What is she doing this time?
Thanksgiving was lots of fun. It's kind of ironic, but I think this was the biggest and most festive thanksgiving celebration I have ever attended. There were a total of about 50 people (27 students and about 20 or so teachers) and enough food for about 100 people, including traditional thanksgiving fare like turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, etc.; traditional american food like macaroni and cheese, brownies, and fruit salad; and spring rolls. Our teachers for the most part enjoyed the american food, but they were kind of turned off by the turkey. Before hand, we overheard teachers who had eaten turkey before tell other teachers that turkey is kind of like a large chicken, but without any flavor at all, and not nearly as good as Peking duck. One teacher actually went so far as to suggest that maybe instead of getting turkey, we could just order several large Peking ducks.
On Thursday afternoon, we started in earnest to prepare food. We originally planned on making a total of 8 pies, but we ended up making 7 apple pies, 4 pumpkin pies, 2 pecan pies, and an apple cobbler. Our teachers came to help us and learn how to prepare American food. Our cooking class teacher and one 3rd year teacher especially wanted to know how to make pie crust. After mixing the flour and butter and adding water, the teachers began to knead the pie crust. "It's a lot like making dumplings" they said. I tried to tell them that you weren't supposed to overhandle the pie crust, but something got lost in the translation. After producing pie crust that looked like bread dough, we rolled it out. It's maybe a little to hard, I said, because we mixed it too much. In that case, we should add more water, they said, and began to sprinkle water on the pie crust. At that point, it was just easier to go with the flow. I had severe reservations about the edibility of the pie crust, but surprisingly, while not the flakiest pie crust, it was quite edible, and still better than store bought crust.
On Friday, we went to Tianjin, a city about 2 hours south of Beijing and home to Zhou Enlai, possibly China's most beloved political figure (his death in 1976 provoked the first Tiananmen demonstration). In Tianjin, I bought an erhu, or traditional two stringed Chinese musical instrument. It sounds similar to a violin, but much more nasily and abrasive. The first time I played, it sounded like a donkey being strangled. However, I also bought a "how to play the erhu" book as well as a book of traditional and patriotic erhu songs from 1949-1979. My current plan is if all else fails, I can play my erhu on the street corner.
Since today is Thanksgiving, ACC every year throws a Thanksgiving party, where we make traditional food and then invite our teachers to eat. The hardest part about fixing a traditional thanksgiving dinner (besides not having recipes) is that it is very hard to find ingredients. There is a western grocery store about 20 minutes away from our school which sells some things like butter and cheese (at very expensive prices), but even these aren't exactly the same (the boy who wanted to find Kalamata olives was completely out of luck). For example, I volunteered to make pie crust, and since I couldn't find shortning, I used butter. After unwrapping the butter, for a moment I thought it was cheese, itwas yellow and waxy and almost gummy and had a strange taste. We were all cooking in our cafeteria's kitchen, and it was very different, because they didn't even the most common utensils used in Western cooking, for example, forks, or paring knives. In China, people just use one incredibly large knife for everything (using smaller knives is a sign of ineptitude), spoons and chopsticks. Luckily, one girl had a potato masher which also worked for pie crusts. Fortunately, ACC buys the turkeys for us.
Hope everyone is having a nice holiday.
My roommate just sent me an article saying that in China, because guns are outlawed and most other weapons are strictly regulated, poisoning is the main method of murder. It has even gotten to the point that in villages, the government has outlawed several types of rat poison because so many people have died after a relative or neighbor put it in their food. In fact, poisoning, accidental or intentional, is the leading cause of death for young people age 15-29 (I would have thought it would be traffic accidents, judging from the way people drive). If that statistic includes food poisoning though, maybe it isn't too surprising. One of my classmates ate some shellfish and came down with acute enteritis. After a week, he went to the doctor and they told him if he had waited much longer, he probably would have died. It's a situation that I don't even want to think about.
Compared to most people on this trip, I have had extremely good health. Although I have the unavoidable gan mao, or cold, and have had a few days of upset stomach, I really haven't been sick at all. I hope writing this entry hasn't cursed me and now I will end up with SARS or something, but I am definitely feeling fairly lucky. So far kids have had, bronchitis, pneumonia, tonsilitis, and sinusitis, ear infections (my roommate just had outpatient surgery) incurable foot fungus, as well as horrible food poisoning. I don't know if it's that relatively susceptible people came on our program, or if it's just China--It could definitely be the pollution, some days its so thick the city looks as if it's covered in a thick burning fog, and the sun looks like an eerie orange-red ball through the haze. Every morning before class, we look out the windows and count how many builidings we can see to gauge the extent of the pollution. On the worst days, we can only see the buildings next to our school. On those days, we can feel ourselves breath because the air is almost chunky. And every day I blow my nose, my mucus is black with soot.(actually, it's not really as bad as it sounds, it's just some days, and I hear it's much better than it was, because the government has released soviet era chemicals into the atmosphere above Beijing to clean up the pollution in order to get ready for the 2008 Olympics. While it may be better than it was, I can't believe that world class atheletes would be willing to compete in this city in 5 years--though as my friend pointed out, as enefficient as the Chinese government can be in many aspects, when they really want to get something done, they go out and do it with the speed and success rate baffling to everyone else, e.g. build a hospital in 8 days, or start a successful space program from almost out of nowhere. Maybe they will be able to transform Beijing into a clean city in 5 years after all)
Last night I went to dinner at the house of a colleague of my friend who is an advertising and circulation coordinator at the People's Daily newspaper. She, her husband and son lived in a modern condominium near my school. Their condo was fairly spacious (for China) looked basically like an IKEA catalog (there is an IKEA outlet in Beijing, I rode by it in a taxi), it was decorated in tasteful scandinavian furniture. Their kitchen was incredibly modern and they also had a brand new computer, television, and piano. They were incredibly interesting, as well as very curious about American and the American mindset. During dinner, I asked her if she believed that it would be possible to implement communism, and every one started to laugh. "Britta," she told me, "I'm a communist party official. How could I believe otherwise." She told me that the communism of Marx, and not the communism of Russia or even of Mao was the communism of the future. Originally, Marx outlined 4 stages countries need to go through--feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism. China's main problem, according to her, was that China tried to jump from feudalism to socialism. Now, China needs to go back and institute capitalism so that it can reenter socialism and eventually become communist. America is stuck on capitalism, she told me, they have some socialist parts, but they need to think past the free market, and past personal freedom. Her husband, an Amerophile (I don't know if that's a word) didn't agree, and they got in a big debate. "During the cultural revolution" she told me "this probably couldn't happen"
Tonight I am preparing to give a 15 minute oral presentation on my independent report, which is pretty daunting, because we can't use any notes at all. I also needed some visual aids, so two teachers and I borrowed a digital camera and went out to photograph mingong, which is an abbreviation meaning "peasant worker." It was dark and cold and rainy, but we went to this construction site near the subway and asked some one who seemed to be the boss if we could take pictures. After several minutes of conivincing, he finally let us. Even though it was after 7 pm, there were still lots of workers still working. They were covered in mud and looked exhausted. My teachers seemed very uncomfortable, you can really see how sharp class differences are in China
Last Friday we went to an acrobatics show. Our teachers said it was pretty ordinary as far as acrobatics shows go, but compared to American standards, it was pretty extraordinary. There were girls maybe 8 years old balancing on their head on top of other girls heads (okay, so thats maybe a confusing sentence, but I can't think of a better way to put it). There were also women who appeared to have no spines at all forming what looked like impossible contortions, as well as about 20 people riding one bicycle. It was fascinating, but also painful just to see people do such things. China is the home to acrobatics, there is even a famous town where every one in the town performs acrobatics, and people come from all over China just to watch. Our teachers told me that it is a hereditary job; parents start training their children when they are about 3 years old or so, and it is a very harsh life.
On another note, in my one-on-one conversation class today, my teacher asked me if that "vegetarian problem" was really wide spread in America. I told her that lots of people were vegetarians, and she looked slightly disgusted. She said that we should eat a diet similar to that of Chimpanzees, because it most resembles our original diet. Furthermore, not eating meat puts one lower on the food chain, and if one continues on such a deficient diet, one might evolve to take on characteristics of say, herbavores, such as sheep. She did concede that if one didn't want to eat actual animal meat, one could just eat animal fat, and that might be okay (fat is a very popular dish here in China). It's an interesting take, perhaps more research should be done exploring this hypothesis.
My Chinese teachers are always giving me useful advice on how to be a healthier and better person. For example, whenever I have a cold, one teacher told me it was due to changes in the weather or humidity, and I needed to put on more clothes (no matter how many clothes I am wearing or how warm it is), or because I am not drinking enough hot water. My teachers say that one should never drink cold water because it upsets the body's temperature balance, and interferes with one's qi. One also shouldn't eat oranges when one has a sore throat, because they contain too much vitality, and can further irritate the throat and ones qi.
I once told my teacher I had nightmares, and she immediately told me not to sleep on my stomach or place my arms near my heart when I slept, because it was uncomfortable and if the body is ever uncomfortable, it leads to psychological discomfort, and therefore, nightmares. It's interesting how different Chinese folk wisdom is from Western folk wisdom. At first when my teachers told me these, I was incredulous, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is just as plausible as say, the idea that wet hair causes colds, or that one should pat a coughing person on the back, etc.
Today I handed in my final draft of my paper. Even though it is completely finished, I still can't believe that I wrote an almost 4,000 word essay in Chinese, or that it didn't seem to be as hard to write as I thought it would be (Maybe I'm as wordy in Chinese as I am in English). I don't know if it is well written or not (I know I definitely could have spent more time and energy writing it) but I am very glad it's done. This Thursday, I have to give an oral presentation of my paper. I know I should start preparing, but it's hard to know how to start. Other than that, life is going on as usual.
We have a talent show next Saturday in which everyone needs to perform. I have been going to this dance class, where we have been up until about 2 weeks ago, haphazardly learning this Xinjiang (an autonomous region in Western China inhabited by Turkic peoples) dance. Suddenly, when we realized we had to perform, we started to get more serious. Still, I don't know if we can pull it off, or if maybe we will end up with an unintentional comedy routine. THe dance is very different from Western dances, with lots of complex hand motions, all of which seem almost the same but aren't exactly in a key way only our teacher seems to notice. We also have to wear costumes, and the teacher, who is about 5'2'' and 90lbs, also says she has costumes for all of us. Seeing as I am maybe the smallest one in the class, I have no clue how these costumes are going to fit.
On another note, the last of the snow finally melted. When we were in Shanghai, it snowed six inches in Beijing. Luckily, the weather has been slightly warmer and drier, but it is still fairly cold here.
I just recieved a message from the Dean of Swarthmore college saying, "due to lack of interest, today has been cancelled." To bad I didn't get it until the afternoon, otherwise maybe I wouldn't have gotten out of bed.
I just spent the last couple of days in Shanghai, which is an amazing city. People have compared Beijing and Shanghai to Washington DC and New York, and that might be a fairly good description, Beijing is (although rapidly changing) a pretty down to earth working city and compared to the frenzied cosmopolitan capitalism of Shanghai, feels pretty laid back. Shanghai is full of huge sky scrapers, condos, and fancy hotels, late 19th century western architecture (for much of the past 150 years, Shanghai has been partitioned between the colonial powers of France, England, Germany, the US, and Japan)and smaller dingier but just as lively little neighborhoods with small stores and eateries. My friend and I serendipitously (I hope that's right) ran into this Chinese girl our own age, who offered to help us back to our hotel and eat some dinner with us (it was kind of late, and we had to take a ferry as well as walk quite a distance). After we ate Shanghai's special bao zi, which are little dumplings filled with pork and sweet broth, mutton, sheep intestine, and liver shish kebob, it was after 11pm and she left us with instructions on how to get back. We of course had trouble, and it took us over an hour to find out how to get back to the hotel. As we wandered through the neighborhoods though, it was amazing to see people sitting outside, eating, playing cards, singing, and laughing as though it were noon instead of midnight. The weather was also incredibly warm, giving the whole situation a very surreal air.
A couple of days later, we returned to the small restaurant, and on the advice of the girl we met earlier, ordered a soup. It turned out to be blood soup, which meant it consisted of a clear broth with chunks of congealed blood and cilantro. It was actually very tasty.
Besides eating food, we also went to the new Shanghai museum, which is possibly the best museum in China, and is very amazing (they also, unlike most museums, have comprehensive English labels) and a small town about 2 hours away known for its famous canals and its unabashed tourism (at least it should be, you have to pay to enter the village if you don't live there). Despite the fact that it was a major tourist site, the locals were all very curious to see us, although communicating was kind of hard, because they mainly spoke Shanghainese, which is a mutually unintelligable dialect. I also went to the Communist party museum. Shanghai is the where the Chinese communist party was founded (communism was outlawed by the Chinese government, but since Shanghai was under foreign control, there was no way for them to arrest the leaders), which was a surprisingly well put together and interesting museum, full of interesting artifacts from late 19th and early 20th century Shanghai history. It also had excellent English signs, and only cost 1 kuai (about 12 cents).
One interesting thing is that on Nanjing jie, one of Shanghai's main streets, which is so full of neon it puts Times Square to shame, there is a large bronze statue to consumerism. It features a family nobly looking into the distance, with big shopping bags in their hands. It was kind of strange to see such unabashed worship of capitalism, especially in a communist country, but then again, to me, Shanghai didn't really feel like mainland China.
This weekend I went ballroom dancing. It was possibly the strangest experience of my life. The ballroom was in this large building which also had an arcade hall, and looked exactly like a high school prom, with numerous disco balls and an area in the center with a DJ. The music was very eclectic, with lots of polka (including 'roll out the barrel') a few waltzes, rhumbas, etc., Chinese and American pop music, and even the macarena. My friend and I tried to teach people the proper way to dance the Macarena, but most people seemed content with sticking to the polka, even though the rhythm was completely off. Possibly the strangest song though, was this traditional-sounding (on the pentatonic scale) Chinese dance song. It was very peppy, and the only words I could make out were she hui zhu yi (socialism) and Mao zhu xi (Chairman Mao). I asked this Chinese man, and he said it was a tribute to Chairman Mao. Everyone danced this strange, almost hopping dance to it with lots and lots of spins. It was incredibly bizarre. Most people at the dance hall were at least 35, and lots of women wore professional ballroom dancing outfits with floor length poofy skirts and stiletto heels (and were very good). The men by in large dressed all in black and slicked back their hair. My friend and I, being the youngest people there by probably 15 years and the only foreigners got asked to dance a lot, even though our polka skills were not quite up to par.
