Abroad in China

This past week was fall break for all of us foreigners here in Beijing, so while the majority of the students headed south for a refreshing, warm, sunny, break, a classmate and I decided to pack up and head for Inner Mongolia. Where? I know, it’s pretty obscure, but after spending the week there, I’m convinced that the only legitimate difference between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia is that Inner Mongolia is owned by the Chinese; so nonetheless, it had a culture and a people that were pronouncedly different from the Beijing area, despite only being about 300 miles away. We were rather relieved to depart when we did, because the morning we left the air pollution was so bad that we couldn’t see the tops of some of the buildings we were passing by!

We arrived in Hohhot, the commercial axis of Inner Mongolia, after a 12 hour train ride through the mountains. We then managed to find rooms at a five star hotel complete with pool, restaurants and free breakfast for about $60 a night, so we were pretty happy with ourselves for thinking to come here. While Hohhot is a commercial center, with about 1.5 million permanent residents, tourism, and thus prices, are very low in the winter months, something we found out when everyone we talked to immediately asked us “why do you want to come here now?” While there obviously wasn’t much business in the city at that point, from the way the people of Hohhot acted it seemed as if they’d never seen foreigners before. Every day dozens and dozens of people stopped and stared at as we passed by. On busses, in restaurants, even when we were at the touristy spots in the city, there was always someone struck still, with a complete look of awe or bewilderment on his or her face, as if he or she couldn’t understand what manner of creatures we were. I have to admit, it brought out the narcissist in me pretty strongly. It’s almost disappointing now that I’m back in Beijing that there aren’t people following my every move, admiring my appearance.

The tour books and travel guides were right when they said that Hohhot was a very culturally saturated city. The Mongolian cultural influence was apparent nearly everywhere, and even the touristy spots were less touristy, and more cultural, with a variety of genuine Mongolian goods, from furs, to knives, artwork and even goat skulls available everywhere we went. What the travel guides were wrong about, so very wrong, was the location of, well practically every site we tried to see. The first day we spent almost 6 hours looking for the foreign bookstore that every guide we had advised us to go to. Unfortunately, everyone in the city had a different idea from the next of where this bookstore was, so we never actually ended up locating it. The next day it was the cashmere mill and the antiques market we couldn’t find, and the day after that the museum went missing from its normal location. I seriously doubt anyone had been to Hohhot to update their maps since the 1980’s. Fortunately we were able to locate the museum, though not after being chased by a certifiably insane lady who tried talking to us at first, but later just decided to sprint down the street after us three or four times. We took refuge in a bank, much to the amusement of the staff, who eventually gave us the correct location of the museum.

The museum itself was spectacular. Anyone who ever makes it to that corner of the world should prioritize spending a full day there. It contained exhibits on every imaginable aspect of Mongol life, culture and history, from the monstrous dinosaur exhibit (wow, bad pun), to detailed exhibits on Mongolian art, music, and other crafts. Each exhibit also contained dozens and dozens of authentic Mongolian artifacts, clothing, tools, weapons and much more. We didn’t have enough time to see it all, but what we did see was incredible (and free too!)
Throughout this whole trip we also got to experience the pure bliss that is Mongolian cuisine. However, before I explain that, it’s important to understand the nature of real Chinese food, so I’ll try to explain briefly: Chinese Chinese food is as different from our American Chinese food as it is from American food. Moreover, most Chinese restaurants in the U.S. are run by southern Chinese, most of who speak Cantonese exclusively, and have an entirely different style of food. Beijing cuisine is based mostly on carbs. Seriously, simple carbs are to Beijingers what hamburger is to most Americans: unhealthy, but you probably have it once a day, or maybe more, because it’s the way you were brought up, and frankly, besides, its only bad if you eat a lot of it, right? Nonetheless, Beijing food uses large amounts of rice with everything, unless of course, you decide to order noodles. Vegetables include Chinese celery, cucumbers, scallions, lettuce (like six different types), broccoli and peppers, lots of other roots and a funny kind of dark seaweed. Many vegetable dishes include a little meat, so I guess vegetarianism isn’t really a big thing here. The most common kinds of meat are pork, chicken and mutton, in that order. Beef is not popular, but eating other parts of their animals, such as the ears, intestines, stomach and tongue sure is. Almost everything is fried in a veritable lake of oil in a wok. Common breakfast specialties include large very thin pancakes fried in eggs and lettuce, and lathered in several kinds of sauce, fried slightly sweetened breadsticks, a kind of fried spicy calzone filled with vegetables and eggs, and rolls stuffed with bean paste (guess how they’re cooked?). For other meals, specialties include fried and usually fatty meat served on sticks, fried noodles, noodles served in a weak broth (noodle soup), rice with varying vegetable/meat dishes, corn and yams from street vendors, and an assortment of tofu dishes. Jiaozi and baozi, two different kinds of small dumpling are also quite popular, usually steamed or boiled. The northern Chinese use almost no soy sauce, preferring instead to use very sour vinegar to season their dishes, as well as a kind of spicy ground red pepper paste. And no, I have not yet seen a fortune cookie since I have been here. However, Mongolian food, even in a city only 300 miles from Beijing, bears absolutely no resemblance to this food. To put it simply, Mongolian food involves two things: meat and dairy. When I say we ate meat for a week, we actually ate almost nothing except meat for a week, except of course when we went to Hohhot’s only foreign restaurant for pizza and milkshakes (oh wait, that’s meat and…) never mind. Anyway, while I’m sure my approval rating among my internal systems dropped considerably, it was really fun to eat with no regard in this way for the week. Most of the time, waitresses would simply bring us still on the bone beef in broth, along with milk noodles, milk tea, and whatever other meat dishes they had in store. We also ate a lot of hotpot, which is one of the most fun and interactive ways to eat China, involving sticking large amounts of raw meat and vegetables in your tabletop cauldron to cook. However the best aspect of Mongolian food is surely the milk tea, which quite literally tastes like liquid butter. Apparently most milk tea is simply bad tasting tea that they add large amounts of boiling milk and salt to in order to improve the taste, but nonetheless, it’s incredible.
Back to the trip, we also saw some pretty interesting architecture and temples around town, not to mention some pretty unique goods, including an awful lot of what appeared to be wolf fur. Unfortunately many of the interesting sights, such as the horse racing track, were closed for the season. However, at the end of our stay in Hohhot we decided that the next thing we had to do was see the famous grasslands of Inner Mongolia. We did some online research, and even though most of the sources were, again, quite old, we ascertained that the grasslands of Hohhot were too touristy for our liking. So, we jumped on the overnight train and headed to the “small” northern city of Xilinhot. Xilinhot, as it turns, out, also happens to be the reason I can’t convince myself that global warming exists anymore. You see, Xilinhot, even though it is only about 360 miles north of the relatively temperate Beijing, happens to have fall temperatures that make winter in New England seem just balmy. The initial temperatures while we were there were hovering around 20°-25°, however, add in the wind chill of 500 or so straight miles of unobstructed grasslands and the temperature ended up reading (and feeling) like -5 the whole time we were there. Needless to say, this quickly deterred us from the notion of spending the night out in the grasslands.
Shortly after we arrived, we did what every travel log about Xilinhot told us to do: asked all the locals we could if they knew a good spot to go in the grasslands.

Most of the people we talked to couldn’t wait to take us, and immediately offered to call so-and-so to take us on a day long tour. So the next day, we were awoken at 8:00 a.m. by a strange, quite untalkative man in our room, whom we finally discovered was there to take us sightseeing. We arrived at the grasslands in his taxi, at a large farm far away from the city center. Fortunately, we were able to go inside quickly, because the wind was about to bodily lift us and take us away. The farm was mostly a summer operation, but there were still a good 20 people around running things, all of whom took us around to show us the real life of a Mongol herder. On the farm the kept, among other things, dogs, sheep, reindeer, cattle, huge furry two-humped camels, and WOLVES! Yes, like 10 wolves, maybe to help them hunt or something, it was amazing. We would have stayed longer if the wind had not been shredding right through what protective gear we had and freezing our innards and our souls. The goings on after that were mostly of a normal sightseeing nature. We found an abandoned temple, walked the streets, stopped (frequently) for tea, and visited the local market. After that, all that was left was hopping on a sleeper-bus (which, by the way, stacked beds built for people under about 5’5, aka not too comfy) and heading back to Beijing, which, mercifully, had cleared up considerably by that time.

People in the west always wonder what the knowledge level of the average Chinese with regards to their government and its various low-brow activities. After being here for three weeks, I thought that it was surprising what a happy and relatively free lot most of the Chinese were. That quickly changed though, when my roommate burst into my room recently to tell me a most scandalizing bit of news: Gasp! The little girl singing the national anthem during the Olympic opening ceremonies wasn’t actually singing! That’s right, it took him two months to find out what us Americans knew in two days, and it took attending a special lecture by one of the most famous and influential professors in Beijing just to make it possible. The bottom line is, the government here is as transparent as concrete, and the media cares about as much for investigative journalism as Sarah Palin does for foreign policy.
Furthermore, once we began discussing the aforementioned issues, it became apparent to me that the only thing Beijingers knew about the tainted milk scandal was that a couple of babies died and it was related to malnutrition. See, the most interesting thing about being here for me is that I really am experiencing what life is like under an authoritarian government, and most importantly, discovering that it’s not all bad. After all, with the kind of unilateral decision making the government employs, everything runs very efficiently around here, and there’s certainly no restraint on economic opportunity. What results is a society that is buoyed by myriad social services, and a populace that is, at least according to the statistics much happier than ours. Obviously, the price they pay is freedom or information and government accountability, but it’s not as if life is unbearable over here, it’s simply a happy oblivion. The other thing that the Chinese have managed incredibly well is the shaping of opinions via there very strong and well structured education system. Oh, sure they all know about various social issues, from Tibet, to overpopulation, to the disparity between rich and poor, but everyone’s opinion has been carefully molded by the government ever since they entered school.

An example is when a friend and I were talking over the Tibet issue a couple of weeks back: My roommate, again, listened intently the whole time we were talking, about the various injustices the government had incurred, and the sad state in which most Tibetans lived, given their lack of natural resources and the way in which Han Chinese had moved in to take away all the middle class jobs. Afterwards, he explained to us that it wasn’t that he disagreed, it was just that he’d never even thought of it in those terms before. He was always taught that, regardless of who invaded who, the Great Industrial Machine that is China had rescued Tibet out of sure economic squalor, and that even though it had what it had today thanks to China, the people still insisted on ungratefully fighting against their saviors. He, and everyone else in China, never realized that the Tibetan people don’t necessarily want to be a part of the greatness that is China, and would really prefer to go on living a quiet, poor, agrarian life. The most interesting part of it all, was that, instead of opposing our views, and repeating the spiel that he had been taught many times over, he seemed genuinely affected by our opinions, and inclined to agree. I think, for most Chinese citizens, their willingness to go along with all their governments dubious actions is more forced ignorance than it is willful support.

So, after several weekends of variable inactivity around Beijing, our group headed out for a two night camping trip to the Great Wall. The first thing that struck me about the great wall is that there were no people. Well, relatively; everywhere we’ve been, even outside of Beijing, has to this point been bursting at the seams with people. We showed up in a little village of maybe 100 people, and set out hiking. The hike was only about three hours, and 6 miles worth of Wall, but it was very difficult. It seems as if, when building the wall, the Chinese just decided to build straight up and over any mountain they cam across, never mind going with the contours of the land. Gotta love that authoritarian decision making.

Anyway, it seemed as if the Wall was just never ending sets of stairs, up down up down, and most of the stairs were in no way even, making travel quite slow. Some parts of the wall were completely unrestored, which added a fun bit of danger to it all. So, we arrived at our destination, a town even smaller and more provincial than the one we just left. To give you an idea, as we walked along the (only street) a couple of little children started laughing at me because they thought my face looked so funny. They’d never seen a Westerner before. That night we held a bonfire/party out in the town square, then went back out to the Wall to bed down for the night. To get out of the wind my roommate and I chose and old abandoned tower with no roof so that we could still see the stars. I woke up at about 3 a.m. and there was a full fledged meteor shower going on up above. The next day before heading back a friend and I went exploring other parts of the Wall, and we found some places where nature was definitely winning the battle with the wall. Before we headed back, we took part in a yoga class held on one of the battle platforms, much to the delight of all passersby. The Wall was overall, incredible. There were several places around that were true highpoints in the terrain, and from those places you could look out and see dozens of miles of wilderness, and of course, wall. I think at one point we counted and could see 40 different towers from one vantage point.
The weather’s finally getting colder around here, and the sun is setting well before 6:00, but it’s still pretty comfy. The winter actually means more business in terms of street food and activities, as all the business the government put a hold on for the Olympics is slowly reemerging now. I’m heading off to Inner Mongolia next week for Fall Break, so the next should be update coming soon.

You know that really awesome scene in "The 13th Warrior" when the narrator doesn't know Norse, so he sits and listens to the other twelve guys talk for like three months straight and figures out the language all on his own? You know how after that you're thinking "wow, maybe i can learn a language if i try at it?" Well i'm here to tell you that you can't and that that some languages just weren't meant to be learned. See, i'm convinced, after my four weeks here that Chinese was invented with the distinct goal of never being able to be learned by outsiders, much like those Navajo languages they used in WWII to throw the Nazis off. You see, in Chinese things can be pronounced the same but have 10 different meanings, there are no tenses or conjugations to speak of, you can't really sing songs because then there are no tones to listen to, and using a dictionary to look up a word is the equivalent of trying to find the address of a Guantanamo Bay detainee using the local phonebook. I'm not really this mad about being here, on the contrary, it's really fun, everything is much cheaper than in the U.S. and the people are mostly very friendly. But after trying to get around the city using anything other than maps and guides in English, i'm conviced that Chinese and English could not be more antagonistic languages if we tried to make them so.

So my first trip to the Paralympics: The Paralympics are actually really great: The sports might be more obscure, and a bit strange, but the price of admission is low, the venues are still all the same, and thanks to them traffic in the city is still at half capacity. My roommate and I first decided to go to mang-ren-men-qiu (literally Blind people door ball in chinese) or Goalball in English. It was the one event being hosted at his university, so we figured we'd check it out. What Goalball involves is six people, three on a side, all blindfolded (they don't actually have disabilities), who stand in front of a 30 ft. long soccer goal. Then, one athlete will take the ball, which is probably 10 lbs., not bouncy, and has a jingly little noisemaker insided, and bowl it toward the opponents' goal. It's their job to stop the ball using any part of their body possible.
Needless to say, it's a pretty odd sport, and after a while it got a bit tiresome to watch, especially since the crowd has to be completely silent in order for the athletes to hear the ball coming, so i spent most of my time being entertained by Lele, the mascot of the Paralympics, who is a cow that, dances, sings, and every once in a while tries to induce the crowd into doing the wave or the hokey pokey with her. Nonetheless, the crowd all got fired up for the final match, China vs. the U.S. in which our team, who all looked like ex bodybuilders or navy seals, got completely trashed by three frail looking Chinese women with a combined height of maybe 16 ft. (i'm not saying there's an allegory here, but....). Afterwards, we went out so i could tour my roommate's school and meet his friends, none of whom knew exactly how big the school was, although the all insisted it was very big. Chinese Universities, if this one was anything to go by, really aren't too different from American ones, in fact they seem practically identical, minus the living situation. However, by then the bus lines had closed for the night and we had to use my roommate's bike to get back. What followed was a literally mortifying 30 minute ride in which i had to balance myself on the rear rack of his bike, holding my legs off the ground while trying not to overbalance and tip the bike over. The next morning my abs, legs and every muscle in between were feeling like I had been the one working out. Seriously, i've been on a lot of bike rides, but i think riding like that was more difficult than pedalling a bike has ever been.

Two days later, on Thursday, I decided to head out of town to catch some paralympic rowing. Little did i know how far out of town meant. So i foolishly tried to take the bus to the Olympic green, after hearing that lots of bus lines ended up there. As it turns out, there is no comprehensive map of the Beijijng Bus system, you have to be at the stop of a particular bus route to find any information on where that line actually goes. Because of this, after an hour of fruitless searching, i abandoned the busses, and decided to take the subway. Three transfers and an hour and a half later i arrived at the Green, only to hear that the special bus to the rowing park didnt come back for another half hour. By this time it was already maybe an hour into the rowing events, so i was slightly more than nervous. The bus finally arrived, and we got underway. However, for whatever reason, on a day with no traffic and all highways and expressways to go on, it took the bus over an hour just to arrive at the rowing park. Needless to say, when we arrived there were only maybe two events left. It was, i think most worthwhile just to go see the venue, which was really gorgeous in its own right. While I was there I met these three college students who wanted to know where i was from, and take a picture with me. Even though they knew some English and I (thought) i knew some Chinese, it was still really hard to communicate, hence my wonder that anyone is ever able to learn this language.

The next day, a few classmates and I decided to check out the Zoo, which is located very close to the school. Though we didn't get to see it all, it was really impressive, spacious, green and really well designed for both tourists and researchers. The Panda House was the highlight of the zoo, (it cost an extra 10 kuai to get in). However, the Pandas were really neat, and by all appearances the Chinese have taking care of them and breeding them all figured out. In one section they had sacks of sand roughly representing the weight of the Pandas, with the 1 year olds weighing in at about 110 lbs. and the two year olds around 270 lbs. I, physical specimen that I am, lifted the two year old and promptly destroyed my back for the next three years.
Afterwards we went to Beihai Park, a 1,000 year old Tang Dynasty lake area with several of Beijing's famous landmarks, including the Nine Dragons Fold and the Drum Tower (where the father in law of the men's volleyball coach was killed). The archictecture was all very classically Chinese, although it was so lacquered that it was hard to tell if it was authentic or had been altered recently.
That night we went out to the concert of a popular Chinese rock band, which unlike Chinese pop music, which I abhor, had some real artistic merit. The next day we went on a full fledged field trip, out to Beijing's most famous Buddhist Temple, Tanzhe, which I was initially excited about. As it turned out, though, the place was really very touristy, although it seemed like most of the Chinese people had come to burn incense and pray to one of the literally dozens of statues in the compound.
Maybe if i understood more about Buddhism it would have been different for me. It also seemed that the many outlying grounds of the temple were off limits, and those areas appeared to be more intriguing. The next day, for whatever reason, the people who had agreed with me to go to Tiananmen decided instead to change it up and go to...Behai! so i got a second tour, which involved exploring all the same places, although it was funny when we went looking for a site on the map called "the Land of Extreme Happiness" only to find that the map at that end of the park had no record of such a place. I'll never figure China out.

So, after three weeks, I finally decided that I had accrued enough things to remark upon to start writing this blog. China is a totally different place from the U.S, but if you just take the country at face value, things don't look that different: There's skyscrapers and cars everywhere, fast food and tourist sites abound, and people here love to eat a lot. Once you get to know some places, however, it becomes apparent just how much is lost in the chasm between our language and culture, and that of the Chinese.

So, off from the airport, I had a relatively quiet flight over to Chicago, nothing remarkable. Getting on to my international flight, though, felt like stepping into a sample of China, and that sample was not at all pleasant. About 80% of the plane I would, guess, was Chinese, along with the stewardesses, which made communication very difficult. Add in the fact that it was a 14 hour flight and that there were at least 20 (ok maybe more like 3, but it felt like 20) little Chinese babies around me, and I didn't sleep all flight. To top it off, about 2 hours before landing, one baby threw up on the seat in front of him, but the stewardesses didn't really possess the proper cleaning tools to deal with it so....yeah. Anyway, getting off the plane and out of the airport was suprisingly easy. For whatever reason, when we arrived, there were only a handful of people in the huge, brand new terminal they had built for the olympics. The airport is far on the outskirts of the city, beyond all of the five ring roads that encircle Beijing, so we got to see a large vertical slice of the city as we came in. It was suprisingly nice; despite the smog, the outer areas were quite verdant, and traffic, which is still at half usage thanks to the paralympics, wasn't bad. Beijing interior however, was quite shocking. I don't think any of us realized this previously, but Beijing, as host to much of the major commerce in China, is, on an infastructural level far larger and more superior to any city in America. Think of New York, only larger, cleaner, and well, Chinese.

Our school, conversely, lies in an alley so tiny that not a single taxi driver in Beijing knows the name of it. The school apparently, was built as a commuter school in the 1970's (hence the slightly Communist architecture) and as far as anyone I have talked to knows, us 50 kids and our Chinese roommates, all of whom attend other universities, are the only permanent residents. Because of this, the facilities are old, even by Chinese standards. The toilets lack the ability to flush paper, and the water contains too much iron to really drink extensively. The roommates they bring in are to help us learn Chinese in a non-classroom setting, yet as we found out, its as beneficial for them as it is for us. While our moderate sized one room doubles may seem typical, in China, the average dormitory room has anywhere from from 6 to 10 occupents, each of which recieve little more than a bed and wardrobe. Orientation weekend involved getting lost all over Beijing in what was somewhat appropriately called a Scavenger Hunt. Although we (literally) ran around many of Beijings famous sites, we were moving too quickly to stop and take photos, so I still need to go back and do that, if possible. The most impressive thing for me, during that time, was seeing the way China has set itself up to be a first class power in the very new future. All the money they have thanks to the U.S. Government and (formerly) U.S. corporations has helped them build a first rate transportation system, virtually eliminate crime in the city, and provide a number of services for the citizens (most notably, there are parks everywhere which contain exercise equipment free for public use). Despite this, China's economy still hasn't caught up to ours: most days I can get by spending $2-3 on breakfast and dinner, thanks to a number of street vendors who sell food for as little as 1-2 kuai ($0.30).
In preparation for the olympics, the city was extensively cleaned, so the product I'm seeing now may not really represent what it's actually like. The weather has been nice, but then again, pollution levels in Beijing haven't been this good in 10 years.

However, as us students quickly realized, no amount of Chinese study will really prepare you for trying to live and interact there. Most people (and some roommates) accents are too strong to really understand, and upon seeing that you're white, most people try to use what broken and fragmented english words they possess. Doing anything here takes a lot of effort, as such, and it doesn't help that all of the bus stop's and subway station's names don't easily correlate with the location they take you to. I know what everyone's going to suggest - and no, asking directions is a bad idea: even if a Chinese person does not know the location you're asking him or her about (more often than not the case) he or she still feels obligated to answer you, so they will point you in any direction they can.

This last weekend we travelled to Cuandixia, a historical town about 80 miles outside Beijing. Built 500 years ago, in the Ming Dynasty, it was a little haven of a village for the wealth and nobility of the court. The architecture is simple but impressive, traditional in design. The town still functions in a semi-provincial manner, without many ammenities. However, the views were spectacular, as the land surrounding it is forested, rocky land riddled with caves and small bodies of water, seemingly carved out not too long ago. It was maybe the most prominent difference from America I've seen yet.

Well, that's been my introduction to China these first few weeks. Next entry: recapping our trip to Beijing's most famous monastery, as well as my two trips to the Paralympics.