Beijing Diaries II

October 19, 2006

I wake up to birds chirping. Birds. Chirping. Not knocking at the door, vacuuming, cars parking, garbage trucks—birds. In the heart of Beijing no less. Very strange. The courtyard house is unnaturally quiet. I lie in bed with my ears ringing. Last night was the first night I’ve slept without a fan in over a month. I wonder if I have tinitis.











I go to a café and drink coffee, eat pastries, then meet Mona and Zach for sightseeing. We go to a trendy art district called 798 (yesss) full of converted factories, warehouses, art spaces, studios, cafes and restaurants. Mona and Zach appear as if they could go all day without eating. I succumb quite easily to coffee and Thai curry.

There are white people with cool haircuts crawling all over the place, English businessmen, high-society ladies. It reminds me of Brooklyn.



We leave 798 and take a taxi to the antiques district. We stroll and window-shop. I handle old a few old things before finding out what they are worth and then refrain from handling them further.

Afterward we stop for Muslim Chinese food that is painfully spicy. Bean curd, spicy chicken, green and red peppers, noodles, lamb kebobs, bok choy, coca cola. Full and sleepy they roll me next door into a Gong-Fu spectacular at the Red Theater.



I get dropped off at the village gates, grab my laptop, and go to the teahouse around the block. The cute waitress flirts with me during the presentation of my ginseng oolong tea and Chinese pudding, which looks like black tire rubber floating in milk and tastes of licorice. I flip through a Beijing Time Out and talk to my Mom through the computer.

October Surprise

Olympic torch sighting in Beijing.

(isn't it a little early for this?)

Beijing Diaries I

October 18, 2006

The morning is hectic. I wake up at 7:00 after four and a half hours sleep. The tank is not full. The phone rings shortly after. It’s Mrs. Yu from school. She’s in the lobby with the driver waiting to take me and my things to campus. I tell her I’m not finished packing, I need to shower, can she give me fifteen minutes. She repeatedly says that Chief Jiang says I will move to the school today. I tell her I understand this but nobody told me and I’m not ready yet. This will take fifteen minutes. She acquiesces. Minutes later she and the driver are knocking on my door. With the shower running I reiterate my position, regardless of Chief Jiang’s wishes. She yields. I get my fifteen minutes.

On the way to the school we stop at JiaJiaYue and I purchase sweet breads, the kind I had only wrapped in plastic until now. They live up to expectations.

In class I show the students my passport and plane ticket, items many of them will never again see in their lifetimes. They comment that I was thicker in my passport photo. I play Sufjian Stevens and we watch slideshows of my trip to Maine.

After class Chief Jiang, Mrs. Yu, Mr. Fang, and Chief Chien take me out to lunch and ply me full of alcohol. I consider telling them that attempting to board a plane drunk in my country is grounds for not boarding the plane, but opt not to. They frequently toast my trip to Beijing.

We leave late and race to the airport, stopping briefly for gas. I step out of the vehicle to videotape a man selling a pile of corn.



Chief Chien assists me with check-in and takes his leave at the security checkpoint. I listen to Harmony in Ultraviolet through boarding and while sleeping the length of the flight to Beijing.

I wake up on the descent with a massive headache. Mona Bei greets me at the airport with a big hug and we board a shuttle bus to city center. We talk and I slowly fill her in on two months of personal drama. She kindly listens and proffers Confucian insight into my predicament.

We go to a lush café for coffee and then to Tiannemen Square to meet Alison who holds the keys to the courtyard house I found on Craigslist.



Alison makes me write and sign a contract that says something to the effect of my deposit will be returned to me if nothing is broken. She mysteriously tells me that if the landlord asks, I am good friends with Jason. Everyone leaves.

Jason, it turns out, is not prepared for houseguests. I venture out into the Beijing night in search of a towel, soap, and bottled water. A nice family overcharges me for something that is not quite a towel. Their little girl’s voice cracks when she talks and she gives me a corn stick.

I eat dinner at a little table on the sidewalk. People walk by and nobody stares at me. I find it comforting to be anonymous again.

Chinese Marketing

October 18, 2006

I stayed up late Tuesday night cutting a Tae-Kwon-Do DVD that I promised my friend Liang and that I put off until the last minute. He may use it for television advertising and I could use a foot in that door. I also had to pack up my hotel room at the Jiaotong. Sometime while I am in Beijing the school will arrange to haul my belongings to campus. I am constantly amazed by the sheer amount of useless items I brought with me to China.

Autumn Festival

October 14, 2007

Last Saturday was the Autumn Festival. I had mentioned to my Tae-Kwon-Do instructor Liang that I wanted to party for the festival but I had no one to party with so he said he’d party with me. Liang and his wife Liang took me out for lunch. They picked me up at the Jiaotong in a taxi and we rode out to the mall. There was a moment where I thought they were trying to decide whether or not to bring me to the sit-down restaurant on one side of the street or the mall food court on the other.

At the mall food court surrounded by the usual assortment of fried pork, clams, and beer, I was once again a source of curiosity for the local volk who had turned out in force for holiday shopping.

After lunch, we too shopped ‘til we dropped, or until I dropped. I ate some kind of sugar-glazed fruit on a stick. I doled out approval and disapproval regarding fashion selections. The Liangs bought me mooncakes, the official food of the Chinese holiday. Mooncakes aren’t actually cake, but a chewy concoction of sugar and dough, sometimes containing gummy nuggets.

I recently had the distinct pleasure of working in a mooncake factory. On a shopping outing not too long ago, my friend Yuan received a call from her boss asking her to come eat cake or make cake or something, I didn’t quite understand, and I was subsequently invited to come observe the proceedings first-hand. Naively, I consented and spent the next three-hours meting out dough, folding boxes, and hand-wrapping the finest assortment of baked breads I’ve laid eyes upon in these two long months. To compound matters, I hadn’t eaten lunch and was sleepy because my body ached all night after sitting though the three-hour outdoor student talent show, which merits its own entry, in the freezing cold the night before. Never have I wanted to eat something sitting in front of me so badly. After an adequate pause in the endless parade of baked goods preceding the National Holiday, I made a break for it.

The Liangs invited me to their home for holiday dinner that evening, not wanting me, I assume, to spend it all alone at the hotel. I arrived and we dined on what I can only describe as a stairwell landing lit by a single thin fluorescent light stapled to the wall. Dinner culminated in a modified version of rock, paper, scissors (hands up or down) where the odd man out had to drink the soup. Not having lost a hand, I pondered what could possibly be wrong with the soup? I thought there must be strong liquor in it. I’m sure there were nuances lost in the conversation, comments on the soup's mustiness or lack of flavor, sarcastic praise for the male cook. When I asked, as one might, why are we doing this, they answered (why of course) for fun! This, somehow, made it easier to join in the revelry.

Recipe for Disaster

Seaside

October 5, 2006

On Thursday I learned what sounds to make to get the taxi driver to take me to the sea. It's beautifully quiet there.



They've built a park alongside the beach with surprisingly tasteful sculptures, quite popular in the region, and a shady grove of pines.





I lay in the grass for the first time in two months and relaxed my eyes and ears, just listening to the ocean and the wind through the trees. Sprawled throughout the grove were laborers, I assume, from the nearby arena in development.



Upon closer inspection I observed that the arena is being built across the street from a vast upscale housing development. The gates to the community were open and unmanned so I wandered through the Disneyesque assortment of enormous houses and endless rows of apartments (these pics don't do it justice). The eerie thing is that the whole development was completely empty.







I believe nobody is living here because nobody can afford to. I wonder where they expect all of their moneyed tenants to come from and when they will arrive. If, indeed, this many people do come, I'm convinced that they will lay waste to the beachfront in no time at all.

Screen Test

Uncle goes to the zoo...

October 2, 2006

The doorbell rang Monday around 10 a.m. in the midde of my morning coffee. My 14-year-old niece, whose name I don't remember (it's not uncommon for me to spend whole days, even weeks, with people whose names I don't know), was standing there asking if uncle wanted to go out and play. I didn't understand where we were going, but I'll go anywhere quite frankly. I ended up here didn't I?

Her father is a policeman who works in the hotel lobby at night (one of the affectionately titled "lobby people" with whom I drink tea and beer on occasion) and we rode to our mysterious destination, eating assorted breads, in a police mini-bus. By this point I had found out that we were going to the zoo. The zoo, incidentally, is in Rong Cheng, which is much larger than I thought, stretching at least an hour to the northwest. There was an alarming moment when we turned the corner into a medium-sized amusement park. I was actually disappointed at the thought of hoofing it through an amusement park all day. I had myself all geared up for the zoo. Luckily, our police escorts waved us through and we drove up to the top of the mountain where the zoo is located.

It's an impressive facility built right into the mountain overlooking the sea. I think non-police persons park at the bottom and walk up the mountain then down the mountain. Fortunately for us, my niece's father didn't enter the park and met us at the bottom of the mountain with the bus.

On the way home we stopped to eat at a restaurant. My policeman friend wanted me to drink beer, I think, because he was driving and this prohibited him from doing so. I should mention that this is a man who likes to drink beer. I declined, thinking I was being clever when I said I didn't want to drink alone. To solve the problem, he had my 14- and 16-year-old nieces join me.