a walk around tian an men

my newfound favorite drink: little earthenware pots of yogurt are sold all over.  aaron and i sat here in a neighborhood alley drinking yogurt and coke from a glass bottle. you drink it at the place so you can return the pot/bottle. 
view of the street as it was getting dark.  these are the old streets or hutongs for which beijing is famous. Many of them were leveled in preparation for the olympics to make room for modern highrises, offices, hotels, etc. 
evening sunset in a smoggy sky. an elderly couple walks through Tian an men square.
An old man playing a three-stringed traditional chinese instrument in the subway.

A friend and i walking through Tian an men square.
Aaron and our friend Rebecca
part of one of the hundreds of pages aaron has filled practicing writing chinese characters.
   A good example of chinglish; aaron bought this shirt at a market.

more writing practice.

tian an men square again. Mao's portrait watches over the square from a distance. 

censorship in action

Just another one to add to the list: 

Aaron and I went to the largest foreign language bookstore in beijing yesterday to pick up a copy of a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide to China since we're going out of town next week.  We didn't bother to bring one to China with us, since we assumed we could just buy one here.  We stood looking at the rows and rows of Lonely Planets and Rough Guides for every country. China was not under "C".  We figured they must have set up a special display.  We found a lot of nice picture books on china, some travel stories, some maps, but no travel guides.  Finally, I asked a worker. She replied "Mei you" (we don't have).  I tried to ask, you don't have them now or you never have them? she just shook her head and smiled a little--i began to wonder if this was a sensitive subject.  After talking to two other teachers we work with and asking to borrow their Lonely Planet, our suspicions proved correct.  Apparently all of the L.P.'s and Rough Guides on China have been removed from bookstores, and a friend of our friends even had his confiscated when he was carrying it around in public.  I wonder what information the books give that the authorities don't like?  My guess is that, in their extensive coverage of the realities of china--both the good and bad--, they mention things that contradict the shiny, squeeky-clean image that China has been trying to show to the world around the Olympics.  After spending more than an hour in China though, or after walking any but the most touristed streets, I don't see how anyone could really believe that the China they portray actually exists. 

vacation, school

there are two main breaks during the school year for students: one week in October for National Day, and a month in January/February for the Chinese New Year.  Next week is our first vacation. I'm excited; we're going to Harbin, the northernmost large city in China.  It's a 8-15 hour train journey depending on the speed of the train you book.  I think of Beijing as northern China, but part of it really stretches up a lot farther in the east, sandwiched on either side by Russia.  Harbin is predominantly a Chinese city, but it is also heavily influenced by Russia.  Russia and China seem culturally worlds apart in my mind, so i was interested in going to this area to see what russian china is like.  

So ordinarily we would be off for 9 days beginning tomorrow, but in true chinese fashion, the government decided that would be just a little too much free time for students, so now all the students and teachers have to go to school on saturday instead, and in many cases, sunday too.  (we don't have to work sunday).  

We live very close to a high school.  An apartment building and restaurant block our view of the school, but we can hear a lot that goes on.  We hear morning music while the rows upon rows of students stand outside and do group exercise--something students do at every school every morning across china--and occasionally we've woken up to a loud megaphone-projected voice echoing off the walls of the surrounding buildings barking some sort of commands.  Rather than a bell to signal the end and beginning of classes, the school blares this "happy" melody that sounds like something playing from a mobile you would hang over a baby's crib.  The melody periodically continues long into the evening until 9 p.m. or so when the last students are finally free for the day.  Then of course they go home and do homework and get up and do it all over again.  this was something i found really surprising the last time I was in China--how hard students are pushed to excel in school.  Besides the regular school week and the loads of homework they were expected to complete each night and weekend, they were also enrolled in extra math, english, music, etc. classes on the weekends.  High school students are under the most pressure.  Basically, with so many people in China, only the very top students are able to go to university--a very small percentage. So parents (who are allowed only one child, and receive little social security from the government) have to place all their hopes and expectations on their only child to do exceptionally well in school, go on to university, get a good job, and be financially able to support the parents after they retire.  And this begins at age five, when parents who can afford it send their child to a private school, enroll them in english classes, etc. 

 

my school

(these are my third graders)

the school I teach at is a large private boarding school first-12th grade.  there are a couple thousand students, but only a 2 or 3 hundred are enrolled in the english department i teach for.  it's a pretty new campus, and feels more like a college campus in that there are different buildings for different departments.  unfortunately, because it's so new, there aren't any large trees and the whole place feels uncomfortably overrun by cement.  Our first day there aaron and i explored the campus.  we were walking along toward the far end of it by a man-made pond, when we saw a cage of some sort in the distance.  we had happened upon the school "zoo" where they keep monkeys.  just a cement block fenced off by chicken wire. no vegetation, nothing natural, just monkeys on cement. the next cement block cage contained about 6 domestic cats, and the next several domestic dogs.  needless to say this was really depressing, so i don't even know why i'm writing about it.  the school also has a bird sanctuary with herons and other large birds.  And back in the woods--or not really the woods--just down a back path through bushes and shrubs about as high as our heads we found a long row of cement cages holding large dogs.  german shepheards, huskies, collies, none of which looked well cared for. about 15 dogs in all and we have no idea why they're back there.  guard dogs?  i don't know.  it was really strange and sad.  There is deffinitely a different additude taken toward animals here that i find hard to deal with.  

anyway,  the kids live at the school monday-friday and most go home on the weekends.  i teach third and first grade.  i got really lucky with my third grade class.  they are such a fun, positive group that get along with each other really well.  talking to some other teachers who have a lot of whining and arguing in their classes, i feel really fortunate; that's never really been a problem with this group.  they laugh a lot and generally do their work and pay attention.  the 1st graders are a little harder. they're sweet little kids too, but i'm not really that good with really young kids, especially when they don't speak any english and have a 10 minute attention span.   i feel sorry for them though.  they are suddenly away from their parents 5 days a week and sometimes the school seems pretty cold and harsh--there is a lot of work and marching in lines, and they kids are in their chinese classes till 7, 8, or 9 o'clock some nights. not to mention there's no playground.  my third graders came in out of breath and sweaty the other day.  i asked them where they were coming from.  they said P.E. class. When i asked what sport they were playing, they said they were just out picking up dry leaves and putting them in piles....  

the english departement does a good job trying to make school more warm for the kids...decorations to make the classroom more colorful, occational games, parties on holidays, etc.  all in all teaching is going pretty well.  i teach full days monday-thursday and half days on Fridays. 

eye exam

a lot of things here feel very westernized; beijing has a ton of malls and shopping centers carrying all of the things i could find at home.  in these places, it's just the little details that remind you that you are not in fact in a western country:  the recordings playing over loudspeakers, abrasive to my ears, announcing sales and special prices, the large number of other shoppers around you almost wherever you go, the unbelievable number of staff working at most places (in a small cellphone shop i counted 14 workers--there were 3 customers),  chicken feet, boiled eggs, and roasted chestnuts sold along side bottled drinks and bags of snacks at mall snack stands,  the way that the meat department in large grocery stores feels more like a visit to the aquarium than anything with its large variety of live fish, crabs, turtles, and other marine life (not to mention the more sinister stacks of severed pig hoofs).  But as much as this is at times unpleasant, there is a certain quality to chinese shopping that America lacks and which i miss there.  Even though China's economy and desire to expand and grow and westernize is forging full force ahead, it retains an unmistakable realness and originality that the corporations of America have all but stamped out.   In the same building as the modern superstore where i bought the turtles, aaron and i discovered a large market on the upper floor--individual stalls which people rent to sell their products, give manicures, foot acupuncture, etc.  it was really refreshing to leave the soulless wide aisles of microwaves and dvd players below and wander through the maze of tiny stalls.  we happened to wander past a stall run by an older couple selling glasses frames.  aaron has been wanting glasses for a couple years, but has put it off because it's so expensive to get the exam, and the lenses and frames.  we started looking at their frames, he found some he liked, and they gave him an eye exam which took about 10 minutes, and told us we could pick up the glasses the next day.  they were so nice to us and friendly.  they didn't have any fancy equipment--just the crazy-looking plastic glasses with the individual glass circles you slide in and out to test which prescription works for you and a lens cutting machine to the side.  anyway,  for the test and the glasses the total was 200 yuan, or about $25.  we only had 20 yuan on us for a deposit, but they said no problem.  when we got home we double-checked aaron's prescription and they had it exactly right. 

meet ping and pang

a couple of weeks ago i went into a super-store to buy cheese because the regular grocery stores don't carry it, and came out with two turtles instead.  it was a hypocritical purchase; i don't really like the idea of buying a pet that you know you can't care for for its whole life and i also don't like supporting the way a lot of pets are sold here, but reason was lost to me when i looked at their tiny old-man faces from where they sat in a large stack of tiny plastic containers, each holding two tiny turtles.  they now have an aquarium with a plant, a little stairway they can climb up to a second floor and a tunnel to hide in.  I named them Ping and Pang (pronounced pong in chinese), which works well because pang is a homonym for fat and he is the bigger eater and larger of the two. 

after four weeks

I’ve been in Beijing for four weeks now. just over.  It continues to feel more like home as days pass.  Bus routes begin to make sense, the layout of the city becomes clearer, the subway easily navagatable, teaching falls into a rhythm.  It’s easy to walk down a street and have no idea what is hidden behind the facades of buildings; our street for example has slowly revealed itself to us.  Being in a foreign country makes you realize how many subconcious signs and hints you use to navagate a place on an everyday basis. When those reliable clues are taken away everything becomes unknown.  And as is so often the case in china, things end up being the opposite of what you expect.  If the candy looks sweet, it often turns out to be salty.  and since when is candy salty?  i once thought a piece of candy in brightly wrapped foil was a strange chocolate when i oppened it, only to discover it was some sort of dried meat product when i tried to chew it.  meat candy?  Our street, or any street i guess, is the same.  Aaron can actually read a lot of chinese characters these days, but there are still so many that we often don’t know what signs mean.  i am basically illiterate here.  So something as simple as finding the grocery store rumored to be right on our street turned out to be a process.  We eventually found it by going into an entry way off the street past rows of bicycles, down a long dimly-lit tiled hallway with some old broken furniture and a strong stench of urine from the bathrooms, past the back entrance to a restaurant and down a stairway to the nice, well-lit, modern grocery store in the basement.  and that wasn’t the back entrance or anything; it’s just how you get to the grocery store.  we also found a huge, crowded, fruit and vegetable market very near our apartment behind a cement wall, beyond a vacant lot area, in a large non-descript pole barn type building. If we hadn’t wandered back there we never would have known it was there.  it would be fun to be magically able to read chinese for a day and go around my neighborhood and the city.  i’m sure most of what seems so mysterious and cryptic to me is actually easily navagatable if you can read the signs, but i think even then there would still be the cultural barrier. (i.e. you could read the candy wrapper that says it’s meat candy, but you still wouldn’t expect meat candy).   or pigeon soup.

after two weeks

I’ve been here for two weeks exactly now and i finally feel like writing about it.  Last night we went to a chinese acrobatics show.  Just when you thought each act could not possibly become more difficult they became 10 times more difficult and you were left pretty much speechless.  I found myself forgetting to clap half the time.  I guess in a way that’s a little like being in china in general.  just when you start to feel like you’re getting reaquainted with the culture, something unexpected happens and i find myself too wrapped up to write about it.  Maybe for now the easiest way to organize my thoughts would be by category.  I’ll start with where i am now: on the 13th floor of our building in apartment 1307.

 our apartment  (this is our view looking north)

the night we got here, so many memories came back about china.  Most of the apartment buildings--regardless of lower or upper class-- seem to have the same dimly-lit, dirty stairwells and industrial feeling elevators.  the walls are scuffed and stenciled with red chinese characters giving information and floor numbers in the stairwells. (rather than the (arabic?) numbers we use, they--at least in stairwells-- use the old chinese numbers which look completely different).  the apartment doors are metal and impossible to close quietly;  you have to bang them to make them stay shut.  there’s an inner wooden door, but the outer metal door has a window in it, so sometimes in the hallway we can get a glimpse into our neighbors’ apartments.  across the hall from us 4 men get together to play majong.  the tiles rattle noisily on the table and they sit around shirtless on hot evenings in the dim tiled living room.  there’s not a lot to say about our apartment.  it’s pretty large with tile floors everywhere except the bedroom which is fake wood.  there are a lot of windows facing west.  the kitchen is small but there’s enough room to cook; the only difficult thing is how low all the counters are...  Every chinese apartment i’ve been in has a back porch lined with windows.  this is where everyone dries their laundry.  it seems a waste to use it just for storage and laundry since it gets the most sunlight, so maybe we’ll try to put some chairs out there or something while the weather is still nice.  we are more or less surrounded by other buildings exactly, or much like ours, but they’re not so close together that we don’t have a view.  our best view is straight west; from our porch and bedroom window we can see the mountains in the distance on clear days.  today is the clearest day we’ve had since we got here.  we can not only see the mountains, but see details on them--other ‘clear’ days we could only see their sillhouette.  (a couple days ago we could only see maybe a half mile away before the buildings faded into a dirty white nothingness).  

The Pollution (This is our view looking west:  clear day, smoggy day) According to the people we’ve talked to who have been here awhile in beijing, there is a very noticable reduction in the amount of pollution since the olympic clean-up began.  Sometime this summer a rule was passed that each car can only be driven every other day according to odd or even-numbered lisence plates.  I don’t know the details about factories in the area but apparently a lot have been shut down.  The regular olympics are over, but Beijing is also hosting the para-olympics beginning this week, so the driving rule will continue throughout that.  The sad thing is, most people seem to agree that this is temporary.  The driving rule will end, and the factories re-open.  There are still days when the pollution is bad, but for the most part people are seeing their city in a whole new way,

enjoying blue-skied summer and long evening sunlight.  Now, when the olympics end it will be taken away from them again and the beijing sky will go back to the way it was.  a couple of days ago the pollution was particularly bad--probably the way it usually was before the clean-up.  the sky was a greyish-white, a nothing color the color of cement.  where the colorless buildings ended the colorless sky began and the whole city and sky seemed to be made of concrete and rock.  crossing a wide street downtown we saw the sun, a perfectly round red ball hovering in the sky.  you could look directly at it and see it’s perfect outline.  i was reminded of the city where we lived last time we were in china, Xi’an, and how the sun often looked like this.  When our younger students drew pictures in class they always drew the sun as a round orange or red ball without rays, never yellow. 

chinese vs. english

it would be hard to write very long about life in china without devoting at least a small section to chinglish.  I’d heard that in the huge effort to prepare beijing for the olympics many of the chinese street and road signs were replaced with bilingual ones, “chinglish” signs would be edited and corrected, taxi drivers  were given manuals and encouraged to learn some basic english phrases, olympic volunteers were taught western customs/ ettiquate and a fair amount of english as well.  i was imagining before coming to beijing that the whole city would be pretty easy to navigate in english which i found kind of disappointing (i know, i know--i’m the one who’s teaching english here...), but for the most part i was wrong.  there is deffinitley english around, but for the most part it would be difficult to get around the city without knowing some chinese unless you stuck to the very very touristy parts.  and as far as erradicating the chinglish--i guess that effort never really got off the ground.  I’m not trying to make fun of the chinese for not having perfect english on all their signs--English is such a complicated, idiomatic language and i’m sure a lot of chinese people who speak some english also notice the mistakes-- but  still it’s pretty entertaining to see the signs and t shirts here.  some t-shirts seem like someone randomly opened a book or dictionary and just started copying down the first thing they saw.  other t-shirts or signs seem like something just couldn’t be directly translated into english from chinese and come out sounding natural.  A few of my favorite signs so far include, (on our block) “The Noble Pet Chamber”,  and “Massage of the Blind Man”.  i also feel like you just wouldn’t call a sporting store in the U.S., “Hot Wind” or a restaurant “The Glory Hymen Restaurant”.  But my favorite has to be “Very Suspicious Supermarket”.  Unfortunately that one’s not on our street or i would be a devoted customer.  One mistake is particularly strange not as much because it’s such a huge mistake but because it’s so widespread.  Every single taxi has a recording that plays first in chinese and then in English when you first get in and they start the meter: “Welcome to take Beijing Taxi”.  All subways also say “Welcome to take Beijing Subway”, and it’s written on signs around the subway too.  I can’t help but wonder, with all the English speakers in Beijing, wouldn’t it have been worth it just to ask one of them, ‘hey-is this correct?’ before putting it on thousands of signs and making recordings that play in every taxi and subway.  As you ride the subway the stops are announced on a recording first in chinese by a chinese speaker and then in english by a native english speaker.  Even she says ‘welcome to take beijing subway’ and aaron and i have been joking that it’s the new english.  when does a mistake cease to be a mistake?  i guess when enough people decide it’s correct and the old way falls out of use.  language is after all constantly evolving....