Kunming, Week 1

So, I've started my studies here, and I guess I'll just let you know my thoughts on my program and Kunming, and me and China in general.

My "dorm" is really a hotel on the campus of Yunnan Normal University, complete with little soaps and towels and free tea. It's nice, relatively comfortable, but sort of a strange place to spend a few months. There's no desk, so to study, I've gone to a coffee shop or sat in an empty study abroad building classroom. Our living situation overall is kind of strange, since it's a hotel, and we have desk people who are there to take care of any sort of trouble we have, not to mention a Gomer Pyle looking PLA attache who's there to make sure we don't have any trouble. It all sort of makes me uncomfortable, since by being a foreigner, I automatically am priviledged. The Chinese don't seem to understand my basic lack of comfort at being waited on, and in a way, a lot of times, it's unavoidable since I don't always know what's happening. Other strange things about my dorm: the gates to the campus close at 1 am. No ifs, ands or buts. I didn't know that my first night, so I spent a panicked hour wandering around the campus before I finally decided to jump the fence, which I also had to do this weekend and probably will have to do again a few more times before the semester is out. Also, China has no dryers. As we speak, my clothes are hanging on the line, in the sun. The people in my program are pretty nice, and since there is just 11 of us and four or five teachers, we're pretty tight knit. Sometimes, however, I notice that I feel more alone and isolated with Americans than by myself.

Kunming is a great city, comfortable, not overwhelming, plenty to do and see. It occurs to me that it doesn't at all resemble the image of China people have back in the states. First, the weather here is beautiful, seventy and sunny everyday (although I'm told that the coming spring will mean lots of rain). Kunming is also full of foreigners, I don't quite know why, but it also often feels like a college town, with plenty of great bars and clubs with a diverse, young clientele. It's also filled with ethnic minorities. The streets are filled with Hui (ethnic Han Muslims), with their head scarves and skull caps; I even went into a mosque near the city center. I'm really interested in the Hui, how they interact with mainstream Han society, how connected they feel to the main branches of Islam. There are also tons of other ethnic minorities, in their own distinctive costumes. I'll take some pictures and show you guys, it's pretty wild. You'll be walking along, and all of the sudden, you'll see someone straight out of National Geographic in a headdress and a colorful shawl.

Another neat thing about staying in one place for a while (and eating with people who know what to order), is that you get a real grasp on the cuisine, and you get to eat absurdly well. Yunnan cuisine is very spicy. It's known for mushrooms, and rubing, a very mild, very delicious goat cheese. There's also a great mashed potatoes dish here. I eat like a pig, and feel guilty, but the thing is, since I'm spending on average about two bucks a meal, there's nothing to feel bad about. I've also been digging heavily on Muslim food here. I've had some great spicy beef skewers here for absurdly cheap off the street, and the other day, I paid under a dollar for a bowl of handmade noodles (you can actually see them stretching out the noodles), flavored with a spicy broth with just a hint of cilantro (that actually did not bother me as it does usually, but was pretty light and interesting). I feel like I might try to talk my way into the kitchen and videotape them making it, just to figure out what spices go into it, because I've never tasted anything like it in my life. It's a matter of time before these guys come to the states. They'll make Thai look like Red Italian.

My program is pretty damn intense. I have anywhere from two to three hours of Chinese, five days a week, in a four person class, starting at 9 AM. Considering that I used to consider an hour a day at 10 AM brutal, it's been quite an adjustment. Not to mention, we also have tons of homework, anywhere from two to four hours a night. My schedule during the week is pretty much go to school, lunch, check my email, do my homework, crash at twelve. It's not too bad though. I've started making tea in a thermos with dried looseleaf tea and boiled water, the way the Chinese do, and drinking bad coffee at night at local coffeshops. It's better than it could be, because my Chinese is at a level where we can have pretty entertaining discussions, and so it becomes more like a conversation class.

One part of this program that I really like is that we're matched up with a Chinese language partner. Mine is a sophomore girl here at the college from Xishuangbanna, a tourist region in the south of Yunnan famous for the Dai people and their "water throwing festival". It's really rewarding (although sometimes frustrating when I'm tired and my Chinese just falls apart), and very interesting. We're given a few questions and then we kind of just talk for an hour or so. We've discussed media censorship, the one child policy, college here and in America, and other issues. Sometimes, her views are wrong or misinformed, but I lack the vocab to debate her: for example, she seems to feel that the government's response to the Sichuan Earthquake was perfect, and while I feel it was pretty good, I know there were some problems. Talking about the One Child Policy was interesting. She thinks the policy is pretty just, and that China's population had to be controlled one way or the other. It was hard for me to get my own nuanced view across; that no government is justified in forced abortions, that while China had and still has a population problem, the one child policy may not have solved it. An interesting interaction was when I pointed out the demographic problem the policy has created. Not a problem, she explained, because in China, the young people always take care of the old. That's Chinese society, no exceptions. It's interesting to me the amount of faith that the Chinese seem to have in their own broad cultural messages.

On Friday, I went walking around the city. There's a very pleasant park within walking distance of the campus (cuihu). The blurred line here between public and commercial spaces is really something, only in China will you see the park filled with people selling stuff (one park here outside of old Kunming is basically an open air puppy market). On Saturday, we were taken on a tour of Old Kunming, which will probably be knocked down in a couple of days to make way for new office buildings/apartments/shopping malls. My ambivalence about the Haussmannization of China continues, and yesterday, I realized that it dovetails quite neatly with my own feelings about the gentrification of Brooklyn. On one hand, it's a tragedy that they're just razing those old buildings, probably giving residents little choice in the matter, and replacing them with inhuman, inaccesible big buildings. But on the other hand, those old buildings are not quite livable, and I wonder how the residents themselves feel about it, being moved to spaces that are probably much more modern than those old houses. After the tour and a long discussion at a nearby teahouse (a lovely converted family mansion with terrific pu'er tea), the professor cabbed with us to a local arts district, where we got a quick dinner and then went to a Nordic cultural center to watch the film "Songs From The Second Floor", and then discuss the film. The film is quite good, a dark brechtian farce, a little heavy-handed but very interesting and enjoyable, and it was also a downright surreal experience: discussing a Swedish film with a bunch of nice Scandanavians in English in China. I envy the Scandanavians; how I wish my government would pay for me to be a hipster around the world. I also felt a little weird about the experience. It seems a bit colonial to hold a discussion in English in China. It's a continued theme of my stay here: on one hand, I always hope to see English signs and translations, just because it makes my life easier, but on the other hand, I realize that we're asking the Chinese to go farther than we would go, and our demands are heeded because we have the economic power to make the Chinese listen.

Overall, I really feel like this decision, this journey has been worthwhile. I think China is really changing me, making me calmer, making me more humane. I feel like I'm actually making an effort to behave and to think in the ways that I've always told myself I should act and think, but never really followed through on. I also don't have that worry that I had before I came here, that this was pointless, that I probably won't even pursue Chinese when I get back. It's a joy just to be able to communicate, and to hear yourself getting better at it, and since I feel like the journey is building me as a person, I'm not worried about whether it was worth it in a meaner sense. Some days are better than others, but mostly, I'm pretty happy here, though I also certainly miss home.

I'll probably check in once a week, more often if anything particularly notable happens. My laptop is coming in the mail, and once I get it, I'll start posting my pictures, probably one day's worth of pictures, with captions, a day. I'll keep in touch, in any case.