Sunday, December 26, 2010

I'll Be Home(sick) For Christmas...

Although it really didn’t feel like Christmas over here, what with palm trees outside my window and my entire family on the other side of the planet, I did my best to recreate a Christmas dinner with a few of my friends on Christmas Day. What had started as a couple of traditional treats with our good friend and regular dinner guest Benson somehow snowballed into a mini Christmas party with six people and a full seven-course Christmas dinner crammed into our tiny dorm room. Despite a brief case of “what the ^&$*!&@ was I thinking,” it all fell quite neatly into place, and for a few fleeting hours I felt the familiar warmth of a Western Christmas (and my Chinese friends got a taste of a foreign Christmas).

Bridget had already received a care package this month from her obliging (and obviously very well-organized) parents, equipped with Christmas decorations, napkins, a pair of crackers, a placemat, a tea towel, and gifts for both of us, and our friend Paul had given us a tiny silver tinsel Christmas tree strung with blue lights, so we were actually fairly well prepared. When we cleared all the books and junk off the homework desk at the front of the room and set the tree on it with all the gifts underneath, it actually looked pretty festive in here.

We spent the day cleaning our apartment and rushing around Beibei buying as many traditional Christmas foods as we could. In the end we had a formidable buffet spread around our little tree, and the only think I had to cook was a pot of mulled wine (accomplished, of course, with my trusty rice cooker). We had apples (苹果, píng guǒ), oranges (橘子, júzi), sesame candies, chestnuts (栗子, lìzi) and roasted yams (红薯, hóng shǔ) procured from various street vendors; smoked walnuts (核桃, hé tao), roasted almonds (杏仁, xìng rén), imported Scottish shortbread, imported Swiss Miss hot chocolate and cheapo Changyu red wine from the supermarket; Korean chocolate covered almonds from the import store; and some raspberry Jell-o, European chocolate-topped digestive cookies and Scottish clotted cream fudge sent all the way from Calgary by Bridget’s awesome parents. In China, if you don’t serve meat to your guests, you run the risk of looking like you’re too cheap to feed them properly, and I knew some of our guests were meat enthusiasts, so without a turkey in sight we opted for takeout kung pao chicken (宫保鸡丁, gōng bǎo jī dīng) and sweet and sour pork (糖醋肉, táng cù ròu) with rice (米饭, mǐ fàn) from the canteen a block from our dorm.

Of course, about half an hour before our guests were expected to show up, I realized I’d misplaced my corkscrew. I ran to a couple of the campus convenience stores, which sell everything from socks and housewares to farm-fresh eggs and booze, and neither of them had a corkscrew they’d sell, although both offered to open the bottle for me if I brought it over. Defeated, I ran back to my dorm and returned with my wine to the nearest store, an incredibly grubby and dishevelled little collection of sparingly stocked shelves in a shop whose function appears to be completely dominated by the mah-jong table in the back. After announcing my presence several times, someone eventually heard me over the chatter and gossip, and four or five older men and women abandoned their game to crowd around and watch the grinning shopkeeper haul out the store corkscrew and open the foreigner’s wine.

Somehow, we got the food, drinks and apartment ready in time. We’d found Santa hats for sale at the supermarket and bought enough for everyone, so as soon as our friends arrived we slapped a hat on them. I had some extra cloves on hand from the mulled wine (which only requires two or three cloves, maximum), so I set them out on the coffee table with some tiny baby mandarins and taught everyone to make pomanders. It ended up being a really nice icebreaker, as well as a fun little cultural detail for my Chinese friends. We stabbed cloves into oranges and chatted a bit, discussing school, Christmas traditions, and plans for spring festival, and then we all migrated to the buffet. It was a good thing we thought to buy meat – it was the only thing on the table that got finished. Benson and Xu Bixi had arrived with a massive cake, and when we were all too full to look at the buffet anymore they forced a big slice on everyone. There’s still nearly half a cake sitting in our fridge right now. I’m scared to look at it.

We spent the rest of the night sitting around, picking at the buffet, making pomanders and chatting. I’d found Toblerones for a reasonable price at the import store and gave one to everyone. I also had a special gift for Bixi. In China, nearly everyone under the age of 30 has studied English, and most of them have an English name, as well, which they either pick themselves or are given by an English teacher. Bixi could never decide on one and was never given one by a teacher, so she was excited when I promised her a name for Christmas. After a few hours scanning lists on baby name sites, I eventually went with my original idea – Bijou – which, although it’s actually French and not English, seemed to suit her the most and sounded closest to her Chinese name. She loved it, and so did everyone else. Although I’ll probably just keep calling her Bixi out of habit.

Chinese word of the day:

晚会
wǎn huì
(Evening) party

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Do they know it’s Christmas?

Wow. It’s already Christmas (圣诞节, shèng dàn jié). Despite the presence of a few Christmas decorations that have been popping up around the city for the past few weeks and the cheesy Mandopop Christmas songs that have been following me from every window and door I pass, I never really felt it coming. I hadn’t really expected much to be going on here in the way of Christmassy events, so I’d planned to just hang out with some friends and share whatever treats and traditions I could scrape together. But one of my teachers told us last week that Christmas Eve (known in China as 平安夜 (píng ān yè, “peaceful, safe and sound night”), is actually a pretty lively event downtown, so we went to check it out.

As it turns out, they do know it’s Christmas in China. Or at least they know it’s December 24th, and that it’s a holiday called Christmas. And they certainly do celebrate. But what I witnessed here bore more resemblance to Halloween or New Year’s Eve than any Christmas I’ve ever seen. Apparently, in China, Christmas is a holiday of chaos and mischief. So much for peaceful, safe and sound.

We walked to downtown Beibei just after dark. The streets were already clogged with people. A stream of honking cars and motorcycles threaded through the crowds, while vendors spread their wares across the sidewalks. Most of them were selling glowsticks, light-up devil horn headbands, cans of coloured spray foam, and large, inflatable plastic weapons. By the time we’d shuffled about a block into the crowd, I’d gathered that the main point of Christmas here is to run amok, spraying foam at everyone in arm's reach and beating them with inflatable hammers. Groups of little kids and teenagers wearing glowing devil horns over their Santa hats chased each other shrieking through the streets, emptying cans of foam into each other's faces and beating each other with the inflatable weapons until they deflated and were tossed to the muddy, foamy, garbage-strewn pavement. Several kids were igniting the spray foam with lighters. I got beaten by a couple of random people with hammers and my roommate got sprayed a bit while we tried to slither between the densely-packed bodies to someplace a little less crowded. We found ourselves at an outdoor market I’d never seen before and browsed the candies, preserved fruits and pickled vegetables for a few minutes before turning back to brave the crowds. We were only downtown about an hour, but by the time we’d fought our way back to the street we’d come in on the crowds had doubled. We decided at that point we’d had enough and headed home before we could get trampled.

On the way back we passed numerous vendors selling piles of large, pale pink apples, some of which were wrapped in a flourish of coloured cellophane. Rather than oranges, as in the West, Christmas is associated with apples here due to the seasonal sentiments reflected in the sound of the name; the 苹 (píng) in the word for apple (苹果, píng guǒ) sounds the same as the 平(píng, meaning peace) in 平安夜. They're a ubiquitous Christmas gift here and all week I've been seeing people lugging huge bags of them around to share with their friends and families.

Chinese word of the day:
节日
jié rì
Holiday 

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Just Cheng-du It: Part Two

Saturday morning I got up early, packed my bag with snacks and a map, and beelined it to the hostel cafe for breakfast and a long-anticipated cup of real coffee. There were lots of things Bridget and I wanted to do in the city and we were kind of at a loss, so we decided to take a bus to Tianfu Square in the middle of the city and just start exploring from there.

We only got lost once on the way to the bus stop and made it to the square without much trouble. The square itself was anticlimactic, just a big open space with some sculptures and benches, and nothing of any apparent interest nearby. Well, except for the huge Museum of Science and Technology that overlooked the square, but we weren't really in the mood to walk around looking at exhibits of cars and airplanes. We bought a proper map from a street vendor and tried to figure out where to go next. We decided to try again for the Wenshu Temple and started off in the direction of the bus stop. Of course, we immediately got lost. Wandering among the skyscrapers and ornate karaoke bars, we stumbled across a lively outdoor market tucked away in an alley behind some buildings and decided to check it out. We got sucked in by a couple of stalls selling beautiful hats and successfully bargained a couple of them down to 40 RMB from 60. Emboldened by our success, I went on to bargain for a warm fluffy scarf from a nice guy a few stalls down who seemed thrilled to meet foreigners who spoke Chinese. We strolled to the end of the alley, and upon discovering that it was part of a larger indoor market, we decided to abandon the earlier plans and spend the afternoon exploring.

The market was full of stalls selling a fairly standard array of clothes, hats, scarves, cosmetics, fake designer bags and household things. When we'd had a good look around, we followed a trail of street vendors to another market nearby. After grabbing lunch from one of the vendors - I had an amazing Chinese crepe filled with squid, cucumber, bean sprouts, cilantro, and a rich spicy sauce - we braved the next market. This one was four storeys of absolute shopping chaos, the narrow aisles between the stalls crammed so full of people it was difficult to move. We spent a few hours there checking out wild shoes, hair accessories and jewelry. When we got tired of fighting through the crowds we grabbed a seat at a manicure stall and got our nails done before heading off in search of dinner.

We left the market and saw a large mall across the street. I figured they'd have some interesting stuff in the food court, so we went to check it out. Unlike the west, malls in China are where people go to get a little upscale. The food court turned out to be a collection of slick, modern, mostly foreign restaurants offering fairly expensive sit-down meals. It was dark by this time and we didn't feel like getting lost again, so we just picked a place and tucked in to a ridiculously overpriced and entirely ordinary dinner. The drinks were good, though - the place specialized in fancy teas and smoothies, which were even more expensive than the food.

We left the mall and wandered around till we found Tianfu Square and got our bearings again. The square, which had seemed so dull and bare in the daylight, had completely transformed into a fantastic urban light show. The enormous statue of a waving Chairman Mao which presided over the square glowed above a powerful set of spotlights. The square itself was lit by dozens of art deco lamps, highlighted by the softly lit spiralling statues that poked out of the fountains in the middle. Colour changing lights played up and down the sides of the huge malls, skyscrapers and luxury hotels that surrounded the square, while two were adorned with enormous screens which played psychedelic shifting colourscapes. We soaked it in for a while before heading down to the metro station under the square. The Chengdu metro was mercifully simple, and we finally managed to make it to our hostel without getting lost.

Back at the hostel, we relaxed a bit and decided we were up for some nightlife. I'd found out Chengdu's longest running gay bar, 1 + 1 Area, was not too far away, so we decided to walk there and check it out. It was hidden away in an industrial part of town on the third floor of a large KTV building without any signs alerting passersby to its presence, but it was there. Peering inside from the deserted, smoke-stained hallway, we both felt a sudden wave of fear about being such obvious outsiders entering this secret place, but we'd already walked all this way, so I steeled myself and marched in, dragging Bridget with me. We were warmly welcomed by the door staff and seated at the closest available seat to the stage, where the nightly show was already in progress. One of the servers came to take our order and informed us that we weren't the only foreigners in the bar, pointing to a table in the far corner. Like many bars in China, there was no cover charge, but it was compulsory to order food or drinks, so we shelled out 40 RMB for two Cokes and sat back to enjoy the show.

The MCs - a man wearing white pants and a white suit jacket over his bare, tattooed chest and a drag queen in a poofy polka-dot sundress which revealed an enormous back tattoo* - bantered back and forth between drag performances and karaoke numbers. We were treated to another awesome drag performance, including some bellydance and modern ballet, along with the standard sex-it-up pop numbers. The MCs greeted the out-of-towners in the audience and asked each of them where they were from, and then they made a special greeting to the 外国朋友 (wàiguó péngyou, foreign friends) in the audience. They waved at Bridget and me, but must have assumed we didn't speak any Chinese, because they didn't ask us any questions. The Americans in the corner got more attention - they somehow got one brave girl up on stage, and when they discovered that she spoke Chinese they grilled her about her sexual orientation and made her dance to Lady Gaga. She gamely kept up with the MCs, and the audience loved her - better her than us, I suppose.

We ended up leaving a little early, about midnight, because we weren't sure whether we'd be disturbing a new roommate in our dorm when we got back to the hostel. In the end, we had the place to ourselves that night. And so ended another day in Chengdu.

Stay tuned for part three...

Chinese word of the day:
性感
xìng gǎn
sex appeal; sexy

* Along with watching Chinese drag, tattoo spotting is one of my new favourite pastimes here, due to the common belief in the west that the Chinese don't get tattoos. They may not be as popular as they are in the west, but they certainly do exist - more on this subject later.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Just Cheng-du It: Part One

Recently, while planning my five-week vacation over Spring Festival (春节, chūn jié, known in the west as Chinese New Year), I realized there are way too many things I want to do here to fit into five weeks. Homework be damned - I need to start making better use of my weekends. So on Friday after class the roommate and I decided to run off to Chengdu (成都), The capital of Sichuan province, which is just a two-hour train ride from Chongqing.

Although I've been living in China for three months now, it didn't really occur to me till I got to Chengdu that I've never actually been a traveller here. When I arrived in China I went straight to school, a comfortable life already cut out for me complete with accommodation, income, and a community of Chinese friends to show me around and help me with the tricky things. Although being a full time resident here has certainly not been without challenges, travelling has a whole different set. Or maybe they're really all the same challenges, only you have only a limited amount of time to figure them out. In any case, as soon as I got to the train station on Friday afternoon and elbowed my way through a sea of chattering, shoving, staring people and onto a train bound for a city I'd never seen, I realized I was about to have a totally new experience here.

We'd done some research ahead of time and found a few hostels that looked promising, but chickened out when it came to actually calling them to book a room - without the ability to use body language or hand gestures, talking on the phone in your second language (or with someone else who's using their second language) is extremely difficult. It's becoming my new hallmark of language proficiency, really - when I can comfortably make a phone call in Chinese, I may actually consider myself bilingual.

So anyway, midafternoon on Friday we arrived at the Chengdu north train station and were about to hop a bus and start searching for the nearest hostel when we heard someone calling to us in English (it happens all the time - despite the fact that plenty of people come to China from non-English speaking countries like Russia, France and Germany, people here tend to assume that anyone with white skin is an English-speaking American). We turned around and saw a couple of people holding a large sign saying "Sim's Cosy Garden Hostel," which just happened to be one of the hostels we'd chickened out of calling. Not only had the place looked great, but they'd advertised a free pick-up service, which apparently doubled as a way to rustle up business. We didn't even need the sales pitch. Feeling lucky and opportunistic - and anxious to ditch our bags and start exploring the city - we decided to just take the chance and go with them. They brought us to a city bus, paid our fare, and escorted us back to an absolutely charming bohemian oasis hidden behind the dull concrete facade of Chengdu's urban jungle. The place was so gorgeous I didn't even bother taking pictures; I knew they wouldn't do it justice. Just check their website to see what I mean.

We had a look at the tiny double room and decided we'd actually have more privacy in the spacious four-bed dorm, which had two bunk beds, shelving, lockers and its own bathroom, including a shower and a western toilet. At 45 RMB (about $7.50 CAD) per person per night, it was an awesome deal. The place even had a mellow little bar/restaurant/cafe which served real coffee. The eclectic, bohemian atmosphere of the place reminded me so much of the Ocean Island Backpackers Inn back home that I forgot I was in China at times; I felt a wave of culture shock every time I stepped through the heavy gates onto the street.

We settled in, freshened up, and went off to find dinner and acquaint ourselves with the neighbourhood, which was in the northeast end of the city. We immediately became lost; Chengdu, like the rest of China, is under relentless development which no map or guidebook can keep up with. The streets generally had a different name on every block, and our map infuriatingly neglected to record this. It also appears they rename the street every time they demolish and replace a building; even when we got a newer, better map, the names often didn't match up.

We'd originally set out to look for the famous Wenshu Temple, which was just a few minutes' walk from the hostel and boasted a vegetarian restaurant, but somehow ended up overshooting the turnoff and ending up closer to the middle of the city. We found ourselves in a plaza of boutiques, restaurants and snack stalls and decided to cut our losses and just pick a random dish from random restaurant. We ended up at a noodle shop where I managed to communicate to the proprietor that I wanted something - anything - vegetarian. Her responses were all completely unintelligible to me, but I ended up with a tasty bowl of noodles in a miso-like fermented bean broth with some kind of vegetable which I think might have been sweet potato leaves. Satiated, we resumed our search. Using our totally inadequate free tourist maps, we eventually found ourselves in a touristy recreation of an ancient Chinese village. We knew we were close to the temple, but it had already gotten dark and we knew we'd probably end up getting lost again, and what's more it would already be closed. So we tried to make a mental note of where we were and turned around to head back to the hostel.

Several wrong turns and nearly two hours later, we finally found the right street and arrived at the hostel. We grabbed some books from their little international library and relaxed at the cafe for a few minutes, plotting our next move. Then we dragged ourselves off to our bunk to prepare for another day of being clueless tourists.

To be continued...

Chinese word of the day:
迷路
mí lù
to lose the way; lost

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Language, wine, and the Sichuan accent

Our Chinese friends here tend to have really strange schedules – classes in the mornings, afternoons and evenings – and often a really odd mix of required courses and electives. Physical education is mandatory for university students in China, as is Marxist theory, no matter what your major is. The electives available are pretty interesting, though, and yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in on one of Benson’s classes all about the art, science, and culture of wine (葡萄酒, pú tao jiǔ).

The lecture room was only about a quarter full, and we managed to sneak in and fold ourselves into one of the rows of tiny seats near the back without getting too many stares. The teacher was chattering animatedly into a headset about the various features and technicalities of wine corks, his voice piped out of the speakers installed around the room. I noticed right away that he had a bit of the local accent, which means, among other things, he pronounced a standard Mandarin “sh” sound as an “s,” a “zh” sound as “dz,” the “r” kind of sounded like a “z,” and his tones were a bit different.

For the first few minutes of class I was pretty lost and could only pick out the odd word or phrase, but I just sat back and relaxed into it and found that the less I strained myself to grasp every word, the more I understood. It’s a bit of a “forest for the trees” phenomenon. The teacher elaborated on barrels, bottles, grape varieties, stemware, and, for reasons not fully apparent, Marilyn Monroe, and by the end of the two-hour lecture I was able to make sense of most of what he said, even when it included some unfamiliar words. I was even able to decipher the meaning of some of those familiar words from the context alone, without even checking a dictionary, and that’s harder than it sounds. Listening comprehension has been one of my biggest obstacles here; while my spoken Chinese is good enough that I generally have no trouble communicating, I often don’t understand what I hear, particularly when it’s addressed directly to me. I tend to get flustered and distracted and won’t understand even familiar words and phrases. It certainly doesn’t help that people often sound like they’re yelling when they talk to you here – I always think they’re angry at me and start listening for a totally different set of words.

Anyway, the class was educational on two levels and I’m stoked to keep going. Now I'm scanning around for more classes to infiltrate. Benson's also learning French (taught by the same Chinese guy who taught the wine class), and I bet that would be a pretty interesting class to check out. Although I studied French from elementary school through high school, it's all completely atrophied from underuse now. Relearning my second language via my third language would allow me to set up a whole new two-way mnemonics system for both languages and would be one hell of an intense brain workout. I've also been invited by one of the teachers here to sit in on her Russian class, which would be entirely in Russian as she speaks no Chinese and only basic English. Not particularly helpful to my Chinese studies, but I've always loved the sound of Russian, so why not?

Chinese word of the day:
语言
yǔ yán
Language

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Carrie-OK

Well, it's happened. After successfully avoiding it for three whole months, I have finally experienced the Asian cultural phenomenon that is karaoke (卡拉OK, kǎ lā OK). Saturday night Benson texted me asking me and the roommate if we wanted to hang out. We met him and one of his friends outside the dorm and he said, “well, what do you want to do? I know, let’s go sing some songs!” Knowing that resistance was futile – and that I had nothing better to do anyway – I made a mild show of protest and gave in.

We walked to the nearest karaoke bar just a few minutes from the campus and stepped through the double glass doors into some kind of space fantasy – the room was bathed in the dim glow of colour-changing lights installed all up and down the walls and under the glass floor, offset by alternating mirrored wall tiles. A chandelier with beads hanging all the way to the floor lit one end of the room and slick black leather couches lurked in the corners. And that was just the lobby. We never actually got to see the rest of it, because the place was full. Unlike the west, where (according to my limited experience) karaoke is usually performed in a crowded, noisy bar in front of a bunch of drunk strangers, karaoke bars in Asia usually consist of little private rooms which you rent by the hour for a cozy evening of drinking, snacking and singing with your friends. They do have people singing karaoke publicly, too, but the private room karaoke seems to be the standard here.

Anyway, after we got turned away from the first bar, we went on to the next one, which was even more grandiose with a colourful, two-storey art deco design covering half the block over the entranceway. We entered the somewhat less impressive lobby, paid for four hours in one of the smaller rooms, and were escorted down a dim corridor to a room that looked like someone’s outdated basement entertainment room – loud, swirly wallpaper covered the walls and ceiling, closing in around the worn vinyl couches and pitted granite coffee table. A large TV and karaoke machine sat against the wall opposite the couches.

As we were settling in, the staff informed us that we needed to order some food or drinks, so we ordered popcorn and dried shredded squid and started picking songs. Benson and his friend kicked things off with a few of their favourites (Benson really loves Faye Wong, or 王菲) and I was relieved to discover that their voices weren’t much better than mine. My roommate, being a fan of Mando-Pop, was slightly better off than I was – there were only a handful of English songs on the machine, and of these the only ones I was really familiar with were “Hey Jude” and “You Are My Sunshine.” She bravely sang a few songs in English and Chinese and I did the two I knew, along with a few Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys songs I didn’t know well enough to follow along even with the lyrics. Our friends looked pretty bored, to be honest, but it turned out to be a much less painful experience than I thought.

Chinese word of the day:
随便
suí biàn
As one wishes; "whatever"