Konnichiwa

This was the view from my room on the 8th floor of the New Miyako Hotel in Kyoto last Friday night; you can see the Shinkasen, the bullet train, in the top portion of the picture. It costs twice as much to go to Tokyo and back from Kyoto (about $300) than to go from Beijing to Ulan Bator in Mongolia (about $120, I think - Parker and Erik will correct me if I don't have it right).

This is the classic portrait of Mao mounted at the southernmost end of the Forbidden City, the former imperial palace, which faces Tian'anmen Square. It is this image of Mao which became famous in the west after Nixon's visit to China in the early 1970s. It's massive.

We are in Japan! The trip was not too difficult, at least until we got to Kansai Airport. Then it got complicated! Beijing and Osaka, where we flew into, are only about three hours apart by air. That's like flying from Chicago to Denver, or Boston to Washington, D.C. Americans don't consider that much of a flight, and most American airlines won't even feed you on a flight under four hours if you are flying economy. But in that space of time we left China and all it means and entered Japan. Today in my class I asked everyone to come up with ten adjectives that described China (they had not read my blogpost where I had already tried to think of ways to describe Beijing). Here are some of them: cheap, tasty, easy, confusing, dirty, disorganized, laissez-faire, friendly, loud, alive, and energetic. And they coined one - a neologism, a new word (I think it was Parker, although he may also have contributed: Yiaaaaoooooow!): Maossive, to describe the outsized nature of so much of Beijing and the preponderance of things Mao. (For instance, all the paper currency, except for the very small bills that are worth a few cents, feature Mao. Fortunately the colors and sizes are different.) Jackie came up with both easy and confusing, which sounds contradictory, but makes perfect sense to those who us who spent eight weeks there. Easy: using the taxis, meeting in the lobby for our trips, getting good cheap food, finding inexpensive presents and necessities, getting to class, finding a convenience store (the latter two in the same building we lived in), getting something rescheduled. Jackie became expert at using the subway in Beijing, along with many others, who found them an inexpensive alternative to the already-cheap taxis (price of the subway in Beijing: one kuai - 12 cents; price of a taxi to a destination about half an hour away - about 40 kuai, less than $5, which could be split up to four ways). Confusing: the bus system, bargaining (at first - later it was easy), figuring out why the power would shut off in our rooms (although easy to rectify), how to get hot water in my shower for more than two days in a row (that was a problem for me), figuring out how to get Internet (impossible for most), getting food at the dining hall (hard to master at first, easier later on).

The Analects of Confucius

Pictured above are Roger Ames, of the University of Hawaii and Beijing (Peking) University and Henry Rosemont, recently retired from St. Mary's in Maryland and currently teaching part-time at Brown University. I'm sandwiched inbetween. Roger, whom I've mentioned before in the blog, is a professor of philosophy and a prolific translator and interpreter of Confucian texts. He and Henry have translated the Analects of Confucius and are working on a new Confucian translation. Chinese students entering college often don't have much academic knowledge of their own culture. The current president of Beiwai was one of Roger's students, and he brought Roger to Beiwai to lecture in English about Confucius, using the Ames and Rosemont translation as a text. I managed to snag Roger for just a short time before his lecture today, since this is our final week, and we had coffee at the BFSU Tasty Eatery, the restaurant in our building. The lecture was right next door at Yifulou, the closest walk I've had to anything so far.

The lecture was in one of their high-tech classrooms, with tiered seats, a huge mechanized screen, and a document camera, my favorite classroom technology. (ELMO is the brand made famous in the O.J. Simpson trial.) You can show anything on it and even use a piece of paper as a blackboard, although your hand shows up magnified on the screen.) Roger did the first hour, and Henry the second hour, tag-team teaching. Roger is one of the reasons I am in Beijing right now, because I was lucky enough to attend two of the Asian Studies Development Program seminars at the University of Hawaii. Several years ago NCC got a terrific grant from the Freeman Foundation for the development of Asian Studies which helped send people to ASDP seminars and other conferences. We have had a long relationship with Japan and a long tradition of teaching Japanese at NCC, but now we have an East Asian Studies major, a professor of East Asian Studies (Brian Hoffert, who accompanied students to Beiwai last year), a respectable collection of East Asian books and films, an increasingly large number of students taking Chinese, and programs like the one the students and I are part of.

Birthday Cake

It's not my birthday yet in the U.S., but it is in China since we are 13 hours ahead of Chicago. And my son Garrett, in England, made me a cake!

So Much Shopping, So Little Time

Not what we're shopping for, but an example of the fresh seafood at Carrefour, known in Chinese as Jia Li Fu. Think of a Jewel and a Wal Mart jammed together with tiny aisles.

We're so accustomed to chicken feet (sometimes they show up in our bowls or on our plates) that this doesn't surprise us anymore. Sometimes the heads, too.

Arghhhh, as Charlie Brown used to say. So much shopping, and so little time left. Our remaining schedule is packed with classes and trips; today some students go to Mr. Jiang's new house in the suburbs; Monday we have classes in the morning and afternoon; Tuesday our written exam; Wednesday our oral exam; Thursday class in the morning, and the Forbidden City in the afternoon; we leave Friday morning. This will go incredibly quickly. And by Friday night we will be in Japan!!! A whole new language and new set of experiences, and a little culture shock as we move from messy, delicious, friendly, trafficky, cheap, crowded, dusty, tolerant, noisy China to Japan.

Jeff in Shanghai

Jim and Jeff went to Shanghai for part of National Week. I asked students to write about one of their experiences in the style of Mary Morris, author of Wall to Wall: Beijing to Berlin by Rail, which she wrote about her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1986, when both Beijing and Berlin (not to mention Mongolia and the rest of what was then the Soviet Union) were very different than they are today. Morris writes travel books as well as novels (her best-known travel book is probably Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone). Her travel writing combines memoir, history, and travelogue, and the students were asked to emulate some of her techniques.

From the assignment :

"Among other things, Morris

1. describes places, people, and events, typical of most travel writing you have encountered, as when she writes about going to the Mongolian Embassy

2. includes lots of detail, as when she describes the places she has already been in China

3. includes autobiography, as when she explains some details about her “companion” who will not be going with her on this trip and the story of her family (details of which may or may not be true)

4. includes historical information and analysis, as when she writes about the history and significance of the Mongol Empire

5. creates a narrative, making the trip into a story"

Here is part of what Jeff wrote about his observations of Shanghai:

On the Boardwalk

A “sea of humanity” is an understatement [to describe] the crowds filling the brick-paved boardwalk lining the Waitan side of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. On one side, the muddy river lazily carried overloaded freighters, crammed
sightseeing boats, and ancient barges from the Pacific to the port and back. The
opposite side of the boardwalk pushed against a quickly moving two-way street;across that street the buildings of the Bund rose up, lit by yellow andwhite lights. Looking at the Bund was like staring old Europe in the face; I believed for a minute that we had inadvertently stumbled into Prague. Regardless of the heavy vehicle traffic meandering by on both sides, the elevated boardwalk seemed loud and crowded simply because of the massive crowds celebrating National Week. Tourists from all over China pushed past each other, lingered at the railing above the river, and haggled for souvenirs. Crowds of people made the boardwalk in Shanghai come alive.

Shanghai is a relatively new city, at least by Chinese standards. The most liberal
estimates [allow] Shanghai a paltry 1000 years of age, during most of which it was an insignificant fishing town. This small port played a surprisingly minor role in Chinese history due to its southern, coastal location. After the Opium War, with the increased presence of Great Britain and France, Shanghai developed a quasi-colonial status. In the 1920s and 30s, the Europeans built a banking street parallel to the river in an architectural style that is anything but Chinese. This district became known as the Bund and did more than supply a distinctly European flavor to the port; it formed a foundation for Shanghai to assume the role as the economic capital of China.

Today, the columned, majestic marble and stone buildings stand as a reminder of the influence of Europe upon Shanghai. These buildings [remind] visitors of the occupation of Shanghai and the colonial nature of the port. Indeed,[its] economic strength remains visible as well, embodied in Versace, Armani,Dolce and Gabana, and Gucci boutiques lining the road. Bustling roads and rivers undoubtedly appear the way they did a century ago and continue to carry wealth, power, and prestige into the metropolis of 17 million inhabitants.

Married couples, apparently unaware of China’s one-child policy, strolled down the boardwalk towing two or three young children. Also close behind was at least one older family member, amazed at how little they could recognize the new China. Groups of teenage friends relaxed during the most cheerful week of the year. Many girls approached us shyly and asked to take a picture. We smiled, thinking they must have intended [that we] snap a picture of their group in front of the beautiful skyline. Rather, these Chinese tourists, probably from some remote village, instead desired a picture with us. A mother practically begged us to hold her baby for a picture, and a young boy stood tall with the foreigners. For them, an American was as strange and wonderful as a 1500 foot, gleaming tower. For some reason, it pains me to think that they may have wasted one exposure of their outdated film camera on me.

With the crowds came the beggars. An armless man sat cross-legged and hopeless next to his friend who played a poorly written, melancholy piece on a keyboard. Dirty, weary vendors peddled the goods we have come to expect from China. Yet the difference in Shanghai was that they hawked their items almost exclusively to Chinese tourists. Beautiful kites, meat kebabs, picture-taking services, and statues of the skyline all could be purchased for just a few American dollars. City workers, assigned to sweep up after the crowds, sat in groups of three or four and casually smoked. Dressed in light blue jump suits and armed with a broom and pan, they were just what the boardwalk needed after a long day of guests. They too gazed at the sights and watch the vendors. Perhaps they were on a 15 minute break; I assumed that they too were simply enjoying National Week.

We will never know the reason each individual journeyed to the Waitan. Every one of Shanghai’s tourists,beggars, vendors, and workers crowding the boardwalk all strained at the railing above the river for a glimpse of the future. They gawked at the modernity springing up opposite the Bund, contrasting in a typical Chinese fashion. There was no need for us to squint at the Pudong skyline’s majesty directly
across the Huangpu, since it dominated in an indescribable manner. And just like a historical timeline, those seemingly ancient buildings of the Bund stood proudly behind us like the bygone era they represented. Yet in that instant, when the air just began to hint at fall, no one cared if the purse on their shoulder was Gucci or their shoes fine Italian leather. Everyone seemed to lust more for a cheap flashing pin, a wind-up mouse, or a Chinese flag. That National week night filled the Chinese with too much love and merriment for the expensive merchandise Shanghai offered.

Look at Garrett's Blog

Take a look at my son Garrett's blog (use the link on the right to "Trousers and Teapots") - his latest post is a link to a site that shows beautiful graphic designs of F.A.A. flight patterns across the United States, including Hawaii. According to the site, "The following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya."

McDonald's in Wangfujing

Wangfujing, also called #1 Street by some locals, is a very touristy spot that includes an impressive mall with western-style stores, side streets with great street food that the students love, big bookstores, and at least two McDonalds. We didn't eat at this one, but I did take some photos. That day McDonalds was featuring three kinds of big meals: the Australia, the Korea, and the Brazil. All of the prices are in RMB, so divide by 7.8, making each a little over $3. Of course for $3 in China you can eat a huge amount (as we did last night when we went out to eat with our Chinese teacher, Xiao Laoshi) if you are with a group and can order lots of dishes. We did, and it cost 25 RMB (kuai or yuan) per person, a little over $2. But once in a while McDonalds tastes good: I did have the Australia once, and the iced coffee topped with whipped cream was great. The burger wasn't bad either!

Lunch in the Alley

(I wrote this a few weeks ago; now I know more about Chinese food and can ask for more dishes than I could when I wrote this!)

I’m getting a little tired of the food in our dining hall; I think I’ve tried all of the dishes that look appealing that sit in the trays that we can point to. There are lots of other things we see people eating which they are order and are made in the kitchen we can only see a glimpse of, but we don’t know what the dishes are called. If we were in a restaurant, we could say “I’m having what she’s having,” but the dining hall is a huge crush of people on three floors and not conducive to conversations about what you might like to eat with the people behind the counter. It’s gently or not-so-gently push your way to the front, point out something you want, and stick your meal card into the reader so they can deduct how many RMB it costs. I know several good restaurants on the west side of the Third Ring Road, but that’s about a 15 or 20-minute walk, and I needed something faster. There’s an alley that runs behind our building filled with small restaurants and shops, also known for the vendors who set up carts and sell food and other goods. I thought I’d look for some jaozi or baozi (two kinds of filled dumplings, the first boiled and the other steamed), and if I could figure out how to say it, some bok choy with garlic and chilies.
It was a beautiful day today, sunny and dry, the haze of smog gone, the sky bright blue, a great day for a stroll down the alley. The variety of vendors in a small space is remarkable: on the short walk to the noodle shop, you can see dozens and dozens of local scenes worth a photograph. I saw a man open a small cardboard box filled with tiny cages; in each cage were even smaller white rabbits and white kittens. On the other side of the alley was a man who every day sets up a cart topped by a steel drum, which is used as an oven to cook smoky sweet potatoes that he sells hot in their jackets, setting them along the rim when they are cooked. In the alley you can also buy a kind of hot dog or sausage grilled in a hot skillet. Another man sells stuffed animals. Beiwai’s student population is about 70% female, so no jokes about eating cats or rabbits: these little white morsels- I hope - are sold as pets, and I saw them examined by college students carrying their books back to the dorm, not men or women thinking of cooking dinner. Many of the vendors sell fruit: watermelons, fat purple and green grapes, bitter melon, pale yellow pears, striped apples, large yellowy-pink peaches. Others sell vegetables: bok choy (it goes by another name in Mandarin-speaking Beijing), onions, scallions, lettuce, cilantro, potatoes, carrots, long thin cucumbers, something that looks like baby spinach. One man sells phone cards from a blanket, lined neatly with dozens, each in a different pattern. Most of the vendors use some sort of wheeled cart to either convey their wares or as a portable table or both. Some carts are attached to a bicycle wheels and pedals so they can be covered and ridden home at the end of the day, or transported to another location. When business is slow, they take a nap.
People sleep anywhere in China, and it no longer surprises us to see them sleeping in unlikely public or private spots. One night, stuck on a bus in traffic at the same spot for twenty minutes, one of our students noticed two waitresses, in their uniforms, sound asleep at a table in the upstairs front window of the restaurant. People sleep on top of carts, on tables, crouched against walls, seemingly oblivious to the crowds going by.
All the while I walked along the alley, I could see over the wall to our building, Guojiao, which reaches up 17 stories. It has a distinctive profile and can be seen from quite a distance in the direction of the alley (east, away from the Third Ring Road), so if you are looking for a restaurant for a few blocks around you see it when you come out and find your way back. There is a western-style restaurant called Tube Station, with pizza and coffee and an English menu, but I’m not hungry for western-style food yet. I tried another – looked like a noodle shop, a good place for dumplings. The alley also includes a Japanese restaurant where I’ve eaten in a group: excellent, and Japanese style (one person, one plate) so fine for just a few people. I found a noodle shop: no baozi today, but they did have jaozi, though no one spoke English. So – some jaozi. And yi ping shui – one bottle of water. I watched them pour hot water out of a tap into a cup. Bu, meiyou bei shui, wo yao yi ping shui. No, I don’t want a cup, I want a bottle of water. Meiyou ping shui. We don’t have bottled water. Yi ting kele? A can of Coke? Meiyou ting kele. I saw her reach into a refrigerator and pull out a 16-ounce bottle of Coke. Hao, yi ping kele. Good, a bottle of Coke. A plate of about eight jaozi arrived, boiled ravioli filled with chopped pork, garlic and scallions. My small phrasebook doesn’t include the Mandarin word for bok choy or green vegetables, so that will have to wait for another day. I looked around for the dark vinegar that the dumplings are usually served with – the manager pointed to the table behind me. Someone handed me the bottle of vinegar. She brought another small dish of sauce, explaining the difference. They were both thin and brown. One vinegar, one flavored soy? I think so. Delicious. I paid the bill: 8 kuai (yuan, or RMB): less than a dollar.

New Blog Will Start - (I think!)

North Central would like me to use their blogging software, so I will probably start doing two blogs, this one (I hate to leave Blogspot! It's so easy!) and give their new blogging software a crack. I'll see how this goes, trying to duplicate some of the content. Blogspot, for those of you who are bloggers, is very user-friendly; NCC has declined to link to a third-party blogging server after initially linking this blog to their site. So....stay tuned! Unfortunately the NCC site is often difficult to link to (probably because of all the firewalls, added to the Chinese firewalls) so the process may be slow. But I see that a student who is doing a semester at sea is managing to do it from the Internet cafes he manages to find, including one in Myannmar! So if he can do it from Burma, I guess I can do it from Beijing.

So What's the Problem?

According to the October 9 issue of New Yorker magazine, which in turn is quoting AdAge.com, "A report last week by Advertising Age Editor at Large Bradley Johnson noted that about 35 million workers - or one in four people in the U.S. labor force - spend an average of 3.5 hours, or 9%, of each work day reading blogs." New Yorker's tongue-in-cheek response: "A much-needed break" (36).

The Alphabetical iPod Shuffle

Above is Command Central: the computer on full throttle, with iPod and camera plugged into bunk-bed style USB ports on the left, and the DSL cable near the screen; on the right, a headset for Skype phonecalls with a microphone and earphones, and the DVD player with Hitchcock's North by Northwest exposed. Behind the iPod you can see Iron and Silk, a movie about a young man who goes to China in the mid-1980s to teach English and learn martial arts.

Before I left my husband Gary got me an iPod as an early birthday present. Gary loves to give people presents, and thinks hard about what he gives them, trying to find just the perfect thing for his family members, whether or not they know that’s what they want. (He told me it was something I needed and I thought: No! Not a raincoat! I don't want a raincoat! ) But it was an iPod. It's a great present, and my son Garrett, who is 21, loaded it with all sorts of things he thought I would like: Sufjan Stevens, Coldplay, Randy Newman, Radiohead. Like a kid in a candy store, I fed it with my favorite CDs: Buena Vista Social Club, Ibrahim Ferrer, Ozzie Kotani, Gabby Pahinui, Patsy Cline, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Beatles, Frank Sinatra. I hadn’t listened to an iPod before that and was blown away by the way it fills your head with sound. I really have no idea what I’m doing, so sometimes I just listen to songs in alphabetical order: the alphabet shuffle. It seems to work just fine. So, kids, I'm finally in the 21st century. It sounds great!

Some Alphabetical C’s:

Can’t Buy Me Love (Beatles – Anthology I, Disc I)
Candela (Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club)
Carinhoso (Yo Yo Ma – Obrigado Brasil)
Carolina in my Mind (James Taylor – Greatest Hits)
Caroline, No (The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds)
Carry On (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Crosby Stills & Nash, Disc 1)
Carry that Weight (Beatles – Abbey Road)
Casimir Pulaski Day (Sufjan Stevens – Illinois)
Cause a Rockslide (Badly Drawn Boy – The Hour of the Bewilderbeast)
Cecelia (Paul Simon – Bridge Over Troubled Waters)
Change Partners (Steven Stills – Crosby, Stills & Nash, Disc 2)
Chan Chan (Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club)
Chicago (Sufjan Stevens – Illinois)
Child is Father of the Man (Brian Wilson - SMiLE)
China (Tori Amos – Little Earthquakes)
Cienfuegos Tiene Su Guaguanco (Ibrahim Ferrer –
Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer)
Clocks (Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head)
Come Fly with Me (Frank Sinatra – Frank Sinatra: The Best of the Capitol Years)

The Beiwai Neighborhood

All the photos in this post were taken by my son Matt when he visited last week. He also did quite a lot of audio recording, but I'm not sure yet how to link those files. Above you can see a corner that is near the neighborhood near the east end of the Beiwai campus. This was taken about nine o'clock on a weekday evening; what you see are mainly fruitstands, foodstands, and other small vendors. This is at the rear of the campus, away from the huge Third Ring Road, and it's much more a neighborhood than the heavily-trafficked Third Ring, which is a busy multi-lane boulevard (we have an underpass, so we don't have to cross it) and feels quite local. Even so, it's full of good restaurants.

In the photo above, you can see the pineapple rice that is a signature dish at Dai Ethnic Restaurants. About a ten-minute walk from our dorm are two that are next to one another. You can also see a shadow of one of the waitresses, who is wearing an ethnic outfit, a patterned cotton short-sleeved blouse and long skirt made from a fabric that is reminiscent of batik. The rice is mixed with fresh pineapple and steamed in the hollowed-out shell. It's delicious! Tim tells me you can find this in Naperville at the Joy Yee Noodle Restaurant on Ogden Ave. near the intersection of Naper Blvd. One of these is enough to serve at least four people as a side dish.

The foodstands stay open pretty late; people can grab a bite to eat on the way home from work, or on their way out for the evening. This stand serves steamed dumplings. The lighted stalls keep this section of the street lively and comforting even late at night.

A Fruitstand on Campus

We know it snowed yesterday in Chicago, but here it's still warm although there is a little nip in the air, which seems to mean the air is just a little cleaner and the bugs are disappearing. Good! Beijing is full of fruitstands, which pop up all over. This one recently appeared on campus. I bought a persimmon and a few bananas and plums. They don't serve much fruit in the dining hall, but it's easy to find everywhere. The blue metal wall behind the stand is a temporary one that borders a lot where a new gymnasium will be built, including a 25-meter and 50-meter swimming pool. Above the wall you can see stacks of wheelbarrows. Although heavy machinery goes day and night in the cavity, a great deal of work is done by hand

Tube Station

Beijing Foreign Studies University is enclosed by walls and fencing, which means that we enter and leave through a number of gates. There is one breach: a slat missing from a metal fence behind the dorms on the East Campus. The students found it early on and suggested I wouldn't fit through it: thanks a lot, guys. I do, and quite easily. I don't know what they were thinking. Slipping through the opening saves about ten minutes of walking through the campus and out a gate into an alley that leads to the main street. The alley itself is fascinating, though, and among its pleasures is an Internet Cafe called the Tube Station. It has excellent western-style food, including subs - Tim suggests the name is a play on "Subway" - and fancy coffee drinks. The boys recommend the roast beef and turkey subs, on excellent crusty bread. I just had a small bowl of pumpkin soup and milk tea late this afternoon. It was a little surreal: I was listening to the Buena Vista Social Club, reading the New Yorker (hand-delivered last week by my kind husband), drinking hot tea with milk, which is what my grandmother used to serve me when I was a little girl and which I never drink at home. It tasted just the same as it did in 1960.

Another surreal moment: you can see "The Mail" page of the New Yorker: one of the letters is about Richard Brodhead, currently the president of Duke and a distant relative. (Here's the definition of distant: I've heard of him and but he's never heard of me or any of my immediate relatives. We both belong to the Brodhead Family Association, which is, trust me, a small group of people who get a newsletter.) The letter in the New Yorker is not complimentary: it's about the Duke Lacrosse team.

Bowling in China?

My colleagues in the English Department – how shall I say this – are more famous for their intellectual than their athletic prowess. Hmmm… that will get me into trouble. I’ll revise: some of my colleagues are terrific practitioners of yoga and even teach it. Some walk a lot and go to the fitness center religiously. But none of us were on athletic scholarships in college. We were studying and writing for the college newspaper and those of us who are old enough were perhaps dropping in on a demonstration or two and maybe playing a little tennis or touch football for exercise. But recently a surprising competition has been suggested by the Speech Department: a Bowling Throwdown Challenge. Somehow this has captured the imagination of the Department and it turns out almost everyone has a bowling history. More about that in another post – those troublemakers in Speech Com don’t know what they will be up against.

There is bowling in China, although I don't know if it predated the late 70s (somehow I have a vision of Nixon describing bowling to Mao: wouldn’t that have been more chummy than Ping Pong?) At our dorm in Beiwai there is a lot to choose from: Latin Dancing and yoga and a workout room. I am ashamed to say I have spent a lot more time looking for good cheap restaurants, which are plentiful, than exercising. Although I do crawl through a hole in the fence to get to some of the restaurants, which should count for something.

I am also a lousy bowler but bowled in TWO leagues in my early days in Naperville when I was - believe it or not - in my mid-thirties. Both were subdivision bowling leagues - one all women - we would drop off the kids at elementary school, race to Gala Lanes (now the Brunswick Zone on Ogden), drop off the pre-schoolers at the daycare at the bowling alley (Yes! Bowling daycare!) nicely dressed and shod in our very own bowling shoes - mine were powder blue and I had my own 10-pound blue ball - and be drinking our Diet Cokes and eating fries by 9 a.m., wearing sparkly sweaters and sporting big 80s hair. Sometimes we even had potluck lunches. Gary and I were in a Brook Crossings subdivision couples league for a short time at Parkside Lanes in the evening and I wore only outfits, including a denim jacket, that I could put in the wash because our clothes would be reeking and smoky by midnight.

Say what you will about Nixon: he went to China and things have never been the same.

Signs: Don't Do Any of This!

Here's what you cannot do on the path along the lake in Beihai Park:

No: motorcycles (biycles?), picking the flowers, loitering, taxis, dropping ashes, blowing horns, rollerblading, playing ball, carrying firearms, walking dogs, or starting fires. I can't tell what the middle bottom direction is. Beihai (North Lake) is a beautiful park near the center of the city, within walking distance of the Forbidden City to the south and Houhai to the north.

Essentials

Skip this post if you are not interested in what a traveler should carry around every day. I've developed my own system after trips of two weeks or more to Central America (Cuba, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica), Morocco, Spain, and Japan and China. Here's what I carry every day in my mini-backpack, which I use instead of a purse when traveling: Starting at the bottom, a wallet with the important cards: dorm keycard, mealcard, international calling card (haven't used it yet), namecards from restaurants I want to return to (in Chinese characters, often with a map, so a taxi driver can find it), wallet; next row up: emergency phone # card from NCC, passport copy, case for business cards (called namecards in China), pen, Mandarin phrasebook; next row up: reading glasses, Beiwai ID card (looks like a little passport), camera; next row up: "Foodguide" (more about that later), chewable imodium (you never know), mini-bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, Tide-to-go instant stain remover, iPod, addressbook, including all students' phone #s; along the top: 220 yuan (a little more than $25), a few Band Aids, and tissues. All the important cards and the passport copy go in the wallet; the Beiwai ID and business card case fold into the address book; restaurant cards go into a little pouch in the front of the backpack; health and clean-up aids into the small zipped pouch; everything else fits neatly into the larger compartment. The camera case also holds extra memory cards and can fit a USB cable. And most important is the backdrop here: the large folding map of Beijing that has all the locations written both in Chinese characters and pinyin, so that both people who read and speak only English or only Chinese can read it. What's in your wallet?

Erik on Mary Morris

My son, visiting from the U.S., mentioned that he thought the part of the blog where I quoted students was very good, which reminded me I needed to do more of that. So here is most of Erik Hajek's essay from Week Three; he and Parker are currently on a sidetrip to Mongolia - not Inner Mongolia, which is part of China, but Outer Mongolia, a separate country. Erik, a fine writer, begins by discussing Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Mary Morris:

Wall to Wall is exactly the kind of book I was looking forward to when the class in travel writing was announced. Fussell’s Abroad is not a travel book but rather a book about travel books; Morris, more interesting and casual but perhaps less analytical than Fussell, writes a story of dilemmas, emotions, and history, intertwined and connected. Morris’s tone is consistently both lonely and contemplative.[After visiting Tolstoy's home,] she writes, “As I roamed from room to room, pausing to examine a book left open, a pair of spectacles on a desk, I thought how unhappy Tolstoy was here, how unhappy his family became.” From this passage and most others, it can be inferred that Morris is usually alone. Whether she’s browsing Tolstoy’s house, taking the train, or even in the company of others, she tends not to fit in. Even though she is pregnant because of him, her boyfriend is still called by her “my companion," the intimacy gone. Her aloneness many times translates into loneliness, and it adds a slightly unsettling mood that makes me uncomfortable.

Continuing in the same passage, [as Morris wanders through] Leo Tolstoy’s house alone, she happens upon books, spectacles, and other seemingly unimportant objects. Yet she has a sharp eye and hardly fails to notice and contemplate even the smallest aspect of where she is; while in Mongolia, she notices that “broad-faced Mongolian women dusted the tracks with colorful green or purple feather dusters. Some of the women wore hats or white scarves tied around their heads…On the fringes of one of the world’s great deserts, scarred with hundreds of miles of sand-laden track, this feather dusting seemed rather futile and I found myself amused at what appeared to be some Soviet-contrived scheme to ensure full employment” (82). Details don’t escape her, and thus she is free to be amused, angered, or depressed by what she notices. Her recognition of the little things evokes a certain intimacy with the particular culture, something only available to those who can see beyond the tourist traps, and she allows us a glimpse of this intimacy.

Continuing [to comment on] the original passage, Morris reflects on the unhappiness of Tolstoy and his family. Only one who studied history, at least the history of Tolstoy, but history nonetheless, would know that. Sometimes Morris seems to know the history at that point in the story, as here with Tolstoy, in which case it affects her thinking. Sometimes the history seems added in later, such as [when she recounts] the history of the Mongols or [discusses] the Great Wall, and then connections are made between the past and the present.... In either case, while she doesn’t [draw on] a particularly deep knowledge of literature, she does have an entrenched familiarity and knowledge of history that colors her narration. Comparing the past with her present, she is able to expand her experiences into something more profound...

The Artistic Street in Liulichang

Holiday in Beijing

At Mr. Jiang's, Friday, October 6 - Day of the The Mid-Autumn Festival

Top Photo: Mr. Jiang playing the accordion

Bottom Photo:

Top Row: Forrest, Tim, Mr. Jiang's niece and daughter, Mrs. Jiang

Bottom Row: Natalia, Mr. Jiang, Judy, Ashley

The October National Holiday week has just ended, and it's been a treat for us. Because of the way the Chinese calendar intersected with the modern calendar, the week began with the National Holiday on Oct. 1 (the anniversary of the declaration of the republic in 1949) and included the Mid-Autumn Festival on Oct. 6 (a traditional holiday that is supposed to fall on the October day with the biggest moon). Mr. Jiang, the liaison for foreign students at Beiwei, offered to host students at his home to learn how to make jaozi, ravioli-like dumplings. This is a typical invitation and a way to introduce foreigners to the way the Chinese cook at home. Some of us went to his apartment on Oct. 6, the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, where he and his wife and niece had prepared all the ingredients for jaozi, in addition to preparing enough dishes to feed an army. Dinner included a dish with chicken, mushrooms, and starch (clear) noodles which Mr. Jiang told us is characteristic of the cooking in the province he's from, which borders Russia.

The filling for jaozi is made of pork, vegetables, and seasonings. Our jaozi looked pretty lame at first (one trick is to keep the filling to a small mound, so it won't squeeze out when you pinch the sides). Mr. Jiang managed to rescue the jaozi we made that were listing to one side or another: when made properly they should stand up so they can be neatly lined up on a tray. After dinner he played the accordion for us, an instrument he learned as a junior-high age student during the Cultural Revolution when he needed to keep occupied during a time when the schools were closed. His mother had played the organ and he was familiar with a keyboard, so he learned the keyboard half of the accordion first. You can click on this link to hear Mr. Jiang playing the accordion for us. Mr. Jiang has also composed the school song for Beiwei and conducted it during the school's recent 65th Anniversary celebration.

Tian'anmen Square October 5, 2006

Although Americans associate Tian'anmen Square with political protest, that is not its major connotation for the Chinese. During the National Holiday, beginning October 1, it is decorated with flowers arranged in patterns (the elaborate designs would remind you a little of the floats at the Rose Parade) and the outlines of the massive government buildings on three sides (east, south, and west) are lit up at night. My husband Gary and son Matt are visiting and we arranged to arrive just before dark. Very few westerners were in the crowd, which meant that we really weren't sure what was going on, except to realize the crowd was filling in quickly in the area facing north, where Mao's famous portrait hangs on the southern end of the Forbidden City Palace. When completely full, Tian'anmen Square can hold a million people. Tonight there were perhaps a hundred thousand people there to see the flag lowered and watch the lights go on. The soldiers in charge of crowd control tried to use bullhorns to get people to sit so more could see, but most of the cheery throng, many of whom hoisted their children on their shoulders, stood on tiptoes to see soldiers trooping the colors and lowering the flag at sunset. The children bobbing above the massive group were entrusted with cameras, since they had the best view. In ancient days the Palace buildings of the Forbidden City were the highest point in Beijing. No more! The highways that ring the city in ever-expanding circles are lined with huge skyscrapers, more every day. The Insight Guide and other references will tell you that in imperial days the emperor was the only adult male (other than the castrated eunuchs) who could remain overnight, guaranteeing that the emperor would be the father of his wives' children. During Mao's era the Forbidden City was used by government officials. Today it is a tourist attraction, but still part of Beijing's geographic core and one few visitors ignore.

Guidebooks and Ice Cream

The photos above and directly below are of the Insight City Guide: Beijing. Excellent photos, information, and suggestions, as well as enough background to make you sound like you know what you're talking about when you get there. My copy had a bonus (below): a small fold-up map of recommended restaurants in a plastic pocket. Even if you just carry the tiny map, you'll have a list of emergency numbers, including ones to call if you lose your credit card. The Insight Guide's one drawback: no Chinese characters. Carry a map with Chinese characters for place names to supplement a book like this to show a cab driver. It doesn't have accents for the pinyin, either, but neither do other guidebooks. The map insert and the outside cover of the book match. I believe the publishing company is European, but I'm not sure if it's British. That's the Temple of Heaven on the cover of the insert map and a view of the Forbidden City above.


This is Coffee Ice Cream at the Stairway to Love Internet Cafe. I thought it was going to be a scoop of coffee-flavored ice cream in a dish, but it turned out to be a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top of strong ice coffee, with some whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. No, folks, don't adjust your sets: it's a green maraschino cherry. Is it still maraschino if it's green? I had the pizza there today too, and it was very good. Green peppers, red peppers and sausage. Great crust. I took a pass on the cuttlefish pizza. You can see the Insight Guide in the background as well as my map.

One of the points of this blog is to provide some information for students who might come on this trip to China and Japan in the next year or two. So - if you are planning a trip, something you will want to bring with you is a guidebook. I asked students to bring two: one for China, and one for Beijing. I also suggested a phrasebook, after seeing how helpful those were on trips to Central America, Spain, and North Africa. Guidebooks themselves are a genre: some are designed for students or backpackers, others for businesspeople, yet others for tourists. All of the categories overlap. Some are big and fat, and some slim and pocket-sized. (In his book Abroad Fussell laments the demise of an English series called The Travelers' Library: "...by 1932 [the series] included 180 titles with over a million copies in print. The volumes, smaller than 5 X 7 inches, bound in a fine, light-blue gold=stamped cloth and selling for 3/6 [3 shillings sixpence] (about a dollar), were 'designed for the pocket.'")

Although those can be found now only in libraries and antiquarian bookstores, current guidebooks that can be easily carried are a godsend. I love my Insight City Guide: Beijing. The Insight guides come in different sizes, including Pocket Guides and Compact Guides. If you're planning a vacation (and I think many of the students are already planning ways they can return to China, perhaps with their families) this is an excellent guide to Beijing. It's even the kind of book that the traveler would enjoy after a trip, recalling some of the places we have visited and reinforcing the memories we're creating. Fussell writes a lot about the process of reading about travel while you're traveling: some of us find this the best time to read. After all, when traveling you're cut off from many of your usual reading outlets: most of us have read all the books or magazines we've brought for pleasure, and you have to work a little to find English-language books (plenty of classics available at the publishing house bookstore, but you have to be really virtuous to want to read Dickens or Hawthorne while in China) and most American magazines are not available. I read some of the N.Y. Times and other news online, but it's not the same as enjoying a paper paper. Like me, some of the students mentioned they would rather do their reading once they are in a location (and of course we have the time to do it) rather than preparing for a trip by reading; others like to read obsessively before they arrive.

I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Stairway to Love Internet Cafe plotting out possible itineraries for my husband and son, who will be visiting soon, and thinking of ideas for the students to use during their week off. Some of them have the Lonely Planet guide to Beijing, which is part of a series students around the world use a lot. One possibility is Liulichang, the old "Artistic Street," where you can buy art supplies, especially those used for calligraphy. I know a really interesting restaurant there (it's the one with the live fish that turns into the Mandarin fish that looks like a Blooming Onion). Our organized trip to the Forbidden City isn't until the last week, but it's not hard to get to either there or Tian'anmen Square, exactly in the center of Beijing. Both of those will be packed this week, which seems to be like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July rolled into one week. Wangfujing, which we have already visited, is within walking distance of Tian'anmen Square, and its pedestrian mall is an attraction during a time when traffic may not move very fast. We've noticed that the traffic around the school has thinned out a lot (especially people on bicycles, since many people don't have to work) but is busier than ever around the interior of the city, where most of the attractions are.

Safe Snacks for Foreigners

Clockwise from the top: Lay's Potato chips, "Crispy roasted pork flavor"; Ritz crackers with a lemon filling (thumbs up from students); Orion Pie (the Little Debbies of China), also thumbs up; dried kiwi fruit (good but too sugary); Middle - some kind of fruit cocktail suspended in jello, as yet untried.


It's lots of fun to try new snacks when you travel, and China is no exception. The convenience store in our dorm is open 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. - a real 7-11. They do have some 7-11's in China, by the way, in addition to a zillion small convenience stores. Not to mention KFC, McDonalds, and Pizza Hut, all quite popular. Our convenience store caters to the foreign students like us, so it includes snacks that appeal to American, European, Japanese, and Korean students, but often with a twist. There are small packs of Oreos (who knew?) and a Skippy peanut butter that is striped with chocolate, various kinds of Ritz crackers, Barilla and Delmonte spaghetti sauce, cans of Mr. Brown cappucino, plastic bottles of Sunkist grapefruit soda, and all kinds of crackers, chips and chiplike items. One item tastes like Pringles flavored with octopus. We are all finding our favorites. Unfortunately for my weight loss ideas there are really great mocha chocolate Dove candy bars with almonds and another kind with hazelnuts. One kind of mini-ice cream snack many of the students like is a Japanese-style bonbon that only costs one kuai/yuan: 12 cents. There's a larger small grocery/convenience store in the next building that has lots more, including cheaper water and paper products, and snacks for both Chinese and foreign students. Another item we see a lot but have not warmed up to is flavored sausage/hot dogs that people seem to eat cold, sometimes flavored with pineapple. There are lots of yogurt drinks and even very fancy cookies there. It's not hard to find things you'll think are yummy. I've started buying snacks for my own class so I'm always on the lookout for new cookies or crackers. Since we can easily get hot boiled water from a tap in the dorm (we all have thermoses) that water can be used to make ramen noodles, known by a different name here. Most of the brands seem to be Korean. I like the shrimp flavor.

Notice that all of these are quite tame. I'll do another post later on the snacks that seem more exotic to us in flavor and/or ingredients. There's a great blog called "sinosplice" that you can Google created by a linguistics graduate student who has been in China quite a while. He and a friend did a very funny thumbs up-thumbs down rating of snacks in Taiwan, including ones that seemed scary to foreigners.

Global Films

Above: Toshiro Mifune, starring in the the crime film High and Low (1963), directed by Akira Kurosawa

One of the classes I'll be teaching in the spring is Global Films, and I'm always on the lookout for good websites and possible new films. In today's Sunday New York Times (it's only 4:27 Sunday morning as I write) three of their film critics, Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, and Stephen Holden, discuss the upcoming New York Film Festival. (There is a link where you can hear each critic speak while you watch stills from the films they are discussing: it's very cool.) A "sidebar" at the Festival is a showing of thirty classics from Janus Films. They each discuss two of their favorites from the Janus collection, including La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini; Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), directed by Agnes Varda; Jules et Jim, directed by Francois Truffaut; the French classic Children of Paradise (1945), and High and Low (1963) by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

The last is not as well known as his samurai films, as the speaker notes, which include The Seven Samurai, remade in the U.S. as The Magnificent Seven, and his Shakespeare adaptations, Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear). Scott describes it as a great crime film, based on a novel by American crimewriter Ed McBain.

Children of Paradise was made, Holden explains, with great difficulty in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and is considered "the French Gone with the Wind," a tribute to French theatre.

I always use La Strada as the first film we study, when we discuss post World War II films. I think I'll switch this year from Les 400 Coups to Jules et Jim for an example of French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) films. I've also used clips of L'avventura (Antonioni). I haven't seen Children of Paradise or High and Low, but Kurosawa is always a great favorite with students, partly because his films can be found in video stores and especially in public libraries, so they can easily access a cross-section of his work. I've never found anyone who doesn't enjoy Kurosawa.

Update: I corrected the spelling of Agnes Varda: It was spelled "Anges" in the link, and I thought it was some odd name - but I realized it was "Agnes," which made sense, when I was ordering some films through the Facets.org foreign film catalog. So there is no director Anges Varda - I think! I also had to remove the link to work on some formatting. If you are interested in the site, Google "New York Times" and "Janus Films." And Facets has a $1.99 sale going on for videotapes of 100 foreign movies. I'm guessing they are phasing out videos in favor of DVDs. For one thing, it's possible to make DVDs in a format that can be seen on American, European, and Asian computers or DVD players, but the VHS format is different even for American and European films.