Final Days

I'm writing this in a 24 hour teahouse in Beijing that I often went to over the summer to cram before tests. Teahouses are not serene. They are loud. They are filled with poker and mahjong games, people watching movies, televisions, loud conversations, laughing, etc. I've adopted a "When in Rome..." attitude and am blasting Bob Dylan from my laptop. I'm a pretty big Dylan fan anyway, but maybe because of homesickness I think he sounds better in China than in America. Perhaps to his discredit, I feel the same way about McDonald's.

I had lunch with one of my professors from the summer. Over the summer she was very blunt with students, so I should have mentally prepared myself before talking with her. She told me that, while my Chinese had improved, it hadn't progressed as much as she had expected. I think she was hoping for fluency. Such is life.

To my dismay my coworker and neighbor both gave me gifts on my last day in Shanghai. I hadn't really been expecting that - it didn't happen in Beijing -, so I was caught off-guard and a little embarrassed. My mom had given me Spurs gear to give as gifts, but I confess I began wearing it for basketball when I found that there were few size L people in China. I managed to scrounge up make-shift gifts, but their ad hoc nature was probably obvious. Luckily I've grown used to being inadvertently impolite.

My office gave me 2000 RMB when I left. It was kind of a strange bonus because I only had/have 2 days to spend it. In a way it was nice because I got to go to a market and buy some guilt-free gifts for people (and will probably buy some guilt-free books tomorrow for the plane). I've found that I'm really not a big fan of bargaining anymore. The mock drama of it all is fun, but the bargaining process pretty good at minimizing your consumer surplus, especially when you're a foreigner and merchants peg the range of potential prices by stating much higher starting offers.


Tomorrow afternoon I fly out. I am sure I will miss China, but I'm ready to leave, at least for a while.

Beijing

This Friday I left work about 30 minutes early, took the subway to the Shanghai train station, and boarded an overnight train for Beijing. A dry business book and a mediocre meal of overpriced train food with half a loaf of bread I had bought that morning put me right to sleep, and I slept relatively soundly until our arrival in Beijing.

People – in both cities – like to ask me whether I like Beijing or Shanghai more. If the conversation is in Chinese, I draw on stock, stilted textbook vocabulary to say that Shanghai is more commercial and has better architecture, while Beijing is China’s cultural and political center (my classmates know how unoriginal this response is). If asked in English, however, I will admit that – objectively – Shanghai is a better city in almost every aspect, but I have a strange, sentimental nostalgia for “The Capital of Dust”, as a lawyer at my law firm called Beijing. I love Beijing, and I had a my-plane-has-just-touched-down- in-the-San-Antonio-airport-after-a-term-at-Dartmouth kind of feeling in my stomach as the train reached the Beijing train station just a little before 7am.

Because it was still very early and I didn’t want to wake up Dartmouth and Beijing friends just yet, I walked aimlessly around the train station neighbourhood, eventually wandering into an internet café to check my email. At 7am, there were still people – mostly younger men - there from the night before intensely playing internet games.

After my email and NY Times fix, I took the subway toward Beijing Normal University. The walk from the subway station is about 20 minutes, but I still had some time to kill – the rest of the weekend I took 5 yuan, ~70 cent, rides in what a guess could be called modern rickshaws, little passenger cars somewhat haphazardly built around 3-wheeled motorcycle frames. In preparation for the Olympics, everything in Beijing is under construction, so I found the university neighbourhood familiar, but changed. A giant construction project near the foreign student dorm had progressed significantly, and a building was starting to appear under what had before been mostly scaffolding.

I spent a lot of the weekend going to my favourite restaurants from this summer, more to see the waiters and waitresses again than to eat the food (though I do miss Beijing food while in Shanghai). Some recognized me, some didn’t. A group of waitresses at a Japanese restaurant my classmates and I often visited remembered how we had, inexplicably, all broken our disposable chopsticks on our heads during our last meal there (I can’t actually explain why we did this either); but at another restaurant, I got an unexpectedly cool reception from Zhou LiHua who was by far our group’s favourite waitress.

On Saturday, I also went to Hong Qiao, a massive indoor market, under the auspices of souvenir shopping, but mostly just to practice my bargaining skills. Later I played basketball at the Beijing Normal courts with a mixture of Dartmouth and Chinese students. Unfortunately, it took me a while to remember how to play Beijing Normal ball – fast-paced, chaotic play that takes place almost entirely in the key with only an occasional outside shot – and we lost a few games before ending with a winning streak. That night, I borrowed sheets from the Dartmouth TA and slept on the floor of two Dartmouth students’ room. I know: I’m cheap.

The highlight of my trip was definitely a Sunday lunch with one of the 3rd year teachers from the summer, Jiang Laoshi. It was really fun to reminisce, complain about jobs, and joke over dumplings and tea at 太平饺子馆, another of this summer’s staple restaurants. She said my Chinese had improved, but scolded me for picking up a bit of the Shanghainese accent (I’ve lost some of Beiing’s stressed “sh”, “zh”, and “ch” sounds). I hope to meet up with her again the weekend before I leave from Beijing for the States.

Before leaving for Shanghai, I spent some time tooling around Wangfujing, a Beijing shopping area, mostly looking for a good English language book for the train ride home (in typical fashion, I bought 4). Early Monday morning, I arrived back in Shanghai, took a taxi home, picked up my dry-cleaning, showered, and went to work. This weekend certainly wasn’t restful, but I had a lot of fun, and I look forward to a last weekend in Beijing this December before flying out of China.

Zhoushan

On Friday right after work (ok, I left work 30 minutes early), I took a taxi to Shanghai Maritime University, where I met Kevin. Using Kevin’s car, we drove around Shanghai picking up the rest of the group. At about 8:30, all 6 of us had piled into Kevin’s 5-seat Kia Sportage and were ready to go. I lucked out and got to sit in the front the whole trip. I kept offering to switch, but I think no one really wanted to share the backseat with the biggest person on the trip – as they told me, “with Americans you are skinny, but with Chinese people you’re fat” (this was also the explanation throughout the trip for why I didn’t think it was as cold as they did).

On the way, we watched the show Friends with Chinese subtitles. I’m not exactly sure why they like the show because it seems like most of the humor comes from silly puns that probably don’t translate well, but Kevin had several DVDs worth of episodes in his car. The girls said they were also fans of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, while the guys preferred Prison Break.

We arrived at our hotel in Zhoushan at 3:30am and checked into our rooms (two 3-bed rooms for a total of 160 Yuan, a little over 22 dollars), which were Spartan but comfortable. On Saturday morning, we snuck under a fence into a nearby beach and walked around – it was pretty cold so none of us swam. We stumbled upon an intense-looking sand sculpture contest. Here’s a picture of one of the more impressive ones:














There were also bigger sand sculptures, including some that you could walk on.

For lunch we ate 海鲜面, seafood noodles. These were essentially an assortment of shelled things thrown into a boiling pot of water (shells and all) with noodles, seasoning, and vegetables added. Here’s a picture:














For 15 Yuan, about 2 dollars, the noodles were pretty good after I got over their initial strangeness. We visited a Buddhist temple in the afternoon. It was pretty, but I think I’ve seen more than enough Buddhist temples while I’ve been in China. Dinner was much stranger than lunch – there were things I ate that I didn’t even know existed in the ocean.

On Sunday, we took a pretty long ferry north towards Shanghai. I taught them how to play Egyptian Rat Screw because I was tired of losing at their card games; however, in the very first game we played, I was the first to lose. Next time I’m bringing a Scrabble board; that’ll get ‘em (joking).

I got home exhausted at about 8:30, picked up my dry-cleaning, ate dinner, and crashed.

Packing

I'm currently getting ready to go on a weekend trip to an island in China with some friends. I don't actually know what the island is called or what we'll be doing there, but I'm excited about exploring some more of China. Because I seem to get sick in China whenever it is the most inconvenient to do so, I'm bringing plenty of Immodium and toilet paper. I leave right after work tomorrow, returning sometime Sunday afternoon.

A Good Weekend

On Saturday, I slept in, went on an outing to buy deodorant, which is annoyingly difficult to find in China, and played basketball at Shanghai Maritime University, 上海海事大学, with a coworker and his friend. The courts were just regular gray concrete, and they were packed; nonetheless, it was a lot of fun to be on a college campus again. My coworker, who was an undergrad at Shanghai Maritime University, said that the 4 floor teaching building was once the tallest building in Pudong. The small campus area is now dwarfed by 50+ floor skyscrapers. I read somewhere that in 2015, 50% of the world's buildings constructed since 2000 will be in China. Looking around the neighborhood where I live, this is not hard to believe.

While we played basketball, my friends' girlfriends made dinner (somehow, I think we got the better end of that deal). Among other dishes, dinner included chicken feet, a first for me. They mostly 'tasted like chicken', except with a definite tendon and ligament texture to them (which I guess makes sense). I learned by watching the others at the table that the way to eat chicken feet is just to bite off the fingers and spit out what you can't chew, which is surprisingly little if you're good. My main complaint was that the feet were a lot of work for very little meat.

On Sunday after another basketball game with some other people from my office, I met with the Fall FSP kids for dinner. It was fun to talk to them and reminisce a little about what it was like to have been in China for only about 4 or 5 weeks, taking classes and exploring Beijing. I think I might try to visit them in Beijing sometime this fall, but we'll have to see - I'm also planning trips to Hangzhou and Suzhou with my neighbors and coworkers.

I'm getting ready to start some intense exploration of Shanghai. It's very easy to just want to go home and read or nap after work, but I think I will regret doing that too often once I'm back in the States.

这几天

On Sunday night, I went to a party with one of my dad's former students. The party was another kid named Joe's birthday party. Understandably, I had some difficulty answering the "How do you know Joe?" question:

"Well, I AM Joe, but - uh - my dad's former student, whom I just met tonight, somehow met Joe... - sighs - I don't know Joe."

The party was actually pretty fun. It was definitely the most multicultural event I think I've ever been to: I met people from France, Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Japan, US, and - of course - China.















On Tuesday, I went to Zhouzhuang with my neighbors and their friends for the day. Because this week everyone in China is off of work for the National Holidays, Zhouzhuang was ridiculously packed. Chinese traveling is something I'm not sure I will ever get used to: you're led by a fast-talking tour-guide with a megaphone through hot, crowded tourist attractions, which mostly exist as places for humorous photo-ops (i.e. sit down at this ancient wealthy Chinese person's desk for a picture).

We all had our fortunes read by monks at a temple we visited. This was very bizarre. You "donate" some amount of money to enter a big room lined with people waiting to talk to one of the 7 or 8 monks reading fortunes. They give you one of about 12 possible pieces of paper with Chinese writing that the monk reads to tell you your fortune (mine had the character 上 on it - my neighbor tells me this is good). If you buy a gift for a monk you can go to the front of the line in front of all those who merely "donated". When the monk finally got to me, a lowly donor, he told me in hushed, fast Chinese that I had a stubborn personality and needed to open up to my friends more. I thanked him and wondered how many of the hundreds around me would get the same advice.

My neighbors

Today my boss gave me my RMB 2000 prize money, so I attempted to ask my neighbors out to dinner. The wife has been making me dinner every day and - whenever possible - (s)mothering me to no end. Anyway, I figured taking them out for Italian food would be a good way to blow some of the money. As I expected, they said no (I get the sense that 19 is much younger in China than in the US). I think I even offended them by very indirectly suggesting that I wanted to eat something besides her food.

When I got home from work at about 6:30, both greeted me and told me she had made me "Italian noodles". This sounded pretty interesting, so I quickly sat down in their apartment. The dish had noodles that looked a lot like spaghetti, only they were mixed in a typical Chinese sauce with chunks of tomato, onion, and beef. It tasted nothing like spaghetti and was a little strange, but it was very cute.

Meals with my neighbors are always pretty funny: the husband, who only wears boxers at the table, usually just makes puns about me that I don't understand to the wife, who - even as I am shoveling food into my mouth - continuously insists that I "多吃一点“， “eat a little more". After every bite, in between her exhortations for me to eat more, she asks "How does it taste," and then - as if in agreement with my standard response, "good" - says "other places don't make X dish as well as I do." She has said that for every meal except for the spaghetti, which she has somehow decided that my mom can make better.

Sanya and Miscellany

I got back from Sanya at about 3am Saturday night. In true Chinese fashion, my plane was delayed both ways. Sanya was pretty fun. It definitely had the most picturesque beaches and I really enjoyed lazily swimming and lying around. By Saturday I was pretty exhausted - essentially every part of the trip was done in Chinese (tour guides, my bosses, activity leaders, and friends all spoke in Chinese). While it was certainly good for me (and while there was some English), I was done with wanting to hear/speak Chinese until Monday.

On Friday night, there was an office-wide banquet with a prize-drawing. Awkwardly, I - the unpaid, newly arrived intern - won the top prize of RMB 2000, about 200-300 dollars. When I went upstage to collect my prize, one of the firm's principal partners said in Chinese, "He has been studying Chinese, so I won't give him the prize unless he gives a speech in Chinese first." The thought of speaking in front of 100 colleagues I had just met in a language in which I am hardly literate was a little daunting. I ended up jokingly saying in Chinese, "Hi my name is 周洪恩 (my Chinese name) and I'm an unpaid intern here." Luckily people laughed, and the rest of whatever I said went by quickly.

I celebrated the mid-autumn festival with my neighbors and their family. We went to a nearby restaurant and had moon cakes. That went pretty well, except that my neighbor has taken up the habit of telling people (or just telling me) that I use chopsticks terribly and then insisting on putting food on my plate herself. Now, while I may not have the skills of a native Chinese person, I'm pretty sure I can at least feed myself. Oh well, I guess I need to practice more.

At work, I'm getting more and more things handed my way. I feel like I'm slowly getting a sense of some of the basic players in Chinese corporate law (the important agencies and regulations). That's probably pretty silly to say, but - at the very least - I don't feel as clueless as I used to when I'm handed an assignment. I had to buy some more clothes for work; as usual - and as my neighbor was happy to point out - I paid too much for them. That'll happen.

I bought a Chinese movie to try to improve my listening comprehension. I just asked a street vendor to pick me out their favorite movie. It was corny and girly, but fun to watch. I asked my neighbor's brother for a movie recommendation, and he gave me the name of an action movie. I'll try to find it the next time I walk by a DVD stall.

台风 (typhoon)

so far the typhoon hitting shanghai has been pretty anticlimactic. when i left work today there were some pretty neat winds and it was raining some, but nothing too impressive. i'm a little disappointed, though there is still hope for more tonight.

the past two nights, i've had dinner with my neighbor and her husband. they're a relatively young couple so it was fun to talk to them. she says that because i'm young and alone, she, as my older chinese sister, has to take care of me. in any case, it's been a great way to practice my chinese and eat good, free food.

on sunday when i get back from sanya, i'm going to play basketball with some of the people at my work (including some of my bosses). while i realize there is a bit of a conflict of interest there, i think it should be fun.

settling in

at work, i've either been extremely busy or very bored. i write and edit (articles, powerpoints, etc.,) for the partners at the firm, meaning i don't really have any long term projects to work on when they don't need something written. it's kind of like being a freelance writer who has to be at the office from 9-6. the upside is that i'm learning a lot about really specific, obscure topics. give me a call if you want to learn about new chinese antitrust laws. or if you're an employment law buff, last thursday i was up late because i had one day to write a 6 page article draft about regulations concerning equity-based employee compensation or incentive plans.

i think i'm starting to make friends at work. it's pretty difficult because, not only is everyone older than me, but those closest to my age are chinese with limited english skills. i think the language problem is actually an impetus to conversation though - they are as eager to practice english as i am to practice chinese.

i'm working on getting more acquainted with shanghai. on saturday, i took the subway shangha's "people square" or 人民广场. after buying some english books to keep me occupied, i attempted to walk back to my apartment. when i realized there wasn't a nearby bridge to cross the huangpu river, which cuts my neighborhood, pudong, off from the rest of shanghai, i had to give up and take a subway-like thing across the river.

on thursday, the office is paying for my coworkers and i to fly to sanya, an island in southern china. i don't really understand what this "office outing" is for, but i think it should be fun. at the very least, i'm staying in a 5 star hotel and eating well on the company's dime.

here is a picture of my apartment building.
it's pretty basic without too many flourishes. on the first floor, there's a bank, two bakeries (one french, one chinese), a hair salon, a dry cleaners, and a coffee shop. in that respect, the location is pretty handy. i've started trying to run up and down the stairs to release energy. i really confused some of the other tenants when they saw me take the elevator down to the first floor and then go right for the stairs.







this is a picture of my office building, jin mao tower (there are probably better pictures on wikipedia). It looks a little like something out of batman's gotham. it also seems very hi-tech: to get to the area where the elevators are, employees have key cards that they slide, opening little clear plastic gates. then to get into the baker & mckenzie office i use another key card to open these big sliding glass doors. there are all sorts of expensive restaurants and bars on the top floors, but i don't have the money to eat at any of them. when i go in and out of the actual building, i see lots tourists taking pictures of china's tallest building (though, obnoxiously, a taller one is being built right next to it).

the first picture is taken of the neighborhood where i live/work from across the huangpu river. i'll try to post pictures of the inside of my apartment sometime soon.

first day

my first day was pretty boring. i spent most of the day going through menial orientation things. the worst part is that the vast majority of the orientation material didn't apply to me, an unpaid intern from america. i was orientated with 3 other people, all shanghainese. two are secretaries and one is an IT support guy. because we were all given the same orientation spiel, a particular section rarely applied to more than two of us.

i'm slowly discovering that the area i'm working in is incredibly expensive. i'm starting to miss all the cheap meals i had in beijing; here, i'm almost paying western prices for my meals. i've been trying to cook a little, but the little gas stove i have is irritable and often goes on strikes.

i'm starting to give up any hopes i had of understanding shanghainese. it really is radically different from pu tong hua (normal mandarin). luckily, most people i've met have been willing and able to speak mandarin with me.

random: a lot of my coworkers have things that look like little desktop humidifiers. they're just these little machines that produce steam. i'm guessing they have some kind of medical purpose, though i can't quite figure out what that'd be.

到了

two nights ago i took an overnight train from beijing to shanghai. i arrived in shanghai at about 7am. after a delicious *rolls eyes* KFC breakfast i took a taxi to the building where my office is. The building (Jin Mao Tower) is one of Shanghai's tallest and the taxi driver knew it by name, though it's at least 20 minutes from the train station.

when i got to the office, the office driver, a secretary and the office maid (they call her wei ayi, or aunt wei) took me to my apartment. The secretary and wei ayi nagged the landlord to fix or clean various aspects of the apartment. while the landlord fixed up the apartment, the two took me to buy various 日用品 (necessities) at a grocery store nearby. The outing was very surreal: two Chinese women leading me through a grocery store, speaking Shanghainese to eachother and Mandarin to me, asking me whether i need dishwashing detergent, milk, chopsticks, etc. Strangely, it reminded me a little of the Wal-Mart visit I did with my parents right before college.

my apartment is on the 19th floor of a 35 floor building and the office building is something like 88 floors tall. when i walk on the street i still find myself spending a lot of time with my neck craned staring up at all the buildings. my apartment is pretty standard: 1 bathroom, 1 bedroom, kitchen, living room, and a closed in balcony/office. From the balcony window I can see the river that splits Shanghai in two, lots of buildings taller than my own, and 6 different tennis courts. i'm not sure why we need so many tennis courts sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.

i start work on monday. i'll post pictures of my apartment and office building sometime soon.

so here's the scoop:

after months of uncertainty, it looks like i'll be working in shanghai until mid-december. i'll be an intern at the law firm baker and mckenzie. i'm still kind of finishing up the details, but so far, that's the plan. i'm sorry to keep you guys out of the loop.

Cell Phone Issues

today i attempted to buy recharge minutes for my cell phone (in china, most plans are prepaid). unfortunately, i don't yet know much cell phone policy vocabulary, so when my phone failed to work after recharging i had about an hour long confusing discussion with the salesman. from my understanding, a long distance conversation i had with my dad on his birthday had actually racked up a debt (i didn't know this was possible), which i either had to pay off or avoid by switching numbers. he convinced me to buy a new number from him because it would be cheaper than settling the debt - i don't yet know if he did me a favor or duped me. he works at the university's store, so i'm going to hope for the the former; i get tricked enough as it is.

Tiananmen Square

This is actually an old one, but it's from a really fun night we spent at Tiananmen Square. We got there just before sunset and saw the lowering of the flag with a huge mass of other people. We walked around and got to see all of the standard Beijing sites. As usual, us foreigners were quite the spectacle - at one point, a pair of Chinese twins asked to take a picture with me and a friend of mine (these strange requests have actually been repeated a few times in various places). I can't imagine how weird we must look that people ask to take pictures with us; or, more commonly, furtively take pictures when we don't appear to be looking. A friend of mine named Lei Zhen (Thunder Earthquake... a.k.a. John) has it worse - several Chinese children upon seeing him have run away or began crying. He doesn't seem too bothered by it, saying seeing us must be like how an American child would feel seeing an alien right out of Independence Day.

Datong

This picture is taken from the courtyard of a Buddhist Monastery in the middle of Datong. I think at the time, the Backstreet boys were playing at an outdoor fashion show nearby (we actually convinced them to let one of our friends walk down the aisle). you run into a lot of similar bizarre contrasts - especially in the ways that the west and east combine.

a chinese sunday afternoon

for various reasons, studying in beijing means being in a state of perpetual exhaustion. i think my closest friends on the trip and i all went to sleep at about 9p last night and slept 13-14 hours each. this afternoon we went to "Panjiayuan" which is an enormous flea market filled Mao-memorabilia and dubiously "ancient" pieces of art. most of us didn't buy much - i think we mainly wanted to hone our haggling skills and people watch a little. we took a rather long taxi back (maybe about the length of a 40-50 dollar taxi in America) and i think i had my best Chinese speaking experience. The cab driver and I talked about the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the respective GDP's and populations of America and China, the difficulties of studying English and Chinese, and even American politics (the driver was particularly fond of Hillary Clinton or, in Chinese, He-La-Li.

random observations

this is my first post and i don't really feel like recounting every thing that has happened in the past few days, so i'm just going to list a few funny things i've encountered:

when you go to the bathroom at a nice restaurant or a karaoke place there is often a man there who attempts to massage you while you pee. i really can't imagine who would find this pleasing. strangely, this is also one of the few times when you are expected to tip in china - needless to say, i have not tipped any bathroom masseuses.

chinese bar owners think that the best way to attract foreigners is to say that they have prostitutes at their bar. if a group of us walk down a street several people will grab hold of our arms and claim to have a "lady bar". the funniest part of these exchanges is that they usually say that the prostitutes only cost about 100 kuai, or less than 13 dollars. the fsp group has found this pretty funny, so we've taken to measuring the cost of random objects in terms of how many women they could buy.

for some reason, i get a really strange feeling whenever i see a fellow waiguoren (foreigner). it's really a novelty to see a person who looks like you - i definitely didn't expect this kind of strange nostalgia.

bargaining is a really funny staged practice. often both the buyer and seller will smile or laugh while they go through the motions of offering and counter offering prices. also, ANYTHING can be bargained for - from food to chairman mao watches.

just about everyone i've talked to in our group has "la duzi" or diarrhea. i think that might be a part of life for a while.