The China Match

Gonna keep with this theme of multiple posts per post till I’m all caught up.

Today: we slept in till one (kinda gross. Usually like to wake up by noon at least, but Ben Segal isn’t here to make that happen, unfortunately), then proceeded to sell four of our classmate’s bikes for a total of 260 kuai. Each of us took a hundred and then we bought lunch at Xiabu Xiabu — good call, Loren! — with the other 60. It’s like a personal hotpot joint, and is always packed with Chinese people for good reason. Dan went off to get his suit fitted, and I recovered some whiskey from the drying room in building 18, did some laundry, and sold off another bike for 80 kuai. Coulda gotten more but made a stupid bargaining mistake. Bah. Met dan eventually in SanLiTun (known colloquially in room 206 as ‘fuckin sanlitun‘ because we’re both sick of going there, but are often for various reasons compelled to), and used the 80 to buy dinner at a pizza place by the worker’s stadium near vics called the Kro’s Nest which was pretty rad. I’ve missed mozzarella sticks. Nothing too much else to note yet, because we haven’t gone out for the night (if that even happens at all, anyway… it’s pretty rainy and gross out).

Ooh except this one little kid on the subway who was grumbling about waiguoren (foreigners). As the only foreigner around, I assumed it with me and told him “zhege waiguoren tingdedong hanyu” (this foreigner understands chinese). He was pretty embarrassed but his parents seemed thoroughly amused; it’s funny to me that in America I tend to assume that everybody understands English, but in china people are perpetually surprised when discover that they can’t talk about you right in front of you. Relatedly, I hate being accosted in English by shopkeepers, and have on a number of occasions told them that i can only speak spanish and chinese (first in the former language, then the latter). I’ve yet to find one who knows any spanish, so this is generally pretty effective at stopping them from reverting to english the second your chinese stumbles at all.

Also, purely for the sake of good record keeping,  both Dan and I have agreed to a now-till-40-years-old total Vics tally. We both figure we won’t be completely done with Beijing for a long long time, and one night of each subsequent Beijing visit will probably wind up at Vics somehow, as nights are wont to do. So we’re gonna keep a big freakin’ tally of how many times this transpires between now and 2030 or something. And now for something completely different…

July 31st: Pretty cool day altogether. We started at the antique market, which was crowded and rather humid. Note when I say rather humid, our teacher would prefer I said “apocalyptically sweltering” or something. Both Zhang and Gu were actually freaking out the whole time about the heat, and were constantly checking to make sure nobody had heat-stroked out in the middle of the market. Granted I’m from Austin and was walking around with a Floridan and a Caribbean Islander so perhaps our group was a bit biased, but honestly we thought the weather definitely was tolerable. Anywho we saw a bunch of cool statues and artifacts, and I got some calligraphy done of my name (牧 克文). The calligrapher himself was really friendly, and let Andrew and I practice lots of Chinese with him and his family.

After that we went to the Temple of Heaven, which is where the emperor would come to pray, if I recall correctly.

I’d write more about this, but honestly when you don’t blog right after something happens, you lose almost all of the little details that make it interesting or funny. So really you’re just as well off going to wikipedia or something. Suffice it to say it was a neat historical site. I do remember that in one of the courtyards leading up to the temple, there was a spot where one could ostensibly speak to the entire universe. I learned this once we had already passed it, however, so I didn’t get to deliver any message onto all that exists. That’s a lot of pressure when you think about it. Wonder what I shoulda said.

Anyway the day didn’t stop there, but this blog is about to, because as ever I am sleepy. We went from the temple to the pearl market, which is shockingly a place where you can get real pearls on the cheap. I didn’t. I did get this awesome “Armani” belt for 30 quai though which has served me quite well. I think I also picked up some shirts or something there, but again, details fade. I do remember Ashley eating a big green tea blizzard though, notable because she is allergic to milk, so by the time we got to the acrobatics show, her throat was starting to close up, which was more than a little worrisome. The record can reflect that I told the girl not to eat it, but ooh well. She made it through the show ok.

Chinese acrobatics shows, incidentally, are every bit as impressive as you might imagine that they are. Among other things, they juggled twelve year old girls on to and off of a totem pole of people, put literally twenty girls onto a single bicycle, and did some tricks with diabolos that I can’t really even describe. Suffice it to say that the whole show was awesome in the true form of the word. Awe was inspired about every forty-five seconds. Absolute craziness.

I actually went to these temples yesterday, because today’s (the 17th) post header wouldn’t have been particularly exciting. “Suits and sandwiches,” I guess. But yeah, picked up two tailored shirts and two suits from YaShow today (Alright listen. It’s YaXiu. 秀。 Xiu. Wade-Giles can go to hell for confusing me so much and making me unable to pronounce things properly. anyway–) for US $300 even, which is pretty incredible. Oh, and Dan got one measured, so when he goes back for fitting tomorrow I’ll be busy hawking my schoolmates’ bikes (shoutouts to andrew, david, ashley, anna, lauren, and chrissy for leaving me their keys) for lunch money in wudaokou. Also, mainly for my own benefit later, as a note to self I need to go back to Bocata and eat their local beef, bacon and cheese sandwich as frequently as is feasible. Holy god.
Also around Yashow, we saw a male version of a romper and a 70 year old woman wearing a polo clearly emblazoned with the playboy logo. Both pretty excellent. Both made me regret not having a camera on me.
Right now i just got back from City Mall, having seen a movie entitled “city under seige.” I was under the impression that this movie would be subtitled into english, mainly because A) it was an international theater and B) Dan told me that it was subtitled into english. In actuality it was indeed subtitled, but only into chinese. The film was absolutely terrible but the plot was simplistic enough so that I could follow it pretty well with the help of the subtitles; the forty quai ticket was almost worth it for the confidence boost that the experience of understanding at least 2/3rds of a movie in a different language bequeaths.

One of many Buddhas. Two stories tall. Shouldn't have taken this picture, but it was just too cool.

The temples yesterday were each awesome in their own right. The Yonghe / 雍和 / Lama temple is an operating Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and people there take things very seriously. They’re also making a racket on incense sticks, because in order to properly show respect to a given Buddha, believers or tourists are prompted to first burn three sticks of incense in their honor outside. There are at least thirty, maybe more Buddhas in there; the temple happily sells you the opportunity to be sufficiently devout. They also sell white people the chance to ring a bell obnoxiously in the middle of the courtyard. Every time this happened, the white person in question would grin like an idiot and the Chinese people around would generally throw him disapproving looks, at which point he’d either ring it again or hand it to the next 白人。 很好玩

The Confucian temple was cool enough, but weird for a couple reasons. First, it was pretty empty, relatively speaking. Normally anywhere this pretty would be packed to the brim with various chinese tourists, but I guess ol’ 孔夫子 isn’t quite as popular these days.
Second, it doesn’t make much sense conceptually, because Confucianism isn’t really a capital R religion so much as a set of social guidelines intended to inform how people ought to approach different relationships. It’d sorta be like building a big shrine to Rousseau or Nozick or something — it’s hard to find a Western parallel. If you have a better one, feel free to comment.  Third, ok this isn’t weird so much as funny, but Dan tried to buy a coke with a torn bill and the shopkeepers had to chase him down as he was leaving.  He has been trying to foist this bill off on people for forever, and it doesn’t really work. Upsets people even more than trying to pay for bus fare with nothing but dimes, which is a new favorite hobby of mine. Screw the Jiao, dude.

So now I’ve turned twelve in Tokyo and twenty in Beijing. Wonder where 2018’ll find me. Anyway, I’m starting out my third decade of life as of a week ago (weird weird weird), and had a pretty incredible birthday. Spent the afternoon at these two parks near the forbidden city.

The first one — pretty sure it was Jingshan — featured the tallest non-building point in Beijing, a lot of retired people dancing and singing, and a tree where some Ming emperor off’d himself. Oh, and dinosaurs. Gotta have your dinosaurs. The Jurassic-park-theme-on-infinite-repeat thing got old pretty fast, though. I think Gu laoshi also mentioned something about how the line that divides the forbidden city from this angle is actually the north-south line for all of Beijing; consequently posing in front of the little pole that marks said line on the tallest hill in the city was really popular among all the other tourists there. This resulted in sorta a wait, so some of the Chinese tourists got bored and instead opted to get pictures of the second best thing, namely themselves next to random white people. Photographing oneself next to uncomfortable-looking 外国人 is somewhat of a national pastime, really. Making them pose with your kids even moreso.

Next up was Beihai, which was less crowded and a lot prettier. It had ornate walkways and gates everywhere, and you could go paddle boating if you had the time to. We didn’t. Anyway nothing really stands out as particularly memorable but overall it was a nice place to kill a couple hours.

Birthday dinner was also pretty rad; we got to go to DinTaiFung — this incredible Taiwanese soup dumpling place that Mike showed us in Shanghai. It went over well, which was pretty much expected considering that they are probably the best things I’ve eaten in China. We’d gone dancing the night before (my first time at Vick’s, actually. Cool place) so after that I think we just went back. I don’t really remember much past that because my memory is fogged by the deliciousness of the dumplings. I’m completely ok with this.

The haze was a little unfortunate, but I doubt it's the last time I'll see this

Went to the Great Wall (长城) this past Sunday. It was only two hours away from Qinghua – the bus left at eight – so it made for a really nice day trip. The wall is (shockingly) pretty long, so we were able to find a part that didn’t have many tourists on it until we showed up. The NU president came with us, along with a trustee couple and their eleven year old kid. I got along way better with said kid than I did with the adults, but that’s kinda to be expected.
I mean, granted, my only interaction with the president of Northwestern was to ask him to Ice my friend on my behalf. Now, I have been lead to believe that I might have a few readers who may not be familiar with the concept of “Icing” someone (shoutout to mom’s friends, potential future employers, or really anyone else over thirty. While I am generally a responsible boy and would of course never even consider drinking whilst underage, the alcoholic age of majority in China is eighteen, so such behavior in moderation is completely justifiable and socially acceptable), so here’s a very brief explanation: there exists a rather unpleasant drink called Smirnoff Ice. It comes in a variety of unnatural fruity flavors, and is widely accepted to be both very girly and something that even most girls have a healthy distaste for. You might imagine, then, that the market for such a beverage is fairly limited — and it is, with one exception. Smirnoff Ice is used as a weapon. By presenting someone with an Ice, you obligate them to “take a knee,” that is, kneel down, and chug the entire thing in one go.
The drink isn’t that alcoholic, so this isn’t as damaging as one might initially imagine, but chugging for instance a warm, Green-Apple flavored Smirnoff Ice certainly isn’t a fun experience. Refusal to drink results in excommunication — you can never Ice anyone else. The only way to block an Icing is to have an Ice of your own on your person when you are challenged, in which case the challenger is forced to kneel and drink both. This puts Smirnoff in an awkward position, because while it’s clear that the drink’s sales have skyrocketed since the game became popular, the company still can’t really endorse an activity that is only “fun” because their product is so awful.
Anyway, my friend Andrew Iced me the other day, and was doing some pretty heavy networking with the president, so I thought it’d be funny if Mr. Schapiro were to Ice him back for me on the Great Wall. Morty was tempted, but alas, some policy prevented him from pressuring a 20 year old student to chug terrible alcohol in a very public place. Damn. But of course the Great Wall was a lot of fun anyway. We were in a more run-down part of it, which actually proved to be much more of a blessing than anything; it apparently kept the bulk of the tourists away, and it made the experience feel like something more than just walking down a sidewalk. There were steep ledges that you had to climb, sections of the wall that had collapsed, all sorts of plant and insect life obstructing the way, and a dozen other tiny challenges that made the hike, if you want to call it that, a lot of fun. The eleven year old was actually a huge help here as well. He wanted to go fast and explore the further parts of the wall, but kept having to wait for his dad to catch up and was getting frustrated. Noticing this, I generously volunteered to accompany the lad so that he could go as fast as he liked. And by that, I mean I was grateful to receive social permission to go running down the Great Wall like an idiot, because really when it comes to climbing and exploring I’m still eleven too.
So while the group was taking their seventeenth or whatever round of pictures, on the first tower they found, two or three of us were basically just running around everywhere else. Because we were going quickly, we were actually able to get to the ‘end’ of our section of a wall – demarcated by impassable, dense brush ending in a barbed-wired barrier – unlike almost everyone else in the group. Needless to say I had a good time with it. I was honestly a little afraid that it’d just be a tourist-packed trudge past a ton of stands selling T shirts or something; the fact that the wall was totally empty aside from our group was probably the best part.

A side note about the wall: the old ladies who hang out there are insane. Like, will follow you a mile or so, trying to sell bracelets or drinks or whatever else. And you have nowhere to run except straight forward along a narrow path and you’re up against someone who does nothing but climb up and down the great wall all day harassing people. From what I could tell, there are only three options to make them leave you alone: you can ignore them for like twenty minutes, be really really rude to them, or haggle extra-unreasonably, which only works if you’re a native speaker and can argue for a fair price of like 2 kuai with a straight face.

Mao and I make a great team, again. I declare this a China Match theme.

Our history class took a field trip to the American Chamber of Commerce yesterday, and to a military history museum the day before. One of these trips featured tanks, Mao Zedong, and awesome fabrications about historical Party activities. The other just had some white chicks and PowerPoint slides. I’ll go ahead and give you some time to guess which one I’ll be focusing on.

Here’s a hint:

I’ll be honest. Any building that comprises 30% Mao, 30% tanks, 30% exaggerated stories of communist victory, and 10% outright lies is gonna be fine by me. This one proved not to be an exception. It was a cool place in its own right, and I liked having more primary-source access to the stories that we’ve been hearing in class. By far the most interesting parts to me, though, were the aforementioned deliberate untruths; I’m not (at least I don’t think) used to museums straight up lying to me. I mean, I get the whole history-is written-by-the-winners angle, and that even the traditional American story brushes plenty of unpleasant things under the rug (Columbus comes to mind). The Chinese, though, go a step further. It’s time for a brief history lesson, so just humor me for a second.

So back in the 1930s the Communist party in China was still fighting for power with the KMT (sometimes GMD — same thing), led at the time by Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT was at the time larger, richer, and better equipped than the CCP, which consequently was forced to retreat into a few key base areas in the mountains. Eventually the KMT was sick of failing to break these, so they basically just built an entire ring of machine gun bunkers (funded in part by the U.S., if I recall) around the whole damn area and leapfrogged them slowly forward, in the aptly named fourth encirclement campaign. Of course, Mao’s forces break free of the bunkers somehow — I think via climbing a mountain and fording a bunch of streams — and so begins the long march. All well and good.

Yeah... this didn't happen. Whoops.

Once they meet up, here’s what the museum says happens: the two armies just happily combined and rolled out Northwards to Yan’an, a safe haven in Shaanxi. That’s all the attention this gets.

Now what actually went down is that Zhang Guotao tried to take power from Mao. Because so many of Mao’s marchers were influential Party members, though, Zhang got outvoted so he turned around and went back South, where his army of like 150,000 people got the crap killed out of them in Sichuan. So he turned around again and started heading for Yan’an, but an order came through from Mao to go pick up some weapons from Russia that were being delivered to northwest China. Zhang needed some cred with Mao at this point and the guys in Yan’an really needed guns, so he agrees.
Halfway there, though, he gets this order to just stop there indefinitely in this random part of northwest China which happened to be occupied by hostile Muslim warlords. Said warlords ostensibly had no problem with this communist army simply passing through their territory, but after Zhang’s army (still 50,000 people) had just been chilling there for a couple weeks, the warlords didn’t have much choice but to begin attacking. Zhang’s army couldn’t run anywhere, had no reinforcements or ways of resupplying themselves. They eventually ran out of bullets and were all slaughtered.

Mao deliberately sacrificed all those people purely so that Zhang Guotao couldn’t use his military to threaten Mao’s authority again, basically. What a classy gentleman. Just look:

The history lesson is done, incidentally, for those of you who got bored and just skipped down to the next picture

Anyway the rest of the museum was just Mao and tanks, Mao and tanks.

Ooh, and this one awesome, sorta terrifying statue.
~~~

Landscaping outside the American Chamber of Commerce