I know...

好久不blog。I haven't posted in quite a while. But, it is not due to a lack of interest in blogging--it's just class. The coursework is often overwhelming, and when my choice is between sleeping a bit more than 5 hours a night, exercising, and writing on the blog, I tended to choose sleep. Now that mid-terms are finished, things should be cooling down. I've visited four very interesting places that I intend to write about in the coming days:

Henan 河南
The Great Wall of China 长城
Nanjing 南京
Shanghai 上海

I'm in Shanghai right now, but need to go out and see things right now so I have something to write about later!

Until then, 再见。

English

I'm often ambivalent about the choices I make here. It's hard to make friends in a language one's not comfortable speaking, especially when it's not the cool thing to do. Most everyone speaks in English most of the time.

There are students who don't really care much about learning Chinese, so they never speak it when they don't have to. They've come to China so they can add another "exotic" adventure to their list of global tourist experiences. They seem to make friends easily, because they go out a lot and don't worry about using the language.

There are also students who are so good at Chinese that they don't need to speak it as much. They've come to China to boost their reading and writing skills, and don't need to bother speaking Chinese among a group of Americans. It's easier to speak English, and they don't need to practice their Chinese.

Then, there are the people like me. We want to learn, and speak Chinese as much as possible, but have trouble fitting in with everyone who doesn't. We have to study all the time just to keep up, and can't go out with everyone half as much.

Of course, no one fits these stereotypes perfectly, and many of them will speak Chinese for my sake. It just makes things difficult, because the people I'm always around and should be "having the time of my life" generally hold me back. When I'm feeling strongly about that, I don't talk much and just seem quiet and weird. But I hold myself back when I let myself speak English to them in order to be friendly.

无可奈何。。。只好找平衡态。

I'm between a rock and a hard place... All I can do is seek some kind of balance.

Getting to Henan

This past weekend, the study abroad program took the group to Henan (河南), a province that lies a bit South of Beijing. It's closer to the longitudinal center of China, but still towards the Eastern coast. Henan is arguably where Chinese culture began. The area has been home to the capital city many times throughout Chinese history, and today has myriad cultural artifacts to show for it.

We visited four main areas of Henan, all of them pretty close to the city of Zhengzhou (郑州): Shaolin Temple (少林寺), Longmen Caverns (龙门龙门石窟), Henan Museum (河南省博物院), and the shopping area around the Erqi Tower (二七纪念塔). But, before we did that, we had to get to Henan.

First, we took an hour long bus ride to the Beijing train station. Then, we took an overnight train to get to Zhengzhou. In each cabin there were lower, middle, and high bunks on each side. So, 6 people to a cramped room. When we got on the train, everyone realized that our bunks were scattered around the car. A lot of study abroad students were placed in rooms with regular Chinese travellers. My room had no study abroad students. We got on the train first, and when the other travellers came it was a big mess. Everyone was in the hallway trying to get them to switch rooms, and they were shouting about how many foreigners there were. The people in my room were no different. When they found out I was rooming with them, one said in Chinese, "A foreigner? That's no good." Of course, they didn't know that I could speak some Chinese. So, I responded in Chinese, "Why?" And then, we ended up talking all night.

The people I talked to the most were two nice ladies who were going on vacation to Zhengzhou. They were going with a group of coworkers. My friend Kuniko and I talked with them until about midnight, and then we all went to bed. The other students were together drinking and hanging out in the all-study-abroad-student cabin.

Thoughts on China's Development

I wrote this a few months ago when we traveled to Henan. It's just a rant I wrote down because I was so shocked by all the buildings. There's not really a point to it--just observations--because I still haven't decided what my point would be if I argued one way or another.

The development is ridiculous. Driving through the outskirts of 郑州 (Zhengzhou), I saw about as many unfinished new buildings as old ones. I have to wonder if the newly ordained capitalists who are funding these projects have done their due diligence. Are they expecting the millions of people who are increasingly affected by inflation and who haven't received the fruits of China's economic development to move into these shiny, new apartments? I have no doubt that these developers are well-educated businessmen, but China has never been a capitalist market before in the Western sense. And I refuse to believe that transitioning into it the way China's economy has, or the way any country could, can yield unending growth or anything resembling economic stability.

Now, I'm not working out the numbers. I'm no economist, and even the opinions of economists are often dead wrong, just as intuition is. But, the way capital is used sets expectations of returns. If the returns meet the expectations, then the owners of capital--and possibly even the renters get something out of it. If the returns don't at least meet the inputs, then no one is happy.

Thoughts on Beijing

In the U.S., Beijing is generally looked upon as just as distant and exotic as the rest of China. That's a huge generalization, but most people I know--including myself--have at one point thought that way. The ideas in our heads are old cars, people on rickshaws, The heavily guarded Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City, and The Great Wall of China. Well, I can now say from experience that the first two are totally wong, and the last three describe very small pieces of Beijing. Most cars are new and no one uses rickshaws, people catering to tourists. Bikes are still the easiest way to travel, and most people have one. There's a whole culture around biking and ways to prevent your bike from being stolen. There are a number of pedaled carts around; but most aren't carrying fruits and small wares anymore, they're carrying PDA's and printers. The tourist spots definitely make up only a small part of the city's life. They're just for tourists, and most people don't come across them during their daily lives at all. I will say that there are many parts of China that are distant and exotic even to Chinese people let alone foreigners, but Beijing is definitely not one of them. This city is full of many people who live their lives almost identically to the lives of many people in American cities. I wouldn't say it's a majority, but it is definitely a much larger number than I expected. From economic perspectives, to tastes in movies and TV, the people in Beijing have a lot more in common with Americans than one might guess.

It actually reminds me a bit of Miami. Big highways going around and through the city, and large condos and offices interspersed with small buildings. There's no real skyline. Obviously, there's no pretty bay to look out into, and the pretty mountains that are nearby can't be seen because of smog. But the similarities that do exist are pretty interesting.

I love just going outside and walking around. There's always something new going on. Everything is very spread out, though. If I wanted to walk to center city Philadelphia from Drexel's campus, it might take a half hour. If I wanted to walk to another district of Beijing from Beida's campus, it might take half a day.

I'm really starting to like the city. I haven't seen very much of it (given that it is approximately the size of Belguim), but I can say that I like what I've seen. The area I live in, Zhongguancun (中关村), is the technology hub of Beijing. It's also known as "China's Silicon Valley". The area includes tons of shopping, universities, and tech firm offices. The place is booming. Everyone I go, I see a new building with really creative architecture, and new stores everywhere. The malls are as nice as any I've seen in the U.S., and the coffee is just as expensive. Everything else is cheaper through the exchange rate, but coffee is a huge novelty. It's okay, because the coffee I have bought here tastes terrible anyway. Starbucks needs to get up on their quality control.

Characters

The first week of class here was ridiculous. I have learned more Chinese in the past week than in the past 6 months. Let me tell you why:

The Chinese writing system is non-phonetic. This means that the way words sound does not have anything to do with the way they are written. You can't sound out Chinese characters because they are pictures of the meaning of words, whereas English letters are pictures of the sounds in words. This method is more interesting for conveying meaning through script, but leaves people no easy way to learn how to pronounce things. So, one way to teach people how to pronounce the words that characters represent is through letters in the English alphabet. Instead of representing the meaning, this method just represents the sound. This is called Hanyu Pinyin, and it's the most common way of representing the pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Pinyin is what I learned in school, not characters. Most schools, including Beijing University, does not use Pinyin. All of the books we use are in characters. If you know about Chinese you can understand how devastating that is for my ability to do well in class. For those of you who are not too familiar with Chinese, I'll try to explain through an example:

鸟 is the word for bird. It sounds like "niǎo", or "niao" with the pitch of your voice going slightly down and then up. 鸟 is just a picture for a meaning. How to pronounce it is unrelated. You can't determine that 鸟 sounds like "niao" by looking at it. You have to know that 鸟 refers to birds, and that meaning sounds like "niao". My textbook at Drexel used "niao" instead of 鸟. My textbook at Beida uses 鸟. So, I was lost when I saw "这只鸟没有眼睛。", instead of "zhe zhi niao meiyou yanjing." Even though I might know what it means if I heard it, I couldn't pronounce it or understand what was written.

I knew some characters before I came, but really not many. When I got to Beida and realized everything would be in characters, it was scary. I thought I just wouldn't be able to handle it. But I buckled down and studied my life away for the whole first week of classes. I don't think I've ever studied that hard in my life. I think I learned about 150 characters in one week. That's more than I had to learn over the span of two semesters at Drexel.

I thought it was horrible at the time, but looking back it was worth it. I'm almost caught up now, and I never would have learned everything as quickly as I had without that kind of pressure. But I shoved everything else to the side--blog posts, laundry, haircut, responsibilities back home, etc. Now I've got to catch up on all that. It's okay though, I think I'll be able to acheive much more balance in the next few weeks than in the past few.

Cracking the Shell

I will shortly arrive in Beijing. After twenty-some hours of traveling, I can rest my weary, jet-lagged head.

It goes like this:


The flight to Hong Kong went north from New York, around the Arctic, and south over Russia, Mongolia, and China. The sights were incredible. I got to see the vastness of enormous parts of the world that very few people ever get to see—places like Siberia and the Gobi Desert. I also got to see a good amount of China from above. I could make out step farms that reached all the way up to the tops of mountains. They must be thousands of years old. I could make out tons of suburbs, each with visibly organized housing, farming, and industrial areas. It was strikingly different than when flying over the United States, where golf courses, lone houses, and random factories often look interlaced from above.

Also on the way, I found out that the flight to Hong Kong would fly directly over Beijing. Hong Kong is a three-hour flight from Beijing. I was at the Hong Kong airport for an hour. So, that’s an extra seven hours of unnecessary travel. But I probably saved about $500 dollars by doing it that way. Oh well.


One of the many things I didn’t prepare for was my own fear of using Chinese. I just assumed that I’d speak as much Chinese as I possibly could all the time. But when I was actually faced with the opportunity/challenge to do so, I realized it takes much more audacity than I had expected.

When I arrived at the Hong Kong International Airport, I had no idea where I needed to go next. There was only an hour before my connecting flight to Beijing, and I was just going wherever the moving walkways led me. Eventually, I found the transfer check-in area. I approached the desk, where two young attendants were chatting in Mandarin. I had a burning desire to speak to them in Chinese, but I didn’t say anything. I was afraid that I wouldn’t understand them or they wouldn’t understand me—and that would just be a total mess. So I looked at them, and they looked at me. And they looked at me, and I looked at them. That went on to the point of being awkward, until they spoke to me in English. After that, it was just an English conversation. They told me where to go and then I was on my way.

I doubt they had any idea of the epic struggle that had gone on in my head. I know my proactive side will start to win, as I get more comfortable speaking. But the more I think about it, the more trivial that struggle seems anyway. The flight attendants, shop owners, and whoever else don’t really care what language I use, they just want to complete whatever transaction is at hand as smoothly as possible. I’m the one with the trans-cultural dilemma, not them.

It’s just a matter of pushing myself into that uncomfortable zone until it becomes a bit more comfortable. It will probably take months, but that’s what I came here for! Regardless, I’ll be learning and loving it every minute no matter how much of a hopeless 老外 I seem at first.