Learning to Toast, Part II

This morning, I took the bus to Beijing Normal University with one of my EAPSI colleagues to participate in his experiment.  He’s studying how English speakers learn Mandarin, with a focus on tones, judging by the things I did.  

I had had to do a pretest to qualify for the experiment, which included a bunch of questions about how difficult it would be for me to do, among others, the following tasks:

1….bargain for items in a tourist shop.
3. …order food from a written menu without pictures.
4. …tell a taxi driver where to go even when I don’t know the specific name or address of the destination.
5. …politely ask a stranger for directions.
9. …debate issues such as free speech or the death penalty with a friend. 
13. …discuss social problems such as air pollution or the gap between rich and poor with friends. 
15. …specifically and clearly explain the details of a technical task in my professional field.
(e.g., how to remove a virus from a computer, how to use a microscope) 
16. …read and understand novels that were written for native Chinese readers. 
22. …make a lengthy toast at a banquet or wedding using appropriately formal language. 
23. …ask a technical question at an academic conference or business meeting. 
24. …effectively insult (assuming I wanted to) a rude haggler who will not leave me alone. 
25. …explain the rules of a sport or other game (cards, board game).

It’s funny, because among the list are things I’ve gotten tons of experience in during my year-plus in China (1, 3, 4, 5), things I’ve specifically worked on (16, 25), things that I can do but without finesse (9,13), things that I came here this summer to work on (15, 23), and things that I think they should teach in Chinese courses (22, 24).  

The tasks during the experiment consisted of listening to sentences and identifying which ones had something wrong, all while wearing an EEG cap and trying desperately not to blink.  So, that was fun.

Nancy Sung, head of NSF-Beijing and one of our main EAPSI contacts, stopped by and took a picture of me as they applied the electrodes to my scalp.

Then there was a lot of identifying of tones and a little bit of translation.  It was the closest thing I’ve had to a Chinese test in 5 years!  I made 300元 for my participation, so I indulged in a taxi ride home (28元) instead of an hour on a bus.  Taxi conversations can be some of the best conversations – 20 minutes in a car with a sociable, knowledgeable local?  Yes, please.  This guy, naturally, asked what I was doing in Beijing – studying at Beijing Normal?  Then, because my destination was the University of Mining Technology, he asked about that next.  No, I’m at Tsinghua, a third university . . . This part of Beijing is absurd, though, just full of universities.  He pointed them out as we drove by – government, medicine, electronics, technology, languages, geology, agriculture, etc.

After a shower to get the electrode gel out of my hair, I biked into lab.  I stopped at KFC for a quick lunch – chicken burger, fries, and a drink for 15元, which is cheap for the US at $2 but equivalent to two or three cafeteria meals here.  Plus I got two egg tarts, which were another 10元.  Hey, big spender!  

I got to lab in time for our afternoon group meeting.  I must confess, I had a hard time following and spent much of the time clicking “random” on the xkcd page to find some good ones to share with my labmates.  I showed GuoYang this one,

but he didn’t know what “nice try” meant.  I tried explaining that it was sarcastic, giving some example usages, etc., but he just asked me, So this is funny?  Yes, it’s supposed to be!  Eventually he got it, and now we use this phrase all the time.  (I never thought about how many situations this phrase can be used in!)  I think when I leave they’re all going to speak fluent technical and sarcastic English.  But again, you learn what you need to know . . . 

After the lab meeting, we went downstairs to take pictures.  There are four students graduating from the group, and a postdoc who is leaving.  

I knew we were going out to dinner, so I asked one labmate if I should dress up.  No, she said, just the same as usual.  It’s hard to know what that means, though – a few of the women wear dresses and high heels every day as if it were nothing, but some of the guys show up in sweatpants and t-shirts.  I erred on the dressier side of things, and was glad because we took a lot of pictures.  But sweatpants and shorts were still well represented.  

A few of the girls were wearing blue dresses as if they had coordinated, so I asked to take a picture of them.

As Cheng pointed out, they’re my 蓝朋友s!  [In the southern Chinese accent, “l” and “n” get mixed up, so I frequently get asked if I have a “lánpéngyoǔ” (blue friend) instead of “nánpéngyoǔ” (boyfriend).]

Once we had taken almost every permutation of group picture, we biked to a restaurant in Wudaokou for dinner.  It was a nice, quiet place, off the busy roads, and we had two rooms to ourselves.  Unfortunately, we had an awkward number of people, so we started out being too few for four tables and ended up being too many for three tables.  It was cozy.  There was a lot of shuffling, but after a brief scary time where I was put at a table with literally all of the people I didn’t know, I ended up with the best seat in the room.  I was next to Cheng and Stacy, the four-year-old daughter of an older alumni.  She was very shy at first, but eventually warmed up to me and we took some silly pictures together.

Also at my table were two of the graduating students, a few other students and their boyfriends, one of the professors I don’t really know at all, and Prof. Feng, my host.  

My education in toasting is still probably not complete, but I feel like today was an advanced class.  I learned (well, relearned; I think I knew this before) that it’s a sign of respect to toast with your glass lower than the other person.  So, when toasting Prof. Feng he should definitely be the higher glass, but in most other situations both people are competing to be the lower glass.  The result is a rapid dive-bomb from face height down to the table immediately before clinking glasses.  

I also learned the nuances of large-group toasting: you can have one-on-one toasts, a whole table toasting one person, one person toasting a whole table, a whole table toasting a whole table, or one person toasting the whole room.  Actually, my host told me there’s not much nuance, you’re just trying to get the other people drunk.  The main targets were Prof. Feng, the graduating students, and Li Bo.  At one point, everyone was toasting Bo and I heard him say, They’re coming again?? as a new group arrived.  Haha!  I also received much more than my fair share of toasts.  There was one Masters graduate that I had never seen before, but we toasted like four times.  The last time, he said “To world peace” and it was like a scene from Miss Congeniality.  

The Yanjing beer we were drinking is 3.1%, so like Oklahoma beer.  The baijiu was only 30%, too, and each toast was probably ¼ of a shot, so I was just not that intimidated, haha.  Add in the fact that I probably weighed more than anyone else in the room, and my face doesn’t give me away by turning red when I drink like most of them, and they all thought I had an incredible capacity for alcohol.  It’s also probably easy for me hide any tipsiness, because I make so many mistakes in Chinese even when sober . . . For instance, I had trouble writing down a character in my notebook when I learned a new word, but I can’t honestly attribute that to the alcohol :(

Prof. Feng’s old advisor was there, a very kind-looking older man.  He is a very good calligrapher, and apparently the traditional graduation gift in the group is a piece of personalized calligraphy from him.  Beautiful!

I joined my table when we went over to toast him, and said that I was very happy to meet my 师爷爷 (lab grandfather).  He looked confused, so I had to explain – they had told me that we were all 师兄弟姐妹 (lab brothers and sisters), which makes Prof. Feng our 师父 (lab father), and him our 师爷爷.  He seemed okay with the title :)  It happened again when we went to toast another professor.  Cheng whispered to me that he was Prof. Feng’s 师弟 (lab little brother), so I instantly responded with, oh, so he’s our 师叔叔 (lab uncle).  He found this hilarious.  

[Incidentally, there’s a similar custom in German, at least where your advisor is called your Doktorvater.  Because Ellen’s a woman, I asked if I could call her my Doktormutter, and she didn’t exactly say no.  I met her advisor in Germany last summer, too – my Doktorgroßvater?]

It was around this point, I realized that Stacy and I are very similar, actually.  Everyone likes to have us around because we’re both cute and funny and can be counted on for a laugh or asked to perform on cue.  Sometimes we’re shy and won’t speak, sometimes we jump into the spotlight.  We also get away with a lot because we can’t really be expected to understand the rules.  Eh, I’m actually not really bothered by this realization.  

I told Prof. Feng about my proposed Chinese classes – ordering food, toasting, karaoke, and getting mad – and they all wanted to know about the last one.  I told the story from Sanlitun again, and he said that we shouldn’t have paid them; once they take the money it’s their responsibility.  I said, I knew what we should have done, but I didn’t know how to say it!  That’s why I want that class.  I just can’t argue or even hold my ground strongly in Chinese, because I just don’t have the vocabulary.  I know “darn it” and “fuck your mother”, and nothing in between.  

Some of the guys told Li Bo that I knew the phrase 不明觉厉 (I don’t understand but I think you’re great), and he said he wasn’t familiar with it.  It’s a very ancient Chinese idiom, one guy responded.  I think Confucius said it, I chimed in.  Then GuoYang told us how it all came about: Confucius was walking and ran into Laozi, who told him a story, and Confucius responded: 不明觉厉.  I about died laughing.

Then they taught me some English sayings – “You can you up” and “no can no BB”.  I didn’t understand their explanations at the time – something about how some people think Kobe can make the shot and some people don’t? – but later someone explained it to me better.  It’s sort of like “put up or shut up” – if you can do it, go do it, but if you can’t don’t bullshit (BB) about it.  It’s a quote from George Washington, GuoYang told me solemnly.  Hahaha.

As the night went on, the professors said their goodbyes and eventually we were left, about 20 grad students (and Li Bo) with a few more bottles of beer and one or two more bottles of baijiu.  Someone finally noticed that one of the graduating students hadn’t been drinking, he’d just been making other people drink.  He explained to me that he was just trying to make other people happy, and I tried to help him out (I don’t like seeing people being forced or pressured to drink) by commenting on how generous this was.  But they kept insisting . . . so he grabbed a bowl of soup off the table and started toasting with that.

Once the baijiu was gone, we biked to the karaoke place to continue the party.  I sang the songs that they ordered for me, which was actually a nice opportunity to see what songs they like (or that I actually sang well).  Call Me Maybe, Domino, My Heart Will Go On, and 遇上你是我的缘 were hits.  I also sang 坐上火车去拉萨, with a little help from Cheng.  She is just the best.  She gets me, you know?  Exhibit A: she grabbed a mic and sang the hard characters, the ones that she figured I didn’t know.  True friendship.  Also before karaoke we stopped at a 7-11 to get drinks, and when I asked if they were 冰的 (ice cold), she answered no when every other Chinese person would say yes.  She knows, though, that I like to drink ice-cold things, not the slightly-below-room-temperature drinks that pass for “ice-cold” in China.  

I stayed until 1am or so.  I ordered 朋友 as my last song, a really sentimental one about friendship and how we’ll always have each other.  As I hugged WeiHua goodbye (she went for the hug!!), I asked her if I would see her again.  She said we would.  I’m not sure if she meant in the next few days around the office, or sometime in our lives.  I’m not quite sure what I was asking about, honestly!  But either way, I liked the answer.  

What Not to Do

Today in English Aerospace Summer Camp (it doesn’t seem to have a name, so I’ll call it that), the students had to give presentations.  It was a veritable What Not To Do for Powerpoint presentations – busy backgrounds with unreadable words overlaid, multiple fonts, slides full of text, crazy animation, no sources listed.  We had told them they could include videos, which of course meant that over the course of the morning we spent about a half hour watching people trying to get their movies to play.  It’s 2015 – when will this no longer be an impossible task?  

Also, most of the videos were just not that relevant.  One guy showed us the trailer for Jurassic World in his presentation about genes and cloning; another showed the trailer for Stealth in his presentation about UAVs, which marked the first time I’ve heard the phrase “ménage à trois” in a scientific presentation.  A few videos were shown without audio, and only one guy was able to tlel us what was going on in the video in English.  

Other odd moments in the morning included the guy who spent several minutes explaining in detail how the people of Atlantis used crystals as a power source, leading me to wonder if he realized that had only happened in a movie.  But then he actually went from there into a discussion of crystal-based power sources like piezoelectric materials, so it ended up okay.  And the guy who presented about Tesla, showing a picture of the headquarters in Palo Alto while I sat there and thought, I went on a date there a few months ago.  

They all thought 10 minutes sounded so long to speak English, but of course you speak slower in an unfamiliar language, so almost everyone went vastly over time.  It was a tiring morning.  

In the afternoon, my friends from the US were visiting Peking University, which is next to my campus, so Cheng and I went over to walk around with them.  I hadn’t been to the PKU campus yet, but it’s quite nice.  I haven’t yet been to the nice parts of Tsinghua, so for now at least I think it’s nicer than my school! 

There were some nice buildings, but the clear standout to me was the lake.  We got a great group picture:

and then got asked to take some pictures with some tourists.  They were from Xi’an, and when they heard that the family was headed there tonight, they apologized profusely for not being able to show them around or have them over for dinner.  So friendly!  

We also got a picture with just the kids on the stone ship:

and one of just me and my labmate:

I was glad that she came with me – I had invited a few of my labmates, to hear Southern accents if nothing else, but the others had work to do (lame).  

My allergies started acting up later in the evening.  This is really the first time I’ve had any problems, and I wonder if it’s because I walked around for an hour or two without a mask on?  

 

Today I learned: 

Fission (裂变), fusion (聚变), Hiroshima (广岛), metaphysics (形而上学), proton (质子), neutron (中子), carbon fiber (碳纤维), entrepreneuer (企业家), photosynthesis (光合作用), and conductor (导体), all from the presentations.  

冠军! Champions!

I woke up at 5am this morning to watch the USWNT in the final of the Women’s World Cup.  Unfortunately, the game didn’t start until 7am – I had miscalculated the time difference (I think because the previous game was in a different time zone in Canada?  Or I’m just an idiot).  

I was too irritated at myself to fall back asleep, so I left the TV on CCTV5, the sports channel, and watched reruns of the 2008 Beijing Olympics (Usain Bolt winning the 4×100 relay!), an interview with a doctor about reducing oil in your diet, and a ribbon dancing exercise program.

I had committed to helping a few days at an English summer camp for rising sophomores in the school of Aerospace Engineering, working on their technical English and presentation skills.  Today was the first day, and we were scheduled to talk about air pollution, so I did some reading while I waited for the game.  It was pretty depressing . . . a lot of really high numbers and pictures like this, which is just about the worst thing I have ever seen.  What have we done to this world?  

The good news about being up so early is that the internet is fast.  At Stanford, the internet is robust enough that I’ve never really sensed heavy traffic, but here at the hotel I am painfully aware of everyone’s else’s browsing/downloading habits.  It’s nearly unusable in the evenings, but mornings are at least not terrible.

The game finally started at 7.  At like 7:03, we got a corner kick and Carli Lloyd nailed a perfect shot into the goal, and I probably woke up my neighbors.  The next goal came so quickly afterwards that I’m not really sure what happened; I was just posting something on facebook about watching the game, which I quickly changed to reference last year’s Brazil-Germany World Cup semifinal.   Serious flashbacks to that day, that joy and that confusion – are they just replaying the same goals over and over, or are these happening live?  

One of my EAPSI friends showed up a few minutes later, and was massively disappointed that he’d “probably missed the only two goals of the game.”  Haha . . . not.  The third goal was the most ridiculous, a lob from just inside center field that somehow went in.  Jesse: “That’s gotta be demoralizing – I love it!”.  After that, we had to wait a few boring minutes before the fourth goal.  Jesse: “At least I got to see two goals.  Haha, who just says that about a soccer game?!”

The worst part about miscalculating the start time of the game was not the two missing hours of sleep, it was that I had committed to being at Tsinghua at 8:30, before the end of the game.  After the Japanese managed to get two past Hope, I was so annoyed at missing such an exciting game.  As it was, we scored again to bring it to 5-2 as I walked out the door, and I ended up getting to see all of the goals.  I was kept up to date via WeChat as I biked to Tsinghua, although nothing major happened.  We won!  Congratulations, team!  

 

This English summer camp got off to a rough start, because I am an idiot.  (Definitely a theme here.)  I had put the location information, building and room number, into my Google calendar, as is my habit.  But when I got to the building, whose name I had remembered, I had no way to look up the room number.  Nothing Google syncs to my phone, I couldn’t get the VPN to connect on mobile data, I didn’t have the login information for the internet account I’m going to use for the rest of the month, and my own internet account was out of money.  I was actually sitting on the steps outside the building when I learned that we won.  Ugh, what an idiot. 

The students all heard some opening remarks about the purpose of the camp and tips about making good presentations, I guess, and then I was able to get a hold of my contact and find my room.  I’m working with a Romanian Masters student who will be there for the whole two weeks, and we have 12 students.  We did introductions, asking each of them to say their name, their hometown, and what they like to do.  Lots of ping pong and badminton, but my favorite was the guy who said he like to read science fiction and that his favorite book was Ender’s Game :)

We have one guy in the class who is a real character.  We decided to go by English names if they have them, and this guy is named “Ancient”.  In his introduction, he gestured to the two people before him and said that “unlike them, my grades are very poor.”  He ended up being the most active participant in today’s group discussion, which was interesting because I don’t think his English is necessarily the best.  Unlike everyone else, though, he seemed reasonably at peace with the possibility that he was going to do or say something stupid, which in my experience is one of the best things you can do when learning a language.  

A few other conversational snapshots from the class:

• on the topic of air pollution, I asked if anyone had seen 穹顶之下, or “Under the Dome”, the recent documentary about air pollution in China.  A few hands went up, and I asked them to tell me about it.  Ancient shrugged and said simply, “It tells the truth, so it is forbidden.”
• when we were talking about biking (perhaps asking about helmet use?  or green transportation?  I don’t remember.), one guy started talking about a bunch of people riding bikes in Poland without clothes.  This was one of those situations where what I thought I heard was so strange that I didn’t dare assume that I had heard correctly.  I felt bad, because he actually spoke well enough but I asked him to clarify four or five times before repeating it back to him.  Yes, something about a naked bike ride in Poland.  
• I tried to introduce the concept of negawatts, which completely failed, but first took us to a discussion of watts.  I kept saying the word “watt” and “kilowatt”, and my coteacher jumped in with “joules per second”, but we just got blank stares.  Finally, I went up to the board and wrote “1 J/s = 1 W” and everyone immediately “aaah”ed with understanding.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we were doing a summer camp to improve their technical English speaking skills.
• They have to give presentations every other day on a science or technology topic of their choice.  While brainstorming ideas for these presentations, I said that they could talk about the science in some science fiction book or movie.  三体, for instance, I suggested (this is the Chinese science fiction novel I’m reading right now), and wrote it on the board.  I had told them that I speak Chinese, but maybe they didn’t expect me to be able to write, because they all flipped when I wrote those characters on the board.  Never mind that 三 is literally the third easiest character to write, and 体 was among the first 100 I learned as well.  I felt like the winner of America’s Got Talent or something.

I had lunch with my coteacher.  (He was surprised that I had gotten up so early to watch the game today.  I asked him, if the Romanian women were in the World Cup Final, would you watch it?  “But this is science fiction!”, he responded.)  He’s here writing his Masters thesis at Tsinghua and seems about ready to leave, although he doesn’t until September 1st.  He doesn’t speak Chinese, doesn’t like his project, and his labmates work 12 hour days 7 days a week and he has nothing really better to do than join them.  He remarked incredulously that he had a few friends who were studying Chinese at Peking University and that they love it here.  This made me realize how much different the life of a language student is than a graduate student.  I am so fortunate to have spent my first times in China the way I did, with so much freedom to learn Chinese in the way I wanted, and beautiful places to do it in.  I don’t think I would I have loved China if this had been our introduction, so I guess I can’t really blame him.  In an attempt to point out some good things, I said that China was cheap so it’s easy to “treat” yourself.  Except, apparently China is more expensive than Romania.  (He’s also getting gouged for student housing, paying 80元 per night.)  And he drinks coffee, which is an admittedly huge stumbling block that I just happen to not have.

When I went into work in the afternoon, I found that something must have been percolating in the back of my brain over the weekend, because a few more things made sense.  Eventually I found a minus sign that I’d misplaced, and successfully derived the Euler equations that I had struggled with last week.  Yay!!  

I rewarded myself with a break and went up to the top of the building to take a panorama on a mild pollution day.  According to different accounts, the AQI was either just above 100 (the point at which I generally wear a mask) or around 160 (on the low end of Unhealthy).  

It was far from the worst I’ve seen (which is over 300) and looked only drab, instead of desolate, but it took a little bit of conscious effort to find the mountains off in the west:

which had been so clear on the horizon last week:

Over lunch, I told my coteacher that I think there’s something stifling, mentally and emotionally, about the gray Beijing sky and the way it shrinks your world down – lowers your eyes, restricts your gaze to the things near enough to be seen clearly.  There’s something aspirational and inspiring about looking up to the sky, I think.  Am I just being dramatic?  These pictures make me think not.  Today we’re missing the mountains for the smog; perhaps the forest and the trees as well.  I’m sure that there are long-term physical effects from this pollution, but I think there must be psychological effects as well. 

I stayed late at the office and got lunch with GuoYang and Zhao Yan.  I asked them for the name of 伟花’s “zhāngfu”, a question that was met with blank stares.  (Story of my day . . . )  I tried again: “zhángfu . . . zhāngfǔ . . . zhāngfù . . . “  Finally: “husband!”  “Aaaaaah, zhàngfu!”, they exclaimed.  Yes, that, of course that!  I allowed myself to complain to them a little bit – how was I supposed to get “lùchī” out of “nùchī” but they couldn’t figure out “zhàngfu!” from “zhāngfu”??  They all agreed that it was a bit unfair, but what can I do?  Tones are more important than consonants.  

I think I’ve been a little heavy on the “Chinese is hard” side of things recently.  I generally like to balance it out with some aspects of Chinese that are easy, so I told them that I have pity on students learning the English names for the days of the week and months of the year.  Neither of them could spell February or Wednesday – such horrible words those must be to learn, although I don’t personally remember what it was like.  They agreed, suggesting that English start calling months “Month Number One” and “Month Number Two” like they do in Chinese.  It would be nice, but again, what can I do?

Learning to Toast

I spent 7 hours at karaoke today with my labmates!  A very traditional 4th of July activity, right?

I sang a lot of English songs – Telephone, Call Me Maybe, My Life Would Suck Without You, Rolling in the Deep (a request), I Will Always Love You, Domino, Thrift Shop.  Then I wanted to introduce them to some country music, so I did Fastest Girl in Town by Miranda Lambert.  It was so strange to watch that music video in Chinese, knowing that Chinese eyes were also watching it.  There were guns . . . 

I also sang Southern Comfort Zone by Brad Paisley and Carolina by James Taylor.  We have a lot of wistful songs about home, don’t we?  I almost did Homeward Bound by Simon and Garfunkel, but I didn’t want my labmates to think I wanted to be somewhere else.

But Southern Comfort Zone really did seem very poignant today.  I have walked the streets of Rome, and I have been to foreign lands.  I definitely know what it’s like to talk and have nobody understand (like, that happened last week).  I’ve been to some amazing places and had some incredible experiences, but I also love the comfort of home.  

I also sang basically my entire repertoire of Chinese songs.  It’s not a ton, as potential candidates have to meet several requirements – I have to like the song, it has to be within my range, and the words have to be relatively easy.  I sang 人间、日不落、桃花朵朵开、and 改变自己, but it was 遇上你是我的缘 that everyone exclaimed over – I think it might be a Western song (either Xinjiang or Tibet) and no one was expecting me to sing it?

YiZhou sang in Korean, and apparently everyone can sing in Cantonese.  (This is a major headache for me, as almost all karaoke lyrics are in Traditional Chinese characters already; when I’m both looking at and hearing words that are almost, but not quite, familiar to me in a second language, I just want to switch off my brain.)  I further contributed to the language potpourri by singing Corre in Spanish, which I was pleasantly surprised to find when scanning through the songs.  

The other 6 hours when I wasn’t singing, I watched my labmates and took notes of songs that I liked.  There were an incredible number of sad songs – probably half of them had someone actively crying in the music video.  The best example of this is 童话, in which music video a guy sings to his girlfriend as she dies of lung cancer, promising that they’ll live happily ever after like in a fairy tale.  In the US, where it seems like getting people pumped up or dancing is the standard by which karaoke is judged, you don’t sing songs like this, but in China it’s a karaoke standard.  My favorite guitar songs are mostly sad drinking a songs (a category in which country music excels), so this is right up my alley.  It’s like I’ve finally found my people – the ones who will watch you sing sad song after sadder song without wondering if you’re suicidal.  

When our time was up at 5pm, we went to dinner.  We biked through Tsinghua’s campus to a 串 place near the West Gate.  串, or “chuar”, is basically like the Minnesota State Fair – everything skewered and cooked on a stick.  We got chicken wings, lamb meat, cow tendon, and fried bread on sticks, plus a mysterious (but delicious) bowl of black noodles, roasted eggplant, and edamame.  

I had told them I eat everything but 肠 (intestines) and bitter things.  I hadn’t really foreseen  them ordering tendon, but it was actually better than what I expected.  (When I commented thus – perhaps I just said it was “good” – we ended up ordering more, haha.)  Later, they asked why I don’t like intestine, and I said it was too chewy.  Tendon can be, too, but this was prepared in a way that wasn’t so much.  “Transversely isotropic”, GuoYang commented, in perfect English.  That was exactly it – tendon, like muscle, is transversely isotropic, with different material properties in one direction than in the others (it’s quite strong in the fiber direction, but the fibers are only loosely connected to their neighbors).  This tendon had been cut through the fibers, so the loose connections between the fibers came apart easily in my mouth, avoiding the dreaded interminable chewing of intestine.  I started laughing when he said this, though, which made him think he had spoken incorrectly.  No, I told him, that’s exactly how I would have explained it to friends back home (if they were nerdy in the same way that I am), but it’s so strange to have these guys produce perfect English technical vocabularly when 99% of our interaction is in Chinese.  He later said the word “morphology” in a different conversation.  I guess it’s like my vocab was when I was living on the farm – mostly based on a 500-word picture dictionary for children, plus construction terms like “weld”, “backhoe”, and “rivet gun”.  You learn what you need to know!

I carry around a little notebook that I bought the first week, and throughout the day scribble down new words, notes for my journal, names, etc.  They’ve all noticed it, because it usually comes out as a preface to a question I’m going to ask.  During dinner I showed JiaWen all the words I’d written down in my notebook, from 特征值 (eigenvalue), which she taught me yesterday, all the way back to 微米 (micron) and 尿布 (diaper) from the visiting American professor.  When we got to those, she said, I think your Chinese and his are pretty much the same level, right?  I agreed with her, but commented on the different ways our language levels are perceived because he looks Asian and I don’t – his level was described as “一般” (average, or half), while they say mine is 非常不错 (extremely not bad) or something like that.  A few of the guys leapt in to my defense, to say that I speak better than him.  One of the things that makes Chinese easy to learn in China is the absolute, unconditional encouragement you get from Chinese people on your progress.  But, I said, you don’t really compliment people on their language abilities once they really get good enough.  I don’t even think of complimenting most of my international friends at Stanford, any more than I would do so to a native speaker, because that’s what they sound like.  As long as I get told my Chinese is great, I know it’s only good.  

We had ordered a few bottles of Tsingtao beer, which we drank from small glasses (about 2-3 times the size of a shot glass).  Before long, the toasts started.  ZhaoYan stood up, said some nice words about America’s Independence Day, and we clinked glasses.  I sought out everyone else’s glasses, clinked with them, and then drank.  This is not how you do it in China, Cheng kindly told me – in China, toasts are one-on-one, not communal.  Oops!  In the US, I said, we usually do group toasts, so I did one as an example and everyone drank, but then we returned to the Chinese model – ShaoZhen and GuoYang toasted me, and I returned the gesture and toasted each of them.  

When I studied Chinese in Xiamen, I took classes like 口语 (oral Chinese), 听力 (listening), and 报刊 (newspaper reading), but I’ve long maintained that these are not sufficient for a holistic Chinese education.  I would like to see classes in four main areas which have a huge impact on the quality of one’s life in China: ordering food, singing karaoke, getting mad, and toasting.  The whole lab is going to dinner after group meeting on Friday in celebration of the three students who are graduating, so I better start preparing some toasts now . . . 

When you’re toasted, I was told, you make the other person very happy if you drink your entire glass. I can just drink a shot in one mouthful, but these glasses are way too big for me.  The girls, Cheng and JiaWen, agreed with me, but none of the guys seemed to have a problem at all.  We decided we’re going to write a paper on how men drink so fast.  It would go well with the visiting professor’s research on urination!  

Someone asked me how old I am – apparently the oldest in the room.  This makes me their 师姐, they explained – it’s something like “older lab sister”.  I love this custom in Chinese, to address members of very close groups with family terms.  I first experienced it in church, which was familiar because we also call fellow Catholics “brother and sister” in the US.  But while I feel like my labmates at Stanford are like brothers, I still call them “labmates”.  Here, though, these guys are my 师弟 and 师妹.  

I treated everyone to dinner.  I think I was pretty awkward about it, but 请客 (treating) is a complex affair in China and friends have a history of sneaking off and paying before I even realize what’s going on.  (For example, I still have no idea how karaoke was paid for or what it cost.)  So after we ordered, I announced that I was going to pay.  I got away with it with only moderate protestations and last-ditch attempts to pay the cashier that I was easily able to override.  Dinner for 6 was just under 500元, or about $80.  That’s a great price for a wonderful day spent with these guys outside of work!  It’s amazing – it’s almost four times what I paid last night for the sangria and various taxis, but I don’t mind spending money on friends and good times, while getting cheated even out of $3 is absolutely infuriating.

In a very bittersweet revelation, I also found out that I’m going to be saving about 200元 this month.  ShaoZhen, my office mate, main lunch buddy, and the first guy whose name I learned, is leaving on Monday for an internship in Zhejiang and won’t be back until after I leave.  The good news is, he’s going to let me use his internet account since he won’t be here and I won’t have to worry about stealing someone’s precious allotment of internet.  

That should save me 10元 a day . . . but ShaoZhen is leaving!  My friend circle just got a little bit smaller.  I was also not prepared to say goodbyes this early.  I’m really bad at sharing my emotions in Chinese, so I’m even worse at goodbyes in China than in the US.  I said that I had enjoyed getting to know him thanked him for all of his help, and wished him a good experience in Zhejiang.  Then I said, We Americans usually hug goodbye, but I know that you guys don’t have this custom, so . . . We shook hands, before everyone else told him to let me hug him.  It was a good hug, actually.  A lot of Chinese people don’t seem to know how to hug, so sometimes they try to go left, but he went right.  Goodbye, ShaoZhen!

As we biked back to the Tsinghua campus together, I biked next to GuoYang and we talked.  He has probably the most similar personality to mine.  We both tease people a lot – he was the one who asked me if I was really a mechanical engineer when I didn’t know how to operate the kickstand on my bike the first week.  (It’s a complicated kickstand, okay??)  He said, I figured you could handle it.  I, in turn, have been giving him a hard time about his Chinese, haha.  (He didn’t know a song by 王菲, the most famous female Chinese singer, so I’m not even sure he’s really Chinese.)  But, he told me seriously, he’s been learning from me about how to learn a language: carrying a notebaook around, reading a book in another language every year.  I was so flattered by this!  Now I’m trying to think of recommendations of English books for him – he especially likes history and culture.  

Another aspect of this perfect day – it rained through most of the day, but we avoided it perfectly during either karaoke or dinner.  Hopefully this means another few days of clear skies!

Today was not the first Fourth of July I’ve spent in China – 2008, 2010, and now 2015.  It was also not the most traditional (in 2008, we put on an amazing fireworks show at the farm and ‘barbecued’, although the meat was a goat we slaughtered).  And it was not the most beautiful (in 2011, we rented a boat and went around to some deserted island’s around Xiamen).  But this one deserves some sort of superlative . . . Today felt pivotal, like it was really the point at which we transitioned from labmates to friends.  

Yeah, I’m definitely leaving a part of my heart in Beijing.

 

Today I learned: 

I cannot sing Shakira’s La Tortura without someone to sing Alejandro Sanz’s part.  Also, all of Lady Gaga’s music videos are super weird.  

How many Tsinghua graduate students it takes to figure out a cell phone plan – apparently 5.  My cell phone plan was, and still is 128元, which is about as much as I pay in the US!  I’m not sure how this simple transaction is beyond my language abilities, but it was some comfort that it took literally all five of my friends half an hour to help me put money on my phone account.  

Straightforward

I skipped this morning’s seminar on the fracture mechanics of nano-paper (not really my thing even in English) and worked instead.  I’ve spent most of this week working through the derivations in a paper that’s similar to what we want to do.  (I have to understand where all the equations come from in this analysis of a single material before I can do it in two.)  Some of it’s easy, but some of it’s not, and I’d say I have about 80% of it now.  Today I spent an [really, another] hour trying to figure out how to get something that the authors said was “straightforward to obtain”.  Actual quote:

it is also straightforward to obtain

Phrases like “tedious but straightforward” generally strike fear into my heart.  I always wonder if it means the author saw it somewhere, and assumes it must be straightforward but knows it to be tedious, and so has not done the derivation independently.  I think these guys did, though, and I got it eventually.  Yay!

I went to lunch with the guys and got cold mixed noodles, so I had my food first.  I took advantage of this first-time occurence to buy four cups of Sprite for each of us.  They’re always getting watermelon for dessert, or occasional treats like Sprite or ice cream for everyone, but between my restricted meal card and general lack of a clue as to what’s going on (example: I still don’t know where they actually buy the watermelon), I’ve never been the one to buy them.  It was nice to do something for them for once.  

Over lunch, I told them about the events of yesterday.  I told them about the party, and how it was about America’s national parks.  There was some confusion about this, because I was describing the different events and activities they had, and which park they were representing.  America has more than one national park? they asked.  Um, yes.  They only knew about Yellowstone!   I think the name is what confuses them; they know about the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, but they thought Yellowstone National Park was like Our National Park, so I tried to explain that “national park” is more like a category.  

I also told them about the events of Sanlitun.  They confirmed that we got screwed.  How would you have fake bills, they asked – anything from an ATM is trustworthy, apparently.  They said if someone says to your face that a bill is fake, then it probably is, but if they disappear with your money and come back to tell you it’s fake, then you’re being scammed.  I asked, but it wasn’t clear to me if this wouldn’t happen to them because they’re not foreigners, or if it wouldn’t happen to them because they wouldn’t let someone out of sight with their money.  Either way . . . it wouldn’t have happened to them.  

I stayed late at work, and discovered that they turn off all the hallway lights after 8 or so.  There will still tons of students working, though.  Fun Friday night!  

Today I learned: 

The Chinese words for senator (参议员), wetland (湿地), eigenvalue (特征值), and constitutive relation (本构关系).  You just can’t learn words like that in a classroom!

Part of My Heart

Today started early; I woke up at 6:30 to watch the US Women’s National Team play Germany in the semifinals of the Women’s World Cup.  I have a great knack for being on the wrong side of the world for these things, so watching World Cup games at awkward hours of the night/morning in China is actually pretty familiar to me.  Two EAPSI colleagues joined me, and we shared weird Chinese snacks (lime and chocolate-and-salt potato chips) while we watched.  

It was a good game.  The NYT said we were “leading 0-0” as we went into halftime, which is about how it felt.  Germany whiffed their penalty kick and Carli Lloyd nailed our [extremely questionable] penalty kick, so then we were 1-0.  I didn’t really want to win that way, so I was happy when we got a beautiful goal late in the game to clinch it.  We’re going to the final!  5am, Monday morning, can’t wait!  

The game was made just that much better by the stickers I used to update Cheng on the game.  Stickers (the love child of emoticons and gifs) are a huge deal on WeChat, and the EAPSI cohort has gotten way into them.  My favorite stickers include a vomiting llama, a toaster with bread jumping out of it happily, a little Dutch bunny who rides a bicycle and says things like “here I am” and “let’s play together”, a hot dog walking another hot dog on a leash, Einstein making the “rock on” sign or doing pushups, and a skipping egg.  You would be surprised how often these and other such stickers are the perfect addition to any conversation.  

Anyway, I downloaded two football-related sticker packs.  One has Barca players’ faces on animated bodies with speech bubbles, things like  Messi saying “I’ve got it”, Neymar with “hahaha”, and Pique with “Love you”.  The other is cartoon fans from different countries cheering on their teams – two Argentines toasting their beers and saying “thx buddy”, a Brazilian screaming “Victory” (hahaha ouch), a Dutch guy yelling “OMG”.  For this game, I sent a sticker of Mascherano running and yelling “Goooall” when we scored, and the Brazilian victory guy when the game was over.  Pretty much sums it all up.  

 

We went to a nicer cafeteria for all-you-can-eat lunch today.  I got date cake (枣糕, zǎogāo) and commented that it sounds like 糟糕 (zāogāo), which literally means “messy cake” but is kind of a mild ejaculation like “darn it”.  They all agreed with me, but the thought had clearly never crossed their minds.  While you can be understood with improper tones (goodness knows that’s been a crucial component of my successful communication!), they’re so fundamental to the Chinese that these two words just don’t really sound all that similar to them.

I’ve known and tried to comprehend this for a long time.  But only recently have I realized that there’s a corollary to this, perhaps even more difficult for me to understand: consonants are just not that important in Chinese.  One guy was trying to tell me the word for a person who gets lost easily (so, me).  “nùchī” he said.  He said it like it was one I knew, and these guys seem to have a pretty good grasp of what characters I know, so I racked my brain trying to think of what this “nù” was.  “The nù in nùdào!” he said, as if that made it obvious.  But while I could think of two characters that are pronounced “nu”, neither of them made any sense with any character pronounced “dao”.  After a few minutes of this, he pointed to the thing we were biking on.  Oooooohh, you mean “lùdào”, or road, in which case this new word makes perfect sense because it’s 路痴, or “road idiot”.  He laughed it off as his “southern accent”, but where I’m from, accents change vowels, not consonants.  I’ve also experienced this many times, from not knowing if vendors in Xiamen were telling me things cost 4 (sì) kuai or 10 (shí), to being asked if I have a blue friend (lánpéngyoǔ) instead of a boyfriend (nánpéngyoǔ), but for some reason it all just sunk in today: tones are more important than consonants.  Unfortunately, even 8 years on, I can hear and produce consonants much more reliably than tones.  Sigh.  

 

I went back up on the roof today, to take more pictures as storm clouds came rolling in.  Looking east, towards the clouds:

and looking west, towards the mountains:

 

Okay, now it’s time to talk about gender!  Being a female mechanical engineer, I have a lot of guy friends. Stanford’s graduate schools are something like 2:1 male:female, my entering class in ME was 17% female, and I was the first woman to join my lab at Stanford (with the significant exception of my advisor!). I love my labmates as brothers, I enjoy their company, and I think we get along well.

My labmates at Tsinghua include four women and about 10 guys. One of the women, Cheng, sits next to me and thus is the unfortunate recipient of most of my questions; she’s really great about it, though! But sometime around 11 every day, the women all disappear, so by the time I start thinking about lunch, I end up going with a big group of guys. I think we’ve had another woman join us three times, out of at least a dozen. The guys are great, though – they pay for me when we get to the cafeteria too late for me to use my card (which is restricted between 11:45 and 12:30), and include me in the daily dessert order of watermelon slices.

But despite sharing meals together sometimes twice a day, we were not friends. Not officially, that is. None of the guys had added me on WeChat (which is the gold standard of these things in China as facebook is in the US). Maybe it’s nothing, you think? All four of the women added me after our first interaction of any significance, while zero of the men I interact with daily added me . . . Also, reports were coming in from my EAPSI colleagues of gender segregation at their workplaces – lots of guys eating lunch with guys, and girls only talking to girls – so I definitely wouldn’t be the only one to see some effect like this.  

Yesterday at lunch, one of the guys asked me if I use English or Chinese on WeChat, so I thought maybe they hadn’t added me because they were afraid they’d have to use English. No, I told them, I use Chinese with Chinese people and English with Americans. Then I jokingly reminded them that they hadn’t added me, so two of them pulled out their phones to scan my QR code (an easy way to find someone as a contact) . . . and then neither followed through by adding me. This is also after I listed my WeChat name in the presentation I gave my first week; I saw a bunch of people pull out their phones and not add me.

What’s up with that? I remember being told in our EAPSI orientation if a request is ignored it’s a way of refusing without having to say no. But why are they refusing to be my friend??

I know that rules governing interactions between people of different genders vary around the world. I thought that could be it, maybe adding someone on WeChat is fraught with implications of flirting or even something more serious? I texted XuLei, my Chinese best friend, and asked her if a guy adding you on WeChat was a big deal. No, she said, not if you know him. About the same as asking for someone’s phone number in the States.

From there, I escalated the situation by texting Cheng, my office neighbor and frequest question recipient. She seemed surprised that none of the guys had added me, and especially that they hadn’t done so even after scanning the QR code. But she said that it wouldn’t be just because I’m a girl. Haha, awkward . . . I thought there was a logical reason I had no friends, but no, it must just be me :-/

Anyway, the reason this is anything close to a big deal (besides cultural curiosity and, okay, maybe a little bit of pride) is that we’re making plans to do something on Saturday and I have no way of contacting them! Cheng offered to help out by making a group chat and inviting us all. And today, one of the guys added me from the group! Somehow, the group thing made it okay and I’m no longer a complete WeChat pariah.

And more importantly, we have karaoke plans for 10am on Saturday! I’ve already been practicing :)

A friend posted a quote about home on facebook the other day, and it rang so true for me.

You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.

I’ve left parts of my heart in Coon Rapids, Tulsa, Stanford, Hunchun, and Xiamen.  This last week in Beijing, with continuously “unhealthy” air, was difficult. When they sky looks like that, it’s like being surrounded by concrete in all directions, even above. Considering also the length of my stay, it’s obviously more difficult to make friends in 7 weeks than over 11 months, and that situation had not looked promising recently. So, I had wondered: would I leave a piece of my heart in Beijing?

On Monday, I would have said no. Today, I think it’s a very real possibility.

Dat View

The sky was blue today!!!!!

I feel like I’m a plant, with my physical and emotional well-being completely dependent on the sky.  I was full of energy and couldn’t stop smiling all day.  The people of Beijing are not plants.  They seem to go about their lives without giving the air or weather quality a second thought.  They don’t wear face masks when it’s polluted, and they don’t linger outdoors when it’s nice.  My whole day is different when the AQI is 300 and when it’s 30, from my clothes to my mood. 

 As we got our bikes to go to dinner, I asked if we could get food and eat outside.  At first they were confused by my words; I had said 外面, which means outside but I realized in this context meant off campus.  When I changed to 户外 (outdoors), though, it didn’t seem to get any clearer.  I guess the Chinese are not a big picnic culture . . . takeout is a staple of life here, and I almost tried again with that, but just gave up.  We ate inside.

A similar instance of understanding the words, but not the concept, happened during dinner.  One of the guys asked where I was going back to, and I felt stupid as I kept asking what he was saying.  They all thought I had forgotten these basic words – “where”, “you”, “go”, “return” – but I just didn’t know what he meant.  I’m going back to the hotel tonight and eventually I’m returning to America, but you know all this so why are you asking??  Turns out he wanted to know if I was going back to the office with them after dinner.  Oh . . . then yes.  

As we ate, I mentioned that I had spent Chinese New Year at the home of a friend from church, so one of the guys asked if I am religious.  This led into a discussion of what it means to be “have religious faith”.  He asked if he prays to Buddha before a test, is that religion?  I said, no, that’s superstition.  Huge thank you to Anki, my awesome flashcard program, which had shown me the “superstition” flashcard literally 20 minutes before.

After dinner, we ran into a friend of one of the guys and he introduced me.  I said 你好 and then, as if on cue, his face changed to one of incredulity and he exclaimed that I speak Chinese so well!  I laughed, and said that it always feels funny when people make such comments after hearing me say literally one simple two-syllable phrase.  He defended it, actually, and has somewhat of a point – most foreigners pronounce each syllable like a word, he said (“Ni. Hao.”) or with no tones (“nihao”) but I spoke smoothly and properly (“níhǎo”).  Maybe 你好 is actually a pretty good Chinese shibboleth?

 

I stayed so late at work that I saw the sun setting out the office window. Cheng saw me staring and asked if I wanted to take pictures. Yes, but the office window is too dirty, I said. She suggested I go upstairs to the top of the building. Um, yes please! She told me how to go up, and I discovered my new favorite place. Our building is 11 stories tall, definitely one of the tallest buildings on campus. What a gorgeous view of the city we have!!

There’s a nice open area up there, too, that seems to just be begging to host a happy hour . . . 

I caught the sunset over the mountains and stayed there until it was all the way behind them, just breathing and smiling.  

 

Today I learned: 

I’ve been pronouncing “who” wrong ALL THIS TIME?!?  It’s one of the question words and probably in the first 100 characters I learned.  APPARENTLY INCORRECTLY??  At Mass this weekend, I noticed the priest pronounced 谁 oddly, as “shuí” instead of “sheí”.  I thought it was an archaic pronunciation, or like the way we pronounce 了 as “liao” instead of “le” when we sing.  Or maybe he has an accent?  He has a few verbal quirks, like saying 好 in between pretty much every clause, so I didn’t think too much of it.  But today, when one of my labmates did it, I asked him about it.  Is it an accent, or a regional thing, or some dialect?  No, it’s pretty standard, he said, even the news announcers use it.  I didn’t believe him, but when I got home and looked it up on Pleco, my favorite Chinese app, it lists

shuí: 1. who 2. (used in rhetorical questions) who 3. someone, anyone 4. (used before 都 or 也) everyone, anyone.
sheí: a variant pronunciation for 谁 shuí.

I’VE BEEN LIVING A LIE!

The Language Game

Today was a pretty good day.  I finally mailed the first batch of postcards (the hotel staff “doesn’t do that” and the guy at the campus mail room wanted me to fill out a form for each of the 22 postcards with their intended destinations).  I bought an awesome bike raincoat that I’ve been eyeing since I got here; it covers all the way over my bike basket in the front, protecting my legs and the contents of my backpack, all while allowing a refreshing breeze to cool me while biking.  I couldn’t do laundry, though, because it was supposed to rain today.  (Heaven help us if we’re waiting for sun; I haven’t seen that since last week.)  

I went into Tsinghua for the weekly seminar.  The first speaker was an American professor, and I got specially introduced to him before the talk.  Like the rest of the event, this exchange was a slightly awkward game of language tug-of-war.  

There are so many factors at play in a situation like this.  First of all, we have to start with outward appearance.  He’s of Taiwanese ancestry – I’m not quite sure of the distance, but he was born in the US.  Basically, he looks Chinese and therefore, in China, is expected to speak Chinese like a native.  I very much do not look Chinese, and thus no expectations are placed upon my language abilities; anything I do is above and beyond expectations.

Secondly, there’s language ability.  Surprisingly, it’s generally not the factor with the most influence.  According to a labmate of mine here who recently studied with him for half a year, his Chinese is 一般 (“average”).  I was personally super impressed that he gave a research talk in Chinese – that vocabulary is not easy, and it was not obtained in a classroom; intro language courses don’t teach you “adhesion”, “micrometer”, or “elasticity”.  The average Chinese person is impressed by my Chinese, but of course it’s all relative to expectations.  (As he pointed out, he hasn’t spent a year in China, so in a colorblind world the burden of expectations would weigh much heavier on me.)  The truth is, both the visiting professor and I speak simply and struggle with tones.  Our struggles are common – he hesitated before saying 蜜蜂 (“bee”) in exactly the same way I have done many times before, making sure I don’t say it backwards instead (because 蜂蜜 is “honey”).  This makes it easy for us to understand each other, but also marks us as intermediate-level non-native speakers. 

Finally, one of the most important factors in the language game is face.  It’s complicated, but I think you get face by speaking well, and lose face when you mess up.  You also seem to lose face if someone has to accommodate you, but gain face if you are able to accommodate someone else.  This often interacts with (and sometimes opposes) another factor, which could be characterized as generosity.  Here you gain points for graciously accepting someone else’s effort, and lose them for snubbing such an attempt or making someone else lose face.  Related to this is the question of larger audience – are other people around who would be excluded by the choice of language?  Are the other people important?

So, given all this, consider this situation:  my Chinese host, whose English is probably on par with our Chinese, introduces me to this professor in English.  The professor says, “It’s so nice to be able to speak English!”  Then, my host mentions that I speak Chinese.  Question: What language do we speak after this?

Answer: an awkward mix of mostly Chinese.  I switched back to English after the formalities (yes, I speak Chinese, I studied in Xiamen for a year) but he persisted in Chinese so I switched back.  I would say it was partly feeling each other out, gauging the other’s ability; partly courtesy towards Prof. Feng, who was in turn being courteous to us; partly the environment (we’re in China!).  But also partly absurd.  Why are we not speaking our mutual native language, for these few moments at least??

He gave a very interesting presentation on three of his research projects, all very “sexy” (as in, exciting and accessibly to the general public) topics in biomechanics.  He spoke at a manageable pace for me, and I learned lots of new words.  But he has a Taiwanese or southern accent, plus a little bit of the careless (or unclear) pronunciation that I sometimes I catch myself using, so a few times I was surprised by what I thought I heard until I figured out what he meant.  For example, when he was talking about self-cleaning materials, he told us to imagine that we were covered in xiǎo kēlì (小颗粒, “small particles”) but I thought he said qiǎokèlì (巧克力, “chocolate”).  I don’t know, it sounded like a laundry commercial, you know?

After each of the three sections, he invited questions.  Almost everyone asked them in Chinese, and he was generally able to answer them, in Chinese.  But one person spoke her complex question quickly and quietly from the back of the room, which left our visiting professor completely lost.  A very Mark Zuckerberg moment . . .  He looked around for help, and a professor up front ended up restating it for him (in Chinese) in about 10 simple words.  Why couldn’t that have been done the first time??

Most people think it’s insulting to speak slowly, loudly, and clearly to “foreigners” (which I say as a joke, really meaning people who don’t speak your native language), but I think it lies somewhere on the spectrum between making an accommodation and causing someone to lose face, depending on the actual language ability of the listener.  Personally, I know my limits in this language and I love it 95% of the time.  I cherish those Chinese people who are masters at the speaking of their language with foreigners.  

Anyway, after that debacle of a question, one woman asked her question in English.  And then the professor began to respond in Chinese.  Nervous giggles spread through the room.  Too many layers for me to unpack, but each of them was simultaneously making a generous effort on behalf of the other, and forcing them to accept accommodation.  Which wins?  And how does rank play into this (the two parties being a graduate student and a well-known visiting professor)?  I’m still not quite who lost face there.  Maybe they both did?

The next speaker (yes, back-to-back seminars, in Chinese!  A mental marathon for me) was a native Chinese professor.  He spoke SO FAST, as if to make up for any time lost by the previous speaker’s nonnative hesitancy.  His research was on . . . I don’t know, there was something about microstructure and electrical charge, which is not my area, but then later when I paid attention again he was doing wrinkling, which kind of is, so . . . again, I don’t know.  I understood so little that even the English bits didn’t help at all.  Actual sentence: 

The DFT calculations are performed in the VASP code with PAW and PBE exchange-correlation functional.

Including articles and prepositions, I understand 10 out of those 16 words – none of the acronyms.  This sentence appeared twice, too, so it must have been important.  Sigh.  

Most of my labmates skipped the second talk (unfortunately, I didn’t realize that was an option…) so I ended up having lunch with just GuoYang.  This ended up being great, because he ‘had’ to talk to me the whole time instead of a few of them going off in rapid-fire Chinese conversation.  We talked about money – his parents still give him money, in addition to his stipend of about 2,000元 per month.  But their rent is less than 1,500元 per year!  One of the other EAPSI fellows had reported similar figures, but I thought there must have been a miscommunication until I heard them corroborated.  (My rent, in a subsidized on-campus apartment with the cheapest living situation at Stanford in which I have my own room, is over ⅓ of my stipend.)  He asked me if Americans drink water out of the faucet just like they do in movies.  

And we talked about families.  He’s his grandparents’ only grandchild.  I asked him to guess how many grandparents my 爷爷 and 奶奶 (my dad’s parents) have, and he clearly went out on a limb to guess 5.  By my reckoning, including my cousins’ spouses, there are 39 of us, plus 12 great grandkids.  I don’t know which he found more unbelievable – the magnitude of the number, or the fact that we don’t all get together at least once a year.  

The funny thing about this conversation is that words for family members in Chinese are very specific – your maternal and paternal grandparents are called different things, and that’s just the beginning.  GuoYang had difficulty with these terms, though, and I’d seen this with my Chinese roommate back at Stanford as well.  Yanyang sometimes asks me what your father’s older brother is called, for instance, or what’s the difference between 伯伯 and 舅舅.  I always thought this was odd, but now I kind of understand.  My family is so big that I have at least one of every kind of family member – my dad has sisters and both older brothers and a younger one, my mother has both sisters and a brother, and they all have kids.  When I learned the word 叔叔, I associate it not with “father’s younger brother”, but with “Daniel”.  For the average Chinese, the single child of single children, “father’s younger brother” is merely a concept, and not a familiar one at that.  (In a similar way, I really can’t keep straight the way that I would call my husband’s parents and the way he would address my parents, because they’re faceless, theoretical people.)

We also had lab meeting in the afternoon, which made for a long day of being talked at in technical Chinese.  I may or may not have dozed . . . 

But in between and after this, I got some work done!  My computer was magically fixed overnight so I can now run Abaqus with all of its functionality on my own desktop, which is awesome!  So I ran a sample job, and actually got it working!  They use a different Fortran compiler, and unfortunately it’s one that actually cares about line length, unlike ifort.  So for the time I’m  here I have to code as if it were going on punchcards like back in the day :)  

It’s a pretty trivial fix – a few line-continuation characters here and there – but is another item on the list of “trivial things Maria can and will frequently forget when coding”.  This list is greatly lengthened by my recent crossover from Linux to Windows: in addition to the backslash/forward slash (no pun intended!) difference I discovered yesterday (which doesn’t seem to be an issue, actually, because apparently Python is smarter than this?), Fortran files have to end in .for instead of .f and the command line is in DOS (so, ‘dir’ instead of ‘ls’  and “cls” instead of “clear”).  Plus some of my error messages are in Chinese.  Woohoo!

I ate dinner with a few of the guys, then biked home.  I stopped at U-Center for milkea (I hadn’t actually been back since discovering the Coco there!) and as I was leaving the building, was treated to a powerful (and beautiful) display of nature over this concrete jungle in which I live.  The sky to the north was lit up by near-constant lightning.  The pollution (around 150 today, just “unhealthy” with no intensifiers) diffused it throughout the whole sky, with no visible thunderbolts.  The wind, too, was building to a frenzy, and I was nearly knocked off my feet – literally, because my skirt was acting as a huge sail.  I biked home as fast as I could, keeping one eye on the incredible light show and one eye on the road as everyone else also tried to get home as fast as they could.  The atmosphere in the air was a little frantic; only I seemed to be enjoying it at all.  I’ve been in California for a while now and can only remember one thunderstorm in the last few years, so this was super exciting to me!

I made it home right before the downpour started.  Perfect timing to curl up with my milktea and the end of Three Men on the Bummel.  It was largely as enjoyable as its prequel, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!), which I can’t recommend enough.  I particularly liked this quote at the end: 

“A ‘Bummel’ . . . I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started.  Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days.  But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand.  We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way.  We have been much interested, and often a little tired.  But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ’tis over.”

I generally describe individual excursions in China (say, to buy a SIM card or to visit friends in Zhao’An) as “adventures”, with a desired destination but also openness to changes.  After reading this, though, I think each of my five trips to China could be perfectly described as a ‘bummel’.   

 

Today I learned: 

All animals take about 20 seconds to pee.  Similarly, bladder pressure is essentially constant, while bladder volume is roughly proportional to body mass.  An elephant’s urethra is about a meter long and as thick as your leg.  

Tsinghua University makes it own ice cream!

We have a ‘normal’ (which is a Western-centric way of saying ‘non-squatty’) toilet at work!  I don’t mind squatting all, but it’s nice to have options.

My Passport’s Bank Account

Baidu Maps says the American embassy is 1 hour and 22 minutes away from where I live by public transportation.  This is a lie.  It is at least two hours.  At least.  

Good thing I left almost two hours before my appointment, and biked to the subway station! 

The newest subway line in Beijing, Line 15, is being built very close to us.  The line isn’t completed and doesn’t seem to be very busy yet, but it’s a convenient way to get to other lines sometimes.  Today I took that and (after a 30 minute wait) a bus to the embassy.

Going to the US embassy in China is an odd feeling.  I kept flashing my blue passport as if it were a VIP ticket or backstage passes, but I kept being beckoned in without any questions.  This was greatly appreciated, as the line of Chinese nationals waiting for their visa interviews did not inspire envy.  

Once I got up to the counter of American Citizen Services, I felt myself subconsciously relax.  Maybe I could sometimes do things in China in English, but I never do.  Here, though, was an English oasis.  My people!  Fellow native speakers of my mother tongue!

I was at the embassy to get a letter notarized, indicating that I had replaced passport #xxxxxxxxx with passport #yyyyyyyyy.  I’d emailed and they’d said that was no problem, just bring photocopies.  They did not mention that it would be $50 (USD!  Not divisible by 6!!!!), so I nearly choked when I saw the fee schedule.  That’s almost half of what I payed to renew my passport!!  

The whole thing was painfully trivial, too.  I literally filled in my name, both passport numbers, and swore that everything was true while he stamped it.  I paid my $50, and left the oasis.  

I went to Bank of China immediately afterwards.  I had gone through all this hassle to reopen a bank account from five years ago that surprisingly contained about $300 more than I had expected.  That was great news, but for some reason my account seems to belong less to me, and more to my passport.  Instead of the passport being used to prove my identity, it seems that the passport is my identity.  Because of this, the fact that I recently got a new passport presented quite the difficulty – hence the embassy trip. 

I got there right around lunch and had to wait about an hour to see someone.  She spent at least 30 minutes shuffling through the papers, taking innumerable pictures of each one, and clicking on her computer.  I signed in a few places.  Then she handed me carbon copies of all the forms and said I was good. 

That was when I mentioned that, by the way, I also don’t remember my password.  She had clearly been ready to be done with me for a whlie now, so this was not good news.  “You’re quite annoying!”, she exclaimed.  

I had thought that re-opening a frozen account for a foreigner with a new passport would be about the most difficult operation she does in a day, but somehow resetting my password took at least twice as long and just as many signatures and pictures of my documents.

I got home and, about an hour later, got a phone call.  It was the bank, telling me I still couldn’t use my card online (which I had also, after her outburst, requested), so could I come back in? I walked back and it appeared that the woman who had helped me earlier had had lunch and a nap and was refreshed and ready to deal with me.  She took all my forms, took more pictures, got a few more signatures, and then pushed it all back to me and said I was ready.

So, that was an all-day affair.  Let’s not calculate my hourly wage, shall we?

Today I learned: The real name of the United States of America.  For the entirety of my first 8 Chinese-speaking years, I have said that I am from 美国, but today I was confused by the Chinese translation on the official embassy letterhead – 美利坚合众国.  They’re basically just equivalent to American and the United States of America; the former is almost always sufficient, but it is good to know the actual name of one’s country.  

Regressing

Stomach uncertainty continued today.  I slept a lot, then read a lot of news.  Drank a lot of water and yogurt.  It’s not getting worse, but also not really getting better?  Just solidly a notch below ‘meh’, with occasional exciting moments of ‘uh-oh’.  After all of our talk on Friday about the vomit on the streets (one guy texted me a picture of two more piles today), whenever my stomach gives me the slightest discontent, I am gripped by a fear of vomiting on the street and ruining my pristine record.  Thankfully, no vomiting anywhere yet.  (Sorry if this is TMI, but living in China with foreigners tends to lead to many digestion-based discussions.  I once shared two bathrooms with 16 people for a summer; many taboos were overcome.)

I went in to work at 1.  Late, I know, but today is technically a holiday even if I’m not convinced my labmates know the meaning of the word.  Also, stomach.  At any rate, there were a few guys there when I got in, and they asked me if I knew it was a holiday.  “Yes,” I said, “but you’re all here . . .”.  And they called me hardworking!  The only time I’ve gotten called hardworking for showing up at 1.  

One of my labmates had told me he was going to reinstall the operating system on the computer I’m using on Saturday, so I went in today hoping it was done.  (As a reminder, this computer is hobbled both by the owner’s forgetting the administrator password, and by the faulty setup of Fortran.  Basically useless to me as it was.)  It was not done; in fact we appeared to have regressed, not only from Windows 8 to Windows 7, which I’m sure was intentional, but also from a mostly functioning computer that just wasn’t able to do the precise technical tasks I came to do, to a computer that could no longer connect to the internet.

I hung around for a few hours, while no further progress was made.  Tomorrow the “computer company” is coming to look at it.  

Before I left, I downloaded a few TV episodes.  Might as well not let that 2 GB go to waste, right??

I hadn’t eaten since dinner last night, except for yogurt, but wasn’t that hungry until dinner anyway.  We went with the hotel restaurant again – a safe and convenient choice – and I introduced a few EAPSI people to some of my favorite dishes: shredded potato, muxu pork, and 地三鲜 (eggplant, potato, and green peppers).  We lingered over dinner to talk, mostly about Chinese.  I’m the only one who had studied it before, so I ended up trying to explain some features of pinyin that I had found confusing when I first studied Chinese, like the fact that nü and qu rhyme but that qu and chu don’t.  I can’t get over how brave these people are for coming to China without knowing the language, although rationally I realize I did the same thing . . . like, 3 times.