I spent some time today reading ‘Oracle Bones,’ one of the books on China that Alex read, enjoyed, respected, and handed to me. The author was first a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching English in a province, and then slowly clawed his way into a successful journalism career. (I say ‘clawed’ because both of my parents were journalists at one time, and I have no romantic illusions about the lucrative or steady qualities of the work.) Starting out in a province and being the main source of English language for those around you, I think must be an awfully good way to learn a lot of language in a hurry. It’s pretty much how I learned Finnish — by being in the middle of it all the time.

I will have to try harder to learn Mandarin, though, as my daily life is easily removed from the surroundings. I am working through the same English-language channels, on the internet, as I would be at home in Seattle. I am listening to my usual mish-mash of English, Russian, and occasionally Spanish, music while I work.

Today I looked out the window, from my position on the tenth floor (which is really the ninth — floors four and fourteen are skipped in the numbering, because the word for ‘four’ also sounds like the word for ‘death’) and saw the image of a crane at a nearby construction site reflected in the windows of the high rise building across the street. There is another building between me and the construction; the only way I could see it was in the reflection. The crane-image moved liquidly across the glass, surrounded by blue sky, the China Mobile offices behind the windows tinted and obscured. A bundle of something was let down, the cables swaying, rippling on the glass like a heat mirage. The body of the crane swiveled and glided through the reflected the sky.

Several stories down, on the street level, the wind whipped back and forth a few flags in front of the China Mobile building, a blue one with the company logo, a white one I could only see part of, and the gold-spangled, red flag of the People’s Republic of China. The red silk crumpled sinuously, now hugging the flag pole tightly, now leaping away with a visible snap, displaying its stars.

That’s what I saw, watching from my English-language bubble, floating along the surface of this great sea of Chinese language and culture. I have quite a bit of Mandarin to learn before I can stick my head completely underwater.

Yesterday I took the subway towards the center city, and got off at the northeastern corner, near the embassy district. I saw the Russian embassy, and several stores with Russian signs. I wound my way south and east and eventually got to one of the big shopping streets, Wangfujing, quite close to Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City. The only thing I bought was some street food — fried dough balls so sticky on the inside that at first I thought they had banana inside.

In an offshoot of the alley with food, I also walked through an alley full of stalls hawking things for tourists — chopsticks, fans, bronze figurines, opera masks, geisha dolls, teacups, saddam husein playing cards. In Russia, the same places sold matryoshka dolls painted with everything from traditional female faces to US presidents, to Simpsons characters, fur hats, lacquer boxes, and any amount of chachki emblazoned with Soviet insignia. There I could bargain with the sellers, chat them up; here the hawkers plucked at my sleeve and addressed me in rudimentary English: “Lay-dee! Looka looka!”

In Chinese, there are no syllables ending in hard consonants – k, p, t, d. Thus the sellers implore you to looka and buy a mapa, a booka, a postacard, which are invariably gooda. When I visited last year, one the phrases Alex taught me on my first day, when we visited Tian’anmen Square, was ‘bu yao’ — don’t want. It’s a useful one in that part of town, where foreign and domestic tourists alike are lured by the promise of spectacular cultural relics.

My strategy is the same here as it would be at home in Seattle, or anywhere. I keep walking, I act as if I didn’t hear, as if they were talking to someone else. More as an exercise than anything, I wandered through a store selling chopsticks and studiously ignored the salesgirl who stood attentively at my shoulder the whole time, waiting for me to show particular interest in anything. A couple times I nearly laughed out loud, as she literally followed me step for step. I kept waiting for her to say something, to try to sell me on a set, so I could use one of the phrases I do know — “wo kan-kan.” I’m looking with the connotation of ‘I’m thinking about it, but have not decided.’

I did get to use it later, in a bookstore, where I was approached by a salesgirl while looking through the ‘Chinese learning texts for foreign devils’ section. When I didn’t respond to her Mandarin queries, she held up a book and asked in English, ‘You want to learn Chinese?’ ‘Wo kan-kan,’ didn’t make her go away, though, it set off another round of Mandarin address, forcing me to come up with an additional phrase: ‘Bu mai, kan-kan.’ Not buying, just looking. On a different floor, though, I did buy an exercise book to practice writing characters in, and a thing of note paper to make flashcards with. I have plenty of studying to do!

Odd items of clothing seen today:

1) A girl wearing a sequined hat that in the US would say ‘HOT’ or ‘Princess’ or some such, but here said ‘Rape’.

2) A guy with a tshirt that said ‘Surfer dreams are wet’

Yesterday afternoon I finally kicked myself out the door at about two in the afternoon, and headed west, toward the mountains and the green patch of the map marked Haidian Park, not far from our place.

A new direction is always exciting, and I hadn’t gone too far when I found a spectacle — a crew of men removing trees in a narrow street. This was a four-story tree, with a guy in a leather harness clinging to the top and using a handsaw to saw off boughs. I stayed and took pictures, deciding it was curious enough that I shouldn’t worry about being a random laowai with a camera. When all the limbs were off, the man in the tree shimmied down ten feet and they sent him up a chainsaw on a rope, and he cut off the top section. Below, a group of men on a rope pulled so it landed in an appropriate spot in the street. The same for a second section, which shook the ground as it hit. The guy came down the rest of the way and had a smoke while some of the others were cutting the logs into sections. It seemed they only had one chainsaw amongst the group — there were maybe half a dozen men — and they were in no great hurry to get to the last twenty feet of tree still standing, so I kept going.

I came upon a canal, empty despite the recent rain, followed it up, then continued west on what turned out to be the fourth ring road, a large highway, where I was going against traffic and didn’t seem to be getting any closer to a way into the park, though I could see fenced in greenery. Eventually I came to an entrance — for a gold course. I turned back and went up a smaller road, again following a fence and despairing of a way in. This time, though, I was rewarded after a bit with a sign saying ENTRANCE, and a very obvious entrance next to it, with a young uniformed fellow standing at attention.

I had no idea if there was an entrance fee, and I also no idea how to ask, but I didn’t see anything obvious saying you needed to pay, so I put on my best impassive laowai who knows exactly where to go face and walked in, ignoring the guard completely. He didn’t say anything, and I discovered a large and lovely park worth the effort of finding it (which really was minimal, so I didn’t get lost of anything).

After I walked around for a while, I was approached by two teenage boys, one of whom asked me something. I gave him a blank look, and he said “picture?”, gesturing with his cell phone. So I let his friend take a picture of us standing next to each other.

This happened last year in Harbin — people finding me so odd and exotic looking that they wanted their photo with me. I imagine it is like when you drive across the country in the US, and you take your picture next to a giant egg, or a statue of James Dean, or with the really big fish you caught, except in this case the remarkable object comes to you.

Or maybe this guy will try to tell his friends he has a laowai girlfriend — see, photographic evidence! Or maybe, the way that all Asians look very much alike to Westerners, perhaps they think I look like some particular white female celebrity. Who knows? In both cases — and I’m sure there will be others — there has been no conversation, no small talk, “Are you American?”, just the photo, and goodbye.

Today’s adventure: As I was getting ready to leave in the afternoon, I picked up a bag off the table and knocked the hanging lamp above it. The glass plate in the bottom of the lamp came out, hit the table, and shattered into a million little pieces, with great sound effects. Glass scattered across the room.

I stood and stared for a bit, as it was probably one of the largest items I have been party to the shattering of, then found a dictionary and looked up the word for broken, got up my courage, and went out into the hall. A few doors down, I could see a cart for the housekeepers, so I approached and said, ‘Duibuqi, wo de dian deng sui de. Sorry, my light broke.‘ (Awfully proud of myself for being able to complete the sentence.) They asked me a question which I didn’t understand, but which I presumed to be ‘What room are you?’ and so ushered one of them with me and showed him to what I was referring. Glass piled on the table, shards on the floor, a few outliers on the couch, in the sink. He surveyed, then picked up the phone and made a call, and went away. After a bit, he returned with a woman who brought a vacuum and began to pick up the large pieces.

‘Duibuqi,’ I said. Sorry. Her reply, of course, I did not understand. The man came back and asked another incomprehensible question, and I understood through sign language that they wanted to make sure I hadn’t cut myself. I had not.

There didn’t seem to be much I could do, other than apologize and not understand anything they said, so I finished gathering up my things and left, to meet Alex, and visit a gym with him after work. It was a nice walk today, since it was raining all day yesterday and most of this morning. The air has cleared up considerably, and I was even able to see the mountains in the west, as well as the building by which Alex judges air quality — the tallest of the buildings in the Olympic complex, shaped somewhat like a can-opener.

The gym was your typical, internationally recognizable setup: weight machines (and most of the men) on one side, cardio machines (and most of the women) on the other. Alex pointed out the rowing machine, and I spent some time on it reflecting how long it has been since I did any erging.

I also learned that Chinese women don’t wear shorts at the gym. I pointed that out the Alex, and he said, ‘Yeah, and they don’t do what you’re doing, either.’

‘What, sweat?’ I asked.

‘No, wipe their face with their shirt.’

I’m kind of coming to the conclusion that if people will stare at me no matter what I do (on account of being white and blond), then I might as well do whatever I want…

Yesterday was a good long day, with an early start to meet a friend and co-worker of Alex’s, who took us out for an excursion on the Great Wall. We went to a section 120 km from Beijing, less popular with tourists than other spots, but still subject to a sizable number of people, and not far enough out to escape the persistent haze.
It took two or three hours for us to get out of the city and then wind our way up through a place called ‘Rainbow Trout Valley’ to our destination, called Jian Kou. It is a particular tower on the wall which is lower than the towers on either side, so making a shape like the string of bow when drawn back with an arrow — ‘Jian’ 箭 means arrow, while ‘kou’ 扣 means held back. (Etymology of the 扣 character: a hand over a mouth.) We parked along with many other cars on the side of the road in the village and paid a couple kwai to a picturesque old man in a Mao jacket — a standard practice, in return for which the farmers keep an eye on the cars. The trail went up through fields still bare, past dry corn stalks piled up on the side, then up through then trees beginning to bud out. The view, which would surely have been striking, was obscured by the omnipresent white haze, but everyone on the trail was in high spirits. Occasionally someone would start whooping, and answering yells would greet them from further up the hillside. There were even a few rounds of song, with one group starting a verse, and another group finishing it.

I got ahead of the guys for a while and got a lot of pretty surprised looks — a white girl, climbing up to the wall by herself? One young woman, also looking surprised, said ‘Hello’ to me as we passed; I said ‘Hello’ back and kept going, wondering what exactly went through her head.

As they say, we aren’t in Kansas anymore, and what’s more, it’s a long way from REI. Many of those climbing were young, but most were outfitted more for street-walking than for hiking. I saw a lot of men in slacks and leather shoes, and, though I didn’t see any women in heels, I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. It seemed that about half of those making the climb up to the wall stopped at that point, had some food, and went back down.

We continued to the north, through various towers, and up a stretch that was, according to Alex’s friend, rated as ‘two stars’ for steepness, which brought to mind the Angel’s Landing trail in Zion National Park, though with a shorter fall awaiting. That and there were brick stairs, but no chains to hold on to.

A bit later there was a ‘three stars’ section, where the stairs had entirely disintegrated, leaving an irregularly surfaced rock wall, which we clambered up one at a time. We had to wait for quite a while as the people before us went up, and then a group coming back made their way down. First a man came down, then a young woman started coming down, then stopped and tossed down her backpack and then her gloves to the man, who then climbed partway back up to help direct her where to put her feet. Those waiting at the bottom where all talking amongst each other, and began laughing — Alex’s friend translated for us: ‘First the backpack, then the gloves fell from heaven — next will be the girl!’

I made sure not to look down on my way up; on the way back we took a side trail that circumvented the wall and both steep sections. We ended up turning around before we reached a section that would have been ‘five stars’ steep — I can’t think what it would have been like!

Today has been a quiet one, particularly because it is raining, an unusual occurrence for Beijing, which has caused umbrellas to sprout like multi-colored mushrooms, and all the taxis to be taken. We went out this afternoon anyway, to a cafe near several of the universities, which turned out to be almost exclusively filled with white people studying Chinese, which, of course, was what we spent the afternoon there doing. We had dinner with another friend of Alex’s, who showed a Yunnan (southern province) restaurant, an unassuming hole in the wall with cheap plastic tablecloths and delicious food. We had some sautéed greens, fried banana, potato balls, fried chicken, pineapple rice, and a mixed dish of bell peppers and ground meat and something that may have been a mushroom or root vegetable, I’m really not sure. The pineapple rice actually came in a pineapple, which was super tasty, and I want to try making it sometime. I’m still kicking myself for not taking a photo, but we took a business card for the place, and I’m sure we’ll be back.

So here I am in Beijing. Day one in China. It is sunny, although due to the general haze of pollution, the sky is a flat white. If I look straight up, I can see the barest hint of blue, and the suggestion that there a few shreds of actual cloud above.

Alex and I got up early, around 7:30, had a shower and breakfast composed of a medley of fruits and yogurt from China, with the addition of bagels from Grateful Bread in Seattle. From the Western perspective, China is severely lacking in decent bread products and chocolate. I also brought a pile of chocolate bars with me.

I spent some time on Alex’s computer to do some work email, and then walked with him to work, about half an hour from our “serviced residence,” aka hotel room. Microsoft has four floors in the top of one tower in a four building set of highrise technology office buldings. Sun is in one of the other towers, the Google building is also just next door.

The bottom has a plaza, with some cafes and such. I stopped in one to get a drink — a Starbucks-like place called ‘SPR coffee’ where I pointed on a bilingual menu to indicate that I wanted an iced pineapple drink. It came with an oreo on top, because, why the hell not?

“Why the hell not?” is the only explanation for a lot of things here. I’m sure examples will accumulate.

On the backside of the four towers is a spot which is labeled TSINGHUA SCIENCE PARK. Tsinghua is one of the universities, and is located next door. The science park is made up of a tile plaza surrounded by a fountain-filled moat, and further ringed by terraces of paving stones and bushes, the uppermost level of which is blooming with yellow flowers.

I spent some time sitting in the park, took a walk around part of the Tsinghua campus, and had lunch with Alex and two of his co-workers in a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant (even saw a monk) before walking back home, feeling very white and freckled and blond on account of the people who stare unabashedly at me.

I detoured a couple times to walk through alleys full of street vendors — fruits and vegetables spread out on cloths on the side of the alleyway. Most of the vendors stared at me, and I wished I knew how to say ‘how much?’, or that I had a better handle on numbers, so I could try and buy some strawberries, or an egg. But I’m still pretty mute, and too shy to just pull out my camera and start taking pictures of people and their stuff, so I’ll just have to provide word pictures instead.

I saw an intense looking poker game amongst several sellers, all sitting under a big umbrella, hunched over their cards and smoking furiously. I saw a cucumber with a six-inch circumference. It looked like you could by slices of it. I also saw a few vendors with live seafood — plastic tubs with fish or shrimp, with bubbling air hoses frothing the water. There were women selling brown eggs, which were piled up in great towers, with cardboard molding between each layer.

I’ll get cracking on my Chinese, and hopefully go back soon with a little more gumption.