which in Chinese is a verb!), but merely worked the camera. However, there is much left to do - yesterday the boys fought over corn by the subway station, then when we had everyone's attention began to ask people about Mencius and Confucius. Tomorrow we are going to take a small paper cup of spare change we gathered from our classmates (somehow asking classmates for money is not so embarrassing if you are wearing a qipao) and scatter it in a public place. We have other plans as well, with greater or lesser potential to get us arrested, so I think it's quite likely our group will have the best movie.

Today we had a fairly pleasant field trip to a reservoir two hours from Beijing. The amount of time travelling to and fro greatly exceeded the amount of time actually there, but it was nonetheless nice to get out of the city and climb a mountain. The weather was not so good though; it's dreadfully sticky out, and the boys I was with both took off their shirts, which I suppose is their perogative.

Women are Tigers

Spent the weekend in Datong, a tourist town in Shanxi Province, to the west of Beijing. We took the train Thursday night after our midterm - sadly, my last Chinese train experience was spent sleeping. (I've been doing that lately - thinking about Last Things: Last Train Ride is the first that I'm aware of but there will be more as the days go by). We pulled into the station rather early - around six thirty - and proceeded to the hotel for breakfast.

ACC's field trips are always rather intense and mountain-climbing-centric, which is all well and good but can be tiring. On Friday we visited the Hanging Monastary, which was a little disappointing because it was so packed with tourists. I love Buddhist sites, especially monastaries, but this one had no monks and no pilgrims, only tourists. Then we went to Heng Mountain, which is one of the most sacred and famous mountains in China. This I did enjoy, because I got to talk to the nice Taiwanese teacher mentioned in an earlier post, C. and Xi Shiyuan, and some Taoists, who C. enjoyed teasing.

"Are you American?" one of them asked him.
"Yes," said C.
"But you don't look like her," the Taoist pointed out, motioning to a blond-haired girl.
"I used to," said C. earnestly. "When I was younger. Do you like blond hair?"
"No," said the Taoist.
"Me neither," said C., "So I dyed my hair black."
The Taoist did not ask about C.'s eyes or anything else that distinguishes him from a white person, and we moved on.
"Do you eat meat?" we asked.
"No, we don't kill anything."
"Can you get married?"
"No, women are tigers."

Women are tigers! That is my new favorite thing!
"What about Taoist women?" I asked him.
"Women cannot be Taoist," he informed me.
"Because they are tigers?"
"That's right."
"What if a woman really wants to be Taoist?" C. asked.
"She can't."

Shi laoshi explained that these people come to Taoism at a very young age, maybe eight or nine, and their master tells them women are tigers and they are scared and grow up believing it. I for one was vaguely flattered to be called a tiger, but my temporary roommate Chen laoshi, a Chinese girl studying in the U.S. and working as a T.A. over the summer, was somewhat affronted.

That evening I went with C., Xi Shiyuan and his roommate, and Chen laoshi for noodles. We wandered around gormlessly for awhile and, to tide ourselves over, purchased some Stinky Tofu. I'd had Stinky Tofu once before, in Chengdu, at Zheng Xiaoxue's insistance, and I can assure you that it lives up to its name. When there is a Stinky Tofu vendor nearby the entire block is unbearable. They say the worse the smell, the better the taste, but the Stinky Tofu we had that night was quite tasty and mildly scented. I suppose it must not have been the real stuff, which is quite all right with me.

We ended up having snails and noodles outside, which was pleasant. I like hanging around with the other fourth years, because we use our vocabulary words and sentence patterns constantly, and say things like "My mind is full of capitalist decadence!"

Datong, being a tourist town, is very full of decadance. Prostitutes propositioned C. and poor Shi laoshi (C., who had just shaved his head, told them he was a monk, and they apologized profusely) and as we walked along the street we passed adult shops and street vendors selling obscene Japanese videos.

Last night I had the good fortune to eat dinner with Chen laoshi, Zheng laoshi, and Wang laoshi, all Chinese people. We had a very nice meal of various Datong specialties (the food was very good on this trip) and then walked through the busy downtown, packed with vendors, fortune telling machines, games, and shops. Chen laoshi purchased more Stinky Tofu, very pungent this time, and it was terrible. I was surprised that it was so crowded - Datong's kind of a nothing little town ("Its specialty is that it has nothing special about it," C. informed me, and I was pleased at the paradox) but the only time I've ever seen more people in one place was at the temple fair my Chinese brother took me to over New Year's.

Returned to Beijing very early this morning, tired, but quite satisfied.

One Month

Yesterday I went with some people I don't normally see much of but whose company I enjoy to the Korean restaurant for banfan, and then on the way back we got milk tea and it struck me: I'm going to miss this place.

I am going home in a month, and for the most part that's been a source of comfort to me. Cockroach the size of my thumb in the bathroom: six more weeks. No internet access: five more weeks. The only three options are boiled, fried, or deep fried: four more weeks. But there are so many things I'm going to miss -

ginger scented shampoo
the way the guy at the Korean restaurant always knows that I'll have a banfan, no meat
having everything be 1/8 the price of the same thing in the US
bootleg DVDs
goofy Chinese pop
lychees, mangoes, and coconut milk

Since coming back from Luguhu, all I can think is that Beijing just doesn't measure up, and of course in most ways it doesn't, but I've been here a long time now, and it's sort of grown on me. I will be sorry to leave. I'd kind of forgotten that.

To Datong this weekend for our field trip. Hopefully there'll be stories when I return.