Location and Identity

I went shopping with the other Beijing EAPSI women today.  We’re going to a 4th of July party at the US embassy on Thursday, and the guys got suits made so . . . the stakes have been raised.  We actually had a decent amount of success – one time I even had to tell the shopkeeper that a dress was too big!  This had never happened to me before in China.

I bought a few dresses and some cute cards.  They had pretty scenes on them, along with “recipes”:

Travel recipe
there are a lot of things that we canlearn through
traveling to different places experience
culture and your information

Reading recipe
in today’s world,
training and learning do 
not stop when
we finish schoolthey
must nowcontinue
throughout our working lives

Shopping recipe
use a shopping list
you also need to think about what you
can afford to have

Sleep recipe:
i spread my wings and i’ll learn how to fly
wanna feel the warm breeze
sleep under a palm tree

The last one was my favorite, because it is literally some of the lyrics from “Breakaway” by Kelly Clarkson.

About halfway through, I started noticing my own behavior and seeing in it a mirror of the behavior I see around me.  Chinese people are beyond generous with the people in their ‘inner circle’ (family, friends, colleagues, etc.), but people on the outside of this circle are really not extended any basic courtesy.  I think in the time I’ve spent here, I’ve internalized this attitude more than I’m comfortable with.  In Chinese, it’s easier for me to be demanding, dismissive, curt.  Even five years later, it’s an easier skin to slip into than I realized.  

It’s a difficult question for me, how to find a balance between assimilation and authenticity?  If I could, I would remove any trace of an accent in my Chinese, remove any indication of my American-ness.  There’s much that I admire in Chinese culture and want to make “mine”, most especially the incredible generosity among friends.  I have enough relativism in me to know that Chinese behavior towards strangers is “rude according to Americans”, not “rude”, but . . . I’m an American.  Should my behavior be governed by identity or location?  A bit of both, no?  I don’t quite know what the test is, but I think it comes down to a comparison of values.  When it comes to food, for instance, I go with location: my gastronomical repertoire has increased markedly because I value “accepting gifts graciously” over “Americans don’t eat that”.  And in public transportation, “getting on a bus at some point this week” does outweigh my American belief in “queueing patiently”.

In dealing with shopkeepers, it’s something like “acting less obviously foreign” vs. “recognizing the people I’m interacting with as human”.  The former (besides being a hopeless cause) is simply not worth sacrificing the latter.  

So I started to make a conscious effort to look people in the eyes, smile, say ‘thank you’.  I know that it’s super American to say thank you so much, but I can’t hide my foreignness in my outward appearance, and maybe I shouldn’t try to hide some aspects of my culture any more than the color of my skin and hair or the shape of my face. 

AQI Apps

I woke up to a flurry of texts in our EAPSI WeChat group (seriously one of the highlights of this experience, sharing our diverse China experiences with 39 other American grad students), comparing air pollution in our various cities – 284 in Shanghai and 349 in Beijing.  

There are several air quality apps available, and I check a few of them.  I don’t know which one this woman in Shanghai is using, but I kind of love it.  In addition to the “air soup” comment, there is a picture of a man wearing a mask next to . . . a glass of wine?  

Apparently this is the suggested method of dealing with it.  This led to my new motto: “Drink up, the AQI is over 300 somewhere.”

One of the apps I use is called Air Quality China.  It offers four monitoring stations for Beijing, with hourly data over the last 24 hours and daily data over the last 30 days.  

The other one is 墨迹天气, a Chinese weather app.  One of my friends was surprised to hear that pollution changes as often as weather, but really all the weather apps here do pollution, too.  It’s the most aesthetically pleasing weather app I’ve ever seen.  The home screen is a litlte girl dressed for the day’s conditions, with the temperature, highs and lows, current pollution, and tomorrow’s forecast.  

Scrolling down, you can see an hour-by-hour forecast for the next 24 hours as well as a weekly forecast, plus a bunch of other information like what license plates are permitted to drive today, the date on the lunar calendar, fishing conditions, and what kind of clothes and makeup you should wear (true story!!  The answer to the former always seems to be t-shirts, and the answer to the latter (taking into account temperature, humidity, and windspeed) was non-oil-based foundation.)  If you click on the AQI number, it tells you where your current city is ranked among 626 of China’s cities – this morning, we were #619.   

Anyway, I should say that it’s the most aesthetically pleasing weather app I’ve ever seen . . . when the weather is good:

But this morning the scene looked positively post-apocalyptic.  

The reading on 墨迹天气 when I woke up was exactly 300, which is the boundary between “Very Unhealthy” and “Hazardous”.  The icon for Very Unhealthy is a full-fledged gas mask, like trench warfare style; later I saw that for Hazardous they don’t pull any punches and just use a skull.  

I laid in bed a little longer, reading those messages and staring out the window in despair.  I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, but now I think some part of my subconscious was waiting for some authority figure to recognize that the conditions outside were terrible and give me permission (or an order!) to not leave the hotel.  Like when I was a kid in Minnesota and we saw the snow built up outside and watched the TV raptly, listening for a school cancellation.  

Alas, none came.  I got up, put on my big girl pants and my face mask, and biked to work.  I saw, like, maybe eight people wearing masks all day.  But I also saw two people jogging, which just . . . what?!  There is no way the overall effect of that activity is positive.

I even wore my mask when biking to lunch.  The lab window was open all day, so it’s really all an exercise in futility, but I do what I can.  I asked one guy if he ever wears a mask, and he said “you get used to it”.  There’s something powerful and sad in that statement.  Powerful because, what an incredible machine the human body is, that it can take particulate matter as input when expecting a pleasant combination of oxygen and nitrogen, and still function normally.  Sad because, while the human body (and mind, and spirit) can accomodate any number of terrible situations, it would be better if it did not have to.

I’m still feeling 20% nauseous 80% of the time, so I picked at my lunch.  

On the way home, I saw out the window a worker squatting on top of the next building over, welding.  The light is so distinctive, it immediately caught my attention.  He was holding his hand up in front of his face, quickly lowering it and raising it again to ‘protect’ his eyes.  And immediately, I’m back at the farm, watching the workers weld rebar.  I remember the day Huo JieKuai repeatedly refused my offers to get him a welding mask, and came to work the next day with horribly sunburnt eyeballs.  

One of [the many] ways in which China seems like a paradox to me is the attitude towards health.  I read a lot of China news, and there’s so many stories about this animal being poached or that animal being driven to extinction because of the Chinese demand for one of its body parts for traditional medicine.  There are also stories about the growing demand for organic or, at least, trustworthy food sources after incidents like the melamine scare of 2008.  My roommate suggested I buy fish oil pills to China if I had any old people to visit; tourists to the Bay Area always visit Costco or GNC to buy quality supplements in bulk.  No meal with Chinese people would be complete without being gently forced to eat something because “it’s good for your body”.  My life in China is one of constant chiding about my love of ice water, which is apparently terrible for you.  

But, at the same time . . . the official pronouncement of today’s air quality is that it is Hazardous, masks and air purifiers are Necessary, outdoor sports are Not Suitable, and open windows are Not Recommended, but 99% of what I saw was no masks, outdoor activities as usual, and “open ALL the windows!”.  Smoking, despite a June 1 ban in public places, is still huge.  Welding masks and other basic safety precautions used in American machine shops were scorned.  

Upon further thought, I realized that this is probably no different than the hypocrisy of American attitudes about health.  We demand the best health care but don’t generally take the proper preventative measures.  I think tanning bed use is still depressingly high, and most Stanford students don’t wear helmets while riding their bikes.  

I think we are all selective about the things we worry about, and the ways we feel capable of action.  In China, there seems to be a high value on traditional medicine and ways of eating, but these traditional beliefs don’t seem up to the challenges of modern China, with 1.3 billion people competing for these scarce ingredients and some of the worst air pollution in the world.  In the US, we place our trust in technology and reactionary medicine, and undervalue preventative measures.  

After work, I biked to the U-Center at 5 to meet Hannah, another EAPSI fellow.  My work chair is broken in 3 places so I needed to invest in some pillows, and she was looking for a wallet.  I bought an adorable and super squishy stuffed elephant, and then we stopped at Paris Baguette.  I’ve been a somewhat vocal critic of eating American food in China, so it was with some self-loathing that I did this.  But my reasoning is solid: American food in China is generally sold at American prices and is not as good as American food in America; while Chinese food in China is both way cheaper and way better than both American food in China and Chinese food in America.  I try to enjoy what I have, when I have it.  

With that said, I haven’t been hungry in a few days and I’m trying to give my stomach what it thinks it wants if it will agree to then eat it.  So I bought a garlic baguette, a cream-filled donut, and egg tarts (which aren’t even American, they’re Portuguese and imported so long ago they’re essentially Chinese).  And I ate, and my stomach was reasonably happy about it.  

Group Meeting

I stayed at home a little longer than usual to practice my presentation, and apparently in doing so I missed the weekly seminar. The speaker was from Georgia Tech . . . but he’s Chinese, and the talk was in Chinese.  Probably not a huge loss.

In the afternoon, we had a group meeting. I was scheduled to talk, and was pretty nervous.  Partly because our lab meetings at Stanford are pretty informal and I wasn’t sure what to expect here, and partly because, oh, my presentation was 30-40% Chinese.

One of my labmates introduced me (in English) with some excessively flowery language, something about me being a kind lady and a strong researcher. Also both Ellen and I were referred to as “he” – a common mistake by Chinese speakers, but mainly funny because he was at dinner yesterday when another labmate asked me what mistakes Chinese people make in English, and this was one of the two I mentioned.

I think it went well. I tried to address a lot of the questions I’ve been asked by my labmates, explaining where I’d been in China before and what I was doing; what the EAPSI program is that brought me here; what my research is on and what I hope to do here. I also brought a box of See’s chocolate to pass around, which couldn’t have hurt :)

I got a few questions about my research afterwards (in English, thankfully). Then the next guy presented. He had just sent some time at Georgia Tech and he gave us a talk about “why are frog’s tongues so sticky?”. A weird and confusing moment came when he was showing a video of a frog capturing and eating a cricket in super slow motion, and he turned to me and said “cricket 怎么说?” (“How do you say cricket?”). Ummm 你是问我吗?? Are you asking me?? I did not know the answer.

There were two more presentations, less engaging than the first, during which I tried my best to stay awake in the warm and stuffy room. The first guy was doing something with dry cells? Really the only words I understood were 细胞 (cell) and HeLa (because I just finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks before coming to China). The second guy was studying the mechanics of tumors, considering the role of both stress and nutrition transport on growth. This was actually interesting to me, but he faced the wall the entire time and I could barely hear him.

In the evening, 10 of the 13 EAPSI Beijingers got together for dinner to celebrate our first week of work. We went to a Xinjiang barbecue place, and it was delicious. The taste of fatty lamb roasted on a stick brings me right back to Hunchun, without fail. We also had super delicious spicy “potato chips”. It was all fairly spicy, but one guy reminded us that if we come back in two months it probably wouldn’t be. That would be an interesting barometer, to eat a place every n weeks and see how it feels.

We had the greatest conversations during dinner. About how one guy lived in a tiny village in Africa and had unlimited internet, but here in the capital of China it’s expensive, slow, and limited. About another guy’s 21st birthday, when some other Americans on coke got into a bar fight in China and he barely got them out of there, although they were bleeding heavily. About pack rat middens (not mittens, and not cute), which are piles of junk hoarded by pack rats and cemented with their urine.

And about the prevalence of street vomit in Beijing. I’m not sure if I’ve just never noticed it before in other cities, but it seems very common here. One guy had texted everyone this morning to say that there were four discrete, giant, puddles of vomit on the way to the subway station. I saw a [very drunk] man vomit between his legs while sitting on a bench on my way home from work on Tuesday (like 5pm, dude, get it together) and we saw a woman supporting another woman while she vomited on our way to dinner.

I’ve never vomited on the street. In fact, I can’t think of a time I threw up anywhere but a trash can or toilet. That was the general sentiment in our group. Yet, it seems to be a common enough occurence in China. Is this a physiological thing, a result of lower alcohol tolerance or a quicker vomit reflex in response to eating something that disagrees with you?? Or a behavioral thing, because the street is largely thought of as toilet/trashcan so why bother rushing home to do it inside your house?

One Shade of Gray

The air today was “heavily polluted” (AQI of 233) with 139 µg/m3 of PM2.5, the smallest and most harmful particles.  (For context, the daily limit allowable in the US is 35µg/m3.)  Some of the other EAPSI students didn’t even bring face masks to China (I guess they like to live dangerously?) but I brought several and am wearing them on my walk to Tsinghua.  My lungs don’t need another reason to act up.  

The walk today was more pleasant in the cooler morning weather, wearing more comfortable shoes, and going directly to my office.  But a 3.5km walk is still a 3.5km walk.  And by cooler weather, I mean that it was still 80.  

I was shown my desk and spent the morning settling in and working on my introduction presentation.  Mostly settling in, though.  They’ve given me a Windows 8 computer, and it’s mostly in Chinese.  The internet situation is also extremely interesting at work.  On the one hand, Google is somehow unblocked!  And it’s all quite fast!  

On the other hand, I have to sign into Tsinghua’s internal network, and we’re limited to 20GB per month.  I’ve never seen wireless internet rationed like this – dialup used to be priced by the minute back in the day, and I know some hotels charge different prices for different speeds, but never by the GB.  I work entirely on a computer and, back at Stanford, on a remote server, so the idea of rationing data is unthinkable to me.  Here, the main program I use is installed on the Windows machine that I’ll be using, so it might be okay.  Well, except I’m using someone else’s account and when I first logged on today, halfway through the month, they’d already used 18.5 of the allotted 20GB.  So, this could get interesting.

While preparing my intro presentation, I wanted to introduce EAPSI, the program that brought me here.  I started to list the 7 host countries where students are working this summer . . . then deleted a few words and changed it to “7 host locations”.  At the pre-departure orientation they told us that NSF refers to host locations instead of countries because both China and Taiwan are included in the seven.  I laughed at the time and rolled my eyes, but I know from experience how touchy the topic is, and I do not want to get into an extended discussion of Taiwan Province at lab meeting on Friday.  So, host locations it is.  Thanks, NSF, for preparing me for this!

My new labmates seem nice.  I guess word spread through the group from the one girl (WeiHua) who took me to the gate yesterday, because a few of them kind of knew my name and at least one knew that I had studied at XiaDa.  We all went to lunch together and they all walked with me because I didn’t have a bike and paid for my lunch because I didn’t have my lunch card yet.  They all spoke a bit of English with me, but once I said a few full sentences they seemed to just throw in the towel and fall back to Chinese.  

Even after they got done freaking out about how good my Chinese is (reminder: the bar is set very low), I surprised one guy again by asking if he was a southerner.  Yes, accents are generally a slightly advanced skill (I remember a time when I couldn’t tell Chinese from Korean, much less distinguish accents) but this one is not that hard.  Southerners speak very sibilantly, turning ‘sh’ into ’s’, and I did live in the south for a year.  It’s also a big region, not like I picked out his exact province or anything.  But he was amazed!  

Over lunch, we talked a bit about grad student life in China and America.  I asked what their plans are for this weekend, which is a there-day for the Dragon Boat Festival.  They confirmed that we get the day off, but basically told me they’ll all go in to work yesterday.  One of the students told me he usually works 9am to 11:30pm, to which I did one of those “I’m sorry, I must have forgotten basic Chinese numbers and time-telling, could you try that again?” things.  The schedule sounds similar on the weekends, too.  My Chinese residents back at Stanford make a whole lot more sense now.  

In the afternoon, WeiHua took me to get my cafeteria card.  Doing things like this (办事) is like a scavenger hunt, where you go to many different locations and they give you a red stamp and tell you the next place to go.  We first printed a letter, then got Prof. Feng to sign it, then 谢伟华 converted that into a letter of invitation.  Then we went to some building to get a red stamp and be told that I can’t use my card between 11:45am and 12:30 because I don’t live on campus.  And then we went to the cafeteria card building, where we got the card.  And then we went to another desk in the same building to put money on the card.  

Tomorrow I still have to get my student card, my building card, and an internet account of my own.  More scavenger hunts!  

Before I left for China, a friend told me to listen to the most recent This American Life episode, about Americans living in China.  My favorite part was when one of the speakers said that the measure word for foreigners is a “hassle”.  It’s very true, and although I’m probably only conscious of about half of the inconvenience I strew about me, even that’s a lot.  I asked Cheng a question about getting my own internet account, and she picked up her phone to make some phone calls.  Five minutes later, I overheard, “but before I called here, I called there. . . “.  Some of that is general Chinese bureacratic inconvenience, but a lot of it is probably me, this foreign visitor who is not a Tsinghua student.  A hassle of foreigners, indeed.

I walked home the long way again, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  I got some pictures of the “main building” (literally its name) and the east entrance.

On the way home, it started to rain.  It’s wierd, though, because you really can’t see the rain against the solid gray backdrop.  This was the view out of my office when it was sunny:

and this was on the walk home as it rained:

It’s so monotonous.  This is the only context in which I would say that I would love to see fifty shades of gray.  

Orientation Day 3 – Forbidden City

We had another lecture this morning by another PKU professor.  This one was supposed to be about society and culture, but it was really more of the history and politics.  The most interesting thing from this lecture (besides the truly impressive number of s’s he managed to put at the end of nearly every word) was that he, like the speaker from the day before, talked about backwardness and poverty as an “invitation for aggression”.  The man yesterday shared the story of Confucius and his followers walking along the Canglang river and hearing a man singing a song.

Confucius said, “Hear what he sings, my children.  When clear, he will wash his cap-strings, and when muddy, he will wash his feet with it.  This different application is brought by the water on itself.

It was interesting to me to learn that this is at least a somewhat common belief among Chinese.

During the lunch break today, I went back to Bank of China to see about reopening my old bank account.  I confidently handed over my account book, card, and passport and said that I had just forgotten the password.  (Why mention the five years thing if they don’t bring it up?)  She asked if this was the passport I used to open it and I said yes . . . then realized it wasn’t.  I renewed my passport a few months ago.  Apparently the account has been frozen and I need the old passport (or a certified letter from the embassy) to reopen it.  It’s almost not worth it for the 71元 that my accounts say I left in the account . . . but the woman casually mentioned that there was over 1000元 in there!  Apparently we got one last scholarship payment a few weeks after I left Xiamen.  I guess for $300 I’ll try to figure out how to get my old passport here . . . 

Today’s afternoon activity was a visit to Tiananmen and the Forbidden City.  The buldings were beautiful, but the weather was clear and sunny and the air quality was great, so I spent most of the time looking at the clouds. 

I did get one nice picture of the three Maria’s, though.  We’re nearly 10% of the EAPSI China 2015 cohort – and the similarities go even further!  Two of us are from Minnesota, two of us are the only two working at Tsinghua here in Beijing, they both go to Notre Dame, and their last names both start with G.

One other fun note from our time at the Forbidden City.  Victoria, our language teacher, had mentioned that she speaks four languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, English, and Spanish).  (There was a hilarious moment in our second language class when she was switching between Chinese and English, and accidentally started a sentence with “tambien”.)  Today I finally took the opportunity to speak Spanish with her.  To my surprise, it felt okay to speak Spanish and I didn’t once slip into Mandarin.  Switching back into Chinese and English later really messed with my brain, though.  Now that I am reasonably proficient in another language (especially one that many people consider difficult) I am less impressed when people speak a second language – but man, am I impressed when they have a third or a fourth, simultaneously held at a decent level.  Code switching is not easy!

For dinner, I ended up at a 土家 restaurant with a few other EAPSI people.  We had a great meal; except for the server switching out our money for a fake 100元 bill, it was the best experience I’ve had yet.  We got some delicious beef, frog, spicy wood ear mushroom, and basically spicy potato chips.

Places like we ate tonight are nice for dinner with friends, but you almost can’t eat there alone and it quickly becomes a two-hour, 40元 affair – not really suitable for a quick lunch.  I guess we’ve done alright for ourselves, but I’m surprised at how tiring eating out is.  I guess I was coming from a very different place when I lived in Xiamen, which was a similar situation food-wise.  But now at Stanford I cook or eat free food all the time, eating out maybe once or twice a month.  The exhausting thing about eating out is that you have to get each meal as you need it – there’s no freezer food, no leftovers to microwave.  We call it foraging, and we really don’t know where the next meal is going to come from.  If it’s stressful for me, I can only imagine how it feels for those who don’t speak Chinese and/or are picker eaters than me.  

Orientation Day 2 – Temple of Heaven

There is nothing like living in China to make me realize how dependent I am on Google.  Google has been blocked here since shortly after I left the last time, joining the ranks of Facebook, Youtube, WordPress, etc.  I was used to the latter, but dealing with Google being blocked has been really annoying.  Emailing, using my calendar, quick conversions – all require a VPN.  Downloading an app from the Play store is the most difficult thing I’ve done; it requires a VPN on two devices simultaneously and, apparently, the intercession of the saints in heaven. 

The internet is much more annoying than last time I was in China.  Part of it is that more of my life is online and my expectations are higher, but also the Chinese internet is, if anything, worse.  More restricted, more arbitrary, slower.  The randomness of it is the worst.  Some things are easy one time and then inexplicably don’t work, or take 40 minutes, the next time, which is hard to account for.  

Another random thing – for much (but not all) of today, Facebook Messenger was working without a VPN on my phone, even though “Facebook is blocked in China”.  

I had breakfast in the hotel cafeteria for the second day in a row.  The food is a la carte, and the price is reckoned with some mystery math that 40 American science and engineering PhD students are apparently not intelligent enough to figure out.  It’s an ongoing topic of discussion.  Yesterday I got an egg, a veggie pancake, and a sesame ball, and paid 6元.  Today I got an egg, a veggie pancake, a mantou, and a bottle of water, and paid 4.5元.  Even with the data points represented by a dozen other people’s breakfasts, we do not have enough equations to solve the system.  

In language class today, we learned clothing sizes – “I would like a medium shirt”, etc.  But the shoe sizing chart she put up only had women’s sizes up to 8.5 (I’m 10).  When it was my turn to practice a few sentences, I said the only phrases I’ve ever used when clothes shopping in China: “I need your largest item of ___” and “It’s still not big enough”.

After a lecture on Chinese history and politics by a professor from Peking University, I went on a quest for a SIM card.  I went looking for a China Telecom store, but when I asked for directions I was pointed to a magazine seller.  So, I bought a drug dealer phone – 160元 in cash, no identification required.  That includes the first month of a plan with 800 minutes of talk and 2G data.  No texting; the magazine seller told me no one texts anymore because of WeChat.  

I didn’t have time to get a proper lunch, so I stopped by the supermarket and found my favorite brand of yogurt (蒙牛, or Mongolian Cow).  It was 买二送二 (buy two, get two free!).  Life is good.

Each day of the orientation has a tourist activity, and today’s was the Temple of Heaven (or, as our tour guide always said, “the Temple of the Heaven”). I had taken my parents here when the visited me in 2010 (which is true of basically everywhere we’re going this week), and I’m not big on temples in general, so I wasn’t that into it.

It was also not a nice day to be outside. The AQI was still in the 160s, and the sky was still the exact same shade of gray as all day yesterday.  It even rained this morning without changing in appearance.

As we were walking and talking about the air quality, a few of us realized that we all had face masks but didn’t want to be the only ones wearing them.  So, finding strength in numbers, we put them on.

I had tried the face masks on back in the States before coming, and was not really looking forward to them becoming a regular part of my wardrobe.  With that said, today it seemed like the lesser of two evils.  I panicked a little when I first put it on, because there’s a little added resistance to breathing and my body thought I was having an asthma attack.  That passed within a few minutes, though, and then the most unpleasant part was that it gets warm in there and my mouth started sweating :-/

I bought postcards at the temple; this interaction was noticeable because the guy who sold them to me was the first to comment or react in any way to my Chinese.  He asked where I was from, how I learned Chinese, and said I spoke very well.  These are the sort of conversations I had approximately 37 times a day in Jilin and Xiamen, but most in people in Beijing appear to be completely unfazed by foreigners (or, as I used to call myself in China, talking muffins).  If anything, I would have thought this guy, working at a touristy location, would be most used to foreigners, but I guess most of the tourists don’t speak Chinese?

After our visit to the temple, we were on our own for dinner.  It basically feels like we live in the one-dimensional world of Flatland, because our explorations thus far have largely been limited to exiting the east gate of our university and turning left or right.  (This is a much better navigational system than some people are trying to use – “is it next to the KFC?”.  This is so frustrating because I know of at least three KFC within a kilometer of us.)

Tonight we turned right and ate at a Sichuan place.  We got an eggplant dish, beef-and-potato, and wood-ear mushrooms with pork.  The latter was by far the best thing I’ve eaten yet and really the first thing to remind me why I say I love Chinese food.

One strange thing – they asked us to pay up front.  I’ve never seen that at a sit-down restaurant.  Is this a Beijing thing, or what?  A group went to 后海 last night and had a lot of trouble getting a taxi (one guy even rolled down the window and said “No foreigners”).  We had some obviously empty cabs with 空车 in the window pass us by last night as well; I didn’t think much of it but after hearing their story we have two data points.  At the embassy they warned us about xenophobia, which I thought was strange; I’ve only ever experienced white or foreign privilege in China.  I’m not sure if this trend has come to an end, or if I’m not interpreting these situations correctly.

I Packed My Suitcases, and In Them I Put*:

*note: this list is not comprehensive

• 21 face masks of various styles (10 of my favorite, 1 super heavy duty, and 10 that I didn’t like but hopefully someone will appreciate?)
• 10 Stanford University shirts (2 to wear, 8 to give away)
• 10 pounds of chocolate – See’s, Ghirardelli, and Hersheys (gifts!  And s’mores…)
• 3 hemispheres of my brain (two in my skull, one 3D printed in my checked luggage)
• 3 bottles of California wine in 3 “flight safe” carrying bags (more gifts!)
• 2 external hard drives (I take backups very seriously)
• 2 bags of marshmallows (s’mores!!)
• 1 light weatherproof jacket, 1 black sweater, 1 long-sleeved shirt (apparently Beijing is “hot” but after four years in Palo Alto it’s impossible for me to envision a warm night.  I have no idea if all three are unnecessary, or woefully inadequate.  Probably the former?)
• 1 DARE shirt (DARE = Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence, a fellowship I just began.  A member of my cohort will be in Beijing in July and we plan to take a picture together)
• “travel” Catan (minus the ocean hexes, and in a plastic bag to save room)
• Chinese bank card and account book (it had 50CNY in it five years ago.  Not sure if it has 57CNY now (from interest), 40 (from fees), or if they just shut the whole thing down a few years ago.)
• Kindle (experimenting with this e-book thing for the first time)
• a few 
• a small pharmacy (hopefully enough medication to keep me breathing for 2+ months in Beijing?)

Um, I hope I didn’t forget anything?

I’ll be in China in 24 hours.  This . . . does not seem real.  I’ve been looking forward to this trip for just about five years, when I last left China without knowing when I’d be back.  

I did a post like this as I departed for my year of study in China, and looking back on it I realize how much has changed, but how much has stayed the same.

For instance, despite having been to China several times, I am aware that I am probably still in for a big shock.  A brief list of the things that I know have changed:

China.  It’s been five years!  Of break-neck, China-paced development!  I remember passing through the Beijing train station 3 months before the Olympics in 2008, and then one month before the Olympics.  The train station was unrecognizable.  Okay, now multiply that by 30 and an entire country . . . What has changed, and what has stayed the same?

The location.  At first, “my China” was a farm, outside a small city, outside a slightly larger city, in the northeast.  It was almost Korea, and everyone thought I was Russian.  It was a place where I worked with my hands, was surrounded by animals and their manure, and got very dirty.  Then, my China expanded to include a beautiful tropical island in the south.  It was almost Taiwan, complete with unintelligible dialect.  It was a place where I went to classes (when I had nothing better to do), danced several times a week, and regularly ate my weight in whatever fruits were in season.  Now, my China is going to include one of the largest cities in the world.  My purpose for being there is also quite different, as I will be doing research at a university, working in a fully Chinese setting.  

Technology.  On my first trip to China, I was delighted to get email at the internet cafes in Hunchun.  On the second trip, we had internet in the house.  On the third trip, I used a friend’s VoIP phone to call home when we got stuck in Yanji due to snow.  On the fourth trip, I Skyped regularly with my parents.  Now, five years later, I have no less than three devices with me that are equipped for video chat.  I have several apps (Whatsapp, 微信 (WeChat), Google Voice) that enable me to send free text messages internationally.  I can get facebook, YouTube, and WordPress on my phone (except for where they’re blocked, which means I need a VPN for my phone as well).

Me.  I’m five years older now and a PhD student, so I’m pretty solidly in 剩女 (leftover woman) territory.  I drink alcohol now.  I eat fish on the regular, and the best 饺子 (dumplings) I’ve eaten in five years have been ones that I’ve made.  I think I’ve gotten more outgoing.  I’m five years nerdier and have gotten more specialized in my field, to the point that when I say what I do, they don’t understand even if I use Chinese :(  I’ve kept a journal for 10 years and have been rereading entries recently, so I think I have some more insight into myself and the things I’ve experienced.  I’m coming from Silicon Valley, one of the most expensive areas in the country at least, which will further affect my perception of Chinese prices.  

What do I expect will be same?  The internet will still be a hassle.  I will continue to have [hopefully comic] misunderstandings, of both language and culture.  I will still feel like a giant talking muffin.  The Chinese people will remain [largely] friendly, welcoming, and generous.  The food better be all that I’ve been dreaming about for five years!

And I predict that it will be difficult to leave once more.  

“Rights”

Recently, living in America has reminded me uncomfortably of living in China.

First there was the proposal of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the resulting uproar against it.  There was that one day where you couldn’t access Wikipedia the normal way, and instead had to use various roundabouts to get the information you wanted.  A lot of blogs were inaccessible, too.  It was crazy!  Oh wait, I did that for a year, paying $5 a month to have access to facebook, Wikipedia, CNN, and (for most of the year) blogs.  The reasoning behind SOPA and the Great Firewall is different – I understand that.  But freedom of speech once curtailed for one reason is easily enough thwarted for another. 

Followed shortly by that issue was the announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services that religious institutions will be forced to supply health insurance plans that offer free contraceptives and other “family planning” services to their employees.  This issue blew up so quickly that it seemed we bypassed some fundamental issues (birth control, really – out of all the drugs to make free?  Have we really decided that pregnancy is the most threatening disease?) and have moved right on to a debate over religious freedom. 

Today, across the country, people are gathering to “Rally for Religious Freedom”.  Someone derisively asked, "Is someone keeping you from going to church?”.  The answer, obviously (thankfully!) is no.  But the rest of the answer is that the practicing of one’s religion is – and should be! – more than just going to church. 

I confess that I thought the US Council of Catholic Bishops was being a little bit overdramatic when it warned about possible issues of conscience when the new health care reform was being debated.  I don’t believe that Obama has anything particularly against Catholics or Christians or believers of any religion, and I believed that the freedom of religion guaranteed in the constitution was pretty secure.  The death panels, forced sterilizations – I thought it was all hyperbole. 

And now I’m scared.  Because I see this mandate as a first step along the path that leads us to a place where the reproductive “rights” are valued higher than the right to religious freedom.  And I think that China is somewhere along that path, further ahead than us.  Remember,

Freedom of religion in the People’s Republic of China is provided for by the country’s constitution, with an important caveat. Namely, the government protects what it calls "normal religious activity," defined in practice as activities that take place within government-sanctioned religious organizations and registered places of worship.  [From Wikipedia]

But China has clearly decided that its interest in curtailing the growth of its population is greater than its interest in protecting the practice of “normal religious activity”, which for some religions that I’m aware of prohibits abortion, sterilization, and contraception. 

So yeah, I’m a little bit worried.  Not sure what other rights will fall before this “right”.  Not sure which Catholic institutions – or what still-practicing Catholic institutions – will be around when in 10 years.  Not sure what US policy will next mimic China. 

 

* Note: I think both articles I linked to make very good points, but I do take issue with the name calling they employ. 

Mad Skillz

While I was in China, I – like most visitors to the country – was continually astounded by the sheer amount of stuff that people managed to carry on a single motorbike. 

Families of five, 15-foot rebar, refrigerators or TVs, 30-40 full dispenser water bottles, etc.  Of these amazing feats of balance, strength, and recklessness, I’ve said that “Chinese people put more on a bike than the average American ever puts in their SUV.”

So now I’m at Stanford, and I again find myself impressed – on a daily basis – by people’s two-wheeled exploits.  The name of the game here is multitasking, not high capacity, but it is no less impressive.  People so rarely use their hands here that I wouldn’t be surprised to see dusty handlebars, and they don’t just let their hands dangle – they’re using them!

Things I have seen people doing while riding bikes:

• texting
• reading a map
• reading a newspaper
• putting on a jacket/sweater
• warming their hands in their pockets
• talking on the phone while drinking coffee

The last one was truly a magnificent thing to witness, as the woman executed a perfect > 90 degree turn with no hands and, as far as I could see, zero visibility. 

Only this state’s especially strict distracted driving laws make me feel okay about driving around these people . . .

Culture Shock

Culture shock is a funny thing.  Based on my experience, it seems to be not so much about differences, but rather about expectations of similarity. 

During my first three trips to China, it’s hard for me to point to many instances of culture shock.  I can think of one, and that was at the end of my two-month summer stay.  The thing is, I knew nothing about China – and I knew that I knew nothing about China.  I had no illusions about my familiarity with the language, culture, food, or anything else that I encountered.  Everything was very different from what I was used to, but I just accepted it as it was and moved on.

When I went back for the year, I felt reasonably adept at life in China, but my recent Chinese language course made me realize that my language skills were rudimentary at best.  Again, with low expectations, I adjusted fairly well to my new life. 

The culture shock came later.

Culture shock is a consequence of confidence.  The instances that easily come to mind (shopping in Beijing after my parents left, and Easter Sunday when a woman told me I’d been sitting improperly all year, for example) both came much later in the year, when I felt like I knew everything. 

The worst culture shock I’ve ever had in my life was my first day in Hong Kong.  I’d already been to Taiwan, so I thought I knew what “China-not-China” was like, and was NOT prepared for the reality of Hong Kong.  The aggressive English-speaking Indian men, the cost of everything, the Cantonese and traditional characters, the cars driving on the left side of the road – it all took me by surprise, going against all of my expectations, and was just too much for to take in all at once.  So I retired to my room and watched youtube videos for a few hours. 

In preparing to come out to California, I knew that the West Coast is different from the Midwestern/Central states that I’ve always lived in.  I was prepared for political differences and higher prices and not being able to carry a gun with more than 10 rounds (not that this was going to cramp my style at all). 

But it ended up being something much more mundane that got to me.  A few days after I arrived, I went grocery shopping and nearly ended up in the fetal position in a corner.  It wasn’t just that there wasn’t a familiar grocery store around – there weren’t any familiar products in the grocery store.  The brands were all different, and everything was organic or gluten-free or free-range or whatever.  Also (like Hong Kong) everything was more expensive than I was used to.   When you’re stocking a brand new apartment, it’s a long shopping trip, and by the end of the produce section I was ready to quit.  I was so happy when I saw something I recognized! (I feel like it was Old El Paso taco shells or something stupid like that.)

I’m not trying to be all small-town Oklahoma here or anything.  (When people ask, I say I’m from Oklahoma; I figure it is at least as accurate as any other possible response.)  When I tell Californians of this culture shock, I make sure to follow it up with the Hong Kong story, so that they know I’m not just freaking out because we don’t have stoplights in the town where I grew up or something stereotypically small-town like that.  Like I said, culture shock isn’t as much about differences as the expectation of similarity.  My Bulgarian roommate nailed it on the head when she said, “But you’re from America!”.  I would never assume that Xinjiang is basically the same as Xiamen, but it’s easier to fall into that trap when you’re dealing with your own country. 

The culture shock passed quickly enough (well before the dairy aisle), and now two weeks after arriving I am feeling pretty settled in.  I’m still getting used to all of the proper nouns associated with my new home (cities, roads, stores, brands, etc.) – a challenge with any move – and I’m sure there will be surprises ahead . . . but I did it in China and I’m pretty sure I can handle California. 

Uh oh, there’s that confidence again . . .