Well, it's been a day of exceptional highs and lows. Some moments were sublime, and some moments were me wandering through a strange city, tired, hungry and stressed.Here's my route (Factory 789 excluded), for those who care to follow:
View Larger Map
Overall, although I certainly have loved parts of the city, I don't know how into Beijing as a whole I am. It's just too big, too much of a pain to walk, too noisy, too crowded. The smog is irritating and there have been moments where, surrounded by crowds of Chinese, I've just about lost my mind. But there are nice moments. I'm just glad I don't have to stay here for three months.
I started today by walking out to the Temple of Heaven, a temple dating from the Ming era that the Emperor used to perform the annual harvest sacrifice (today, I found out that afterwards, in a hilarious collusion of bureaucracy and religion, he would issue an edict saying that the sacrifice had been done). I really loved the Temple of Heaven. The park is absolutely gorgeous, beautiul slate and pine, and the temple is the first piece of Ming era architecture that I really took to. Once again, the crowds of Chinese tourists here for the New Year kind of hampered my enjoyment of the space, but there was one part of the park, the Fasting Palace, that was completely empty. I don't know why; it might be because it was an extra ten yuan and there's nothing really famous there. But it was so empty and quiet and just absolutely gorgeous; probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in. Walking around the Fasting Palace, I was just so happy. It's beautiful places like that which make you happy to be alive so you can see things like that. The Hall of Music Administration, however, which is included in the ticket can be skipped, unless you're really into Chinese musical instruments.
A few odd experiences I had at the Temple of Heaven. First, the issue of separate entrance fees. You often pay a general fee to get into the park, and then another fee to access certain buildings. On one hand, it's the kind of thing that would get my dad grumbling about nickel-and-diming, and quite rightly so. On the other hand, when you're talking about an extra 10 yuan, it literally is nickel-and-diming, and it feels silly to not go somewhere on principle when you came all this way in the first place.
Also, I had a brief conversation with an American from Texas. It was thankfully brief, because he was one of those Westerners I've been seeing a lot of lately, old white men (who clearly have no background in Chinese or in China) with young asian women. It's really, creepily prevalent.
I had a five minute, frustrating but pleasant conversation with an old man on my way out of the Temple of Heaven park, half in English and half in Mandarin. My encounters with the Chinese tend to be rather polar. Either they're delighted that I speak even a little bit of Mandarin and actively engage me, or they're annoyed I even exist. I've been called "waiguoren" (foreigner) a couple of times, but occasionally, the Chinese have been really nice to me, like that old guy.
At this point in the afternoon, I was delirious with hunger and realizing that I haven't had coffee in a couple of days. I wandered into a local restaurant and ordered some pretty gross boiled beef and rice, but I was so starved I didn't care. On a whim, I decided to head up to the Lamaist Temple, which is the most important sanctuary for Mayahana Buddhism outside of Tibet. I was tired and grumpy at that point, and put in an even worse mood by the mobs of Chinese tourists around the temple. But once inside the temple, my mood immediately picked up. What's different about the Lama Temple is that it's an active sanctuary, and so I got to watch the faithful offer incense and pray in front of the statues of the Buddha. It really felt like a spiritual place (even the Chinese didn't take pictures, so I didn't dare) and I was almost tempted to join in, but figured that it wouldn't be right. I also got to see the fascinating mix of business and religion that is the temple: monks in full gear selling incense and collecting donations. The statues here are quite lovely, and there's also a freakin'two story high Buddha carved out of a single piece of wood. So there's also that.
After that, I worked up the courage to trek out to the Factory 789 Art District, out near the 4th ring road (Beijing has several concentric ring roads, think the Beltway). This trip required me to take the bus, which was a white knuckle experience: I crammed in there, listened to a conductor yammer on in Chinese, and hoped to God I read the map right. I've always hated buses, and when you have only the smallest idea of what's going on, it's even worse. Once there, I walked a few blocks (a few blocks here is more like a mile) and ordered some coffee at a Starbucks ripoff chain endemic to the city. Once I had coffee, I felt like Birdman returning to the sun; it was really amazing.
To my chagrin, Factory 789's galleries were all closed due to the holiday. The district is monumental, however, like pretty much everything in Beijing, filled with galleries. The area itself looks pretty nice, and I'm glad I went anyway, just to see Beijing's take on artsy-type areas. Also, it gave me a sense, again, of the sheer sprawl of the place: I was technically in the suburbs, but it was just as urban as any other place, and urban for miles. Overall, I'm not entirely comfortable with the deal the artists here have made with the state. It's incredibly discomfiting to watch soldiers patrol the streets of an arts district. On the other hand, it's not like artists in China have many other choices. I am reminded of Yu Hua defending his friend Zhang Yimou's embrace of the government; you either make compromises, or you get squashed.
From there, I headed to the CCTV building. When I emerged from the subway and saw the building, I almost weeped. Probably part of it was how tired I am, but also, the building is one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen, certainly the most beautiful contemporary building I've ever seen. It's simply thrilling and awe inspiring, dramatic and gorgeous. The building is not open yet (to my knowledge), but I'm glad I was just able to walk by it. It's incredibly magnificent, and one of my top experiences so far.
I planned to buy an early morning ticket to Chengde, at the train station, but quickly abandoned that idea after wandering around among the throngs of people. It's not something to do unless you absolutely know what you want, and since I wasn't prepared, I was just stressed and disoriented by the crowds, and headed off to dinner without even seeing the Ming City Walls, which was the secondary purpose.
The restaurant where I planned to get Peking Duck had been unceremoniously displaced by a government renovation of the street, so I ended up wandering around for a while, hungry, tired and miserable, so desperate for roast duck I started seeing it everywhere, like a mirage. Finally, I gave up and ate at a crowded restaurant near the hostel. This worked out. I had some delicious beef prepared on a red hot iron plate, and made friendly conversation with the waiter (who hilariously had to wear a fake queue) about learning Chinese and reading Dream of The Red Chamber. Eating at these restaurants alone is just crazy, since all Chinese dishes are made for about two people. I feel awful not being able to finish my food, but that's the way it goes.
One thing that really stood out to me today is the presence of the state. Some foreign visitors say that they forget that they're in an authoritarian state, but I don't see how. Soldiers are everywhere, and security checks are ubiquitous. The subways are filled with videos telling you what to do, and the big character banners are still here to a certain extent. One particularly disturbing element is how the party has used the Olympics to promote its aims. The Olympics is used everywhere as a device to push the Chinese into a nationalist stupor, whether through the insipid Öne World" song that is heard everywhere, or banners instructing the Chinese to accept the spirit of the Olympics and conform with the state's mission.
In a lighter note, if I had to make a sweeping generalization about the Chinese, I'd say that they all love KFC and fancy haircuts, since this city has the biggest concentration of KFCs and hair salons per capita than any city I've ever been to. Also, having an outrageous haircut seems to be the main requirement for getting on TV.
In general, I have to watch my fatigue. The punishing pace has taken its toll on me. Tomorrow, I'm going to try and get more sleep and make fewer stops. I'm going to try and see both the Summer Palace and the Marco Polo Bridge. We'll see how it goes. Till tomorrow.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
1/30/09, Beijing: Forbidden City/Beihai Park/Drum and Bell Towers/Olympic Stadium
I had a very, very long day today, and I'm absolutely beat, but I'm in much better spirits today then I was yesterday. This was roughly my route, if the folks at home care to follow along: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl. Hope that link works.
First, my general impression of Beijing. What strikes me about the city is both the sheer size and the way the city was planned and built entirely by fiat. The city is simply not on human scale. Even many of the public spaces just totally dwarf the individual, and my walk from my hotel to the Drum and Bell towers felt ten times longer than they actually were. It is just not a city that lends itself to the pedestrian, and it seems to sprawl out endlessly from an arbitrary center at Tiananmen Square.
The design of the city also made a big impression on me. New York is an organic city, a product of a good natural location, a city that grew around one of the world's greatest natural harbor according to its own volition. Beijing, however, is highly planned. There is no river or natural landmark here, outside of a few small lakes. The city is rigorously planned, according to an ancient sacred order. The important buildings of the city are built along a north-south axis in the center of the city, and the city is organized around four temples located in the corners of the ancient city. Walking today, I got used to the simple rhythm of the city, east and west, north and south, all roads leading to Tiananmen. The design of the city really impresses upon you a feeling of being governed by rituals older than can be imagined.
Last night, I was kind of in panic mode. I ended up eating bowl of noodles in my room (yeah, half the way around the world for bowl of noodles) and falling asleep at 10:30. I meant to wake up at 7:00, but ended up waking up at 8:30, thanks to a fun physics fact. Not only does China have a different standard voltage than the United States, but the current alternates at a different frequency. Which usually means nothing...unless you're plugging in an alarm clock that uses that frequency to keep time. Oh well, I'll just buy a battery next time. In the end it didn't matter, because the fireworks here around New Year's Time start around 7:30 AM. Yep. Loud firecrackers, everywhere you go. And they go all day long. I heard fireworks everywhere today.
The hutongs have grown on me. They're still kinda stinky and unpleasant, but also kind of charming at times. Walking through the hutongs, I think about an observation I made last night that was so banal that it must be recorded: "China's kind of like Chinatown, only bigger." Yes...I think that's the idea. Once I got dressed, I walked through the hutongs from my hotel up to Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen Square is massive, although not as wide open as I had thought. I was planning to see dead Mao, but the line was absolutely insane. Unfortunately, this is the New Year's holiday, which means that the Chinese are on vacation, travelling in big unpleasant tour groups (although some of these hilariously seem to require that all participants in the tour wear the same hat, even if that hat is a hot pink fisherman's hat). I was driven by a morbid curiosity to see dead Mao, but that wasn't enough to make me wait hours, so I decided to skip it. Tiananmen Square is absolutely huge, inhumanly so. Also, like all parts of Beijing I've seen so far, it is guarded by dozens of idle PLA soldiers or policemen. I also went to see if the Great Hall of The People (China's "legislative" house, a big piece of Socialist architecture, meaning that it's freaking huge and not particularly attractive) was open, but it wasn't, so I just walked by. I decided to go to the Forbidden City.
I spent most of the day in the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is one of the few pieces of palace architecture that has ever had a dramatic effect on me. The series of gigantic gates and receiving halls impressed on me the rigor of the rituals of the emperor. China's emperors had a spiritual and temporal authority that is really hard to imagine, incomparable even with the popes. As you pass through each successive gate and cross each large courtyard before you even get to the emperor himself, you get a feeling of the awe the imperial power must have inspired - and also the wealth, in a way I didn't even get when in say, The Basilica of St. Peter. The Forbidden City is also, well, a city, sprawling for miles. I spent 4 hours there and didn't even see it all. Parts of it are breathtaking, especially the garden, and the collection has some pieces that are just stunning in their craftsmanship. I had a bad overpriced lunch there, but it's not like you can just walk across the street.
I had to make myself leave the Forbidden City after I found myself getting palace fatigue, and what's more, I wanted to try and squeeze other things in. I proceeded by foot through Beihai park, which was probably the height of my day. Beihai is one of the most lovely parks I have ever been in, a pine and slate lined lake shore, with a gorgeous bridge to a beautiful pagoda type piece in an island in the center. I was glad to walk through there for twenty or thirty minutes on my way to the Drum and Bell Tower. I don't know how much I have to say about the Drum and Bell Towers. They provide breathtaking views of the city, and they have lawsuit-ready steep stone stairs. The drums and bells reinforce the ritual order of the city.
From there, I hopped on the subway to the Olympic Park. The Beijing metro is real nice, super clean and state of the art. They have these sweet ticket taking things where you just put your ticket on the sensor and the gate opens, and then you feed the ticket to the machine when you exit. You need to transfer like a billion freaking times to get anywhere, however. I was a little disappointed by the Olympic Park. The stadium and the aquatic center are impressive, especially the stadium, with its dramatic lines and sweeping, airy structure. But at the end of the day, it's fascist architecture, in that it just dwarfs the individual and gives no access (although the stadium is transparent in a way that invites you in). The park especially is poorly designed; it's just way too big, with nothing but open space.
This city could use more public maps. Sometimes, like looking for this one restaurant near the Olympic Complex for dinner, you've got absolutely no bearings, even near tourist centers, and the panic and frustration of being lost in a large foreign city starts to set in. Luckily, I did find the restaurant, which was great because it was my first great meal in China and really improved my mood. It was a Uighur (Chinese muslims from western China) restaurant, and as anyone familiar with our Bukharian excursions can tell you, central asian food just can't be beat. I had some curried lamb and naan bread that just hit the spot. What's more, the staff was super nice (partly because I was one of the few people there), and changed my teacup a couple of times because they saw I was having trouble drinking out of it, and offered me a knife and fork. It helped to build my confidence because I was able to communicate pretty effectively in Chinese. And all this for 40 odd yuan, which is just about six dollars! Awesome.
So, I'm in a better mood now. The isolation here can be bitter, and I wish I had a friend to travel with. Beijing is still not a very tourist friendly place. There's English everywhere, but it can be downright incomprehensible, even in big tourist spots! It's as if they had me writing Chinese translations of the signs in front of the White House. Sometimes it really hits me that I'm all alone here, and can very easily get lost or messed with and then I'd be SOL. Also, to my surprise, the crush of people is really getting to me. It's weird, because I'm used to lot of people, of course. But Beijing really is ren shan ren hai, as the Chinese say: people from the mountains to the sea, meaning that it's just jam packed with people. Also, New York is more diverse, so you never really feel isolated. Beijing is pretty much entirely Chinese and so it feels more monolithic. Also, the smog is unreal, the spitting is so prevalent it seems like a public disease, and the Chinese have no great desire to learn how lines work, and prefer to just crowd the ticket booth. They like to crowd everything, actually; they're big on crowds. Also, a small pet peeve: I cannot count on two hands the times I saw Chinese tourists touch things that they were explicitly instructed not to touch and take pictures of things where pictures were explicitly forbidden. If they're not going to learn to value their patrimony, nobody else is; but hey, otoh, China isn't exactly running low on old stuff.
So that's Beijing so far, tough, but mostly good. Tomorrow I'll do the Temple of Heaven, and Factory 789/CCTV building and maybe some other odds and ends. See ya later.
First, my general impression of Beijing. What strikes me about the city is both the sheer size and the way the city was planned and built entirely by fiat. The city is simply not on human scale. Even many of the public spaces just totally dwarf the individual, and my walk from my hotel to the Drum and Bell towers felt ten times longer than they actually were. It is just not a city that lends itself to the pedestrian, and it seems to sprawl out endlessly from an arbitrary center at Tiananmen Square.
The design of the city also made a big impression on me. New York is an organic city, a product of a good natural location, a city that grew around one of the world's greatest natural harbor according to its own volition. Beijing, however, is highly planned. There is no river or natural landmark here, outside of a few small lakes. The city is rigorously planned, according to an ancient sacred order. The important buildings of the city are built along a north-south axis in the center of the city, and the city is organized around four temples located in the corners of the ancient city. Walking today, I got used to the simple rhythm of the city, east and west, north and south, all roads leading to Tiananmen. The design of the city really impresses upon you a feeling of being governed by rituals older than can be imagined.
Last night, I was kind of in panic mode. I ended up eating bowl of noodles in my room (yeah, half the way around the world for bowl of noodles) and falling asleep at 10:30. I meant to wake up at 7:00, but ended up waking up at 8:30, thanks to a fun physics fact. Not only does China have a different standard voltage than the United States, but the current alternates at a different frequency. Which usually means nothing...unless you're plugging in an alarm clock that uses that frequency to keep time. Oh well, I'll just buy a battery next time. In the end it didn't matter, because the fireworks here around New Year's Time start around 7:30 AM. Yep. Loud firecrackers, everywhere you go. And they go all day long. I heard fireworks everywhere today.
The hutongs have grown on me. They're still kinda stinky and unpleasant, but also kind of charming at times. Walking through the hutongs, I think about an observation I made last night that was so banal that it must be recorded: "China's kind of like Chinatown, only bigger." Yes...I think that's the idea. Once I got dressed, I walked through the hutongs from my hotel up to Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen Square is massive, although not as wide open as I had thought. I was planning to see dead Mao, but the line was absolutely insane. Unfortunately, this is the New Year's holiday, which means that the Chinese are on vacation, travelling in big unpleasant tour groups (although some of these hilariously seem to require that all participants in the tour wear the same hat, even if that hat is a hot pink fisherman's hat). I was driven by a morbid curiosity to see dead Mao, but that wasn't enough to make me wait hours, so I decided to skip it. Tiananmen Square is absolutely huge, inhumanly so. Also, like all parts of Beijing I've seen so far, it is guarded by dozens of idle PLA soldiers or policemen. I also went to see if the Great Hall of The People (China's "legislative" house, a big piece of Socialist architecture, meaning that it's freaking huge and not particularly attractive) was open, but it wasn't, so I just walked by. I decided to go to the Forbidden City.
I spent most of the day in the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is one of the few pieces of palace architecture that has ever had a dramatic effect on me. The series of gigantic gates and receiving halls impressed on me the rigor of the rituals of the emperor. China's emperors had a spiritual and temporal authority that is really hard to imagine, incomparable even with the popes. As you pass through each successive gate and cross each large courtyard before you even get to the emperor himself, you get a feeling of the awe the imperial power must have inspired - and also the wealth, in a way I didn't even get when in say, The Basilica of St. Peter. The Forbidden City is also, well, a city, sprawling for miles. I spent 4 hours there and didn't even see it all. Parts of it are breathtaking, especially the garden, and the collection has some pieces that are just stunning in their craftsmanship. I had a bad overpriced lunch there, but it's not like you can just walk across the street.
I had to make myself leave the Forbidden City after I found myself getting palace fatigue, and what's more, I wanted to try and squeeze other things in. I proceeded by foot through Beihai park, which was probably the height of my day. Beihai is one of the most lovely parks I have ever been in, a pine and slate lined lake shore, with a gorgeous bridge to a beautiful pagoda type piece in an island in the center. I was glad to walk through there for twenty or thirty minutes on my way to the Drum and Bell Tower. I don't know how much I have to say about the Drum and Bell Towers. They provide breathtaking views of the city, and they have lawsuit-ready steep stone stairs. The drums and bells reinforce the ritual order of the city.
From there, I hopped on the subway to the Olympic Park. The Beijing metro is real nice, super clean and state of the art. They have these sweet ticket taking things where you just put your ticket on the sensor and the gate opens, and then you feed the ticket to the machine when you exit. You need to transfer like a billion freaking times to get anywhere, however. I was a little disappointed by the Olympic Park. The stadium and the aquatic center are impressive, especially the stadium, with its dramatic lines and sweeping, airy structure. But at the end of the day, it's fascist architecture, in that it just dwarfs the individual and gives no access (although the stadium is transparent in a way that invites you in). The park especially is poorly designed; it's just way too big, with nothing but open space.
This city could use more public maps. Sometimes, like looking for this one restaurant near the Olympic Complex for dinner, you've got absolutely no bearings, even near tourist centers, and the panic and frustration of being lost in a large foreign city starts to set in. Luckily, I did find the restaurant, which was great because it was my first great meal in China and really improved my mood. It was a Uighur (Chinese muslims from western China) restaurant, and as anyone familiar with our Bukharian excursions can tell you, central asian food just can't be beat. I had some curried lamb and naan bread that just hit the spot. What's more, the staff was super nice (partly because I was one of the few people there), and changed my teacup a couple of times because they saw I was having trouble drinking out of it, and offered me a knife and fork. It helped to build my confidence because I was able to communicate pretty effectively in Chinese. And all this for 40 odd yuan, which is just about six dollars! Awesome.
So, I'm in a better mood now. The isolation here can be bitter, and I wish I had a friend to travel with. Beijing is still not a very tourist friendly place. There's English everywhere, but it can be downright incomprehensible, even in big tourist spots! It's as if they had me writing Chinese translations of the signs in front of the White House. Sometimes it really hits me that I'm all alone here, and can very easily get lost or messed with and then I'd be SOL. Also, to my surprise, the crush of people is really getting to me. It's weird, because I'm used to lot of people, of course. But Beijing really is ren shan ren hai, as the Chinese say: people from the mountains to the sea, meaning that it's just jam packed with people. Also, New York is more diverse, so you never really feel isolated. Beijing is pretty much entirely Chinese and so it feels more monolithic. Also, the smog is unreal, the spitting is so prevalent it seems like a public disease, and the Chinese have no great desire to learn how lines work, and prefer to just crowd the ticket booth. They like to crowd everything, actually; they're big on crowds. Also, a small pet peeve: I cannot count on two hands the times I saw Chinese tourists touch things that they were explicitly instructed not to touch and take pictures of things where pictures were explicitly forbidden. If they're not going to learn to value their patrimony, nobody else is; but hey, otoh, China isn't exactly running low on old stuff.
So that's Beijing so far, tough, but mostly good. Tomorrow I'll do the Temple of Heaven, and Factory 789/CCTV building and maybe some other odds and ends. See ya later.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
1/28/09 - 1/29/09, Flight/First Day In Beijing
So I have arrived, safely and soundly, at the hostel, and while slightly shell shocked, I've at least got a place to sleep tonight and am not just totally stranded. Which is good and almost didn't happen.
Flight was ok, although with some turbulence. My Uncle Babe, who has braved the flight to China a couple of times has hit the experience on the head. When you're there for 13 hours, it becomes a question of, ok, now what? Sleep? I slept for five hours, and I still had 8 long hours to go. I guess I went super American on this flight, in that I managed to watch High Noon (which I've never seen, incidentally) and an episode of Mad Men. Continental treated me pretty well, had a few good meals. I wonder if jet lag is less a biological clock thing than a psychological reaction to the sheer strangeness of spending pretty much a whole day in a small confined area.
When I landed, I was struck immediately by what a shock it is to have a language other than English, especially one I study, be the dominant language. China is not like Italy or Greece in that, most of the time, you can't fall back on English. This makes the experience pretty nerve racking. Case in point, I decided to take a taxi to the hostel, figuring it'd be easier since I had a lot of bags. The woman, as soon as I loaded my bags in her trunk, accused me of scratching her car and yelled a lot of things at me in rapid Mandarin, which I could half understand (the gist, I took it, was that she was not fond of Americans in general and clumsy me in particular). That pretty much shellshocked me from the get go. Then she gave me the opportunity to learn a new word: miaohui. Miaohui, I found out the hard way, means "temple fair", a traditional street fair type thing with food on sticks and parades and what have you. Anywho, it was blocking our approach to the hostel, so she just dumped me off as close as we could get and overcharged me for the taxi ride (I just wanted to get out of there, so while I understood enough to know I was getting ripped off, I let it happen). At that point, I was in the middle of a crowded street fair with all my luggage and no clear bearings to the hotel. Oh, and the fireworks. There's been a constant barrage of fireworks since I got here, all kinds, firecrackers, M80s, most of them set off by kids in the street. When you're lost as is, it doesn't help to be jumping for cover every few minutes. Mortal terror would probably best have described my mood. Somehow, I got to the hotel; I don't know how, I decided to walk in one arbitrary direction.
The hotel is alright, rather spartan, but has everything I need, so it's fine. It's in an old hutong neighborhood of Beijing. The hutong are the famous architectural pattern of old Beijing, narrow east-west alleyways and courtyard houses. The hutong are famous and supposed to be charming, but after walking in them for a little bit, I'm not quite sold. They're kinda dank and vomity smelling. But I'll try to give i time.
Obviously haven't quite gotten a read on Beijing yet, but a few things do strike me. The sprawl of this city is astounding, miles and miles of metropolis. Also, they are not joking about the air pollution; sometimes it feels like I'm stuck behind a bus for the whole day. I haven't seen any really attractive parts of the city yet, but eh, I just got here.
I'm going to try and scrounge around for something to eat and get to bed early. Right now, I'm kinda feeling like, what the hell did I get myself into, but maybe a good night's sleep and walking around time will help me with that. I realize this post is a little scattershot and not necessarily very compelling, but that's my state of mind right now. Tomorrow, I'm going to Tiananmen Square/The Forbidden City, so hopefully that'll pick me up. I'll let you know how it goes...
Flight was ok, although with some turbulence. My Uncle Babe, who has braved the flight to China a couple of times has hit the experience on the head. When you're there for 13 hours, it becomes a question of, ok, now what? Sleep? I slept for five hours, and I still had 8 long hours to go. I guess I went super American on this flight, in that I managed to watch High Noon (which I've never seen, incidentally) and an episode of Mad Men. Continental treated me pretty well, had a few good meals. I wonder if jet lag is less a biological clock thing than a psychological reaction to the sheer strangeness of spending pretty much a whole day in a small confined area.
When I landed, I was struck immediately by what a shock it is to have a language other than English, especially one I study, be the dominant language. China is not like Italy or Greece in that, most of the time, you can't fall back on English. This makes the experience pretty nerve racking. Case in point, I decided to take a taxi to the hostel, figuring it'd be easier since I had a lot of bags. The woman, as soon as I loaded my bags in her trunk, accused me of scratching her car and yelled a lot of things at me in rapid Mandarin, which I could half understand (the gist, I took it, was that she was not fond of Americans in general and clumsy me in particular). That pretty much shellshocked me from the get go. Then she gave me the opportunity to learn a new word: miaohui. Miaohui, I found out the hard way, means "temple fair", a traditional street fair type thing with food on sticks and parades and what have you. Anywho, it was blocking our approach to the hostel, so she just dumped me off as close as we could get and overcharged me for the taxi ride (I just wanted to get out of there, so while I understood enough to know I was getting ripped off, I let it happen). At that point, I was in the middle of a crowded street fair with all my luggage and no clear bearings to the hotel. Oh, and the fireworks. There's been a constant barrage of fireworks since I got here, all kinds, firecrackers, M80s, most of them set off by kids in the street. When you're lost as is, it doesn't help to be jumping for cover every few minutes. Mortal terror would probably best have described my mood. Somehow, I got to the hotel; I don't know how, I decided to walk in one arbitrary direction.
The hotel is alright, rather spartan, but has everything I need, so it's fine. It's in an old hutong neighborhood of Beijing. The hutong are the famous architectural pattern of old Beijing, narrow east-west alleyways and courtyard houses. The hutong are famous and supposed to be charming, but after walking in them for a little bit, I'm not quite sold. They're kinda dank and vomity smelling. But I'll try to give i time.
Obviously haven't quite gotten a read on Beijing yet, but a few things do strike me. The sprawl of this city is astounding, miles and miles of metropolis. Also, they are not joking about the air pollution; sometimes it feels like I'm stuck behind a bus for the whole day. I haven't seen any really attractive parts of the city yet, but eh, I just got here.
I'm going to try and scrounge around for something to eat and get to bed early. Right now, I'm kinda feeling like, what the hell did I get myself into, but maybe a good night's sleep and walking around time will help me with that. I realize this post is a little scattershot and not necessarily very compelling, but that's my state of mind right now. Tomorrow, I'm going to Tiananmen Square/The Forbidden City, so hopefully that'll pick me up. I'll let you know how it goes...
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Yu Hua
Hey guys,
Don't know if you happened to get past the obnoxious cover of the New York Times Magazine today, but if you did, there's a nice little article about the Chinese writer Yu Hua. He's the real deal, one of my favorite contemporary Chinese writers. I'm particularly fond of his short stories, "The Past And The Punishments" and "This Story Is For Willow" His short stories really push narrative structure and have some amazing, brutal depictions of violence. I'm a bit miffed that I'll be in China when the English translation of his latest novel hits the US, but I guess that's just more incentive to polish up my Chinese.
Here's the article, though you'll probably need a Times account: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25hua-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
Don't know if you happened to get past the obnoxious cover of the New York Times Magazine today, but if you did, there's a nice little article about the Chinese writer Yu Hua. He's the real deal, one of my favorite contemporary Chinese writers. I'm particularly fond of his short stories, "The Past And The Punishments" and "This Story Is For Willow" His short stories really push narrative structure and have some amazing, brutal depictions of violence. I'm a bit miffed that I'll be in China when the English translation of his latest novel hits the US, but I guess that's just more incentive to polish up my Chinese.
Here's the article, though you'll probably need a Times account: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25hua-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
1/21/09, A Week Before I Leave
So, a week before I leave for China, I've decided to start another one of those increasingly ubiquitous study abroad blogs. I'm fairly negative on personal blogs, and I'm doubly negative on study abroad blogs. I used to keep a personal blog, and what I found was that I would spend more time blogging about my life than actually living it. I always have a lot to say, and if I had let a week or so go by without blogging, I would spend hours creating a blog post, so I'd get into the ridiculous situation of spending an entire day creating a blog post about my day. I would also get into multiple fights and bad social situations, because I would blog honestly, meaning I would talk about people in my life, and of course, inevitably, someone I didn't want to find the blog would find it, and it would be an awful situation for everybody. I came to the conclusion, after a while, that the personal, diary format blog is generally negative thing, feeding into the loathsome trends in this culture of insanely out-of-control egotism and the commodification of identity. I think there's something to be said for having a private self and for keeping your damn mouth shut sometimes. I still keep the article in the New York Times Magazine about Emily Gould from Gawker to remind me of everything in my generation that I hate and should fight. I'm doubly skeptical about keeping a study abroad blog. My experiences might be of some interest or value to other people, but they might be totally unremarkable in a larger sense. Although I will be taking quite a journey, I'll also be isolated in some way from actually living in the country. I won't be in the control conditions of the classroom, but I also won't be naturally experiencing life in the country; I'll be somewhere in between, and that's not necessarily a very interesting or unique experience.
So, here's my study abroad blog. I've decided, with all my misgivings, to keep one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, anyone who knows me knows that I can be maddeningly difficult to keep in touch with. A mix of laziness, self-involvement, social awkwardness and general misanthropy means that it can take a great deal of effort to keep in contact with me and keep up with my life. Bottom line, I'm not a postcard sender, and I'm barely even an email sender. I figure, by starting a study abroad blog, I won't have to worry about compiling massive emails or forgetting to contact people. If you want to know what I've been up to, or see where I've been, you can just add this blog to your RSS feed, or check in every once in a while. Secondly, this blog will serve as a travel journal for my experiences, that I can keep and look back on. However, to overcome some of my misgivings about personal blogs, I will try and focus more on what I'm seeing and experiencing than myself, and I will absolutely refuse to write negatively about specific people, which will mean that occasionally, you might not be getting the whole truth. Finally, I'm someone who has always had great difficulties with foreign languages, and I feel totally enmeshed in English. The various details, quirks and oddities of English, I feel, are absolutely part of my personal identity. I am heading into an environment where English will not be heard routinely, and in situations where I am isolated from English, I often feel like I am separated from my true identity. So this blog will serve as a place where I can touch base with my mother tongue, as well as with my friends and family.
The first question is always, of course, why am I going to China? And I expect that the answer to that will change in midstream, just like the reasons for the Iraq War. Right now, there are two main reasons I can think of. The first is the reason I tell everybody, because it's the most practical: to learn the damn language. I have been studying Chinese on and off, with varying levels of success(depending on the year, and heck, the day), since I was in 8th grade. My Chinese right now is a big question. My grammar and vocab are ok, my pronunciation, ehh, less so. Sometimes I can have days of brilliance, but sometimes, native speakers just look at me blankly. What's more, I haven't been field tested, for the most part, except for the occasional intervention at a restaurant and helping tourists in Chinatown. So I really don't know how good or bad my Chinese is, but I hope that, by going and studying in country, I can bring it up to a level where I can at least read basic literature in Chinese, and talk with some level of fluency.
But the thing about the answer is that ultimately, the question remains, why am I going to China? And the real answer to that is complicated, to the point where I probably don't even know all of it. While I have a lot of experience with Mandarin, I don't necessarily have much of a grounding in Chinese culture, literature or history. I may know more than the av-er-age bear, but, especially while preparing for this trip, I realized that it's absolutely threadbare compared to my knowledge of say, the history/culture/literature of France. What bothers me more is that I may not really have an affinity for it, and I've invested a great deal of time in it. Part of the reason I'm going is to figure out how much I really am into this Chinese thing. Not the best idea, maybe, but I'm stubborn, and the sunk costs fallacy is a powerful thing. And I know that I do have an affinity for certain things: Wong Kar Wai, Tang dynasty poetry in the original, that kind of thing. So we'll see.
Along with that, I unfortunately must confess that I have some of those romantic, orientalist notions that accompany most study abroad trips, especially to the far east. I am hoping that this trip will serve as a shock to my system, that by seeing something so different, I will become different. I hope that being kinda by myself will make me into more of an independent adult. I hope that this trip, and the foreigness of where I will be, will give me the necessary ground to figure out myself, and what I want to do, and who I want to be. I want to come back from China and know exactly what I want to do, and have grown as a human being. Now, I am also aware that this idea is probably bullshit. But like the Hegelian notion of human progress, it may be one of those things that I am pretty much convinced is bullshit, yet believe in anyway.
I've tried to prepare in a variety of ways for this trip, some ways more ridiculous than others. I've taught myself to use chopsticks, which I've always avoided since they're far from optimum for someone with an essential tremor, by buying a pair of nice ones from the Broadway panhandler, and eating every meal at home with them. I have begun an intensive language review this week, which mostly consists, so far, of making a study sheet while watching House. I've been reading only Chinese texts in translation. I've read a collection of Chinese avant-garde fiction, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing, and I'm in the middle of Volume 1 of the classic Qing-era Chinese novel, Story of The Stone. It's been quite an experience for me, and given me at least a bit of cultural background before I go. Whether any of this stuff will do me any good, that, I don't know.
Like anybody about to set out on big trips, I have fears and some ideas of ways I typically screw up in similar situations. I do have a nightmare scenario where, isolated and unable to communicate, I finally have the mental breakdown I've always been half-expecting. Or, I just get lost in China, which would probably be bad too. I thought, before I went to college, that growing up in New York City would make me immune to culture shock. But after an awful first year, I realized that actually, I was more susceptible to it than most people I knew. With the typical New Yorker conviction that New York is the best of all possible worlds, I found it difficult to adjust to different ways of doing things. So I might have a lot of trouble adjusting to China, which is probably more dissimilar to New York than even St. Louis, although it also might be closer in some ways. I also know that I often fall into a couple of pitfalls when encountering foreign cultures. I often assume that people are the sums of their entire culture and history, and am puzzled when they aren't. At my worst, I can get into Conradian/borderline racist mindsets of the Other as completely impenetrable. And while I do believe that there are epistemological limits to understanding other people, not to mention other cultures, you can also, say, play mahjongg with them without that coming up a whole lot.
My first two weeks in the country, I am traveling. I will land in Beijing on the 29th, and stay until the 4th of February, seeing the sights and making day trips to the Great Wall and to the city of Chengde, a summer retreat of the Qing dynasty, where the world's largest wooden statue is. I will then take an overnight train to Taishan, the holiest mountain in Daoism. The next day, I will visit Qufu, where Confucius' tomb is, and then take an overnight train to Shanghai. I will stay in Shanghai until the 12th, taking day trips to Suzhou and Hangzhou. On the 12th, I will fly to Kunming, where I will spend most of the next four months. I probably will travel to other locales, but I haven't planned those trips out yet. I will try and blog every day or so while I'm travelling, with pictures, although I might have some difficulty with that, since my laptop is in the shop right now, and might not be repaired in time, and I might have some issues with the Great Firewall. But I'm going to try.
So, the title of the blog. I generally like to begin new journeys with a healthy dose of skepticism. My yearbook half page in high school had two quotes, one from Candide and one from James Brown, both expressing a general skepticism on the idea of big changes. The title of this blog, similarly, is intended to be a dose of healthy skepticism to protect against falling victim to those previously mentioned romantic fantasies of the revelatory power of the Other. The title comes from the Dao De Jing, and the full relevant quote is: 出彌遠， 其知彌少 (chu mi yuan, qi zhi mi shao), or "The further out goes, the less one knows". It was the Daoist belief that journeys like the one I'm about to take don't really tell you anything except what you already know, and at worst, they reinforce your beliefs in the various illusions of the material world. The only true journey is the inward journey of discovering the Dao within you.
But I'm a fan of oppositions, of thesis and antithesis, and this idea has its opposite in Daoism as well. The Dao advises that one seek to be "曠兮其若谷" (kuang xi qi ruo gu), "accepting/open like a valley". And so, despite all my grumpy convictions and doubts and epistemological concerns, I will seek to be kuang xi qi ruo gu. Because, as Lao Tzu might have said, ya never know.
So, here's my study abroad blog. I've decided, with all my misgivings, to keep one for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, anyone who knows me knows that I can be maddeningly difficult to keep in touch with. A mix of laziness, self-involvement, social awkwardness and general misanthropy means that it can take a great deal of effort to keep in contact with me and keep up with my life. Bottom line, I'm not a postcard sender, and I'm barely even an email sender. I figure, by starting a study abroad blog, I won't have to worry about compiling massive emails or forgetting to contact people. If you want to know what I've been up to, or see where I've been, you can just add this blog to your RSS feed, or check in every once in a while. Secondly, this blog will serve as a travel journal for my experiences, that I can keep and look back on. However, to overcome some of my misgivings about personal blogs, I will try and focus more on what I'm seeing and experiencing than myself, and I will absolutely refuse to write negatively about specific people, which will mean that occasionally, you might not be getting the whole truth. Finally, I'm someone who has always had great difficulties with foreign languages, and I feel totally enmeshed in English. The various details, quirks and oddities of English, I feel, are absolutely part of my personal identity. I am heading into an environment where English will not be heard routinely, and in situations where I am isolated from English, I often feel like I am separated from my true identity. So this blog will serve as a place where I can touch base with my mother tongue, as well as with my friends and family.
The first question is always, of course, why am I going to China? And I expect that the answer to that will change in midstream, just like the reasons for the Iraq War. Right now, there are two main reasons I can think of. The first is the reason I tell everybody, because it's the most practical: to learn the damn language. I have been studying Chinese on and off, with varying levels of success(depending on the year, and heck, the day), since I was in 8th grade. My Chinese right now is a big question. My grammar and vocab are ok, my pronunciation, ehh, less so. Sometimes I can have days of brilliance, but sometimes, native speakers just look at me blankly. What's more, I haven't been field tested, for the most part, except for the occasional intervention at a restaurant and helping tourists in Chinatown. So I really don't know how good or bad my Chinese is, but I hope that, by going and studying in country, I can bring it up to a level where I can at least read basic literature in Chinese, and talk with some level of fluency.
But the thing about the answer is that ultimately, the question remains, why am I going to China? And the real answer to that is complicated, to the point where I probably don't even know all of it. While I have a lot of experience with Mandarin, I don't necessarily have much of a grounding in Chinese culture, literature or history. I may know more than the av-er-age bear, but, especially while preparing for this trip, I realized that it's absolutely threadbare compared to my knowledge of say, the history/culture/literature of France. What bothers me more is that I may not really have an affinity for it, and I've invested a great deal of time in it. Part of the reason I'm going is to figure out how much I really am into this Chinese thing. Not the best idea, maybe, but I'm stubborn, and the sunk costs fallacy is a powerful thing. And I know that I do have an affinity for certain things: Wong Kar Wai, Tang dynasty poetry in the original, that kind of thing. So we'll see.
Along with that, I unfortunately must confess that I have some of those romantic, orientalist notions that accompany most study abroad trips, especially to the far east. I am hoping that this trip will serve as a shock to my system, that by seeing something so different, I will become different. I hope that being kinda by myself will make me into more of an independent adult. I hope that this trip, and the foreigness of where I will be, will give me the necessary ground to figure out myself, and what I want to do, and who I want to be. I want to come back from China and know exactly what I want to do, and have grown as a human being. Now, I am also aware that this idea is probably bullshit. But like the Hegelian notion of human progress, it may be one of those things that I am pretty much convinced is bullshit, yet believe in anyway.
I've tried to prepare in a variety of ways for this trip, some ways more ridiculous than others. I've taught myself to use chopsticks, which I've always avoided since they're far from optimum for someone with an essential tremor, by buying a pair of nice ones from the Broadway panhandler, and eating every meal at home with them. I have begun an intensive language review this week, which mostly consists, so far, of making a study sheet while watching House. I've been reading only Chinese texts in translation. I've read a collection of Chinese avant-garde fiction, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing, and I'm in the middle of Volume 1 of the classic Qing-era Chinese novel, Story of The Stone. It's been quite an experience for me, and given me at least a bit of cultural background before I go. Whether any of this stuff will do me any good, that, I don't know.
Like anybody about to set out on big trips, I have fears and some ideas of ways I typically screw up in similar situations. I do have a nightmare scenario where, isolated and unable to communicate, I finally have the mental breakdown I've always been half-expecting. Or, I just get lost in China, which would probably be bad too. I thought, before I went to college, that growing up in New York City would make me immune to culture shock. But after an awful first year, I realized that actually, I was more susceptible to it than most people I knew. With the typical New Yorker conviction that New York is the best of all possible worlds, I found it difficult to adjust to different ways of doing things. So I might have a lot of trouble adjusting to China, which is probably more dissimilar to New York than even St. Louis, although it also might be closer in some ways. I also know that I often fall into a couple of pitfalls when encountering foreign cultures. I often assume that people are the sums of their entire culture and history, and am puzzled when they aren't. At my worst, I can get into Conradian/borderline racist mindsets of the Other as completely impenetrable. And while I do believe that there are epistemological limits to understanding other people, not to mention other cultures, you can also, say, play mahjongg with them without that coming up a whole lot.
My first two weeks in the country, I am traveling. I will land in Beijing on the 29th, and stay until the 4th of February, seeing the sights and making day trips to the Great Wall and to the city of Chengde, a summer retreat of the Qing dynasty, where the world's largest wooden statue is. I will then take an overnight train to Taishan, the holiest mountain in Daoism. The next day, I will visit Qufu, where Confucius' tomb is, and then take an overnight train to Shanghai. I will stay in Shanghai until the 12th, taking day trips to Suzhou and Hangzhou. On the 12th, I will fly to Kunming, where I will spend most of the next four months. I probably will travel to other locales, but I haven't planned those trips out yet. I will try and blog every day or so while I'm travelling, with pictures, although I might have some difficulty with that, since my laptop is in the shop right now, and might not be repaired in time, and I might have some issues with the Great Firewall. But I'm going to try.
So, the title of the blog. I generally like to begin new journeys with a healthy dose of skepticism. My yearbook half page in high school had two quotes, one from Candide and one from James Brown, both expressing a general skepticism on the idea of big changes. The title of this blog, similarly, is intended to be a dose of healthy skepticism to protect against falling victim to those previously mentioned romantic fantasies of the revelatory power of the Other. The title comes from the Dao De Jing, and the full relevant quote is: 出彌遠， 其知彌少 (chu mi yuan, qi zhi mi shao), or "The further out goes, the less one knows". It was the Daoist belief that journeys like the one I'm about to take don't really tell you anything except what you already know, and at worst, they reinforce your beliefs in the various illusions of the material world. The only true journey is the inward journey of discovering the Dao within you.
But I'm a fan of oppositions, of thesis and antithesis, and this idea has its opposite in Daoism as well. The Dao advises that one seek to be "曠兮其若谷" (kuang xi qi ruo gu), "accepting/open like a valley". And so, despite all my grumpy convictions and doubts and epistemological concerns, I will seek to be kuang xi qi ruo gu. Because, as Lao Tzu might have said, ya never know.
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