Thursday January 3rd, 2011

Let me say this: while it ma be difficult to find time to write these journals while I am in class, the difficulty in doing so is second only to writing journals in a time of lethargy. My excyse for the next few days is that I am engaging in meaningful cultural experiences by doing as the Chinese are doing over the next few days: nothing. My second excuse for not doing anything is that nothing is open right now. That, even more than my weak attempt at an excuse, is true.

Over the last week, I have had a grave suspicion… About what, you ask? It could be anything from my roommate who is secretly plotting my death, to massive surveillance by the police, to a plot to overthrow the organization of ACC and incorporate it into the patient hegemony of the National Flagship Language Program. However, none of these are true; the real reason that I lay awake at night fearing for my life is thatChina is eating my computer’s battery. I can use the battery for about 45 minutes at low light and with one or two programs running, but when it gets to 50% battery life, the computer completely shuts down. I have voiced these fears to my fellow classmates, and they say that it is a critical flaw in the design of the Mac batteries.

I thus remained in my room, eating the supplies that Morgan sent to me, alternately skyping people back home and typing emails. I literally did not leave my room until 4 in the afternoon, when Shazeda knocked on my door and demanded that I rise from my languorous position on my bed, that we might get some food. Shazeda, Lee, and I (the only people who were left in the entire dorm, I have concluded. Everyone else was visiting their respective host families) found ourselves cruising around the neighborhood looking for a restaurant that would serve us a meal, and we found one open near the West Gate. It was one of two open restaurants among the myriad of Xi Men restaurants.

This restaurant specialized in selling very expensive seafood, which was kept in several tanks at the entrance of the restaurant. They kept catfish, carp, shrimp, my favorite tiger shrimp, bass, grouper, flounder, soft shell turtles, and more. We dined on three delicacies soup served over puffed rice, spicy and numbing tofu (that is the real name; you can’t make this stuff up), and stir-fry eggplant – the greatest dish in this country. We had quite the scare during our meal. You see, we have a language pledge that all of us diligently observe. There we were, speaking all sorts of Chinese, when what could only be a clone or the doppelganger of the ACC program director walked into the room. We immediately silenced ourselves, hearts in our mouths. We were safe.

We came back to the dorm, with the intention of watching a movie. However, the Internet in China had other plans. Naught was to be watched online, and we finally gave up. Shazeda’s room soon became the party room in the dorm, as everyone was getting back from a day with the Chinese family. We played Ma Jiang, spades, and liar’s dice, as others prepared to go out for the evening. I was having none of that, and went back to the room about 3 in the morning and fell asleep. It has been a surprisingly Anglo day here in the great country of China.

Translation: The Central Government Group from Songs and Dances of Ethnic Minorities. I've been looking for this place all over...

Sunset in my neighborhood

Wednesday January 2nd, 2011

I rolled out of my slumber around nine in the morning, and prepared myself for the day. I must have been taking my time getting ready and cleaning the room because I looked up and it was almost ten in the morning, which is the time that I told my “Chinese sister” that we would leave to visit the family. I grabbed some food walking out the door, met my “sister” on the first floor, and we headed towards the National Library Subway station. She was an old pro for Chun Jie, as this was her second or third time in China for it. My host “sister” is named Sandra, and she is a graduate student from New York. She went to undergrad at the University of Hawaii, and is the daughter of two immigrants from Grenada. She is one the most multicultural people that I think I have ever met.

We chatted on the way to our subway stop, which was the terminal station for line 4, about 6 stops to the north of the campus. When we got to the station at the appointed time, we were met with naught but a dismal view of the urban sprawl of Beijing and some rather poor looking dwellings. The scene was brightened by the arrival of a man and his Saluki, which I mistook for some sort of greyhound mix. However, within ten minutes or so, our host father arrived, driving the family’s Passat. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but the mom tried to drive me in the family Buick on the night that she gave me the fish and plant. I did not fit in the car, and I’m sure that my “mom” requested that the father drive something that would fit me.

It was about a 15-minute ride over to their apartment, which was one of many in a sea of apartments. There were no less than 40 apartment buildings in their “subdivision,” each one of eight floors, and each floor having three apartments. That makes no less than 960 apartments in this one neighborhood. That is incredible! Also, allow me to give you a sketch of my host family.

The father is approximately 4’ 8” by my guestimation, and is a portly man with a quick eye set behind a pair of glasses and keen mind. He works in ZhongNanHai (gasp!), the secret location of the central government. I have no idea what exactly he does, but supposedly he advises the government and advised Hillary Clinton herself when she visited the country during Clinton’s presidency. He loves trinkets of all sorts, and has quite a collection of Chinese souvenirs from all over the country.

The mother is a law professor at MinZu University, and she is as smart as her husband. She is about the same height as her husband, and quite a bit less rotund. She has the Chinese telltale round face, and is in many ways the epitome of the modern Chinese woman.

The two parents have one son, whose name is Ben-Ben. I remained in the dark about the nature of this name, as the son’s name sounds like the parents are calling him a dumb-dumb the whole time. Dumb-dumb is the stereotypical Chinese boy at age 16. (May I interject? I hope that at age 16 I was not half as socially awkward or strange as this lad.) He is around his parents’ height, and has the thin frame of all Chinese boys, garnished with a little bit of the baby fat that Chinese parents love to see on their children. Being a little chubby in this country means that your kids are not on the verge of starvation, and that they can afford to put on a few extra pounds. He is a freshman in high school (but remember that Chinese high school only has three years. So maybe he is a sophomore… Think about it), and has his sights set on the Gao Kao, the test that all Chinese graduates must take to prove their worth. The Gao Kao is the culmination of work from the first 18 years of their life, and high schoolers will postpone sports, exercise, love, their health, their sanity and more in order to get good grades on this test. And parents expect their kids to be the best on the test because if you don’t you have no chance of getting into college. In a country where 20 million people are unemployed every year (that’s the equivalent to the population of Canada), an education is all that stands between you and and a life working in a sweatshop for the rest of your life. Ben-Ben is preparing for said test, and he is also preparing for the SAT. He hoped to attend college in the US, which for a student looking to get a god job on the mainland, is a great move.

We got a tour of the house, and then we sat around and watched NBA, while the mother peeled fruit for us. After a little while, the mother and another lady whose presence remained a mystery to me throughout the entire visit retired to the kitchen and prepared the midday meal. That left Sandra and I with the father and Ben-Ben. The father must have grown tired of his son’s awkwardness as well, as he left us alone with the son after a few minutes.

Soon, the lunch was ready, and we sat down to a great meal. We ate salt pork with peppers, homemade tofu, stir-fried cucumbers, tomato and egg, kimchi (Korean pickled vegetables), green beans, pickled-spicy mildew, chicken wings, shrimp, and dumplings. Dumplings are a New Year’s tradition for China, and a must-have for any festival. To top off the meal, the father decided that we should drink some Great Wall dry red wine and Xin Jiang rose wine. I stuck to the red, and we sat around the table for about 2 hours, eating our fill of Chinese cuisine. We talked about everything ranging from the Chinese government, US politics, cultural customs, cuisine, life in the states, and sports. Nothing is taboo in this country – expect revolution (shh!).

The family had some sort of arrangement, where they were going to meet their relatives out of the city, and I politely told the host father that I did not want to interfere with their plans. It would seem that the host father was waiting for me to say that (but would never show it), as we were walking out the door in less than three minutes of when I opened my mouth. He gave each of us a bottle of Great Wall red wine, which would make a great gift for my next appointment of the day.

We drove back to the station, wished each other well, and boarded the train taking us back to campus. The mysterious woman accompanied us back to campus, and on the ride I learned that she was a professor at MinZu as well. She lived on campus, which I thought was very strange.

When we made it back to the dorm, I made contact with Shazeda, Lee, and Emily. Shazeda invited us to go with her to visit her host family to celebrate dinner. Dinner is the more important of the two meals on New Year’s Eve, and she thought it a shame that we couldn’t celebrate the meal with our families. I brought my wine and some chocolate – in Chinese custom – and Emily brought some apples. We took the subway to a northern district of the city, with fireworks going off all around us. The city looks and sounds like a war zone: empty streets and explosions everywhere.

Shazeda’s “Chinese brother” greeted us at the entrance to the neighborhood, and we walked over to their apartment with the din of fireworks ringing in our ears. I did not expect Chinese fireworks to be this potent. This family lived on the 6^th floor (or so) of an apartment building, and I met the family there. The relationships were quite confusing, and I’ll try to explain with a diagram:

                      Grandfather----Grandmother

                  /               |                       \

Host father---Host mother    Older sister---husband    Younger brother---Wife

            |                              |                              |

        Xuan-Xuan                        15-year-old son                  Infant son

                                                                            ØOlder female cousin (by marriage)

(Underlined members were absent)

Confused yet? I was. The family was so nice, and they seemed very excited to have us in their home. Their four-year-old son, Xuan-Xuan, really liked the chocolate, and tried his best to prevent anyone else from consuming it. He liked to take pictures on his father’s Cannon camera, and insisted that I take pictures of him while he took pictures of me. I helped the family cook some food for the meal that evening, and I learned how to make and cook dumplings on my own. I would also love to have a gas stove at my future residence, so that I can cook stir-fry. You can make so much with a round-bottomed pan…

We sat down at the table to share the New Year’s meal, and there was quite the spread. Allow me to expound upon the food. There were all sorts of dishes: spicy beef with peppers, boiled beef, tofu skin, rice noodles, dumplings (and a lot at that), roast fish, shrimp, 100-year-old eggs, eggs with shrimp, roast pumpkin, bread, and fish fillets. You can see the seafood theme running through the day. The Chinese people love their fish on New Year’s.

After the meal, we sat down to watch the Chinese New Year’s spectacular TV program extravaganza. The entire Chinese-speaking world put their lives on hold to watch this program, but the attraction of the program is beyond me. I, along with my fellow students, did not understand the jokes in the program. I was, however, mesmerized by the crazy stunts that they made Chinese people do, like a Tron-themed gymnastics presentation, 20 people on unicycles in unison, giant ethnic minority dances, and a host of other strange things.

After watching the program for a while, we played some MaJiang with the family. This is an inordinately complicated game, somewhat akin to gin and rummy, played on colored tiles. I had to have a coach to just play the game, and I won my first game! It was sheer luck, I assure you, dear reader. Around 10:15, our host mother told us that if we wanted to make it back to our dorms, we needed to get on the road. Her words were most true. There were no cabs for hire in the streets, and we walked over to the subway station to board a near-empty train back to the dorm. We probably made the last train for line 4, the boarding of which saved us a 45-minute walk through the cold.

We made it to the dorm no earlier than 11:30, and I wrote journals and sent emails until the midnight festivities began. Please keep in mind that throughout this entire day, I have been bombarded with a cascade of explosions. The explosiveness of the city, which one once thought could not have been increased, not by one measly iota, was immediately brought to an apocalyptic level at 12:00 AM. The sky brightened from fireworks all over the city, and the sky clouded with sulfurous fumes. Angels sang. Doves cried. I watched. Around 1 in the morning, I could take it no longer, and fell into a deep sleep.

I’ll write soon!

Love,

Jameyi

Wednesday's Pictures

Meet Xuan-Xuan and his camera-wielding prowess

This is more White Alcohol. The amount contained here could kill a small village

The supper spread

These are the apartment buildings in which my host family lives

Need some automatic analyzing?

Fireworks in the city

Emily makes some dumplings

This the look that Lee has given me the entire trip..

The Saluki

Goldfish at my host family

My host mom peels some fruit for us

The lunch spread

A few Random Pictures

This is my plant, Roosevelt 

Richard on the night of our first visit 

Tian'An Men at night

Sunday January 30th, 2011

Sorry this one is out of order! He forgot to send it to me at first!! - Morgan

This morning, I rolled out of bed at 11 AM. As one might expect when getting to sleep around 4 in the morning, I was still quite tired upon waking. I showered, but remained in the room, working on an essay due on the morrow. I prepared minimally for the lesson, and then I fell asleep for another 2 ½ hours. After this second sleep, I was feeling a lot better. I contacted Shazead and Lee, and and three of us took a cab over to Carrefour.

Next week, again, is the Spring Festival, and we all needed more food to make it through the week. Our primary objective was to get breakfast foods and snacks. I found some “chocolate muffins,” apples, oranges, yogurt, hawthorn juice, “sweet tea,” and my favorite Ritz cracker-esque snacks. The girls took a cab back, but I walked back to the subway station. Richard Whitehouse (from a few days ago) and I had arranged to get supper together. I met him at the subway station at 7:30, and we walked back to the dorm. Joy and Shazeda said they wanted to eat with us, but in the end, Richard and I had a romantic dinner of our own – just the two of us.

We went back to the Legend of Spice. Why let something good go to waste? We made a meal of spicy green beans, roast lamb, and white rice. We chatted more about our friends from Ole Miss, where they are now and such. I also learned some of the particulars of Richard’s internship, for which he will be leaving in two days. He will be in rural Yunnan province, which is in the southwestern part of the mainland. He will be working with a group that is experimenting with environmentally sustainable practices in rural China. They are taking manure from the livestock, along with waste products from humans, and retrieving methane gas, which they then use to heat their houses and use for cooking gas. That sounds very interesting to me. Not only did this group figure out something to do with their waste, but they also provide a service to people in these rural areas: they would be unable to gain access to cooking oil or heat from the government because they live in a “southern province.” We parted ways about around 9:30, and I went back up to the room to study.

I was quite enterprising in my studies, and by 10:15 I was done and ready for bed. However, my roommate had other plans. He enjoys staying up late and talking to people on Skype in languages that sound much like those utilized by aliens in Star wars, or getting on chat rooms at midnight. One might assume that the former was the worse of the two, but I have been awakened on numerous occasions by incredibly loud tappings upon his keyboard. Something has to give.

Then, I fell into a restless sleep.

Tuesday February 1st, 2011

To those of you who are calendarily challenged, today is the first day of the new month! It is strange to think that the first month of the new year has already passed. This day also means that I have almost been in China for a month. Now that is strange to think about.

I was dead tired upon waking. I have made a decision: I am going to talk to the roommate about his insane antics. This stuff must come to an end, lest I meet an untimely death here at the program.

I ate breakfast, as usual, and then walked to class. My teachers immediately noticed that the usually marginally chipper lad who sits in their class was absent today, only to be replaced my an ill-tempered, slow-responding dunce. In short, one of them said that I looked like death. Thanks. I tried telling them that I was going to sleep at a decent hour, but my roommate is an insane ninja. However, they seem unwilling or unable to accept the idea that I could not sleep due to the actions of another, and they regarded my fitful verbal ejaculations with a skeptical eye at best.

I do have one important piece of news to share. I had debate class with a girl that I have not seen or met since the beginning of the program. I would have passed her presence off as that of a specter; however, my delusions were shared with those around me. If nothing else, we have all gone insane together.

After surviving my first three classes of the day, I went back to the room and slept a beautiful sleep.

Then, I went to my individual class with the best teacher this side of the Yellow River: Teacher Zhu. I will have to take a picture of this lady to share with you. I’ve already mentioned her a couple of times (see January 13^th and 14^th), but I will probably continue to do so until the end of this program. After conversing with Zhu on the topic of satire (a branch of literature not well understood by the Chinese people), I went back up to my room and played guitar again. I would like to give another shout-out to the parents and Morgan for persuading me into taking my guitar with me. It has probably been the single best item that I have brought from the states, and everyone on the floor has enjoyed playing it at least once or twice.

At four, I emerged from my musical hermitage and went with Shazeda to meet a “friend” that she met in a bar a few weeks ago. Supposedly, this girl works in the independent film industry in Beijing, which sounds like a dubious occupation at best. This is what I’ve gathered about this industry: independent film is only marginally legal here, and can only be sold in certain areas of the city. I don’t think that independent film artists can have public showings of their movies, which does not surprise me at all. The central Entertainment Bureau must certify all films that the Chinese people enjoy, and the idea of having an independent film artist (oh no!) make their own movie outside the mechanisms prescribed by the government is only too gruesome. However, these hardships do not justify the fact that we were stood up by this girl.

We had already taken a cab to the locale where we planned to meet her before we realized the folly of our maneuver, and we were found as a fish without water, aimlessly tossed in the sea of corny advertisements and gaudy decorations. We looked around for a little while, and we found ourselves near an electronics emporium. We entered the room with great caution, and we were amazed at the selection to behold. We ambled about the store for over an hour without passing the same booth twice. I must say, dear readers, that if you come to China, do take some time to find electronics facility similar to the one that we found. You are in for a treat. You can purchase any knock-off electronic item in the world here: Nikon, Cannon, Sony, and Pentax cameras; Mac, Dell, Lenovo, Sony, IBM, and Gateway computers; iPhones, Blackberries, Motorola, Notarola, Nokia, Nckia, and China mobile phones; video cameras, from professional grade to security cameras; USB drives; webcams; I think that you get the picture.

And the greatest thing about these huge vendors is the unbridled capitalism. Yes, capitalism in China. You can see so many economic factors at work here: The stalls are either having price wars with each other, selling items way below cost, just to cut off operating expenses, or they cross stall lines to fix prices across the board. This entire market’s existence can be traced right back to the high tariffs that the government places on luxury items to the country; no one can afford to pay the ridiculous prices of the real goods, not even government officials.

After we could walk around the electronics market no longer, Shazeda and I took a tour of the neighborhood. We found my favorite Chinese clothing store, Meters/bonwe, which you may remember from my previous China saga. Meters/bonwe was the store that was celebrating the production of Transformers 2, and all of their clothes were Transformer themed. We window-shopped some, and then we found what we had been looking for the entire time: a way to escape Chinese cuisine.

We found a Papa Johns. It was great. We ordered a design-your-own pizza to the tune of great 90s pop songs in the background. In Shazeda’s words, “I have never felt so American during my time here, as I do at the Beijing Papa John’s.” We savored great American cheese, mushrooms, peppers, and ground beefy goodness, and we talked about life in New York and the Great South. I think that the two of us are both simultaneously mesmerized and repulsed by the notion of living in the other’s hometown.

After eating, we took the “scenic route” back to the school, which mostly entailed me guessing the right way back to campus and having to ask directions numerous times. I once, had to look at Shazeda and say: “I need you to not freak out here, but I don’t really know where we are…” We made it back to the dorm unscathed. Walking through the city now is a little unnerving. The place has become a ghost town, and the streets are all but deserted. The only places that have any sign of life are the stores that sell wares to be devoured on Spring Festival, stores selling nuts and dried fruit. How delicious!

As we walked through the streets of Bejing, Shazeda and I decided that Chun Jie (Chinese for Spring Festival) would be the perfect time for murdering someone. Not only is no one around to see you, but the sound of fireworks fills the air, and no one could possibly hear the sounds of a gun or the cries of the assailed.

We made it back to the room with no harm done, and I just hung out the dorm for a little while. I had a date with my host family in the morning, and I needed my rest for the Spring Festival.

I’ll write soon!

Love,

Jamey

Monday January 31st, 2011

As would be imagined, I was not refreshed in the morning. I broke fast with a chocolate muffin, yogurt, a banana and an apple. It was delicious, as only food bought from Carrefour can be. After my meal, I went to class. Our lesson for today was the first half of an article that talked about the social norms of Mainland and Taiwanese people. The article was unbelievable not only regarding the ignorance of the writer, but also his blatant condescension of anyone not born into the Mainland Club. And while I won’t expound on the full absurdity that was the article – since the government would probably shut down my Internet more than they do already. Be prepared for a secret journal in the future!

I had the last one-on-one class, and that meant that I had a 2-½ hour break after 11 AM. So, I walked over to Bally, ran, and did my thing. Then, I stopped by Ma Lan to get some lunch. When I got there and was waiting in line, I found one of the teachers in front of me. It turned out that we had ordered almost the exact same meal. We sat and talked for about a half-hour, and it was very cool. We both hated on the article, and she, even being from the Mainland, though that the author was insensitive about the whole issue. While we talked, there was not a single awkward moment. The difference in when I’m talking to teachers in and out of class is astounding. I enjoy the Chinese language so much more when it is not being forced by the constraints of the classroom. However, I recognize the necessity of the classroom instruction; I just like being out of class more!

I came back to campus, and walked over to my individual lesson for the day. All went well, but I must say that my Chinese will still need some work to be that of a native speaker. I then trapsied back up to the room, where I read an article that my thesis advisor sent to me about Chinese investment in Africa. I enjoyed it a lot, and the article prepared me for my next interview, which was today at 4. The interview went well, and although my interviewee did not have any experience in the field per se, he did possess useful insight. He gave me some new perspectives for looking at this topic, which I find to be more helpful, in some ways, than a lot of hard facts.

Then I retired to my room, so that I might revitalize my brain after a day of stretching it to speak Chinese. I sang and loosened up my vocal chords, which have been a little “stiff” since I got sick before coming here.

Then Lee, Shazeda, and I all walked over to the YunNan restaurant – the one where I ate on the first night of the program. The food was a little on the pricy side, and there were not as many choices as the usual Chinese restaurants, probably because this place was an ethnically focused dining establishment. Despite these obstacles, we braved ourselves against the forces of inflation and lack of choices, and we ordered fried bananas, fried peppers, spicy chicken, and pineapple rice. The pineapple rice may be the most memorable part of the meal, but I have very ambiguous feelings about this dish. It is good, but incredibly sweet. I would have liked it as a child…

After the meal, the three of us all went back to my room, where we studied for the next day’s class. I finished reading the egregiously racist article about Taiwanese students. I tried to push the article out of my mind after I’d read it, and in that respect, I think that I succeeded. We all finished at a decent hour, and by 10:30 we were all done with our preparations. I decided to end the night again, but alas my roommate was jabbering again! He has been angry at his mother all day, and at one point, I could resist my inner urges no longer. When I am back in the States, I will post a video of him talking excitedly to his mother, and maybe you can understand what my room life has been like for the last couple of days. He has also been typing on his computer, and I was awakened between 12:30 and 1 this morning by his angry tappings on the keyboard. I slept horribly again, and I knew even as I tried to sleep in the wee hours of the morning, I would not be fit for killing in the morn.

Sleep.