Yep, here we are — it’s grad school for sure, and I have the pre-first day of class reading assignments to prove it. And I’ve also got to get everything in boxes to move this weekend, all of which makes it absolutely necessary to avoid the temptation of newly updated RSS feeds showing 26 new items from The New Yorker.

…..

Fortunately, Pippa Cat is self-packing!

Yesterday was a wonderful day. We took breakfast out to Haidian Park, and ate on a rock next to little wetland, and listened to some frogs, and wandered around and saw an amusement park with the most bizarre things ever. {photos} My sister called me on my cell phone and I got to talk to her for a little. We went to the Summer Palace {photos} in the afternoon and rented a pedal boat and pedaled around the lake, and ate chili spiced dried mangoes (from Trader Joe’s in the US, alas, no more of those for a while!) and got steamed buns and an ice cream bar and enjoyed a sunny clear afternoon. In the evening I met with one of my language partners, and learned to say ‘I think China has many strange flavors of yogurt,’ and went over The Tale of Custard the Dragon with her, and she promised to prepare and tell me something about Chinese history next time, and then we went to open mike night at Lush, a bar most popular amongst foreign students studying in Beijing and listened to various covers of the Fugees, Oasis, and Bob Dylan. Not only that, but the night-time vendors were out in force on the sidewalks, with t-shirts of all sorts of messages (my favorite: emblazoned in the largest letters possible to cover the whole front of the shirt, “I AM SO WORTH IT”), and even the puppy-sellers. That’s right, a couple of guys with cardboard boxes full of fuzzy little puppies, which they will hand to you to pet and cuddle, and hopefully purchase. There is no way we can have a dog — couldn’t keep one in the US, couldn’t bring one to the US from here, couldn’t keep one in the hotel room — but damn, they were cute!

Today, though, I am sick. And I am tired. Because I do not understand anything that anyone says, and it is getting old.

I decided I would be proactive, and go out to find lunch on my own, on not street food, because I didn’t want to walk quite as far as the nearest street-with-food that I know of. There are several mall/shopping centers right near where we live. I wandered around, saw one fast food-ish place labeled ‘Kung Fu’ with a big picture of Bruce Lee, but finally settled on a place called ‘le Jazz,’ which had some curries, and a numbered set of meal combos, so I could say “I want 4.” Simple enough.

I took my tray, found a seat, and was shortly approached by a girl, who said something to me. I gave her the genuine clueless white girl face, and she went away. Then came a more authoritative woman who also addressed me, and made an X with her hands, pointing to a sign above.

The only thing I recognized on the sign was a character for ‘section,’ and as far as I can read, it might have said ‘this section for patrons of eatery x,’ or it might have said ‘all martians report to the green sector daily at 2 o’clock,’ but I figure it must have been something along the lines of the former. I moved to sit closer to the origin of my meal.

Next I went to the supermarket, and browsed through the books, which are inside the electronics department. I know that for electronic items, you have to pay for them on the way out, so I took the children’s book I selected to the counter. They pointed me to a different counter. At that counter, the girl told me several times before I realized she didn’t want to ring up my book, it was a cheap commodity and didn’t fall under the same rules as electronics. Guess I could have figured that out, but I assume there are more rules and regulations here than would be logical.

I chose my groceries, and went to the checkout line. I handed the girl my reusable tote bag, she put things into it, I took out a large jug of juice, intending to carry it separately, as it is heavy. After I did that, she put everything else into a pair of plastic bags. And one for the juice. And I have no idea how to say, ‘Please, put everything into this bag.’

So I took my groceries home, and got to the room just as the housekeepers were leaving. They smiled in a friendly way, and said they were just finishing. Or maybe they said, ‘Welcome, Western imperialist, to your room.’ Perhaps they quoted Shakespeare in translation, or said, ‘hey, you’re the girl that broke the light!’ I wouldn’t know. I smiled back in a friendly way, closed the door behind them, put away the groceries, lay down on the bed, and cried for a while, out of sheer frustration.

It’s not that I’m not learning, because I am, it’s just that I haven’t learned enough yet. Hence the book I got — I flipped through the children’s books until I hit on the level when they are written with pinyin above the characters — whether to help the kids learn pinyin or learn characters, I don’t know. But hopefully it will be helpful for me to learn the words and the characters. The book is helpfully labeled in latin letters on the front cover ‘BBZXHDYZMY.’ Inside, it has 150 verses, three or four lines long. I’m not sure if they are actually poems — some of them follow the rhyming pattern aaba, some aaaa, some abcb, some seem to have no rhyme at all. Each one has an illustration — a chef chopping onions and crying, a puffed up bullfrong on a lilypad, a caveman roasting a hock of ham on a fire, an elephant listening to a boombox with headphones, a grandmother reading a story to two children — and promises interesting vocabulary.

Oh yes, also on the frustrating side — blogspot seems to have joined livejournal on the list of inaccessible domain names through the Great Firewall of China. But to put up posts, I actually navigate through blogger.com, which still loads. I’m sure this has little to nothing to do with my blog in particular, and everything to do with the general governmental frown on too much free sharing of information, which blogs do quite a bit to promote.

Say, where did that building go?

And here’s a graph of the air quality levels since I got here. You can see where it rained. The data is from the Chinese version of the PRC Ministry of Environmental Protection website.

Beijing air today: 176. The buildings I had mentally marked from the window earlier as being the farthest I could see are just barely visible today. I’ll take a comparison picture of the can-opener building this afternoon when I walk to the gym.

Among any number of other issues, China is not know for its healthy environment. Polluted air, polluted water, lack of water, increasing car ownership, functionally unregulated industry — you name it and there’s probably a damning news article about its manifestation in China somewhere.

I had been living in the Emerald City, in a blue-green state, where recycling is matter of fact and if you can’t see the tops of the skyscrapers downtown, it is raining. Now I’m in Beijing, and buildings are obscured by pollution regularly. On Saturday, Beijing checked in at 72 on the Air Pollution Index. Last weekend it rained for two days and has been fairly windy, so the particulate matter has been knocked down, and the smog blown away. This morning, though, the wind has died down and the haze is closing in again.

72. What does the number mean, exactly? The API is calculated from reports on air quality from different stations around the city and the region, and considers levels of inhalable particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrous dioxide, plus carbon monoxide and ozone in miligrams per cubic meter. The World Health Organization considers 50 to be a safe number. For Beijing, an API number below 100 makes it a ‘Blue Sky Day,’ and it isn’t until 101 that the State Environmental Protection Agency recommends that “the cardiac and respiratory system patients should reduce strength draining and outdoor activities.” Up to 200 is still only “light pollution.” With a sandstorm, the API can reportedly go to 300 or higher, as it did in mid-March, before we arrived. Or, in December, 2006, it was over 500.

Beijing has a target number of ‘Blue Sky Days,’ 70% in 2008. To meet the targets, there is a multi-layered approach: nearly the entire taxi fleet has been replaced with Hyundai Elantras, the city’s environmental agency has been encouraging drivers to give up one day of driving a month, factories have shut down (more will be shut down in July, and remain out until the Olympics are done), and monitoring stations in the places with consistently bad air ratings have been taken offline (or not?). Maybe it is simplest, and cynicalest, to simply consider the number an indicator of how likely you are to get cancer, or have decreased life expectancy due to prolonged exposure. Though, really, who am I to comment? Is criticizing China’s environment racist? I think I’d place myself alongside James Fallows, on that one.

When we visited the Great Wall last weekend, the haze was very much in evidence. On the way back, I asked Alex’s colleague, who had very kindly taken us out there, what his opinion was on the environmental problems, and the more recent moves to rein in industry and improve environmental quality. His answer was simple — the Communists might not be very good, but they don’t want to kill everyone, so therefore they will take real action on the environmental problems. This seemed logical, and I hope it is true. The same fellow, though, is soon to be a father, and asked Alex to buy some cans of baby formula while he was in San Francisco, as he is mistrustful of the domestic options.

For myself, I don’t think there’s any way to get around the large portion of responsibility that the West should bear, in regards to the Chinese environment. Though the domestic factors are not small, a lot of the pollution is industrial in origin. And everyone knows what Chinese industry produces — cheap goods for Western markets. They make all the things we used to produce domestically, until we devised our own environmental regulations, and our own workers started requiring health plans and such. So we outsourced our environmental problems, and cleaned up our own environment, but at the cost of other places on the globe.

That’s my Great White Guilt.

In consideration of all the above — green lifestyle in the US, awareness of environmental issues here (and I didn’t even go into water), and Great White Guilt, one of the things I think about here is how to live best and greenest. The most concrete thing I can think of is taking fewer, shorter showers. And the grocery store (really a French chain, soon to be boycotted in relation to the Olympic torch debacle) has an understated campaign about reusable bags, so Alex got one of those.

But how to balance other aspects? Is it better to eat street food (little infrastructure involved in its preparation, but probably contains all the tasty things from the air and street) or restaurant food (bought and cooked in bulk, but eaten with disposable chopsticks?) or to cook and eat at home (my US solution, but I have a limited kitchen, and a limited ability to identify or find necessary ingredients)? Better to walk, or to bike, or to take a taxi (is the air inside a taxi somewhat filtered, compared to outside? is it supporting the local economy?) Is it better to buy food from the grocery store, with some presumable quality control, or to buy it on the street and practice language skills? Should I let Alex try to take his button-up work shirts to a dry-cleaner, or should one of us figure out how to iron them? Is there any way to recycle bottles? Does someone down the line pick through the hotel trash and glean out the reusable bits? What about composting? What can I say or do when I see people littering in the streets? Do the air filter masks that many people on the street wear have a positive health benefit?

What can one foreign white girl do in a city of nearly 18 million?