I got back to Taipei last Thursday. Andreas, Fong, and their whole family have been extremely welcoming and hospitable, way beyond anything I could have asked for.
It's interesting to come back here. Last year I was a little overwhelmed by the noise, the size and unfamiliarity of the place, the fact that I could barely communicate with almost anyone. Now, after living for seven months in a place where a lot of people only speak a dialect I can hardly understand even with a semester at Sichuan University, it's a relief to be back where most people speak "standard" Chinese!
After a few days in Foshan－－where the food is so terrific it's ridiculous, and I won't write about it now because it deserves its own post－－Z and I took a boat to Hong Kong. We stayed there for six days, taking lots of ferries and eating a lot of fresh seafood. We went to several Hong Kong-style diners, which look a lot like my mental image of an American diner from the 50s or 60s: futuristic, chrome, pastel turquoise walls and orange tables, waiters with uniforms and round hats. Except of course they serve Chinese food. But even the Chinese food is pretty close to what I consider Americanized Chinese food. They also have a version of "Sinosized" Western food, like French toast (practically deep-fried in butter, with peanut butter in the middle) and club sandwiches. And, of course, the notorious Hong Kong milk tea, which is black tea steeped to the strength of espresso, and then mixed with milk. But the tea is actually so strong that the milk hardly decreases the bitterness at all.
Then I flew to Taipei. Andreas taught me how to play Chinese chess. We went to a hot spring. I am eating large quantities of soymilk and youtiao (油条). No place on earth has better soymilk and youtiao than Taiwan; I don't need to travel anywhere else to know this fact. On Saturday night I am flying to Seattle! I am taking a time-traveling jet which will arrive four hours before it leaves. If this causes a disturbance in the space-time continuum and tears the world apart, I am sorry.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Goodbye, Chengdu
I packed up what I most wanted to keep, and gave away most of the rest. A few bottles of soy sauce, vinegar, and ketchup were left behind, plus maybe some bits of cardboard and a few leftovers in the fridge that I never got around to. Packing took longer than I expected and ended up becoming an all-night ceremony, almost. Then in the morning I flew to Guangzhou, and took the bus to Foshan.
The last two weeks have been a chaotic mess of trying to accomplish too much with too little time, trying to say goodbye to everybody, and all the while having an ongoing case of what I think is/was a stomach virus or infection. I think I got out of Sichuan just in time; the food there is not good for people who are trying to recover their digestion. Cantonese food, apart from being better on the stomach, is phenomenal. For dinner tonight we had stir-fried soybean noodles with zucchini, greens, and dried shrimp, steamed fish with ginger soy sauce, fish-stuffed green chilies, fish-stuffed eggplant, and boiled greens (there was only one non-fish meat dish). After dinner, we passed a "cold tea" herbal medicine place (the first of many), and I sampled a cup of dark brown, syrupy tea. "It might taste a little bitter, but it's good for your stomach," said the lady. If you condensed the essence of the word "bitter" into a cup, this is what it would taste like. I had the plum juice. Now I am looking forward to sleep.
I wrote this other post a while back, but because of all the happenings mentioned above, I never got around to posting it.
---
The apartment where I live is inside one of several small communities of apartment buildings, which together are designated the Zongbei community. Each community or complex has about ten buildings, and each building has about ten staircases, and each staircase has seven floors, and each floor has two doors. So I guess each complex must have about 1,400 apartments.
Across the street from and standing far above the Zongbei communities, there is a big tower of condominiums called the Zongbei International. A lot of foreigners live there; it's close to the University, the U.S. consulate, and the majority of Western restaurants in Chengdu (or at least the plurality), and it's nicer and more expensive than the Zongbei community. One day my friend Anna and I tried to get onto the roof of the Zongbei International, thinking it might be a good place to study. Taking the elevator to the top floor, we found that the hallway ended in an open ledge that you could lean out over, from which you could see the complex where I live (you can actually see the back window of my apartment on the far right side of the picture). It was also a perfect place for throwing paper airplanes.
From that hallway, we went up an unlit staircase, which after a couple of switchbacks and a ladder came to a room full of big pipes. There was a metal gate through which we could get to an outdoor walkway. The walkway ran between the outer wall of the building and an overgrown patio. Unfortunately, the walkway was a dead end. After spending a while admiring the strangeness of the little patio trapped in a cage on the top of a skyscraper, we went back down and ended up studying in the park (where by studying I mean making collages).
---
A few weeks ago, there was word around the school that a TV company was looking for some foreigners to be on TV for an evening. In return, participants would receive free dinner and 100 kuai. Interested people should show up in front of the school building at 5:30. I got there right at 5:30, and there were already six or seven other people waiting. A few were friends, and we talked about what we thought we were going to have to do. There was a rumor that they were taking us to the Panda Base to look at pandas, but someone brought up the fact that the Panda Base closes in the evening. Anyway, what was interesting about watching foreigners look at pandas?
Around 6, a van crawled up to the school. The driver opened the side door of the van, and then nodded at us while vaguely staring at some point in the distance. I was a little bit wary of climbing into a van before even making eye contact with the driver, but I did it. The rest of the students came in after me--now there were about eight of us. Without a word, the driver and another Chinese guy got back into the car and we drove off.
As we pulled away from the school, we started hypothesizing about a Chinese gang bribing school officials to abduct foreign students. Then the van stopped in front of a bar. We were in a neighborhood called Jiuyanqiao ("nine eyes bridge"), which is a bar and club area next to the river. On our right was a narrow park and then the river. On the left was a row of bars, most of them with bright flags and banners, neon lights, and outdoor tables.
They led us into the nearest bar, which actually comprised several small, one-room buildings scattered around an otherwise table-filled garden. In a wooden room with broad, low tables and benches with colorful pillows, we sat down. Then they explained to us (through one of the best Chinese speakers in our group) that we were going to wait here while they put makeup on us, and then we could eat.
The makeup, food, and everything else were supposed to take about four hours (i.e., five or six hours), and some of us were starting to talk about forgetting the whole thing. We were still within walking distance of the school. We told the young man who had explained things to us--I had mentally started to call him our handler--that we weren't too impressed with his plan. We suggested a pay raise. He quickly said he couldn't make that decision, and would have to talk to his boss. We assumed the issue had been dropped and kept trying to build up the nerve to walk out, but a little while later the handler came back and said he could pay us each 200. Only one person left after that.
After an hour of putting makeup on some of us (I declined the offer, unlike at Chengdoo Magazine's '80s-themed anniversary party), they told us we could eat. We crossed the street again, and in the little park on the river there was a table stacked with plastic takeout boxes. To tell the truth, when I'd heard about a free dinner I had been expecting the kind of big, round table, 30-dish feast that usually happens here when somebody is somebody else's guest. So I admit I was a little disappointed with our insipid-looking rations partially falling out of their flimsy white containers. Also, predictably, all or almost all of the dishes had meat in them.
After some prodding, the handler agreed to give me some money to buy my own dinner. "Just come back," he said. A few blocks away I found a restaurant and ordered eggplant and potatoes to go, and then bought some lychee at a fruit stand. When I got back, the rest of the foreign students had finished eating and were sitting at a table in the garden of the bar, drinking beer and watching Portugal vs. North Korea on a big projector screen. The beer was from the convenience store down the street and not from the bar where we were all sitting, and waiters kept coming to our table to ask if we planned to order anything. There was one Japanese guy in our group, A____, and as the only one who looked like he was from East Asia, he was the one the waiters always approached. To their dismay, however, A____ pretended not to speak any Chinese at all, and this probably gained us an extra thirty minutes at the table while the staff searched for someone who spoke English. Eventually they did find someone, and then A____ started to explain to them about the TV show, telling them they should talk to the TV crew. Just then, the handler appeared of his own accord and told us we were going to start filming.
They ushered us into a small, fenced-off area with a stage. There were already about 30 other people inside the area, although they mostly clung to the edges in small groups. We found out we were shooting a commercial for the city of Chengdu, advertising it as a city of vibrant culture. To demonstrate this vibrancy, the local pop-rock band Mosaic would play a song, and we would be the enthusiastic (international) audience.
Everywhere there were lights--pointing at us, at the stage, and even at the bridge over the river nearby--and the brightness during dusk gave everything an unreal color. The members of Mosaic were sitting around too, and we talked to them for a little while. The singer's permed hair reached down to his shoulders. After learning the Chinese names for all the instruments and stretching our own Chinese vocabulary to the limit, we turned to the big screen across the street, where Portugal was now beating North Korea 4-0 (they would score three more goals that night, to the extreme dismay of the North Korean team, who had lost to Portugal the only other time they made it into the World Cup).
We stood there a long time before the music finally started. Only a few more people had arrived after us, and the crew pressed us into a tight square in front of the stage to make it look more crowded. Excited to have something to do, we danced with verve as Mosaic lip-synced through their song (the lyrics of the chorus went like "M-O-S-A-I-C"). Then it was over and the long quiet resumed. Portugal scored its last goals. Someone handed out some battery-powered wand things, which we were supposed to wave in the air. We started mock-fighting with them, and by the time the music started again, half of them were broken.
Someone noticed a small boat coming down the river with a panda on it. A couple of men paddled the boat up to the shore, helped the panda out, and led it inside the enclosure with us. They started the song again, with the panda tottering slowly in the middle of the square of people. When the song ended, three people rushed in to remove the panda's head. Inside was a little boy of maybe ten, face and hair saturated with sweat. They wiped his face with a cloth and gave him some water through a straw. Then the head went back on. I hope they were paying him more than they were paying us, but somehow I doubt it.
We did the same song about eight times. The last several times, they used a big camera on a long-necked crane, which a few crewmen pushed through the crowd. While we danced we had to keep one eye on the camera, because whenever it passed we had to jump over the cables and dodge out of the way. And we had to do this without ever looking directly at the camera.
Around 11:30, as we were getting ready for yet another round of the song, the producers suddenly announced that the filming was over and everyone quickly left. The handler and another crew member walked us across the bridge to a van on the other side and drove us all home.
The last two weeks have been a chaotic mess of trying to accomplish too much with too little time, trying to say goodbye to everybody, and all the while having an ongoing case of what I think is/was a stomach virus or infection. I think I got out of Sichuan just in time; the food there is not good for people who are trying to recover their digestion. Cantonese food, apart from being better on the stomach, is phenomenal. For dinner tonight we had stir-fried soybean noodles with zucchini, greens, and dried shrimp, steamed fish with ginger soy sauce, fish-stuffed green chilies, fish-stuffed eggplant, and boiled greens (there was only one non-fish meat dish). After dinner, we passed a "cold tea" herbal medicine place (the first of many), and I sampled a cup of dark brown, syrupy tea. "It might taste a little bitter, but it's good for your stomach," said the lady. If you condensed the essence of the word "bitter" into a cup, this is what it would taste like. I had the plum juice. Now I am looking forward to sleep.
I wrote this other post a while back, but because of all the happenings mentioned above, I never got around to posting it.
---
The apartment where I live is inside one of several small communities of apartment buildings, which together are designated the Zongbei community. Each community or complex has about ten buildings, and each building has about ten staircases, and each staircase has seven floors, and each floor has two doors. So I guess each complex must have about 1,400 apartments.
Across the street from and standing far above the Zongbei communities, there is a big tower of condominiums called the Zongbei International. A lot of foreigners live there; it's close to the University, the U.S. consulate, and the majority of Western restaurants in Chengdu (or at least the plurality), and it's nicer and more expensive than the Zongbei community. One day my friend Anna and I tried to get onto the roof of the Zongbei International, thinking it might be a good place to study. Taking the elevator to the top floor, we found that the hallway ended in an open ledge that you could lean out over, from which you could see the complex where I live (you can actually see the back window of my apartment on the far right side of the picture). It was also a perfect place for throwing paper airplanes.
From that hallway, we went up an unlit staircase, which after a couple of switchbacks and a ladder came to a room full of big pipes. There was a metal gate through which we could get to an outdoor walkway. The walkway ran between the outer wall of the building and an overgrown patio. Unfortunately, the walkway was a dead end. After spending a while admiring the strangeness of the little patio trapped in a cage on the top of a skyscraper, we went back down and ended up studying in the park (where by studying I mean making collages).
---
A few weeks ago, there was word around the school that a TV company was looking for some foreigners to be on TV for an evening. In return, participants would receive free dinner and 100 kuai. Interested people should show up in front of the school building at 5:30. I got there right at 5:30, and there were already six or seven other people waiting. A few were friends, and we talked about what we thought we were going to have to do. There was a rumor that they were taking us to the Panda Base to look at pandas, but someone brought up the fact that the Panda Base closes in the evening. Anyway, what was interesting about watching foreigners look at pandas?
Around 6, a van crawled up to the school. The driver opened the side door of the van, and then nodded at us while vaguely staring at some point in the distance. I was a little bit wary of climbing into a van before even making eye contact with the driver, but I did it. The rest of the students came in after me--now there were about eight of us. Without a word, the driver and another Chinese guy got back into the car and we drove off.
As we pulled away from the school, we started hypothesizing about a Chinese gang bribing school officials to abduct foreign students. Then the van stopped in front of a bar. We were in a neighborhood called Jiuyanqiao ("nine eyes bridge"), which is a bar and club area next to the river. On our right was a narrow park and then the river. On the left was a row of bars, most of them with bright flags and banners, neon lights, and outdoor tables.
They led us into the nearest bar, which actually comprised several small, one-room buildings scattered around an otherwise table-filled garden. In a wooden room with broad, low tables and benches with colorful pillows, we sat down. Then they explained to us (through one of the best Chinese speakers in our group) that we were going to wait here while they put makeup on us, and then we could eat.
The makeup, food, and everything else were supposed to take about four hours (i.e., five or six hours), and some of us were starting to talk about forgetting the whole thing. We were still within walking distance of the school. We told the young man who had explained things to us--I had mentally started to call him our handler--that we weren't too impressed with his plan. We suggested a pay raise. He quickly said he couldn't make that decision, and would have to talk to his boss. We assumed the issue had been dropped and kept trying to build up the nerve to walk out, but a little while later the handler came back and said he could pay us each 200. Only one person left after that.
After an hour of putting makeup on some of us (I declined the offer, unlike at Chengdoo Magazine's '80s-themed anniversary party), they told us we could eat. We crossed the street again, and in the little park on the river there was a table stacked with plastic takeout boxes. To tell the truth, when I'd heard about a free dinner I had been expecting the kind of big, round table, 30-dish feast that usually happens here when somebody is somebody else's guest. So I admit I was a little disappointed with our insipid-looking rations partially falling out of their flimsy white containers. Also, predictably, all or almost all of the dishes had meat in them.
After some prodding, the handler agreed to give me some money to buy my own dinner. "Just come back," he said. A few blocks away I found a restaurant and ordered eggplant and potatoes to go, and then bought some lychee at a fruit stand. When I got back, the rest of the foreign students had finished eating and were sitting at a table in the garden of the bar, drinking beer and watching Portugal vs. North Korea on a big projector screen. The beer was from the convenience store down the street and not from the bar where we were all sitting, and waiters kept coming to our table to ask if we planned to order anything. There was one Japanese guy in our group, A____, and as the only one who looked like he was from East Asia, he was the one the waiters always approached. To their dismay, however, A____ pretended not to speak any Chinese at all, and this probably gained us an extra thirty minutes at the table while the staff searched for someone who spoke English. Eventually they did find someone, and then A____ started to explain to them about the TV show, telling them they should talk to the TV crew. Just then, the handler appeared of his own accord and told us we were going to start filming.
They ushered us into a small, fenced-off area with a stage. There were already about 30 other people inside the area, although they mostly clung to the edges in small groups. We found out we were shooting a commercial for the city of Chengdu, advertising it as a city of vibrant culture. To demonstrate this vibrancy, the local pop-rock band Mosaic would play a song, and we would be the enthusiastic (international) audience.
Everywhere there were lights--pointing at us, at the stage, and even at the bridge over the river nearby--and the brightness during dusk gave everything an unreal color. The members of Mosaic were sitting around too, and we talked to them for a little while. The singer's permed hair reached down to his shoulders. After learning the Chinese names for all the instruments and stretching our own Chinese vocabulary to the limit, we turned to the big screen across the street, where Portugal was now beating North Korea 4-0 (they would score three more goals that night, to the extreme dismay of the North Korean team, who had lost to Portugal the only other time they made it into the World Cup).
We stood there a long time before the music finally started. Only a few more people had arrived after us, and the crew pressed us into a tight square in front of the stage to make it look more crowded. Excited to have something to do, we danced with verve as Mosaic lip-synced through their song (the lyrics of the chorus went like "M-O-S-A-I-C"). Then it was over and the long quiet resumed. Portugal scored its last goals. Someone handed out some battery-powered wand things, which we were supposed to wave in the air. We started mock-fighting with them, and by the time the music started again, half of them were broken.
Someone noticed a small boat coming down the river with a panda on it. A couple of men paddled the boat up to the shore, helped the panda out, and led it inside the enclosure with us. They started the song again, with the panda tottering slowly in the middle of the square of people. When the song ended, three people rushed in to remove the panda's head. Inside was a little boy of maybe ten, face and hair saturated with sweat. They wiped his face with a cloth and gave him some water through a straw. Then the head went back on. I hope they were paying him more than they were paying us, but somehow I doubt it.
We did the same song about eight times. The last several times, they used a big camera on a long-necked crane, which a few crewmen pushed through the crowd. While we danced we had to keep one eye on the camera, because whenever it passed we had to jump over the cables and dodge out of the way. And we had to do this without ever looking directly at the camera.
Around 11:30, as we were getting ready for yet another round of the song, the producers suddenly announced that the filming was over and everyone quickly left. The handler and another crew member walked us across the bridge to a van on the other side and drove us all home.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
KTV Blackout
It's been two months since I've made a post!? I blame work and finals. Now that both are finished, I finally have two weeks to do whatever (else) I want! Actually, I meant to post this yesterday, but the internet crapped out.
To celebrate the end of finals, Z and I went to sing KTV this afternoon. One of the most famous KTV chains, ATT, has a newly remodeled branch not far from my apartment. ATT is also known for having the best selection of foreign songs (including one song from Radiohead, who are banned in China). At the entrance, a tall young man in a white dress shirt bows as you go in. Then you ascend one of two curved staircases into what looks like a low-ceilinged hotel lobby, everything in off-white marble. The all-young staff in black waistcoats help you figure out which room to order, or you can sit in the chilly waiting room and watch news on a little TV desk.
Like some less reputable hotels, KTVs rent out rooms by the hour. There are usually half a dozen different room sizes for different prices. The price also varies depending on the time, with evenings and weekends being more expensive. Since there were only two of us, the right size would have been a "mini" room, but they only had small rooms, which fit up to five people. The hourly price for the room on a weekday afternoon would have been 36 kuai (about $5), but there was also a special: we could pay 36 kuai per person and get a room for four hours, and they would bring us dinner, a fruit plate, and popcorn.
KTV rooms are small and windowless. The essential features are a leather couch that circles around three sides of the room, a big-screen TV, and a big coffee table with a giant ashtray. And of course the touch-screen computer for choosing songs. When you sing for four hours, you have to pace yourself. Early on I made the mistake of trying to sing two Nirvana songs and half my vocal range went mute. Bohemian Rhapsody would have to wait.
Exactly two hours in, when we were almost finished with The Sound of Silence, everything suddenly went black. It was also completely quiet, and for a few seconds I was disoriented. Then I could hear people walking in the hallway outside, and a vested employee came in with two bento boxes, two bowls of soup, and chopsticks. In the dark, he set them down on the table, and asked if we wanted a candle. I asked him what time he thought the power would come back and he said he didn't know.
For a while we sat in the dark room, eating by cell phone light. The food wasn't bad for something from a karaoke house. The employee eventually came back with a candle. When we were finished eating, there was still no sign of returning electricity, so we went outside. No sooner had the room door closed than four employees intercepted us to apologize about the sudden darkness. Z asked them if we could have a refund, and they agreed to give us half our money back--36 kuai. Z pretended to be mildly satisfied, but really we were both glad, having half-expected them to refuse any kind of refund ("it wasn't out fault"; "you already ate the food"; or simply "we don't do refunds").
At the end of the hallway, a group of middle-aged women were arguing with another employee. We left, and this time the doorman had four companions, and they all bowed and thanked us for coming. Next door at the Trust-Mart supermarket, a crowd was standing around the entrance, looking vaguely in the direction of the darkened bag check room. Apparently the whole block had lost power, which meant that the customers at Trust-Mart wouldn't be able to retrieve their bags from the newly installed electronic cubbies. I wondered how many people would have to cancel whatever plans they had because they were stuck at Trust-Mart, waiting for their stuff. And then about the mad rush that would ensue when the power finally went back on.
To celebrate the end of finals, Z and I went to sing KTV this afternoon. One of the most famous KTV chains, ATT, has a newly remodeled branch not far from my apartment. ATT is also known for having the best selection of foreign songs (including one song from Radiohead, who are banned in China). At the entrance, a tall young man in a white dress shirt bows as you go in. Then you ascend one of two curved staircases into what looks like a low-ceilinged hotel lobby, everything in off-white marble. The all-young staff in black waistcoats help you figure out which room to order, or you can sit in the chilly waiting room and watch news on a little TV desk.
Like some less reputable hotels, KTVs rent out rooms by the hour. There are usually half a dozen different room sizes for different prices. The price also varies depending on the time, with evenings and weekends being more expensive. Since there were only two of us, the right size would have been a "mini" room, but they only had small rooms, which fit up to five people. The hourly price for the room on a weekday afternoon would have been 36 kuai (about $5), but there was also a special: we could pay 36 kuai per person and get a room for four hours, and they would bring us dinner, a fruit plate, and popcorn.
KTV rooms are small and windowless. The essential features are a leather couch that circles around three sides of the room, a big-screen TV, and a big coffee table with a giant ashtray. And of course the touch-screen computer for choosing songs. When you sing for four hours, you have to pace yourself. Early on I made the mistake of trying to sing two Nirvana songs and half my vocal range went mute. Bohemian Rhapsody would have to wait.
Exactly two hours in, when we were almost finished with The Sound of Silence, everything suddenly went black. It was also completely quiet, and for a few seconds I was disoriented. Then I could hear people walking in the hallway outside, and a vested employee came in with two bento boxes, two bowls of soup, and chopsticks. In the dark, he set them down on the table, and asked if we wanted a candle. I asked him what time he thought the power would come back and he said he didn't know.
For a while we sat in the dark room, eating by cell phone light. The food wasn't bad for something from a karaoke house. The employee eventually came back with a candle. When we were finished eating, there was still no sign of returning electricity, so we went outside. No sooner had the room door closed than four employees intercepted us to apologize about the sudden darkness. Z asked them if we could have a refund, and they agreed to give us half our money back--36 kuai. Z pretended to be mildly satisfied, but really we were both glad, having half-expected them to refuse any kind of refund ("it wasn't out fault"; "you already ate the food"; or simply "we don't do refunds").
At the end of the hallway, a group of middle-aged women were arguing with another employee. We left, and this time the doorman had four companions, and they all bowed and thanked us for coming. Next door at the Trust-Mart supermarket, a crowd was standing around the entrance, looking vaguely in the direction of the darkened bag check room. Apparently the whole block had lost power, which meant that the customers at Trust-Mart wouldn't be able to retrieve their bags from the newly installed electronic cubbies. I wondered how many people would have to cancel whatever plans they had because they were stuck at Trust-Mart, waiting for their stuff. And then about the mad rush that would ensue when the power finally went back on.
Friday, May 21, 2010
some potatoes and greens on the coffee table in my apartment
I'm starting to make plans for my trip back. For whatever reason, the semester ends in mid-July. I'll go to a few of the places in Sichuan that I've wanted to see--maybe I'll try to find one of the old towns that's still actually old, and hasn't been rebuilt as a tourist trap--and then go east, stopping in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taipei before flying home sometime in mid-late August.
In about a week I'll have been in Chengdu for six months. I find that hard to believe. When I think about such a length of time in the abstract--such as before it happens--it's made up of habits, patterns, and repetitions. I see myself going to class every morning, studying every afternoon, working every weekend, etc. But when it happens, of course, it isn't really like that. Every class or lunch or studying session or neglect of one of these is unique, and the real events don't blend together, they elude categorization. And because every "event" is so different from every other, it's impossible to comprehend them all at once. So naturally my mind summarizes the period, alighting only on the most interesting or somehow otherwise memorable parts, and the time necessarily feels shorter.
A month or so ago all of the street vendors were selling pineapple. For the equivalent of 20 cents you could select a stick of pineapple from a jar of water on their cart, or else you could buy a whole pineapple (peeling optional) for a dollar a kilogram. A few weeks later the strawberries appeared. They were big, bright, firm, and delicious, and probably laced with pesticides. At first you had to pay a little over two dollars a kilogram; toward the end of the run they went down to a dollar fifty a kilo. Now they're harder to find. The woman who used to stand every day outside the gate of the apartment complex I don't see so often anymore.
One day, after I paid for a stick of pineapple and was inspecting the glass jar, trying to find the best stick, the fruit woman suddenly became agitated and started telling me to hurry up. Usually her patience is inexhaustible, so I was surprised--I looked around and saw a police car driving up. The police got out of his car and shouted angrily, and I took a few steps back, away from the fruit cart. The woman immediately grabbed the handles of the cart and dragged it inside the gate. The officer went as far as the gate, speaking in a rough tone of voice, but he stopped just outside of it. The woman, inside the gate, smiled at him indulgently. The police barked a few more times, but by then it was clear that he was only half serious. Then he left. I went inside the gate and grabbed a stick of pineapple.
A few weeks ago I went to a place called Luodai, which has a lot in common with Jiezi, the old town I visited last month, including the narrow, car-less stone streets, the multitude of small shops selling all kinds of sweet snacks, and the new-ancient architecture mixed almost seamlessly with the real-ancient buildings--which are only distinguishable by the "naturalness" of their decrepitude. What makes Luodai different is its fame as a Hakka town. The Hakka are a minority with their own language and culture, although supposedly they are ethnically indistinguishable from Han Chinese. For a long time they have primarily occupied the eastern provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Fujian. However, around the turn of the 18th century, the Qing emperor Kangxi encouraged a lot of them to relocate to Sichuan, which for evil reasons was lacking in population. A lot of the Hakka moved to Luodai.
One quintessential Luodai food is "heartbreak noodles" (伤心面), which supposedly serve to remind Hakka people of their far-off homeland. But in case the memory of Eastern China isn't enough to make you cry, the spiciness can help. These noodles were so spicy they gave me a headache.
May Day weekend is a national holiday in China, and this year it was also the second annual Zebra Music Festival. The three-day festival comprised three stages and multitudes of bands and DJs from all over China and the rest of the world. The international acts included Does it Offend You, Yeah? (UK); Exile Parade (UK); and Reptile and Retard (NL). The festival was held in a big park near the Panda Base (which I also visited while I was there--pictures later). Z and I went on the second day and stayed overnight in a borrowed tent, which we set up on a hill right in front of the main stage. Aside from the music, one big attraction was the Jägermeister tent, where if you played a game of foosball you could win a shot of that awful stuff.
The festival was a lot of fun. A few of my friends went on the second day (pictured below), the crowds were exuberant, and at night it rained like hell. Finally, here are a couple movie posters for films coming out this year that I'm excited about.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Swedish Pesach
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to have a Seder on Passover. And Trust-Mart didn't even stock unleavened bread. On the other hand, avoiding hametz wasn't too difficult, since most of the bread around here tastes like Styrofoam. The two biggest staples are rice and noodles. Still, in the spirit of tradition, I went on a matzoh hunt one evening. I guess when its main competition is Styrofoam, cardboard doesn't sound so bad.
I finally found the afikoman--or something resembling it--behind the checkout counter at IKEA. It was wrapped in a blue, wedge-shaped package with the label "LEKSANDS KNÄCKE: NORMALGRÄDDAT," which is Swedish for "Passover matzoh." I was also excited to find a jar of real blueberry jam (blueberries are a relatively uncommon fruit here), and found the two make a good combination.
And I was reminded that IKEA is a pretty fun place. You can sleep on any of the displays (people here do so frequently, I've heard) and the staff isn't allowed to bother you. You can try on costumes (Rorschach, anyone?), play with stuffed animals, eat cafeteria food, and look out the window.
I finally found the afikoman--or something resembling it--behind the checkout counter at IKEA. It was wrapped in a blue, wedge-shaped package with the label "LEKSANDS KNÄCKE: NORMALGRÄDDAT," which is Swedish for "Passover matzoh." I was also excited to find a jar of real blueberry jam (blueberries are a relatively uncommon fruit here), and found the two make a good combination.
And I was reminded that IKEA is a pretty fun place. You can sleep on any of the displays (people here do so frequently, I've heard) and the staff isn't allowed to bother you. You can try on costumes (Rorschach, anyone?), play with stuffed animals, eat cafeteria food, and look out the window.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Ancient Town
The Monday before last was Tomb Sweeping Day, when families traditionally visit the tombs of their forefathers to make sure they're all in order. Since there was no class that day, and I was invited to teach again at the English school in Chongzhou on Sunday morning, it became an overnight trip. The last time I taught at that school was also my first time teaching an English class (when I gave those "Christmas lessons"), and coming back three months later with a little more experience and confidence gave me a feeling of accomplishment.
Chongzhou is only an hour away from Chengdu by bus, but the climate makes it feel a lot farther; both times I've left a gray, smoggy Chengdu to arrive in a warm, bright Chongzhou. My friend Z____ came along with me, and after class we walked around taking pictures.
There's an ancient town called Jiezi (the "z" is pronounced almost like "ts", and the "i" at the end is sort of like "ə", the generic unstressed vowel) not far from Chongzhou, so that afternoon we decided to take a bus there. And we would have taken the bus, if there had been one. Instead, there was a line outside the bus station, and every ten minutes a van would pull up in front of it. Then an attendant would oversee the cramming of as many people as possible into the van (short of sitting in another person's lap). I was lucky; because of my height they chose me to sit shotgun.
We drove for about half an hour down dusty roads that were mostly under construction. Suddenly, the traffic got extremely crowded with pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes, and we started to make our way through some kind of open market. A few times we stopped unexpectedly to let somebody in or out--I couldn't figure out how the people standing on the side of the road communicated to the driver that they wanted to get in the van, or how they knew the unmarked, unremarkable silvery-gray van was the right one.
After the crowded market, the scenery quickly turned green and rural. The road was lined with tall, straight trees, and behind them were fields of yellow rapeseed flowers and intermittently an old, brick farmhouse. But this only lasted about 15 minutes, and then everything was under construction again. We came to a gigantic intersection where equal numbers of buses and tractors were lumbering around, kicking dust into the air. This was the stop. When we got out of the van, the driver told us that Jiezi was just a short distance up ahead. We could have taken one of the motorized pedicabs that were waiting around, but after riding down a bumpy road for the better part of an hour we opted to walk.
In retrospect, we should have taken the cab. For about 20 minutes we walked down a gravel road with no sidewalk, dodging mud puddles and the continually passing, continuously honking trucks that carried over-sized loads of sewer piping and other construction materials. The ancient town is being expanded into a luxury resort. Immediately around the town, the architecture at least is trying to mimic the old style. A little farther out, everything looks modern. On a fence, behind some people digging with shovels, there was a red banner that Z____ translated for me as "Never forget the policy."
The real "ancient town" is only a few blocks of buildings in the middle of all the mayhem, but once you get there it's surprisingly peaceful. True, the streets are full of tourists (though I might have been the only foreign tourist that day), but the absence of cars on the narrow, carved stone streets, and the profusion of outdoor tea houses with people dozing in their chairs, and the generally relaxed manner of the locals makes Jiezi feel like a decent place to live. The main street runs parallel to a wide river. Branching off from the street toward the river are numerous, narrow side roads with quiet guesthouses, and at the end of each there is at least one tea house where you can sit and look across the river at the bright green hills on the other side. Actually, when we were there, this experience was somewhat diminished by the heavy tractors that kept driving up and down the river, which had been made temporarily shallow so they could build a new bridge.
Looking out the entrance of a restaurant (hanging meat overhead)
Making sesame-peanut candy in front of the shop
Steamed buns--brown sugar, black rice, sesame filling, meat filling, ...
Medicine shop
The first section of the main street
Chongzhou is only an hour away from Chengdu by bus, but the climate makes it feel a lot farther; both times I've left a gray, smoggy Chengdu to arrive in a warm, bright Chongzhou. My friend Z____ came along with me, and after class we walked around taking pictures.
There's an ancient town called Jiezi (the "z" is pronounced almost like "ts", and the "i" at the end is sort of like "ə", the generic unstressed vowel) not far from Chongzhou, so that afternoon we decided to take a bus there. And we would have taken the bus, if there had been one. Instead, there was a line outside the bus station, and every ten minutes a van would pull up in front of it. Then an attendant would oversee the cramming of as many people as possible into the van (short of sitting in another person's lap). I was lucky; because of my height they chose me to sit shotgun.
We drove for about half an hour down dusty roads that were mostly under construction. Suddenly, the traffic got extremely crowded with pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes, and we started to make our way through some kind of open market. A few times we stopped unexpectedly to let somebody in or out--I couldn't figure out how the people standing on the side of the road communicated to the driver that they wanted to get in the van, or how they knew the unmarked, unremarkable silvery-gray van was the right one.
After the crowded market, the scenery quickly turned green and rural. The road was lined with tall, straight trees, and behind them were fields of yellow rapeseed flowers and intermittently an old, brick farmhouse. But this only lasted about 15 minutes, and then everything was under construction again. We came to a gigantic intersection where equal numbers of buses and tractors were lumbering around, kicking dust into the air. This was the stop. When we got out of the van, the driver told us that Jiezi was just a short distance up ahead. We could have taken one of the motorized pedicabs that were waiting around, but after riding down a bumpy road for the better part of an hour we opted to walk.
In retrospect, we should have taken the cab. For about 20 minutes we walked down a gravel road with no sidewalk, dodging mud puddles and the continually passing, continuously honking trucks that carried over-sized loads of sewer piping and other construction materials. The ancient town is being expanded into a luxury resort. Immediately around the town, the architecture at least is trying to mimic the old style. A little farther out, everything looks modern. On a fence, behind some people digging with shovels, there was a red banner that Z____ translated for me as "Never forget the policy."
The real "ancient town" is only a few blocks of buildings in the middle of all the mayhem, but once you get there it's surprisingly peaceful. True, the streets are full of tourists (though I might have been the only foreign tourist that day), but the absence of cars on the narrow, carved stone streets, and the profusion of outdoor tea houses with people dozing in their chairs, and the generally relaxed manner of the locals makes Jiezi feel like a decent place to live. The main street runs parallel to a wide river. Branching off from the street toward the river are numerous, narrow side roads with quiet guesthouses, and at the end of each there is at least one tea house where you can sit and look across the river at the bright green hills on the other side. Actually, when we were there, this experience was somewhat diminished by the heavy tractors that kept driving up and down the river, which had been made temporarily shallow so they could build a new bridge.
Looking out the entrance of a restaurant (hanging meat overhead)
Making sesame-peanut candy in front of the shop
Steamed buns--brown sugar, black rice, sesame filling, meat filling, ...
Medicine shop
The first section of the main street
Saturday, February 27, 2010
A half-meter of panda, please.
In Chinese, pretty much every noun uses a measure word. "A person" is yi ge ren, which is literally "one (measure word) person". Ge is the most generic measure word, so I guess it could also be translated as "one unit of person". The way that measure words are categorized is interesting. Zhang is the measure word for something flat--yi zhang zhuozi for "a 'slice' of table", yi zhang piao for "a 'slice' of ticket" (or any other paper-like object). For animals, zhi is usually used, so yi zhi gou is "an (animal-unit) of dog". One of my favorites is tiao, which is seemingly used for anything longer than it is wide. This includes yi tiao sheng ("a length of rope"), yi tiao lu ("a length of road"), you tiao, the name for a length of fried dough sometimes eaten for breakfast, and even yi tiao yu ("a length of fish"). I've heard that in China many people don't consider fish real animals (I guess this is analogous to pescetarians who think of themselves as vegetarians), so when I first learned about yi tiao yu, I thought it was telling of this fact. But then my friend told me that tiao can apply to other animals as well, like in the alternative to the yi zhi gou already mentioned, yi tiao gou: "a length of dog". If I wasn't already a pescetarian, it would make me think twice before buying one of those sausages hanging in front of the little shop down the street.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
"Welcome to China. We have walnut milk." - Chinese people
Everybody goes home on Chinese New Year. The shops all close, the cities empty of the large portion of their residents who come from the country, and the trains fill up to standing room only. Luckily, my friend Diana invited me to go stay with her family in Kaiyuan for the holiday, saving me from two weeks in a post-apocalyptic Chengdu. Kaiyuan is in Yunnan province, which is just south of Sichuan. The city is a four-hour drive from Kunming, the capital, and this is where we landed when we flew there two weeks ago. Despite being next to each other, Sichuan and Yunnan's climates are completely opposite (at least the parts I've seen). Chengdu is in a basin, and in the winter it is pretty much continuously grey, clammy, and just above freezing. Yunnan, on the other hand, is hot, and because it's on a high plateau the air is dry. It makes me think of southern California.
We took a taxi and got to the bus station around 4 o'clock, and bought tickets for a bus two hours later. The station was crowded but not overwhelming, and we only had to wait about 15 minutes in line at one of the dozen ticket windows. We were both pretty hungry and there was a cafeteria, but all they were serving were some elderly-looking noodles, and we couldn't find a table that hadn't already been occupied by flies. So we went to the convenience store instead, and bought some pistachios, sunflower seeds, peanuts, desiccated date cake, spicy papaya, and bottled tea, and then sat outside in the bright afternoon sun.
The Greyhound-style bus was pretty poorly kept, none of the overhead lights worked (which after the sun set turned out to be a bummer), and the windows rattled so loudly when we hit bumps in the road that I was afraid they might shatter. But the bus was also mostly empty, and so the ride was pretty comfortable. While there was still light I just watched the changing iron-red hills and the weird, skinny trees with tufts of needle-like leaves at the top and in the middle, cracking sunflower seeds and throwing the shells out the window. I've read several times that in China, every square meter of arable land is under cultivation, and whenever I go outside of the city this seems to be true. What from a distance look like gradually sloping hills with wild vegetation turn out to be terraced garden plots, crisscrossed with raised mud walkways.
We got to Kaiyuan around 10 o'clock. By China's standards, Kaiyuan is a small town, mostly organized around the axis of one main arterial. Diana's apartment is on the arterial, but a few miles north of the town center. Her mom had cooked a late dinner for us, including stir-fried potato slivers, cabbage, and spicy pickled garlic cloves. Diana's family was extremely welcoming, hospitable, and generous. They graciously accommodated my vegetarian preferences, gave me my own room, included me in all of the various family and extended family outings, and when we left her mom sent me back with a big jar of homemade "rose sugar", which as far as I can tell is made of rose petals preserved with sugar--an exotic take on the fruit jam idea.
Two days after arriving, I took the bus back to Kunming for a couple days to see my friend, Z____, who happened to be traveling through. This time the bus ride was in the morning, and I got to see a completely new stretch of land, which we'd only passed after dark the day before. The land was mostly red, flat farmland with hills in the distance. Every once in a while, at a gas station, there would be a few guards or officials sitting under a cinderblock shelter, with more cinderblocks to hold down the plastic roof. Along the road there were also villages, which mostly comprised crumbling, faded brick single-story houses of indeterminate age. Sticking out amid these humble, handmade dwellings, there would sometimes be another kind of house--new, wooden, tall, and boxy, often painted garish pink or green, with a new car in the cement driveway. This sometimes created the appearance of a Malibu beach house that had been air-dropped into the middle of a medieval village.
Whenever our bus passed another car--which was about once every three minutes--the driver would lean into his horn before swerving into the opposite lane, sometimes swerving back just in time to avoid oncoming traffic. Once or twice, when the roads were crowded, this "passing lane" would grow to two or three lanes wide--as drivers who felt that other cars in the middle of passing weren't passing fast enough proceeded to pass them--and it felt like a miracle when we got back into our (single) lane without getting into a head-on collision. The bus was also full this time, and although the wind was strong I kept the window open because at any given moment it seemed like half the passengers were smoking. One man had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand, but I assume the direction was a mistake.
The eastern bus station in Kunming is pretty far from the city center, and it was a little bit challenging figuring out which buses to take. A few times I got what seemed like contradictory information from different people. On one of the buses there was a girl sitting behind a big, cardboard box, which was tied shut with straps. In the middle of the ride the box started crowing.
Kunming is smaller (and cheaper) than Chengdu, but it also seems to have a higher proportion of foreigners. There is one street in particular that hosts a whole plethora (really, an entire, honest-to-Kant plethora) of Western restaurants. On Wednesday morning we went to a French cafe called French Cafe, where we had a chocolate crepe, a strawberry tart, and panini. A happy man tried to sell us a jar of honey through the window.
Then we went to a farmer's market down the street, where I bought a wedge of goat cheese to take back to Kaiyuan. (I was also planning to buy several more wedges at the request of some friends in Chengdu when we passed back through the following week on the way to the airport, but on that day the cheese stall turned out to be closed, since it was only a couple days after New Year's.) The market and cafe are also right next to a beautiful park of walkways, bridges, gardens, and lakes, filled to the brim with dapper old men (the park, not the lakes). One common phenomenon in parks in China is a group of old ladies dancing. These are often traditional folk dances where everyone does the same thing at the same time. In this park on this day there was a particularly large group of dancers, and not all of them were old ladies.
After the park we went to a bakery and bought a green tea-flavored roll thing, but half an hour later we were accosted by three children begging for food. After making them promise to share it, we gave them the roll, but the kid we handed it to ran away, and the other two kept following us asking for food. For some reason, poverty is much more conspicuous in Kunming than it is in Chengdu. Kunming seems to have a higher number of people begging, a lot of whom are missing limbs or are otherwise mutilated--this it has in common with Hong Kong. I saw a few of these doing calligraphy with brushes held between their toes. Another phenomenon that seems to exist in Kunming but not Chengdu is performing or begging children. Every other corner had a child or two singing with a cheap, little microphone and amplifier, and none of the children looked very happy to be doing it.
Walking through the center of the city, we came to a little plaza, on either side of which was a line of old people in white lab coats. Each one was standing behind an office chair. The men and women in the coats didn't look at us as we walked passed, but seemed to be gazing benignly into the walls of the buildings across the street. I wondered if a chemical lab nearby was having an emergency evacuation (and was going to great lengths to ensure each staff member would still have a place to sit...), until a woman passing by sat down in one of the chairs and the scientist behind it started giving her a shoulder rub.
Z____ had been teasing me for being so fascinated by the old men in the park earlier, and when we passed a table selling "old man hats", I started trying some on. I was surprised to find one that I actually liked, and I asked how much it was.
"160 kuai," the lady said. I thanked her and started walking away.
"Don't you want that hat?" Z____ asked. "You have to bargain!"
"There's no way I can get it down to a price I'd be willing to pay," I said.
"Those hats should be 50 kuai at most," said Z____.
"But she wanted 160! She'd be insulted if I asked for 50."
But Z____ assured me this was not the case, so I walked back and made the offer, trying to sound jaunty. The lady laughed and shook her head, saying she couldn't possibly go below 100.
We started walking away again, when the lady called out after us "Ok! 60!"
Z____ replied "We'll take it for 50!"
"Well, in that case..." the lady conceded, and that is how I became the owner of an old man hat.
Me and Diana with bananas and hat
It seems like there is always one movie that must be mentioned immediately whenever anyone talks about movies here. When I first arrived it was 2012. For the past month or so it's been Avatar. In Kunming I finally saw it (in 3D...golly!). This was also my first experience going to a movie theater in China. We arrived two minutes after the nominal start of the movie, just in time to find out that it would be shown dubbed in Chinese with no subtitles! But since I was more interested in the animation than the dialogue, this didn't stop me from enjoying the film. When we entered the theatre, the lights hadn't yet been turned off, and a lot of people were still chatting. There was a picture of a space station on the screen, which I guessed was some kind of promotional preview, maybe for Avatar: The Game, or Avatar: The Theme Park Ride. We found our seats and I turned to Z____ to say something, but noticed that she seemed strangely engrossed in the preview. I looked around at all the people talking to each other but watching the screen, and then realized that there were no previews. The movie had started. There was a pretty steady stream of conversation going on around us through at least the first hour of the movie, but since I couldn't really understand it it was easier to tune out.
I'm writing this sitting by the window in a bakery, and there's a group of kids setting off fireworks right outside. They light a firework in their hands, and when it starts popping and shooting sparks everywhere they throw it on the ground and play soccer with it. One of them was standing by the window earlier staring at my laptop, and when I looked at him he grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.
The next night we ended up going to a movie bar, which I believe was called "Movie Bar 1895". They advertised as having live music and old movies. We had a hard time finding it and had to call three times for directions, but when we finally made it the waitress greeted us as if we were distinguished and anticipated guests. The bar had a PA, a piano, and several guitars, but the live music that night turned out to be a middle-aged woman singing movie theme songs over Music Minus One. Around 10:30 the woman left and the staff lowered a projector screen over the stage. The staff hadn't yet decided which movie to show that night, so they gave us their DVD album. We suggested 8 1/2, but were dismayed when they started the movie without turning off the lively Latin music playing over the PA. "Most of the customers here don't want to watch the movie, so we have to leave the music on" was the explanation. Looking around at the group of Chinese people playing cards, the white guy with his laptop, and the couple enjoying a romantic evening in the corner, I realized they had a point--none of them seemed too interested in watching a Fellini movie. We watched it with subtitles for about half an hour, and I laughed a couple of times imagining that the Latin music was the movie's soundtrack, and then we left.
I was hungry after that so we went to a sort of food court where we'd been the day before. Yunnan is known as having a large number of ethnicities (as recognized by the government), and each restaurant in the food court represented the food of a different one of these ethnic groups. This time it was late when we arrived, however, and most of the places were closed. Also unlike last time, the food court was ridiculously filthy. Pools of water and other liquids lay on the floor with paper plates, napkins, leftover food, trash, and plastic mats and buckets. The tables weren't much better. We were wading through this, looking for a place with that magic combination of openness and cleanliness. As we were walking, a scrawny young man suddenly jumped in front of us and started shouting "Eat! eat!" and making weird growling noises and miming someone shoveling food into their mouths. We ignored him and walked past, but soon realized that this was the only truly open restaurant. For a while the guy--who was actually a waiter--would come around and shout something at us, but we kept ignoring him and eventually he stopped. We ordered a famous Yunnan dish called "across the bridge noodles", which are rice noodles in a big bowl of hot, oily soup, with mushrooms and vegetables that you add at the table and that you hope will be sufficiently cooked by the hot broth. I made sure with the waitress that the soup had no meat in it and also no meat in the broth, but in retrospect I'm almost sure that it was chicken broth.
An hour later in the hotel room my stomach started hurting; over the course of the night things deteriorated until by morning I had completely rid my digestive system of all traces of food--past, present, and future--using all means at my disposal. The next day I had a fever and couldn't hold down anything but bread and water. This was also the day when I was supposed to take the bus back to Kaiyuan. But I'll save that story for another time.
While we were walking around in Kunming, Z____ and I entered a convenience store to buy some water when a little glass bottle with a green and white label caught my attention. The picture on the label looked like a big walnut. And lo...walnut milk it was. I had never noticed walnut milk before, but after that of course I started seeing it--and advertisements for it--everywhere. The walnut milk consisted of nothing but walnuts, sugar, water, and sometimes an emulsifier. I was so excited I bought three different brands and wrote reviews of them. I have never seen walnut milk in the U.S.--does it exist there?
Another place we went was "lady street" (女人街), which is not a red light district, but a big shopping mall that caters only to women (I know, what a strange concept). The mall was a lot like those malls in Taipei where each floor is a ring of tiny shops organized around a central escalator. We went down to the basement and saw what I think can best be described as a "manicure warehouse": rows and rows of tables and easy chairs with women getting manicures, pedicures, and a few massages, stretching as far as the eye could see (more or less).
Finally, I would like to mention a clothing store bravely called Unsightly & Peculiar, and a restaurant called My Favor Restaurant with, underneath this in big letters, the subtitle My Favor Steak. That's all.
We took a taxi and got to the bus station around 4 o'clock, and bought tickets for a bus two hours later. The station was crowded but not overwhelming, and we only had to wait about 15 minutes in line at one of the dozen ticket windows. We were both pretty hungry and there was a cafeteria, but all they were serving were some elderly-looking noodles, and we couldn't find a table that hadn't already been occupied by flies. So we went to the convenience store instead, and bought some pistachios, sunflower seeds, peanuts, desiccated date cake, spicy papaya, and bottled tea, and then sat outside in the bright afternoon sun.
The Greyhound-style bus was pretty poorly kept, none of the overhead lights worked (which after the sun set turned out to be a bummer), and the windows rattled so loudly when we hit bumps in the road that I was afraid they might shatter. But the bus was also mostly empty, and so the ride was pretty comfortable. While there was still light I just watched the changing iron-red hills and the weird, skinny trees with tufts of needle-like leaves at the top and in the middle, cracking sunflower seeds and throwing the shells out the window. I've read several times that in China, every square meter of arable land is under cultivation, and whenever I go outside of the city this seems to be true. What from a distance look like gradually sloping hills with wild vegetation turn out to be terraced garden plots, crisscrossed with raised mud walkways.
We got to Kaiyuan around 10 o'clock. By China's standards, Kaiyuan is a small town, mostly organized around the axis of one main arterial. Diana's apartment is on the arterial, but a few miles north of the town center. Her mom had cooked a late dinner for us, including stir-fried potato slivers, cabbage, and spicy pickled garlic cloves. Diana's family was extremely welcoming, hospitable, and generous. They graciously accommodated my vegetarian preferences, gave me my own room, included me in all of the various family and extended family outings, and when we left her mom sent me back with a big jar of homemade "rose sugar", which as far as I can tell is made of rose petals preserved with sugar--an exotic take on the fruit jam idea.
Two days after arriving, I took the bus back to Kunming for a couple days to see my friend, Z____, who happened to be traveling through. This time the bus ride was in the morning, and I got to see a completely new stretch of land, which we'd only passed after dark the day before. The land was mostly red, flat farmland with hills in the distance. Every once in a while, at a gas station, there would be a few guards or officials sitting under a cinderblock shelter, with more cinderblocks to hold down the plastic roof. Along the road there were also villages, which mostly comprised crumbling, faded brick single-story houses of indeterminate age. Sticking out amid these humble, handmade dwellings, there would sometimes be another kind of house--new, wooden, tall, and boxy, often painted garish pink or green, with a new car in the cement driveway. This sometimes created the appearance of a Malibu beach house that had been air-dropped into the middle of a medieval village.
Whenever our bus passed another car--which was about once every three minutes--the driver would lean into his horn before swerving into the opposite lane, sometimes swerving back just in time to avoid oncoming traffic. Once or twice, when the roads were crowded, this "passing lane" would grow to two or three lanes wide--as drivers who felt that other cars in the middle of passing weren't passing fast enough proceeded to pass them--and it felt like a miracle when we got back into our (single) lane without getting into a head-on collision. The bus was also full this time, and although the wind was strong I kept the window open because at any given moment it seemed like half the passengers were smoking. One man had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand, but I assume the direction was a mistake.
The eastern bus station in Kunming is pretty far from the city center, and it was a little bit challenging figuring out which buses to take. A few times I got what seemed like contradictory information from different people. On one of the buses there was a girl sitting behind a big, cardboard box, which was tied shut with straps. In the middle of the ride the box started crowing.
Kunming is smaller (and cheaper) than Chengdu, but it also seems to have a higher proportion of foreigners. There is one street in particular that hosts a whole plethora (really, an entire, honest-to-Kant plethora) of Western restaurants. On Wednesday morning we went to a French cafe called French Cafe, where we had a chocolate crepe, a strawberry tart, and panini. A happy man tried to sell us a jar of honey through the window.
Then we went to a farmer's market down the street, where I bought a wedge of goat cheese to take back to Kaiyuan. (I was also planning to buy several more wedges at the request of some friends in Chengdu when we passed back through the following week on the way to the airport, but on that day the cheese stall turned out to be closed, since it was only a couple days after New Year's.) The market and cafe are also right next to a beautiful park of walkways, bridges, gardens, and lakes, filled to the brim with dapper old men (the park, not the lakes). One common phenomenon in parks in China is a group of old ladies dancing. These are often traditional folk dances where everyone does the same thing at the same time. In this park on this day there was a particularly large group of dancers, and not all of them were old ladies.
After the park we went to a bakery and bought a green tea-flavored roll thing, but half an hour later we were accosted by three children begging for food. After making them promise to share it, we gave them the roll, but the kid we handed it to ran away, and the other two kept following us asking for food. For some reason, poverty is much more conspicuous in Kunming than it is in Chengdu. Kunming seems to have a higher number of people begging, a lot of whom are missing limbs or are otherwise mutilated--this it has in common with Hong Kong. I saw a few of these doing calligraphy with brushes held between their toes. Another phenomenon that seems to exist in Kunming but not Chengdu is performing or begging children. Every other corner had a child or two singing with a cheap, little microphone and amplifier, and none of the children looked very happy to be doing it.
Walking through the center of the city, we came to a little plaza, on either side of which was a line of old people in white lab coats. Each one was standing behind an office chair. The men and women in the coats didn't look at us as we walked passed, but seemed to be gazing benignly into the walls of the buildings across the street. I wondered if a chemical lab nearby was having an emergency evacuation (and was going to great lengths to ensure each staff member would still have a place to sit...), until a woman passing by sat down in one of the chairs and the scientist behind it started giving her a shoulder rub.
Z____ had been teasing me for being so fascinated by the old men in the park earlier, and when we passed a table selling "old man hats", I started trying some on. I was surprised to find one that I actually liked, and I asked how much it was.
"160 kuai," the lady said. I thanked her and started walking away.
"Don't you want that hat?" Z____ asked. "You have to bargain!"
"There's no way I can get it down to a price I'd be willing to pay," I said.
"Those hats should be 50 kuai at most," said Z____.
"But she wanted 160! She'd be insulted if I asked for 50."
But Z____ assured me this was not the case, so I walked back and made the offer, trying to sound jaunty. The lady laughed and shook her head, saying she couldn't possibly go below 100.
We started walking away again, when the lady called out after us "Ok! 60!"
Z____ replied "We'll take it for 50!"
"Well, in that case..." the lady conceded, and that is how I became the owner of an old man hat.
Me and Diana with bananas and hat
It seems like there is always one movie that must be mentioned immediately whenever anyone talks about movies here. When I first arrived it was 2012. For the past month or so it's been Avatar. In Kunming I finally saw it (in 3D...golly!). This was also my first experience going to a movie theater in China. We arrived two minutes after the nominal start of the movie, just in time to find out that it would be shown dubbed in Chinese with no subtitles! But since I was more interested in the animation than the dialogue, this didn't stop me from enjoying the film. When we entered the theatre, the lights hadn't yet been turned off, and a lot of people were still chatting. There was a picture of a space station on the screen, which I guessed was some kind of promotional preview, maybe for Avatar: The Game, or Avatar: The Theme Park Ride. We found our seats and I turned to Z____ to say something, but noticed that she seemed strangely engrossed in the preview. I looked around at all the people talking to each other but watching the screen, and then realized that there were no previews. The movie had started. There was a pretty steady stream of conversation going on around us through at least the first hour of the movie, but since I couldn't really understand it it was easier to tune out.
I'm writing this sitting by the window in a bakery, and there's a group of kids setting off fireworks right outside. They light a firework in their hands, and when it starts popping and shooting sparks everywhere they throw it on the ground and play soccer with it. One of them was standing by the window earlier staring at my laptop, and when I looked at him he grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.
The next night we ended up going to a movie bar, which I believe was called "Movie Bar 1895". They advertised as having live music and old movies. We had a hard time finding it and had to call three times for directions, but when we finally made it the waitress greeted us as if we were distinguished and anticipated guests. The bar had a PA, a piano, and several guitars, but the live music that night turned out to be a middle-aged woman singing movie theme songs over Music Minus One. Around 10:30 the woman left and the staff lowered a projector screen over the stage. The staff hadn't yet decided which movie to show that night, so they gave us their DVD album. We suggested 8 1/2, but were dismayed when they started the movie without turning off the lively Latin music playing over the PA. "Most of the customers here don't want to watch the movie, so we have to leave the music on" was the explanation. Looking around at the group of Chinese people playing cards, the white guy with his laptop, and the couple enjoying a romantic evening in the corner, I realized they had a point--none of them seemed too interested in watching a Fellini movie. We watched it with subtitles for about half an hour, and I laughed a couple of times imagining that the Latin music was the movie's soundtrack, and then we left.
I was hungry after that so we went to a sort of food court where we'd been the day before. Yunnan is known as having a large number of ethnicities (as recognized by the government), and each restaurant in the food court represented the food of a different one of these ethnic groups. This time it was late when we arrived, however, and most of the places were closed. Also unlike last time, the food court was ridiculously filthy. Pools of water and other liquids lay on the floor with paper plates, napkins, leftover food, trash, and plastic mats and buckets. The tables weren't much better. We were wading through this, looking for a place with that magic combination of openness and cleanliness. As we were walking, a scrawny young man suddenly jumped in front of us and started shouting "Eat! eat!" and making weird growling noises and miming someone shoveling food into their mouths. We ignored him and walked past, but soon realized that this was the only truly open restaurant. For a while the guy--who was actually a waiter--would come around and shout something at us, but we kept ignoring him and eventually he stopped. We ordered a famous Yunnan dish called "across the bridge noodles", which are rice noodles in a big bowl of hot, oily soup, with mushrooms and vegetables that you add at the table and that you hope will be sufficiently cooked by the hot broth. I made sure with the waitress that the soup had no meat in it and also no meat in the broth, but in retrospect I'm almost sure that it was chicken broth.
An hour later in the hotel room my stomach started hurting; over the course of the night things deteriorated until by morning I had completely rid my digestive system of all traces of food--past, present, and future--using all means at my disposal. The next day I had a fever and couldn't hold down anything but bread and water. This was also the day when I was supposed to take the bus back to Kaiyuan. But I'll save that story for another time.
While we were walking around in Kunming, Z____ and I entered a convenience store to buy some water when a little glass bottle with a green and white label caught my attention. The picture on the label looked like a big walnut. And lo...walnut milk it was. I had never noticed walnut milk before, but after that of course I started seeing it--and advertisements for it--everywhere. The walnut milk consisted of nothing but walnuts, sugar, water, and sometimes an emulsifier. I was so excited I bought three different brands and wrote reviews of them. I have never seen walnut milk in the U.S.--does it exist there?
Another place we went was "lady street" (女人街), which is not a red light district, but a big shopping mall that caters only to women (I know, what a strange concept). The mall was a lot like those malls in Taipei where each floor is a ring of tiny shops organized around a central escalator. We went down to the basement and saw what I think can best be described as a "manicure warehouse": rows and rows of tables and easy chairs with women getting manicures, pedicures, and a few massages, stretching as far as the eye could see (more or less).
Finally, I would like to mention a clothing store bravely called Unsightly & Peculiar, and a restaurant called My Favor Restaurant with, underneath this in big letters, the subtitle My Favor Steak. That's all.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Photos from Hong Kong
Near the end of the main street of the main town on Lamma Island, an island near Hong Kong Island where no cars are allowed. To the right is a used bookstore and vegetarian cafe.
Something I ate at a vegetarian restaurant.
A view from Kowloon Park.
Smaller statues in front of the Giant Buddha.
New Year's Competition part 2
After a couple hours of listening to a story about a wolf who terrorizes a riverbank and the coalition of thirsty animals who try to stop him, we were almost finished. I was given a chart and had to put a check mark next to the names of the 15 or so children who I thought had given the best recitations. We drove back to the hotel courtyard, where groups of children in various costumes and uniforms were milling around one building in particular. We went inside. To the right was a stage and a catwalk, on which four emaciated girls who couldn't have been older than 13 were awkwardly modeling skimpy dresses. In front of that were several rows of chairs, all empty except for four in the front that were occupied by the judges--including Aileen and Liu Xiao. Behind that, on the other side of a crowded aisle, were more seats, which were full.
Mary and I stood in the doorway for a few moments, and then a guy with a headset pushed through the crowd and beckoned us to follow him. He led us to the judges' chairs. Feeling a little embarrassed about this special treatment--I wasn't actually going to judge these models, was I!?--I chose a seat several rows back and on one side. Soon the modeling transitioned to dancing, which was mostly hip-hop and I thought pretty impressive. After about half an hour I decided it would be more fun to use the remaining hour or so until lunch to explore the city. Mary and I pushed our way back through the crowd of people--assailed with "Hello!"s from every direction--to the courtyard. After checking in with the woman in the neon orange coat--who I had started to think of as my handler--we left. We walked across one of the covered bridges and through some sunny open markets.
Influenced slightly by my throbbing head, I suggested we stop for tea. Instead of a traditional tea house, Mary took me to a black-and-white cow-patterned, narrow place across the street from her university. I ordered a hot green tea, and a black ceramic mug on a shelf behind the cashier reminded me to ask for it in something other than plastic. "Plastic is all we have," I was informed. "What about the mug right behind you!?" I asked. That was for display purposes only. With Mary's help, however, I prevailed upon them to serve my tea in it. The cashier called the busboy over and asked him to wash the dust out.
After tea we walked back toward the hotel and intercepted the other judges and organizers (including the woman in the neon orange coat) on the bridge. Together we walked to a nearby restaurant and feasted on foodstuffs. As we walked lazily back to the hotel, we passed an old man sitting at a little table with a camping stove, on which there was a bowl of shiny brownish liquid sugar. In front of him was a baking tray with a piece of wax paper on it. The man picked up the bowl and with deft motions poured tiny amounts of the liquid sugar onto the paper, soon creating a fish, which he mounted on a stick. Another of the judges paid the old man two yuan and asked me to choose an animal. The man had a wheel with twelve different animals on it that you could spin, and the arrow ended up pointing to a crane (sorry it's not the best picture).
Walking back to the hotel, Mary told me that the man was a local celebrity.
We were taken back to the school for another round of speeches. This second time, however, the contestants were the same (minus the ones I hadn't given check marks). And they performed the same speeches, recited the same stories. The only difference was that this time I had to give them ratings on a 10.0 scale, marked next to their names on another chart. As far as I could tell, I was the only one rating these children, and I found it a little disquieting that although I had no formal training and had been given practically no instructions, I was solely responsible for how they fared in the contest--for which most of them must have spent a long time practicing.
After the second round of judging, we had more time until dinner, so after watching the dancing again for a while--this time it was mostly large groups of children doing traditional ethnic dances, although right when I came in someone was breakdancing--Mary and I took off again. We walked toward the biggest of the bridges, which was lined with teahouses and tea shops.
We were sitting in one of the teahouses sampling their finest grades when Mary got a call. It was the woman in the orange coat, calling us back for dinner. So we went to another restaurant, where we had a private room on the second floor. This time there were about 15 people, and there were so many dishes on the table that they had to start stacking plates on top of the edges of other plates. One of the dishes was the famous "Ya'an fish soup". One of the reasons the fish is so famous is a bone in its head that looks a lot like a saber. The restaurant guarantees that any customer who orders the fish will get a saber bone to take home with them. When they brought the fish out, the orange coat woman and the waitress spent several minutes digging around in its head with a knife, but they were unable to find the bone. Fortunately, the restaurant must have kept a stock of extra saber bones just in case, because the waitress returned shortly with a little gift box. It was passed around for everyone to see, and then the woman in the orange coat gave it to me.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
New Year's Competition
In the middle of December I got a call from a guy I met through a teaching interview, asking me if I wanted to judge an English competition in Ya'an on New Year's Day. A driver would pick me up on New Year's Eve around 6:30, I would stay in a hotel, judge the competition the next day, and they would drive me back that night. Ya'an is a town about a two hours' drive from Chengdu, famous for its elaborate covered bridges, high quality tea, copious rain, edible fish, and beautiful women (there's a pun in Chinese about the last three). That was about all the information I could get.
On New Year's Eve, around 9:00, a van drove up to the gate. There were already four people inside plus the driver, and before leaving Chengdu we stopped to pick up one more. I sat in the middle row next to a young couple, and we chatted for a while. I tried to ask them if they were going to the same competition, but I couldn't understand the answer. I thought maybe they were honeymooners or something and this was one of those unofficial cabs that take multiple groups at the same time.
Once we got onto the freeway I dozed, and when I woke up we were driving along a wide river. We turned down a covered bridge, at the end of which was a huge, perfectly shaped tree silhouetted against some street lights, the air around it glowing orange. Some people were strolling along the bridge and river bank with big red paper lanterns.
We went through a gate into a courtyard and got out of the van. Some other people were there waiting, but they left with the driver and the couple who had been sitting next to me. I stood by the van with my bags, wondering if someone was going to tell me where to go.
After what seemed like twenty minutes, a woman who had been sitting behind me in the van motioned for me to follow her. She was walking with two other guys toward what turned out to be the door to the hotel. Inside the deserted lobby she gave me a key. I tried asking again what was going on. Finally I learned that these three were also here for the competition. The woman, Aileen, was a singer; one guy, Liu Xiao, was a dancer, and the other guy, M_____, was a professional MC. I started to feel slightly under-qualified. They helped me find my room and said they would come get me the next morning at 8:00. It was then about 10:30.
The room was considerably nicer than the hotel room in Chongzhou (not that I'm complaining! There are worse things to suffer than being put up in an imperfect hotel room). The bathroom was big, clean, and didn't smell like sewage, the heater worked well, and the wallpaper was only peeling in one place. I put on my pajamas, but I didn't want to go to bed right away since it was New Year's Eve. Fortunately, I had anticipated this scenario and had brought some DVDs. I was just about to watch one of them when the door became the source of a knocking sound. "How did you become the source of a knocking sound!?" I asked. Actually, I think I just called out "Hello?" The voice from the other side of the door belonged to the other judges. I opened the door. They had come to ask me if I wanted to go eat something with them. I ran back into the room and threw my clothes back on, and we went.
At the entrance were a man, a woman, and two cabs. The man and woman were introduced as friends. We took the cabs across the river to a restaurant on the shore. The place seemed to be made completely of weathered wood, with gaps between the floorboards and stairs that creaked alarmingly. It was mostly empty, but we were led up the stairs to a little nook directly over the river. If not for the darkness and fog, I think it would have been quite a view. The waiter then put up a theater curtain, turning the nook into a private room. The darkness, wooden walls and furniture, little windows, and that we were sitting above the river made it feel almost like we were in the cabin of an old ship.
First beers were distributed, and "soy milk" for the ones who didn't drink ("soy milk" in China means a combination of soy and cow's milk). Then dishes quickly started appearing. My clearest memory is the chicken feet--a plate of five or six long, gnarled claws covered in brown scales that glistened under the hanging light bulb. There were also skewered vegetables and meat, sliced meat, stir-fried meat, and just meat. But there were some things I could eat, like corn, stir-fried greens, and tofu. The tofu had an interesting flavor and I asked about it. The man who had been ordering and seemed to occupy the head of the square table said it was stinky tofu (chou doufu), but it tasted nothing like the overpoweringly pungent stuff I had in Taipei.
I also got to experience Chinese drinking culture again. Even after the first toast involving everyone at the start of the meal, it's considered impolite to drink by yourself; you either have to toast someone else, or be toasted. But it's hard to break the habit of drinking whenever you feel like it when that's what you're used to. Once I caught myself doing this, but luckily, I made eye contact with someone across the table and was able to avoid a faux pas by shouting "Happy New Year!" before we both took sips. At one point the waiter brought us a big pitcher of some kind of steaming yellow liquid with flowers and vermilion things that look vaguely like walnuts. Is that tea? I asked. They told me it was beer. It tasted kind of like Dimetapp. Near midnight everyone had pretty much finished eating. I was still picking over a plate of home-made potato chips, dipping each one in a plate of powdered chili pepper and MSG. Everybody seemed to be half focused on whatever conversation was happening around the table, and half focused on text messaging with their phones. At midnight we all stood up and had another toast.
The next day, after a breakfast of cold vegetables and steamed buns (mantou), hard-boiled eggs, and milk (no coffee or tea!), I was ushered into another car. A girl got into the front seat and introduced herself as Mary, my interpreter. She was a student at the local university. Then a woman in a neon orange overcoat drove me, Mary, and the MC to a slightly dilapidated school building not far away. There we met up with the "honeymooners", Y_____(f.) and Z_____(m.), who were actually also judges. Mary, Y_____, and I were shown into one of the classrooms. All of the desks were pushed against the far wall, except for three set in the middle. We sat at these desks.
Up until this point I had an extremely faint idea of what I was supposed to do. I had pictured myself sitting at a judges' table near a stage and holding up signs with "9.7", "8.5", "9.2" printed in big numerals as crowds booed and cheered. I wasn't really sure how this empty classroom fit into the picture. I wanted to ask Mary about it, but I didn't know where to start.
A small child walked into the classroom and started giving a well-rehearsed speech in Chinese. Y_____ made a few notes, asked the child some questions at the end, and thanked him. A little girl came in and gave another speech. These children were almost offensively cute. "Am I supposed to be doing anything?" I asked Mary. She said that the English speeches were later. The English speeches turned out to be about 20 children later.
They mostly acted out stories, or gave monologues about a particular park or school or something. Most of the children from the same school had learned the same speech. And not only were the speeches the same, but they were told with almost identical intonation. At the end of each speech I was supposed to ask the children questions (that was the extent of the guidelines I received), so I usually asked them their names and ages, and then I tried to test comprehension of the stories they had told. I was disappointed that most of them seemed to have a very foggy idea of what their monologues were about.
To be continued...
On New Year's Eve, around 9:00, a van drove up to the gate. There were already four people inside plus the driver, and before leaving Chengdu we stopped to pick up one more. I sat in the middle row next to a young couple, and we chatted for a while. I tried to ask them if they were going to the same competition, but I couldn't understand the answer. I thought maybe they were honeymooners or something and this was one of those unofficial cabs that take multiple groups at the same time.
Once we got onto the freeway I dozed, and when I woke up we were driving along a wide river. We turned down a covered bridge, at the end of which was a huge, perfectly shaped tree silhouetted against some street lights, the air around it glowing orange. Some people were strolling along the bridge and river bank with big red paper lanterns.
We went through a gate into a courtyard and got out of the van. Some other people were there waiting, but they left with the driver and the couple who had been sitting next to me. I stood by the van with my bags, wondering if someone was going to tell me where to go.
After what seemed like twenty minutes, a woman who had been sitting behind me in the van motioned for me to follow her. She was walking with two other guys toward what turned out to be the door to the hotel. Inside the deserted lobby she gave me a key. I tried asking again what was going on. Finally I learned that these three were also here for the competition. The woman, Aileen, was a singer; one guy, Liu Xiao, was a dancer, and the other guy, M_____, was a professional MC. I started to feel slightly under-qualified. They helped me find my room and said they would come get me the next morning at 8:00. It was then about 10:30.
The room was considerably nicer than the hotel room in Chongzhou (not that I'm complaining! There are worse things to suffer than being put up in an imperfect hotel room). The bathroom was big, clean, and didn't smell like sewage, the heater worked well, and the wallpaper was only peeling in one place. I put on my pajamas, but I didn't want to go to bed right away since it was New Year's Eve. Fortunately, I had anticipated this scenario and had brought some DVDs. I was just about to watch one of them when the door became the source of a knocking sound. "How did you become the source of a knocking sound!?" I asked. Actually, I think I just called out "Hello?" The voice from the other side of the door belonged to the other judges. I opened the door. They had come to ask me if I wanted to go eat something with them. I ran back into the room and threw my clothes back on, and we went.
At the entrance were a man, a woman, and two cabs. The man and woman were introduced as friends. We took the cabs across the river to a restaurant on the shore. The place seemed to be made completely of weathered wood, with gaps between the floorboards and stairs that creaked alarmingly. It was mostly empty, but we were led up the stairs to a little nook directly over the river. If not for the darkness and fog, I think it would have been quite a view. The waiter then put up a theater curtain, turning the nook into a private room. The darkness, wooden walls and furniture, little windows, and that we were sitting above the river made it feel almost like we were in the cabin of an old ship.
First beers were distributed, and "soy milk" for the ones who didn't drink ("soy milk" in China means a combination of soy and cow's milk). Then dishes quickly started appearing. My clearest memory is the chicken feet--a plate of five or six long, gnarled claws covered in brown scales that glistened under the hanging light bulb. There were also skewered vegetables and meat, sliced meat, stir-fried meat, and just meat. But there were some things I could eat, like corn, stir-fried greens, and tofu. The tofu had an interesting flavor and I asked about it. The man who had been ordering and seemed to occupy the head of the square table said it was stinky tofu (chou doufu), but it tasted nothing like the overpoweringly pungent stuff I had in Taipei.
I also got to experience Chinese drinking culture again. Even after the first toast involving everyone at the start of the meal, it's considered impolite to drink by yourself; you either have to toast someone else, or be toasted. But it's hard to break the habit of drinking whenever you feel like it when that's what you're used to. Once I caught myself doing this, but luckily, I made eye contact with someone across the table and was able to avoid a faux pas by shouting "Happy New Year!" before we both took sips. At one point the waiter brought us a big pitcher of some kind of steaming yellow liquid with flowers and vermilion things that look vaguely like walnuts. Is that tea? I asked. They told me it was beer. It tasted kind of like Dimetapp. Near midnight everyone had pretty much finished eating. I was still picking over a plate of home-made potato chips, dipping each one in a plate of powdered chili pepper and MSG. Everybody seemed to be half focused on whatever conversation was happening around the table, and half focused on text messaging with their phones. At midnight we all stood up and had another toast.
The next day, after a breakfast of cold vegetables and steamed buns (mantou), hard-boiled eggs, and milk (no coffee or tea!), I was ushered into another car. A girl got into the front seat and introduced herself as Mary, my interpreter. She was a student at the local university. Then a woman in a neon orange overcoat drove me, Mary, and the MC to a slightly dilapidated school building not far away. There we met up with the "honeymooners", Y_____(f.) and Z_____(m.), who were actually also judges. Mary, Y_____, and I were shown into one of the classrooms. All of the desks were pushed against the far wall, except for three set in the middle. We sat at these desks.
Up until this point I had an extremely faint idea of what I was supposed to do. I had pictured myself sitting at a judges' table near a stage and holding up signs with "9.7", "8.5", "9.2" printed in big numerals as crowds booed and cheered. I wasn't really sure how this empty classroom fit into the picture. I wanted to ask Mary about it, but I didn't know where to start.
A small child walked into the classroom and started giving a well-rehearsed speech in Chinese. Y_____ made a few notes, asked the child some questions at the end, and thanked him. A little girl came in and gave another speech. These children were almost offensively cute. "Am I supposed to be doing anything?" I asked Mary. She said that the English speeches were later. The English speeches turned out to be about 20 children later.
They mostly acted out stories, or gave monologues about a particular park or school or something. Most of the children from the same school had learned the same speech. And not only were the speeches the same, but they were told with almost identical intonation. At the end of each speech I was supposed to ask the children questions (that was the extent of the guidelines I received), so I usually asked them their names and ages, and then I tried to test comprehension of the stories they had told. I was disappointed that most of them seemed to have a very foggy idea of what their monologues were about.
To be continued...
Friday, January 29, 2010
Yak Butter
[edit: I can access blogspot again! Woohoo!]
As of today, my living room has graduated from "rustic" (3 out of 5 on the living room homeyness scale) to "comfortable" (4 out of 5). A friend just went out of town and generously let me keep her bookshelf and couch. And I have even gotten around to acquiring such civilized articles as a plant, a non-eye-frying, non-headache-inducing light bulb, some real speakers, and a bowl of fruit. And the fridge is perfectly situated so that no matter which of the two couches you sit on, you can open it and grab a drink without standing up.
The other night I got together with my friend Aileen for dinner. She's one of the people I met at the New Year's Day arts competition I judged at, and she's a professional singer and singing teacher. We went to a Tibetan restaurant in the Tibetan part of town, where we met another of Aileen's friends, J____--who also happens to be a kung fu teacher--and a friend of his, T_____, from Tibet. I think this Tibetan friend must have invited us, because he ordered and paid for everything.
We shook hands in the parking lot, and then T_____ handed Aileen and me each a long strip of white, silky cloth. Aileen put hers around her neck, so I did the same thing. Are these scarves? I asked. Everybody laughed, leading me to conclude that these were not scarves. The ends were frayed and the material had a tendency to get wrapped around things, so pretty soon there were little strands of white fiber clinging to everything. Eventually I gathered the cloth might be a Tibetan holiday tradition. A Tibetan tallis?
The restaurant was in a 3-story complex with a lot of statues, instruments, and art, and the interior was made to look like an old wooden building (I think this was carried out pretty well). As I sort of expected, the meal was not centered heavily on vegetable matter. I broke my normal rule by drinking some of the salty yak butter tea. Tasting like liquefied buttered popcorn, yak butter tea somehow manages to occupy that ambiguous space between a soup and a beverage. I also tried some kind of pita sugar sandwich, and an extremely crumbly, maroon-colored cake of tasty but mysterious contents that in terms of texture seemed closest to wet sand. At the end of the meal we played rock-paper-scissors/"stone-scissors-cloth" to determine who would have to eat the last three pieces. The main dish was a big plate of beef cubes (or was that yak meat?), and there was also a plate of meat dumplings. And we were each served a bowl of yogurt. I don't usually eat yogurt, but I ate it this time, and while I can't say I exactly "liked" it, it wasn't a bad experience. Finally, I think my friends were feeling bad that I couldn't eat some of the things on the table, because halfway through the meal the waitress brought out a heaping plate of french fries with ketchup.
I have a tutoring session in half an hour, so I'm just going to add a picture from my first teaching experience, on Dec. 27th, in Chongzhou. Christmas lessons!
As of today, my living room has graduated from "rustic" (3 out of 5 on the living room homeyness scale) to "comfortable" (4 out of 5). A friend just went out of town and generously let me keep her bookshelf and couch. And I have even gotten around to acquiring such civilized articles as a plant, a non-eye-frying, non-headache-inducing light bulb, some real speakers, and a bowl of fruit. And the fridge is perfectly situated so that no matter which of the two couches you sit on, you can open it and grab a drink without standing up.
The other night I got together with my friend Aileen for dinner. She's one of the people I met at the New Year's Day arts competition I judged at, and she's a professional singer and singing teacher. We went to a Tibetan restaurant in the Tibetan part of town, where we met another of Aileen's friends, J____--who also happens to be a kung fu teacher--and a friend of his, T_____, from Tibet. I think this Tibetan friend must have invited us, because he ordered and paid for everything.
We shook hands in the parking lot, and then T_____ handed Aileen and me each a long strip of white, silky cloth. Aileen put hers around her neck, so I did the same thing. Are these scarves? I asked. Everybody laughed, leading me to conclude that these were not scarves. The ends were frayed and the material had a tendency to get wrapped around things, so pretty soon there were little strands of white fiber clinging to everything. Eventually I gathered the cloth might be a Tibetan holiday tradition. A Tibetan tallis?
The restaurant was in a 3-story complex with a lot of statues, instruments, and art, and the interior was made to look like an old wooden building (I think this was carried out pretty well). As I sort of expected, the meal was not centered heavily on vegetable matter. I broke my normal rule by drinking some of the salty yak butter tea. Tasting like liquefied buttered popcorn, yak butter tea somehow manages to occupy that ambiguous space between a soup and a beverage. I also tried some kind of pita sugar sandwich, and an extremely crumbly, maroon-colored cake of tasty but mysterious contents that in terms of texture seemed closest to wet sand. At the end of the meal we played rock-paper-scissors/"stone-scissors-cloth" to determine who would have to eat the last three pieces. The main dish was a big plate of beef cubes (or was that yak meat?), and there was also a plate of meat dumplings. And we were each served a bowl of yogurt. I don't usually eat yogurt, but I ate it this time, and while I can't say I exactly "liked" it, it wasn't a bad experience. Finally, I think my friends were feeling bad that I couldn't eat some of the things on the table, because halfway through the meal the waitress brought out a heaping plate of french fries with ketchup.
I have a tutoring session in half an hour, so I'm just going to add a picture from my first teaching experience, on Dec. 27th, in Chongzhou. Christmas lessons!
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Getting as much ultraviolet light as possible
It is sunny and 21 degrees (69.8 Eastern Orthodox) here in Kowloon Park, multiple birds are making funny sounds with their throats, and leaves are gently waving around in the air.
Yesterday I boated to Lantau Island, and then took an exhilarating bus ride to the giant Buddha statue. The name does not lie; the size of the thing is a little startling. It reminds me of a Harvey Birdman episode (Harvey Birdman is a former superhero who became a lawyer but still retains his super powers [which he only uses occasionally], his costume [which is now worn underneath a business suit], and his big blue wings [which he also usually doesn't use]). The episode starts with Harvey sitting at his desk, writing something or doodling. He sits there for a minute or two, and then he rotates a little bit in his swivel chair, and his wings move out of the way to reveal that his "sidekick", Peanut, is standing right behind him. Harvey jumps out of his chair. Glancing up and seeing this giant Buddha statue sitting above me was kind of like that.
I also visited the Po Lin Monastery, which has a few vegetarian restaurants, a lot of large incense pots, a few temples, and many areas under construction. Around that are the obligatory expensive tourist shops, cafes, and restaurants with "Gourmet Oriental" cuisine. I didn't stay very long.
Last night after dinner I met up with my friend Annie for tea. Afterward on the way home I stopped at the 7-11 near Mirador Mansions to get some water, but to get to the water aisle I first had to get past the huddles of people who were standing around drinking beer and wine out of little paper cups. "7-11 party?" I asked the cashier. She told me it was for their regular customers, but I was welcome to join anyway.
Yesterday I boated to Lantau Island, and then took an exhilarating bus ride to the giant Buddha statue. The name does not lie; the size of the thing is a little startling. It reminds me of a Harvey Birdman episode (Harvey Birdman is a former superhero who became a lawyer but still retains his super powers [which he only uses occasionally], his costume [which is now worn underneath a business suit], and his big blue wings [which he also usually doesn't use]). The episode starts with Harvey sitting at his desk, writing something or doodling. He sits there for a minute or two, and then he rotates a little bit in his swivel chair, and his wings move out of the way to reveal that his "sidekick", Peanut, is standing right behind him. Harvey jumps out of his chair. Glancing up and seeing this giant Buddha statue sitting above me was kind of like that.
I also visited the Po Lin Monastery, which has a few vegetarian restaurants, a lot of large incense pots, a few temples, and many areas under construction. Around that are the obligatory expensive tourist shops, cafes, and restaurants with "Gourmet Oriental" cuisine. I didn't stay very long.
Last night after dinner I met up with my friend Annie for tea. Afterward on the way home I stopped at the 7-11 near Mirador Mansions to get some water, but to get to the water aisle I first had to get past the huddles of people who were standing around drinking beer and wine out of little paper cups. "7-11 party?" I asked the cashier. She told me it was for their regular customers, but I was welcome to join anyway.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Hong Kong is warm.
Sleeping in a room with no windows can be very disorienting. But when I opened the door to the inner courtyard walkway and was greeted by the bright sunlight bouncing off the white walls across the way, and the sounds of people and animals and cars down below, I immediately felt grounded. This is the first really sunny day--and the first day when it's been warm enough to wear only a jacket and a shirt--that I've seen in a while.
I walked up Nathan Road, away from the harbor. A short way up, big, snaking banyan trees line the road, the concrete sidewalk turns to brick, and the seedy tailors, money changers, and gift shops are replaced by expensive yuppie fashion stores, jewelers, and cafes. For a minute I actually imagined I was on State Street in Santa Barbara.
For breakfast I wandered onto a narrow street lined with little Chinese restaurants and got a table at a place that was so jammed I ended up sharing a tiny, two-seat table with a middle-aged civil engineer. In addition to Cantonese he spoke some English and Mandarin, so he helped me order a bowl of hot soy milk and a big green onion pancake, which I will henceforth refer to as a "Chinese Latke". A bowl of dòu jiāng in Chengdu costs exactly one yuan (15 cents). At this place it was more like a dollar. The Chinese Latke was also a dollar. After breakfast (and some hassle having to do with adaptors not working, etc.) I went to a big chain cafe (where I am now) to use the internet, and a cup of regular black coffee cost me three dollars. That is approximately twenty-two bowls of soy milk.
I walked up Nathan Road, away from the harbor. A short way up, big, snaking banyan trees line the road, the concrete sidewalk turns to brick, and the seedy tailors, money changers, and gift shops are replaced by expensive yuppie fashion stores, jewelers, and cafes. For a minute I actually imagined I was on State Street in Santa Barbara.
For breakfast I wandered onto a narrow street lined with little Chinese restaurants and got a table at a place that was so jammed I ended up sharing a tiny, two-seat table with a middle-aged civil engineer. In addition to Cantonese he spoke some English and Mandarin, so he helped me order a bowl of hot soy milk and a big green onion pancake, which I will henceforth refer to as a "Chinese Latke". A bowl of dòu jiāng in Chengdu costs exactly one yuan (15 cents). At this place it was more like a dollar. The Chinese Latke was also a dollar. After breakfast (and some hassle having to do with adaptors not working, etc.) I went to a big chain cafe (where I am now) to use the internet, and a cup of regular black coffee cost me three dollars. That is approximately twenty-two bowls of soy milk.
Back in HK
I'm about to run out of batteries so I'll make a really quick post. This evening I arrived back in Hong Kong. Originally I was planning to take the train again, but then I realized that would entail spending more time on the train than in Hong Kong proper (if you consider the train out of and into Hong Kong an extension of Hong Kong's essence). So I flew. The flight was only a little over two hours (compared to 30 hours!) but it still felt like a long journey after the cab, the delay at the gate, the long bus ride from the Shenzhen airport to the train station, and then the long train ride from the border to Hong Kong. For old time's sake I had dinner at that "tea house" in Shenzhen where I whiled away the night a couple months ago. This time ordering was a lot easier.
In the bathroom at the train station while I was relieving myself I looked down and saw two small pink things on the floor next to me. On closer inspection I realized that they were fingers. It made me think of all the other scandalous and/or horrific things that may have happened in places where I have been, before I arrived.
When I got to Hong Kong the things that struck me most were the narrowness of the streets and the abundance of bright signs sticking out from the buildings. Next to Chengdu's wide, perpetually-under-construction boulevards and relative drabness, Hong Kong feels both venerable and vibrant. But then after you've been offered your 15th hand-tailored shirt this vibrancy can start to get a little bit annoying (though this only seems to happen in Kowloon). The first thing I did after checking into the guest house (the same one as last time in Mirador Mansions, although I got a different room; the last one was 160 HKD a night for what I thought of at the time as "four walls and a bed" and a bathroom the size of a closet. This new room is 120 HKD and is literally four walls and a bed, and the bathroom is shared this time. But that's OK.), and after stocking up on bottled water and tea and having a second dinner at the vegetarian Indian restaurant nearby, was try to log onto Facebook for the first time in two months. Unfortunately, the internet wasn't working in my room. Fortunately, there is an internet cafe two floors down that has good internet (which is where I am now). Unfortunately, my battery has run out so this is the end of this post.
In the bathroom at the train station while I was relieving myself I looked down and saw two small pink things on the floor next to me. On closer inspection I realized that they were fingers. It made me think of all the other scandalous and/or horrific things that may have happened in places where I have been, before I arrived.
When I got to Hong Kong the things that struck me most were the narrowness of the streets and the abundance of bright signs sticking out from the buildings. Next to Chengdu's wide, perpetually-under-construction boulevards and relative drabness, Hong Kong feels both venerable and vibrant. But then after you've been offered your 15th hand-tailored shirt this vibrancy can start to get a little bit annoying (though this only seems to happen in Kowloon). The first thing I did after checking into the guest house (the same one as last time in Mirador Mansions, although I got a different room; the last one was 160 HKD a night for what I thought of at the time as "four walls and a bed" and a bathroom the size of a closet. This new room is 120 HKD and is literally four walls and a bed, and the bathroom is shared this time. But that's OK.), and after stocking up on bottled water and tea and having a second dinner at the vegetarian Indian restaurant nearby, was try to log onto Facebook for the first time in two months. Unfortunately, the internet wasn't working in my room. Fortunately, there is an internet cafe two floors down that has good internet (which is where I am now). Unfortunately, my battery has run out so this is the end of this post.
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