Wednesday January 19th, 2011

This day has been so much better than the day before. Without further ado…

Got up with the intentions of having some spare time to go eat at the No 5 Café before going to class. I was going to eat some fried eggs,bao zi, and maybe some hot soybean drank. I was going to enjoy this meal. However, I suspect my roommate, Grand Harbinger of the Alarm Clock, of meddling with the alarm so that I cannot wake up as early as I plan. He says that the alarm went off at 7:10 this morning, but I got straight up, took a shower, and walked out the door only to find that it was already 7:45. Foiled again! I had to walk straight to class, and then do poorly on the daily little writing quiz. I do believe that they are pulling the words for this quiz from somewhere other than our textbook.

I went to class, learned some, got corrected a lot, and spent some time talking with my classmate from the land of Yale. I did so well in class that day I treated myself to a lunch at KFC. For approximately $3.25, I ate my own weight in delicious chicken sandwiches, French fries, and lemon juice. Then, I swung back to the room, put on my workout shoes, and booked it over to Bally Fitness, the best fitness center this side of the Yellow River. I had to run around like a moron trying to find the place, after receiving bad directions from the guard outside the building. This is what happened:

“Excuse me, could you tell me where to find the Bally Fitness Center?”

“Fitness Center? Oh yeah, down the street, on the other side.”

“…Okay, thanks.”

The building that said Bally Fitness was behind the guard, and I went to ask someone else.

“I’m looking for Bally Fitness.”

“Yeah… Go to that door at the end of the building, with the red banner above it.”

Done. I walk into the building, into what looks like a 5-star hotel.

“I’m looking for Bally Fitness.” Where can I find it?”

“Go walk down to the door with the yellow banner above it, find the elevator, and take it to the third floor.”

Done. I walk into this section of the building, only to realize that I’m in the hotel restaurant and if I look to my left, I can see the people at the front desk that just gave me crappy directions. I walk through the restaurant and find a waitress walking around aimlessly. She finally gave me the right directions, and walked into another section of the building, found the secret elevator, scanned my thumb, and ascended.

When I got to the front desk, I gave them my information and proceeded to pay for my membership. My card won’t work there. Imagine that. So, I truck it back downstairs, find a bank of China, and finally manage to take a run on a treadmill there.

The fitness center is very nice. They have showers, a sauna, squat toilets, free sandals that you can wear to shower in, hair dryer, and 24-hour hot water (wow…). The exercise equipment is also very nice. All of the machines are in English, which is great for me. Sadly, the treadmills calculate distance in kilometers, and I can’t make the conversions too fast. Also, all of the weight equipment is funny because it’s designed with the little Chinese guy in mind. I topped out the back extension machine, which is a feat that I could never accomplish back in the States.

Then, I headed back to the room for an extremely cold shower. I got ready to head out for the evening. I had finally talked to Jesse, and I was going to meet her at 5 at her school! I took what looked like the most logical course to her school, which was about a 25-minute walk from my dorm. I found Jesse and her boyfriend Levi in the gymnasium, after getting some help from a pair of students there.

Jesse is a bundle of energy. She is so funny to talk to, and she is excited about everything. I really like her. Her boyfriend Levi is a lot more reserved, and they are both extremely smart. They thought that I was around 25 years old when we met due to the beard, and I would have sworn that they couldn’t have been more than freshmen. We were both surprised to learn that Jesse and Levi are a year older than I. Jesse is a senior and Levi a junior. There was confusion as to the nature of my name, and they were quite thrown off by my teacher’s choice for my name (it sounds like a girl’s).

Our plan for the evening was to meet some of their friends in a restaurant on the 5^th floor of the shopping mall of doom – it was enormous – and there we would all eat supper. I met BingBing, JiaoJiao, WeiDa, and David. They are all Christians and attend the same church service in the neighborhood. It was very encouraging to be in the room with these people. They give me great hope for this country.

Dinner was great. They insisted that I be their guest, and I reluctantly accepted. We consumed Beijing duck, niblet corn fried in egg batter, more fried bread, beef and peppers, eggplant (yahoo!), and cold beef things, all with voracity. And for the record, last night was a very humbling meal for me: I couldn’t understand half of what the dinner conversation was, with all of the hip new jive those kids are using.

After the meal, we took the elevator down to the basement of the monolith, where I learned we would not, in fact, be skiing, as my email from Jesse said, but rather ice-skating. I walked to the counter, said “give me your biggest size,” and hoped for the best. In a strange turn of events, this rink actually had skates that fit me! Once again, I think I was the only mildly competent ice skater in the group, which is very sad. I skated around and tried to help them learn the art of ice-skating, but there was not much I could do. David fell no less than 20 times over the course of the hour and a half skating party.

After skating, we parted ways and took a cab back to Jesse’s school. They showed me the secret East Gate of the university, and I finally realized where we were. We were in the shadow of Jesse’s dorm, which was literally not thirty yards from the congee restaurant. Allow me to elaborate: Beijing has a population of no less than 17 million people. Around 500,000 (if not more) of these people are college students. Haidian, my district, houses the majority of these schools, but the district is huge, enclosing approximately 30 square miles. Jesse, the girl who came to Passion Atlanta and spoke, who ran into Morgan and Caroline on the last day of Passion, lives in a dorm that is a 5 minute walk from my own. This is more than coincidence.

They walked me back to my dorm, and we played a few songs on the guitar before they left. Right before they left, Levi said, “Do you mind if I pray for us.” Not at all, not at all. So we prayed in my room, and I escorted them out of the building. It has been an amazing afternoon with the two of them.

Then, I proceeded to study the wrong text for class tomorrow, which I would only find out much later on into the night. I’m sitting in my room, studying away, blissfully, when I hear a knock on the door. It’s Joy. She says: I’ve just finished having this really long discussion about Christianity with my friend, do you mind if I ask you some questions? Of course, I say, and then I tell her that I’m going to break the language pledge for the remainder of the conversation (I’m not even about to try to begin to explain the Gospel in Chinese right now). We stay up until about 2 in the morning, talking about salvation. This too is more than coincidence.

I finally finish my homework around 2:30 in the morning, and I die on my pillow.

I’ll write soon!

Love,

Jamey

Tuesday January 18th, 2011

Again, I must apologize for the tardiness of these journals. I’ve had a little more free time than usual during the day, and I can’t bring myself to write in the afternoon. As all modern writers do, I must write in the dead of night, in a smoky room, of a shoddy apartment above the crowded streets of some big city. However, my apartment isn’t too shabby, and my roommate doesn’t smoke… Let us begin.






Today, I got up and ate the remainder of my breakfast supplies. Many of the others in the camp are starving, and I think that soon everyone will resort to cannibalism for breakfast. Perhaps, I will make another trip to Carrefour (oh nectar of the CCP!) to get some more food for the week to come.

I got up and went to class. I’ve had difficulty all day paying attention to the material in class. A lot of the vocabulary is words that we’ve already studied, and the text isn’t as bad as the usual articles for Chinese back at Ole Miss. Thus, I have been at wits with myself throughout the entire day: should I move up to 5^th year and take harder classes? Once the extracurricular activities start, maybe I will learn more than the classes. What if that doesn’t happen? If I wait to late to make a decision, I’ve already unwillingly made the decision to maintain the status quo. The debate raged all day.

Funny story: I went and ate lunch at the Muslim cafeteria on campus. They were getting ready to close up for the break, and they only had about 10 dishes to choose from. I got some potatoes and beef for 13 Yuan. Then I said to myself, “I’m kinda thirsty.” I got a bottle of peach juice from the refrigerator in the cafeteria. As I sat in the poorly heated cafeteria, it occurred to me that the juice I was holding was warmer than the surrounding room. Which reminds me, our room is still freezing.

I went and talked to the program director about the possibility of moving up, and in classic poor Jamey form, when I go up to talk to her, I’m a mumbling idiot. No woman in her right mind would let a bumbling American like the one who presented himself then to move up to a higher level. This is what I gathered: the 5^th level classes are much more like the ones I took at Ole Miss. Check.  The program director openly condescends all of the students in the program. Check. The 5^th year classes don’t have too much speaking practice, and focus more on higher-level vocab. Check. The 5^th year classes are designed for people whose native language is Chinese. Check…

Thus, I was even more confused about what I should do in the way of classes. If I don’t learn a buttload of Chinese while I’m here, I do believe that my folks will strangle me (shout out for Demopolis!). This is what I finally decided. Albeit the material that I am learning now is very little, this lends me the opportunity to learn more about Chinese culture through other media – TV, movies, books, etc. I will also have more time to hang out with Chinese people, exercise, and maintain my sanity while I’m here. I might even read a book or two. I will remain a 4^th year student.

This afternoon, in lieu of my decision, I watched The Last Emperor, by some Italian guy. It was very good, and portrayed the life of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China (hence the name). Then, I watched about 30 minutes of a Zhang YiMou movie called My Father and Mother. Zhang YiMou is a super-artsy director from the Mainland, whose movies generally incorporate two key elements: a countryside setting and a documentary-style plot. Although the movie was well directed and such, the movie has a lot of dialect, and it makes my head hurt a little.

Around 7, my hunger got the best of me, and found some other hungry students in the dorm. Joy, Cailin, Lee and I all ate at our neighborhood favorite Cheng Du Roast Fish restaurant. We ate eggplant (yeah!), egg-cucumber-tomato soup, fried bread with icing dipping sauce, beef with peppers, and cucumbers. I’m going to miss the food here when I leave. It’s so good, and you must eat it to believe me.

Then we headed back to the dorm, so that we could all prepare the next day’s text.

Monday January 17th, 2011

Classes have begun. The model of the classes is very different from what I’m used to. We aren’t allowed to write notes in class, and I think that is very strange. On the flip side, we just repeat the sentence structures from the text read the night before, and I don’t even really need to take notes on anything. We go to a different room for our first and second classes, and our first and second classes are almost identical. I still don’t understand the reasoning for going to two different classes, and doing the same thing. Its good practice, I guess…

Our third class is called a “debate and speaking” class, and in this class, there are two students to a teacher. My partner is a girl from Yale, and I have no idea what her English name is. What’s in a name? Her Chinese one is Pu ZhaoHai. This class is pretty fun, and the topic for today’s class is colonialism, and the topic quickly turned around to modern quasi-colonialism and the Chinese presence in Africa. I had some good ammunition for this topic, but neither my partner nor teacher had particularly studied modern economic development (not that I’m an expert by any means).

Then, I took lunch at the Muslim cafeteria on campus with some of the other students. Most of us had one-on-one class at 12, so we ate quickly to make it back to class in time. My one-on-one class was with the same teacher as I had for debate class, and the topic gravitated back towards quasi-colonialism in Africa. Turns out that she thinks that I have 1) really bad pronunciation and 2) really bad grammar. By the way, I challenge anyone to talk about Chinese investment in Africa (Chinese people included) with accurate grammar. Tis a most difficult feat to accomplish, but it is my duty (play Hail to the Chief in the background now).

The teachers here are a little more “technical” about their Chinese than at Ole Miss. Back home, the teachers emphasize fluency with the language. By their logic, if the common people make a grammatical mistake, we should make that same mistake when communicating with them, so that our speech is more like the average Chinese person. I am also a supporter of this logic, and I’ve used it when studying Spanish (with pretty good results, I would say). However, the teachers here want us to sound better and more educated than the people on the street, and we can only do that by having perfected grammar and pronunciation as it appears in textbooks. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, it will certainly take some time for me to get used to it.

I got out of class and reviewed for the next day. I had some free time after getting done, and I decided to watch Nanjing! Nanjing!, a movie about the Rape of Nanjing. It was a very difficult movie to watch, but I understand more of the Chinese opinion on this historical event now.

I decided to get some grub about 6:30, and Shazeda, Cailin, Lee, and myself all went to another Chengdu restaurant in the neighborhood. I approve wholeheartedly, and we ordered potatoes and eggplant braised in soy sauce, spicy asparagus, and stir-fried lamb and onions. It was so good. We even ordered a couple bottles of Qingdao to celebrate St. Anthony day, a most glorious feast of yore.

Then, I headed back to the dorm to study with Shazeda. I retired at about 10 to my room to fall dead asleep.

Over the last week, the heating situation in the rooms has been steadily declining, and I think the entire matter came to a head yesterday. Most of the rooms hover around 15 C (58 F), which isn’t so bad if you wear a couple of layers to sleep or walk around in your room with your outside jacket on (as some students do). My room is lucky in this right because its on the west side of the building. I have the afternoon sun to warm the room, and for some reason, the west side of the building doesn’t stink as bad as the east side does. It smells bad over there – I will let you use your imagination. They “say” that the problem will be resolved tomorrow. We shall see…

I’ll write soon!

Love,

Jamey

Sunday January 16th, 2011

This morning, I rolled out of bed around 7 AM. I left the dorm at 8 with Shazeda and Joy, and we found some street food for breakfast. I found my favorite Chinese breakfast food: a meat between two pieces of bread (in the strict Chinese translation), or in a looser translation, a “meat smash.” I like the latter better.

We headed over to JingShan Park for the day (please refer to day 2 [January 8^th] for further clarification). The mountain in the park, as I suspected, is man-made. The refuse from which ths mountain is composed comes from the construction of the Forbidden City. Imagine that. We had 2 objectives for going to this park: see the scenery and check out the crazy excerises that Chinese people do in the morning. We accomplished both of these feats.

Then we went over to Tian’An Men Square, to check out the Maoseleum, the square, and the giant portrait of the venerable Chairman Mao. I took several emotional pictures in front of the great Chinese leader, and then we headed back towards the campus. Don’t let the simplicity of the tour lead you astray; it was after 12 when we got back to campus.

We ate lunch at my favorite Muslim cafeteria on campus, and the seven of us who went ate an extremely cheap and good meal. Each paid a mere $1.25 for a full meal.

That afternoon we attended yet another meeting at 2, which lasted for an hour. Teacher Zhang spoke again, and we also had a speaker from the University come. In this meeting, Zhang introduced all of the teachers for the program. There are 24 teachers in all, and but one of them is male. One of the teachers looks exactly like Jack White – the lead guitarist and singer from the White Stripes – and simultaneously excites and disturbs me. The remaining teachers, sadly, did not look like any of my other favorite musicians.

Then, it was nose to the grindstone. We have a good amount of homework to do every night, upon which I won’t elaborate now, for fear of alienating and boring those following my blog.

That about wraps it up for the day, but I’ll be sure to write again soon. Please email me and tell me about the states, and also if you have any questions or comments about living in the People’s Republic of China!

I’ll write soon.

Jamey

Saturday January 15th, 2011

First and foremost, let me say that I apologize for delaying my writing of the past few days’ journals. As I told Morgan not too many hours ago, the program has upped the ante on us. You’ll see below.

Today, we got up and attending an orientation meeting with the program director of ACC, also known as teacher Zhang. She basically read the handbook from cover to cover, and I really wanted to shoot myself for having read the handbook before my arrival. It was a very long three hours sitting in a cold auditorium on campus, but at the end, I got 7 free bottles of water. That’s not too bad, I’d say.

At the end of the meeting, we signed the language pledge, which said that I would not use English over the next four months except when communicating with people who do not speak Chinese. Thus, my blog is excluded, along with talking to family and friends on the phone; however, Teacher Zhang says that I should limit my conversations with you and my exposure to “contamination.” This lady just might be more intense than my Chinese teacher at Ole Miss.

We got a two hour break for lunch, during which I called the homeland and went back to the congee restaurant from the day before. It was good, once again, and we all sat around awkwardly wishing we could speak English.

After lunch, we each had separate class meetings. There, we got to meet the teachers for each of our classes. We have 6 that will rotate for our classes: Teachers Sun, Zhu, Zhang, Zhao, Li, and Ding. Try saying that 5 times fast. They all talked inordinately slow during this class meeting, and it also made me want to shoot myself. I amazed all of the teachers by knowing how to say their names. They all think that I have “excellent character recognition.” Maybe I do, but I feel like I’m constantly messing up new words and how to pronounce them.

We then had a short break, which was followed by another meeting with the teachers. This meeting was designed to be a meet and greet with the teachers. I talked to teachers Zhu and Ding the entire time. Zhu is a positively enchanting woman. She was born in Hai’Er Bin, which is a town not far from the Russian Border, on the Pacific Coast. She has a very strange accent, and she is a giantess of a Chinese woman, at an impressive 5’ 10”. I talked to Ding about Chinese bai jiu [white alcohol: a pure grain alcohol made from rice] – for some strange reason – and also about Qingdao beer – which may very well be the only good tasting beer in this country.

Then, I got some food with some fellow classmates at a Uighur restaurant nearby. I recommend looking up Uighur on Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia – if you’d like to know more about the people from this highly contentious province. The food was good, but ordering it was incredibly complicated, as it was a Uighur restaurant. I sat by Joy at the restaurant. She is the only 5^th year student, and she spent the first few years of her life here. I really like talking to her.

Then, we walked around to some of the shops in the area – Christina, Joy, Shazeda, Alex and I. There are some interesting stationary shops in the hood, with some excellent Chinglish translations throughout the store. We all hung out in the Shazeda/Joy room, with Luke and Michael until about 12, when we all retired in preparation for an early morning.

  

January 14th, 2011

Dear all –

Day number two of the program! We got up to take the placement tests around 7:30, as the test began at 8:30. The tests were being held in the No 8 building, right behind our dorms. I walk into the classroom where the test is scheduled to take place, and as soon as I sit down, a teacher walks up to me and says, “Are you Jamey?” Yes… It turns out that the placement tests that I took back home didn’t make it to Hamilton at all. They’re lost somewhere in cyberspace, in the realm of the broken Hamilton server. So I had to go into another room with 4 other guys (so much for the dominance of our sex), and I took the exact same test as before. It wasn’t that bad, except for that I had to complete three tests (listening, reading, writing) while everyone else was just doing writing.

Luckily, my oral exam was at 12:15, giving me plenty of time to finish the test and even head back to the room to hang out. My oral exam went well. They are supposed to last 15 minutes, but I was out in about 10, which kinda scared me. I had to wait until 4 o’clock to determine my class. You’ll have to wait in suspense, as I did.

I know that it’s been cold this whole time, but I’m pretty sure that yesterday took the cake. I was about miserable walking to meet some students for lunch after my oral exam. We ate at a Congee restaurant, but I refrained from eating Congee today. Maybe I can bring myself to eat it later. Congee is a grain or vegetable dish, where one simply mashes the grain – or vegetable – into a pot, cooks it, and puts some spices in the dish. Most Congee is served sweet. While I was there, I met Joy (Shazeda’s roommate who lives in Miami. She actually grew up in China, but moved to the US before high school. She attended college on the East Coast, and now she lives outside Orlando.) And also Cliff (he lives in San Francisco, and goes to college in Seattle. He is familiar with Portland, and we share a love for the Powell’s bookstore there.)

After lunch, Cailin (previously and erroneously spelled as Kaylin; it is still pronounced the same, however) and I went to Carrefour again. She had to grab some more domestic items, and I bought a teacup, some hangers, and a bag of tea for myself. I’m drinking some of this tea now. Then we trudged back to the dorm in the wind, which was incredible. We (the 6^th floor) spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out in my room or in the big room at the end of the hall. Lee can play guitar extremely well, and we literally spent the entire day passing the guitar back and forth playing songs that we knew. She started playing when she was 8, and is very good at finger picking. We have some of the same tastes in music, and a mutual admiration of Cat Power.

At 4 we all headed over to the second floor to see what class we were in. The suspense is killing you, right? I could be placed in classes ranging from 2^nd year to 5^th year, and I made… … 4^th year! I’m so excited (can’t you tell?). There are a good many of us in the 4^th year class: Cristina Lillian, Emily, Shazeda and more. I believe there are 13 of us in all. We hung out on the 6^th floor for a while after that, until we got hungry. A group of us decided to eat at the place we visited last night, which turned out to be a ChengDu restaurant, not a SiChuan one. It was delicious, yet again, and ridiculously cheap. We ate beltfish, cucumbers, Japanese tofu, beef and peppers, and tree fungus.

Then, we all braved the cold and went back to the dorms for the evening. Some brave souls went back out into the cold and visited the bars, but I chilled in the room with Lee and others. We played guitar for a while, then went to bed around 12.

The language pledge starts tomorrow, and I won’t be able to speak in English to any of the people in this country. I can still write journals and call people on Skype, but other than that, there will be no English in my next four months.

I’ll write soon!

Jamey

January 13th, 2011 (written on the morn of the 14th)

Dear All –

As of today, the program has begun! Yuki set an alarm for the both of us, and we went to register in a building just behind our dorms. That building, called the North Building, is where the ACC offices are located. After that, I went back to the dorms, and played guitar during my free time. Whilst I was playing, some folks from the program stopped by. There are a good many people who play guitar here (I count 3 excluding myself at the moment), and a lot of the people sing or play other musical instruments. I don’t think this is coincidence at all, as Li Ding’s mother Rebecca once told me, “people who are good at languages are good at two things: math and music.” Given that Chinese is a tonal language (expressed through number measurements of tone), it makes sense that we all love music. My room as become the unofficial hangout room, and before we left to go on a campus tour at 10 AM, there were about 15 people in my room, all singing and drinking tea.

Yesterday, I met some more people. Shazeda is from NYC, and I think her roommate Joy is too. We went on the campus tour, and saw some of the noteworthy buildings in the neighborhood: banks, restaurants, etc. While on the trip, I got to meet some of the ACC professors. Our guides were Wang, Shi, and He Laoshi. Shi Laoshi, a male professor from Beijing, teaches the Chinese chess and Go elective classes. I made sure to talk to him! On the tour with me were Vinod, Kaylin, Emily (from Grinnell College – I can’t get over that), and Yuki. The tour lasted for a good to hours, and after that we all ate with the professors in a Muslin cafeteria. I felt like a traitor in enemy territory, but no on else there was Muslin either, so I guess it’ll be ok. The professors were all interested in the places in China that I’d visited. Not surprising. Chinese people love their country.

After eating lunch, we went over to the Chinese Development Bank so that folks could withdraw money from ATMs and exchange currency. While we were there, I was helping Kaylin exchange her dollars to Yuan. Kaylin’s family is full-blooded Chinese, and the bank teller thought that she was a native Chinese person, and kept asking asking her questions. She can’t say too much Chinese, and the guy kept thinking that she wanted to change RMB to US dollars. We finally got it worked out, and it took a minute to get the currency straightened out.

Then, I went back up to the room and called Morgan. She got the first of her surprises last night! I’m so excited, and can’t wait for her to get the rest of them!

After that, Vinod, Emily, Kaylin, Nina, Susanna, Will, and myself went over to QianHai and ice-skated. It was awesome! I don’t have any pictures from the day though; I didn’t want to mess up and break the camera. Since I’d be skating around. We skated for around two hours, and the girls stepped out on the ice and walked around. Will, a guy from San Francisco, at one point while I wasn’t with him, looked at the girls and said: “How does a guy from Alabama know how to ice skate?! And why can he do it so well?” That made my day when they told me he said that. But his appraisal of my skating ability may have been a little off. I definitely fell hard on my knee, and now its swollen. I feel like a dumb.

Then we walked around the Old City for a while and looked for an old Catholic Church. It was closed by the time we found it, and we got to know each other while we walked around. Turns out that Will is an Eagle Scout! That was also cool.

Then we took the subway back to our stop, and ate at a SiChuan restaurant. The food was spicy, but so good. And it was cheap; only 102 Yuan (16 dollars) for the seven of us. I spent about an hour trying to find an ATM that would give me money. Then we went back to the dorm, and by that time, it was about 10 PM. All of the 6^th floor (almost) came over to my room, and we had a party in here to welcome in the program. We played Scrabble, ERS, Richman/poor man, 31, and others played a bluffing game that I don’t understand.

We got to bed around 12, ready to take the placement test at 8 in the morning!

I’ll write soon!

Jamey