I’m lucky enough to have a good friend from Beijing whose family still lives there, so I arrived with someone to pick me up from the train station and a comfortable place to stay all lined up for me. I spent 11 days living with my friend’s parents on the 26th floor of an apartment compound for military retirees. I’d planned to visit a few of Beijing’s famous historical sites, but I knew it would be the everyday, mundane experiences – not the traditional dishes eaten or must-see tourist attractions visited – that would really make the trip.
I couldn’t have found a better place to stay. My friend’s parents spoiled me like I was their own granddaughter. I woke up every morning to a hot mug of tea and a full breakfast, which they would heap onto my plate until I couldn’t eat any more. Then, while I prepared for the day’s adventures, they’d help me figure out an itinerary and tell me which buses to take. They’d even walk me to the bus stop if they weren’t sure I could find it. They kept the house well-stocked with snacks, which they’d shove into my bag before I set out. And when I stumbled back at the end of the day, exhausted, footsore and frostbitten, they’d have a huge vegetarian dinner cooking. We’d chat over dinner, discuss the places I went to see, and then I’d stubbornly try to help with the dishes. After dinner, they’d try to get me to eat more snacks. I’m starting to get the impression that in China, “young” is synonymous with “underfed.” Older people are constantly urging you to eat more, more, more, even when you’re full to bursting.
As they didn’t speak any English at all, staying with the couple really put my Chinese to the test. It was my first time being completely immersed in the language, in a situation where there were no bilingual friends to act as translator and my English was truly useless. It went really well, actually – I was delighted by how well my mere one-and-a-half years of Chinese studies served me. For the first two days I even surprised myself with my fluency. I was able to talk around the gaps in my vocabulary without getting flustered and forgetting how to construct a sentence. But then it got difficult again, and the hesitation and mental blocks came back. I think that, being immersed like that, I learned so much so quickly that my brain was forced to go into assimilation mode for a while to make sense of all the new information, making on-the-spot recall difficult. I wonder if everyone goes through cycles like that in the second-language acquisition process.
One of the best things about going to Beijing (aside from the sheer fabulousness of the city itself) is that the standardized form of Mandarin we learn in school is based on the Beijing dialect, so communication with the locals was easy. It was such a relief to be able to converse smoothly with strangers and understand directions without having to decipher a heavy local accent. Even though everyone in the country understands standard Mandarin, they can’t all speak it, so I often encounter a one-way communication barrier where people can understand my Chinese but I can’t understand theirs. It can be very stressful. Coming from Chongqing, where this is a constant problem for me, this new clarity was a huge thrill. I’ve never enjoyed talking to strangers so much in my life as I did in Beijing. The sudden ease of communicating in a mutually intelligible dialect, and the compliments I got from Beijingers who were impressed to hear a foreigner speaking their dialect, gave me a huge confidence boost that had me chatting with everyone who gave me an opportunity. It really came in handy with all the aggressive hawkers, who’d lose interest in trying to hustle me as soon as they realized they could have a real conversation with me. My favourites were the young guys slinging dumplings and stinky tofu and bugs on skewers at Wangfujing snack street. Perusing all the crazy snacks, I was greeted with the usual catcalls of “HELLOOOO! Look-a-look! Delicious Beijing special treat!” But as soon as I walked up for a closer look and started asking questions in Chinese, they’d immediately drop the act and show a genuine interest in me, asking me where I was from, telling me my Chinese was awesome (很棒, hěn bàng!), flirting a bit and finding common ground with me.
Chinese word of the day:
双语
shuāng yǔ
Bilingual (adj) (lit., double language)
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Going off the rails on a Chinese train, cont'd
A few hours into the trip, one of the attendants came around to collect our tickets. The 12- or 13-year-old girl in the bunk below mine had apparently lost hers sometime after boarding the train, and, from what I understood, the staff suspected a scam and wanted to kick her off. The woman in the bunk opposite hers, a feisty Chongqing local, butted heads ferociously with the staff and the situation escalated into an ongoing saga that had the woman fielding phone calls every few minutes while various attendants and managers visited our bunk repeatedly to engage in yet another heated discussion with her. I gathered she wasn’t related to the girl, and possibly didn’t know her at all, but they were going to the same place and she decided to take charge of the situation. Between the Chinese-speaking foreigner, the silent, ticketless mystery girl, the fierce Chongqing lady and the loud drunk, ours was definitely the most interesting bunk in the car. As we neared Beijing and the situation with the ticketless girl was still not resolved, the staff became more agitated and began taking other passengers aside to press them for information that might help them decide whether or not the girl was scamming them for a free ride across the country. Eventually, they came for me.
After nearly a whole day listening to my bunkmates discuss every angle of the matter (and overhearing everyone else on the car gossiping about it), I’d pretty much tuned out the drama unfolding around me and was just keeping to myself, listening to the Cocteau Twins, and watching the poor farming villages go by. Then one of the attendants, a young girl with a mean, catty look behind her polite smile, came and told me they’d like to ask me some questions. Not knowing what else to do, I agreed, and she grabbed me by the arm and marched me through seven or eight cars to the dinner car, where several more attendants were waiting at a table. The ticketless girl was sitting alone at a table behind ours, looking blankly out the window. They obviously weren’t letting her leave.
They asked me to sit down and introduced me to the boss, a woman who appeared to be in her 30’s. They started asking me questions about the ticketless girl and the woman who’d taken on the role of her advocate, but I couldn’t make out the meaning of anything they said through my nervousness and their heavy Sichuan accents. They seemed intent on getting certain information. When it became clear to them that I had no idea what that information was and I could tell them nothing helpful, they thanked me with exasperated smiles and the mean-looking one grabbed me by the arm again and escorted me back to my car.
In the end, they never resolved the issue with the ticketless girl. She and the woman stayed on the train till we got to Beijing, where everyone wordlessly went on their way and the temporary relationships formed on the train dissolved as quickly as they’d formed. I arrived feeling like I’d just reached my second destination on the trip instead of my first. The train ride was a trip in itself.
Chinese lesson of the day:
奇怪
qí guài
Strange (adj)
After nearly a whole day listening to my bunkmates discuss every angle of the matter (and overhearing everyone else on the car gossiping about it), I’d pretty much tuned out the drama unfolding around me and was just keeping to myself, listening to the Cocteau Twins, and watching the poor farming villages go by. Then one of the attendants, a young girl with a mean, catty look behind her polite smile, came and told me they’d like to ask me some questions. Not knowing what else to do, I agreed, and she grabbed me by the arm and marched me through seven or eight cars to the dinner car, where several more attendants were waiting at a table. The ticketless girl was sitting alone at a table behind ours, looking blankly out the window. They obviously weren’t letting her leave.
They asked me to sit down and introduced me to the boss, a woman who appeared to be in her 30’s. They started asking me questions about the ticketless girl and the woman who’d taken on the role of her advocate, but I couldn’t make out the meaning of anything they said through my nervousness and their heavy Sichuan accents. They seemed intent on getting certain information. When it became clear to them that I had no idea what that information was and I could tell them nothing helpful, they thanked me with exasperated smiles and the mean-looking one grabbed me by the arm again and escorted me back to my car.
In the end, they never resolved the issue with the ticketless girl. She and the woman stayed on the train till we got to Beijing, where everyone wordlessly went on their way and the temporary relationships formed on the train dissolved as quickly as they’d formed. I arrived feeling like I’d just reached my second destination on the trip instead of my first. The train ride was a trip in itself.
Chinese lesson of the day:
奇怪
qí guài
Strange (adj)
Monday, January 24, 2011
Going off the rails on a Chinese train
Once again, I’ve been slacking on my blog. Sorry about that. I wrote my exams about 2 weeks ago after a week of intense cramming, and I think I managed to pass, but I won’t know until next semester, if they ever tell me at all. During this time, I was also trying to salvage my travel plans for the Spring Festival, which were rapidly unravelling. Taking advantage of my six-week vacation to travel in China seemed like a good idea; I mean, I’m in China with nothing to do, so naturally I should travel, right? Well, Spring Festival is also the largest annual human migration in the world – the time when the millions of migrant workers who’ve left their hometowns for a better income in the cities go home to spend Chinese New Year with their families. It’s nearly impossible to get a train anywhere; plane tickets double or triple in price.
I’d originally planned to spend a few days in Beijing, then fly to Japan and spend a week or two there, and then fly back to my friend’s hometown in Xuzhou to spend Chinese New Year with his family. Afterward I’d hoped to hop a train to nearby Suzhou or Hangzhou to spend a day or two soaking in the famous scenery (Suzhou is famous for its gardens and Hangzhou is known as the “Venice of China”), and then continue south to Shenzhen or Hong Kong before flying back to Chongqing. Japan ended up being impossibly expensive, eating up almost my entire travel budget and paralyzing my plans until I could cancel everything – a very expensive, time-consuming and depressing task. By the time I got that worked out, I’d decided to just spend some time in Beijing and then take a train to Xuzhou at the end of January, and I thought I’d break up the long, long train ride to Beijing with a stopover in Xi’an. Poor train scheduling to Xi’an ended up making things more complicated when it was supposed to make them simpler, so I dropped that idea and decided to fly to Beijing; I’d found a cheap ticket that would get me there in two hours for just 100 RMB (15 CAD) more than the cost of a train ticket. The website was confusing and the prices were climbing by the second (I could watch the numbers go up as I sat and looked at the page), so by the time I had a friend come over to help me the ticket was more than double the price of a train. So, after another split second change of plans, I ran out and bought a train ticket straight to Beijing; 31 hours. I was actually really lucky to get it only five days in advance – tickets generally sell out the day sales open, which is ten days in advance. I found myself a cheap plane ticket to Chongqing from Shenzhen and my holiday began to take shape again. Meanwhile, Beibei had become unnaturally subdued as all the shops and street stalls I’ve come to know and love pulled down their heavy steel shutters or just packed up and disappeared completely for the holidays. The campus turned into a creepy, deserted ghost town. I was anxious to leave.
The train station was overflowing, but I managed to get onto the train without any trouble or confusion. I must be getting better at this whole “not being a clueless foreigner” thing. I’d booked a “hard sleeper,” which, so I’m told, is exactly the same as a “soft sleeper” except there are three beds to a bunk instead of two, so it’s a little more crowded. But, clocking in at 440 RMB (about 66 CAD), half the price of the soft sleeper, I decided it was money well saved. Of course, my bunk was in the middle of the car, and to get to it I had to walk past about 30 pairs of stunned eyes. Everyone watched, riveted, as I fumbled conspicuously with my overstuffed suitcase. Then a girl about my age approached me in the corridor and struck up a conversation. Of course, everyone listened in, and word spread quickly through the car that there was a “waiguoren” who could speak Chinese on the train. I could hear everyone talking about me, but they all seemed to be saying good things, so I relaxed a bit. People kept dropping by to participate in the conversation and exchange a few words with the foreigner. They were all quite friendly, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying half the time as they were all Sichuan/Chongqing locals and spoke with a heavy accent.
Eventually I went back to the little table next to my bunk to have some dinner and was followed by the crazy drunk guy who’d been blundering around making a scene ever since he arrived. He made lively conversation with me while I tried to review some vocabulary and eat my dinner, spraying me with flecks of chewed-up betel nut as he spoke. He told me repeatedly that I was beautiful and then he called his wife and told her he was talking to a “foreign beauty,” gleefully reporting afterward how jealous she was. My other bunkmates joined in and we all talked for a while – I’m always amazed at the social ease of the people over here. I guess in a country this crowded, where maintaining personal space is impossible, you don’t really have the option of being hesitant to talk to people. Chatting with strangers is both a way of life and an art form over here. It’s funny – when I see fellow foreigners now, my first instinct is to run over and strike up a conversation, ask where they’re from, what their story is, and then I realize that that’s a very Chinese response. It’d be the last thing I’d be likely to do back home. Being in China has fundamentally changed the way I view social interaction. Not only do I have no choice but to talk to strangers here, it’s basically my entire purpose for being here. And the social interactions I have here, in my horribly inadequate Chinese or in someone else’s faltering English, are completely different from the culturally nuanced, socially molded conversations I have in my native language. Every conversation I have here is useful to me in some way – it’s never worth it to avoid them (unless you’re talking to a crazy drunk who’ll just end up following you around all night). And it’s changed the way I view awkwardness in social interaction, too. No social interaction in the world can be as awkward or intimidating as being interrogated in a heavily-accented version of your second language.
…to be continued.
Chinese word of the day:
尴尬
gān gà
Awkward (adj.)
I’d originally planned to spend a few days in Beijing, then fly to Japan and spend a week or two there, and then fly back to my friend’s hometown in Xuzhou to spend Chinese New Year with his family. Afterward I’d hoped to hop a train to nearby Suzhou or Hangzhou to spend a day or two soaking in the famous scenery (Suzhou is famous for its gardens and Hangzhou is known as the “Venice of China”), and then continue south to Shenzhen or Hong Kong before flying back to Chongqing. Japan ended up being impossibly expensive, eating up almost my entire travel budget and paralyzing my plans until I could cancel everything – a very expensive, time-consuming and depressing task. By the time I got that worked out, I’d decided to just spend some time in Beijing and then take a train to Xuzhou at the end of January, and I thought I’d break up the long, long train ride to Beijing with a stopover in Xi’an. Poor train scheduling to Xi’an ended up making things more complicated when it was supposed to make them simpler, so I dropped that idea and decided to fly to Beijing; I’d found a cheap ticket that would get me there in two hours for just 100 RMB (15 CAD) more than the cost of a train ticket. The website was confusing and the prices were climbing by the second (I could watch the numbers go up as I sat and looked at the page), so by the time I had a friend come over to help me the ticket was more than double the price of a train. So, after another split second change of plans, I ran out and bought a train ticket straight to Beijing; 31 hours. I was actually really lucky to get it only five days in advance – tickets generally sell out the day sales open, which is ten days in advance. I found myself a cheap plane ticket to Chongqing from Shenzhen and my holiday began to take shape again. Meanwhile, Beibei had become unnaturally subdued as all the shops and street stalls I’ve come to know and love pulled down their heavy steel shutters or just packed up and disappeared completely for the holidays. The campus turned into a creepy, deserted ghost town. I was anxious to leave.
The train station was overflowing, but I managed to get onto the train without any trouble or confusion. I must be getting better at this whole “not being a clueless foreigner” thing. I’d booked a “hard sleeper,” which, so I’m told, is exactly the same as a “soft sleeper” except there are three beds to a bunk instead of two, so it’s a little more crowded. But, clocking in at 440 RMB (about 66 CAD), half the price of the soft sleeper, I decided it was money well saved. Of course, my bunk was in the middle of the car, and to get to it I had to walk past about 30 pairs of stunned eyes. Everyone watched, riveted, as I fumbled conspicuously with my overstuffed suitcase. Then a girl about my age approached me in the corridor and struck up a conversation. Of course, everyone listened in, and word spread quickly through the car that there was a “waiguoren” who could speak Chinese on the train. I could hear everyone talking about me, but they all seemed to be saying good things, so I relaxed a bit. People kept dropping by to participate in the conversation and exchange a few words with the foreigner. They were all quite friendly, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying half the time as they were all Sichuan/Chongqing locals and spoke with a heavy accent.
Eventually I went back to the little table next to my bunk to have some dinner and was followed by the crazy drunk guy who’d been blundering around making a scene ever since he arrived. He made lively conversation with me while I tried to review some vocabulary and eat my dinner, spraying me with flecks of chewed-up betel nut as he spoke. He told me repeatedly that I was beautiful and then he called his wife and told her he was talking to a “foreign beauty,” gleefully reporting afterward how jealous she was. My other bunkmates joined in and we all talked for a while – I’m always amazed at the social ease of the people over here. I guess in a country this crowded, where maintaining personal space is impossible, you don’t really have the option of being hesitant to talk to people. Chatting with strangers is both a way of life and an art form over here. It’s funny – when I see fellow foreigners now, my first instinct is to run over and strike up a conversation, ask where they’re from, what their story is, and then I realize that that’s a very Chinese response. It’d be the last thing I’d be likely to do back home. Being in China has fundamentally changed the way I view social interaction. Not only do I have no choice but to talk to strangers here, it’s basically my entire purpose for being here. And the social interactions I have here, in my horribly inadequate Chinese or in someone else’s faltering English, are completely different from the culturally nuanced, socially molded conversations I have in my native language. Every conversation I have here is useful to me in some way – it’s never worth it to avoid them (unless you’re talking to a crazy drunk who’ll just end up following you around all night). And it’s changed the way I view awkwardness in social interaction, too. No social interaction in the world can be as awkward or intimidating as being interrogated in a heavily-accented version of your second language.
…to be continued.
Chinese word of the day:
尴尬
gān gà
Awkward (adj.)
Happy Spring Festival!
Please excuse the lack of new posts as of late - life's been hectic! I finished my first semester at SWU a couple weeks ago and wrote my exams a week after that. Now I'm taking advantage of the month-long vacation to do some travelling through China and only have sporadic internet access. I'll try to keep writing when I have time and just dump my posts on here when I find a place with good wifi. I'm currently in Beijing at a Starbucks on Qianmen street, just south of Tiananmen Square. Stay tuned for updates on my adventures on the road!
Chinese word of the day:
放假
fàng jià
To have a holiday or vacation
Chinese word of the day:
放假
fàng jià
To have a holiday or vacation
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
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
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.
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.
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