Why Blogger Is Banned in China: Halloween and H1N1 (Pt. I)

During Shansi orientation in January, we heard a lot of horror stories—from hostage situations in airports and emergency helicopter evacuations to outbreaks of infectious diseases and prolonged hospitalizations. In China in 2003 during the thick of the SARS epidemic, all of the Shansi Fellows were airlifted back to the U.S. for four months before the situation settled and they could return to their teaching posts. Yet through all of the warnings and nay-sayings, never did I think that I would be one of the lucky few appointed Fellows to say they were abroad during such a trying time.

H1N1 (better known as swine flu in the states) is quickly becoming a global crisis. In China, specifically, there seems to be a divide—in the south, due largely to a warmer climate, the situation is apparently under control, but in the north, it is making daily headlines. Two dead at Peking University in Beijing and many more dropping off in the countryside. As of about two weeks ago, H1N1 has developed into a full-blown pandemic closer to home—on the campus of Shanxi Agricultural University (SAU). According to hearsay, the whole situation started when one undergraduate student came to the higher-ups on suspicion of having H1N1 and was immediately rushed to the hospital. Almost in exactly the same breath, his dormitory was quarantined, and the entire rest of the school was put on lock-down—no students could enter or exit any of the gates on campus, effectively trapping them inside.

Ironically (and more than a bit nonsensically), though, teachers and other staff were able to leave at will. The first night that we got word of the new regulations, I had planned to go with some of my students and the other foreigners to do some karaoke singing off-campus. Meanwhile, every entrance to the school was swarming with confused students, bewildered as to why they couldn’t leave. My students came to me with the bad news shortly before we were about to go to dinner, but in a stroke of spur-of-the-moment thinking, we swooped them up, and, citing them as our translators, made it safely out of the gates. After that first day of commotion, though, the administration got wise, and that was the last time my students, or any, saw daylight outside of campus.

My Group I class and their collection of pumpkins. It was with a few of these students that I went to sing karaoke prior to the lock-down.

Within days, other freedoms started to give. There was an earlier curfew instated for when students were to return to their dormitories. Another whole dormitory was quarantined, such that crews of bio-hazard clad personnel were forced to deliver pre-packaged food and water to those students’ rooms three times a day. The swimming pool was closed, as were most indoor spaces where large clusters of people could congregate. Even luxuries we had not considered luxuries started to fade. Because students couldn’t leave the gates on campus, the neighboring and outlying businesses began to go under. Bei yuan (North Yard), where we had previously frequented to eat dinner, buy fruit, and shop at local vendor stands, became completely deserted, with all of those individuals and families out of a job. This may have been the most heartbreaking consequence of the entire scare. After two days or so when vendors realized that the situation wouldn’t improve, they left, and the school went so far as to erect a brick wall on the opposing side of the gate so that students literally couldn’t “slip through the cracks.” We now affectionately refer to it as “The Great Wall of Taigu.”

I’m being made increasingly more aware every day that I’m living in China. It's hard to imagine that anything to this scale could ever really happen in the states. If we were all trapped at Oberlin, there would literally have been riots, not to mention innumerable attempts to cheat the system. Posted at every entrance at SAU there is a security guard who carefully monitors the flow of traffic (or lack thereof) into and out of the school. Each is armed with a device that resembles a speed detector more than it does its actual function—a thermometer. All of us teachers are required to carry our “Foreign Expert Certificates” every time we want to leave campus, because apparently our white faces are not always sufficient enough to elucidate the fact that we are not students. More still, we must ask permission from our bosses if we want to go past the main gate, and are virtually prohibited from traveling any further than the Taigu city limit. We can often leave without a hitch, but on our return, we get a speed gun to the head to make sure we are still well enough not to infect the twenty thousand students made completely vulnerable by being cooped up on campus.

It all feels a little bit like a war zone. Red tape litters considerable stretches of campus and beyond the closed gates is an almost visceral feeling of desolation. Even those who live nearby can’t go home and loved ones have to greet sons and daughters at the main gate to deliver food and other care packages. With the number of nearby restaurants literally limited to the handful that are located on-campus as opposed to off-, exiting into town is really the only way to go out for a meal. As a result, we have all been eating much more frequently at the Foreign Affairs Office, where the hired cook now works evenings and weekends when previously she had off. This on-off divide is further exemplified in establishments like the campus-affiliated underground supermarket, cafeterias, and bathhouse. Sometimes I feel like this whole lock-down is effectively a measure to increase the school’s own in-house economy, as these institutions are getting three and four times the business they used to prior to the scare.

Two students posing with their creations. I thought that the skull head made particularly good use of the oblong-shaped pumpkin.

It makes me question a lot of the measures China, and more specifically, this university, is taking to ensure safety. In many ways, they seem more hypocritical than they do helpful. Firstly, the very fact that some people can leave and others cannot is preposterous. If we were all truly at risk of getting H1N1, teachers are just as likely to carry and spread the disease as students (though admittedly, there are less of us). Not that I’m knocking being allowed out, but I believe that privilege should be extended to everyone. Secondly, some indoor establishments like the swimming pool are closed, but giant breeding grounds like the supermarket and the cafeterias are quickly becoming over-capacity to accommodate for the lack of other dining options. Additionally, all classes with 50 or more students have been cancelled, but student dorms are routinely overcrowded, sometimes fitting eight students to a single room—not exactly the best way to censure the transfer of disease. This has led in recent days to the new edict that all third- and fourth-year university students be sent home to free up room for other students. As a result, these students will miss four months of classes and cannot return until the start of the spring semester in late February. Though much of the costs associated with Chinese education are subsidized by the government, there is no tuition reduction, and for many this has meant a later graduation date, not to mention a heavier burden on families.

All students are required to take their temperature twice a day, at 7:30 and 11am, and to report to the authorities if their readings are abnormally high. But especially with winter approaching, high temperatures often mean nothing more than a seasonal cold, or, at worst, a routine flu. But because of the looming fear of hospitalization (with an unspecified return date), students are understandably more and more wary of letting on if they are feeling under the weather, even to their peers. It’s like something out of the McCarthy hearings—the school administration counts on students to turn their friends in for the sake of their own presumed wellness. What’s more, the students are as ignorant of the details of the situation as we are, if not more so, as many do not own computers and almost all do not have access to the news on TV. This in itself is hugely different from the way global epidemics are talked about in America. All that many students (and teachers) are left with is an overwhelming sense of powerlessness—we have no real defense against catching the disease, and with the school locked down, we can’t do much else but sit around and wait for the whole mess to blow over.

(More on Biz Markie, Animal House, bench-pressing pumpkins, knife-related injuries, my Chinese name, the WHO, and sobriety in Pt. II of this post).

Everything in Its Rightful Place

Thirteen time zones and almost 7,000 miles away, it is easy to write off my former life at Oberlin since being transported to China. But in reality, my life has not been transported so much as it has been transplanted—uprooted lock, stock, and barrel, and grafted onto another continent.

Just like at Oberlin, my life in Taigu has revolved around a few constants. In the morning, I have class for two hours. At noon sharp, we have lunch at the Foreign Affairs Office. After that, I have an hour to catch up on lesson planning, reading, Chinese studying, ice cream eating, or sleep before my afternoon class—another two-hour affair from 2:30 to 4:30. Immediately following, there’s exercise—everything from running to swimming to playing basketball. At 6:30, we have dinner—usually out at one of the local restaurants in town—and then it’s back home for more lesson planning, writing, and hanging out. Once a week, I also have a Chinese lesson with one of the teachers at the school. After a month, it seems like I’ve finally pieced together the semblance of routine.

But barring the striking similarities with regard to content and time structure, inherent in this routine is a plethora of disparities. Rather than attending classes as a student, I am the teacher—the lone person at the podium in a cramped room full of eager Chinese faces. Not only must I be punctual and present, but I must be prepared and full of energy. Gone are the days when, feeling particularly unmotivated, I could simply go through the motions. Now, the success of my class is dependent upon the strength of my curriculum, the value of my attitude, and the ability to which I can motivate my own students. No longer am I a spectator or a side-show contributor; I’m the entire three-ring circus.

Meals are also viewed very differently here. As opposed to the states, lunch is taken very seriously, and dinner is something of an afterthought. We foreign teachers are all very fortunate to have a cook hired by the Foreign Affairs Office who makes lunch every day that we sign up to eat, and merely charges us at the end of the month for the cost of her ingredients. As if going out to eat wasn’t inexpensive enough, this option is a great way to save money and affords us balanced and varied meals in the comparatively short time between morning and afternoon classes. Oftentimes, we eat dinners as a flock of foreigners with the addition of a few of our Chinese friends. It’s a nice way to have a back-and-forth dialogue—simultaneously learning from others as we ourselves are making contributions. Rarely is conversation ever in one language. Once or twice a week, we splurge and go out to bigger meals that usually encompass a wider circle of friends—oftentimes Nick or Anne’s former students—and eat leisurely, letting time sit like a stuffed guest between us at the table. These dinners have been great opportunities for me to practice Chinese and make friends here outside of the foreigners, friends who might later accompany us on outings to Taiyuan or join us for swimming after class at the pool. Additionally, most of the eating customs have already been well-ingrained—by now, I have become accustomed to eating with chopsticks at every meal, using sheets of toilet paper as napkins, and drinking boiled water with my food. Chopsticks, themselves, have been purveyors of survival of the fittest—without a degree of efficiency, one may starve in a group meal setting.

For a culture that still refutes the notion of “dessert,” there is no shortage of places to get our sweet fix after dinner. Given that the Mid-Autumn Festival is fast approaching, there are yue bing (moon cakes) everywhere (although I still miss the Southern-style mooncakes that are more common in the states). Additionally, there are pastries and bao zi stuffed with red bean paste, dan ta (egg custards), and a small selection of more Western junk food too, including Oreos and Chips Ahoy! On the whole, though, I tend to have a soft spot for Chinese snacks—usually opting for some bing and a milk-based beverage—nai cha (bubble tea), soy milk, or freshly boiled sweet milk for dessert. Recently, I had the good fortune to stumble upon a childhood favorite in the states—Chinese haw flakes (a kind of fruit) served up in a stack of thin red discs, which I used to pop like OTC meds as a kid.

Chinese haw flakes, in all of their delectable, completely non-appetizing glory (photo courtesy of Wikipedia).

Mid-day, there is also fresh soft serve ice cream—certainly more artificial-tasting than the kind served up in the states—but at one yuan (15 cents) a cone, you can’t really go wrong. There is a new flavor every day—melon, mung bean, taro, pineapple, strawberry, and the ever-elusive, chocolate—each paired with vanilla in a twist. Additionally, Taigu is famous for two delicious dessert foods—suan nai (yogurt) and its own kind of bing, simply called Taigu bing. The yogurt here is so thin that you can sip it with a straw from a paper cup, and it perfectly complements the sesame seed-covered bing—not too sweet and neither hard nor soft. And speaking of Taigu specialties, our little town is also famous for its zao (dates) that you can pick and eat right off trees, cu (vinegar), which goes perfectly with meat or vegetable jiao zi (dumplings), and finally, dao xiao mian (knife-cut noodles), which are hand-sliced and served up in a number of different styles.

Taigu bing and yogurt, two regional Taigu specialty desserts.

Luckily, there has been enough exercise to counteract the excessive amount of food I’ve been eating here. The main problem I’ve had to come to terms with is the cost of food. When food is so cheap and delicious that you can afford to buy a lot of it—not to mention the fact that it’s foreign, and one should always be trying new things!—it’s hard to convince yourself to pass up on anything edible. But I strongly believe that exercise is a great excuse to treat oneself. I’ve been running with Anne a few times a week, which has proven to be a great motivator. She drags me off-campus, past the crop fields where farmers toil past sundown, and into neighboring villages and towns. The back roads make for a nice change of pace. What they lack in air quality (even the farmland seems to bear the smell of car exhaust), they make up for in scenery—even if on one occasion I did end up stepping in a puddle of cow manure at the expense of watching it.

The swimming pool on campus has also been put to good use. I have probably swum more in the last month than I have in my entire adult life in America. It helps that all of the foreigners are so adamant about swimming, and with the cost of a yearly card less than a monthly gym membership in the states, we’ve certainly been making the most of it. The conditions may not be the most ideal, but they certainly suffice. It’s nice enough having a luxury like a swimming pool at a university of this size in China. Of all the things I’ve experienced in China so far, though, the locker rooms may perhaps have been the biggest culture shock of all. Suffice it to say that I never imagined I would enter a room literally wall-to-wall with naked Chinese men, standing four to a showerhead, alternately taking turns bending over and scrubbing each other with a loofah. But it’s strange how, after a while, nothing is shocking anymore. One month ago, I could barely go half a lap without being winded, and now, I am proud to be able to swim over half a mile at a time. It doesn’t hurt to have James living here, who has been a swim instructor for many years.

After swimming, we always hit up the mock gym set-up in the courtyard out front. For lack of a dedicated indoor weight room, we make do with the 1950s-era collection of yellowing and rust-peeling exercise equipment, including, but not limited to, monkey bars, parallel dip bars, leg presses, arm extenders, and elliptical machines that only require you to lift your own body weight. Basketball has also been a lot of fun. The flow of the game is a little different here—namely, there is a lot more coarseness in general and not a lot of defensive team strategy—but the game play is still great. Every time we go out to play, a crowd seems to gather to watch the game, with Chinese noting our every foreign move. Almost everyone in China loves basketball, and I can’t wait to get the opportunity to play with some of my students in the future.

One thing I’m still struggling with is trying to find the balance between my life as a teacher and that of a peer. My students are almost all at least my age (with some who are much older), and it’s hard to be a distanced authority figure when part of what human beings do is try to connect and make friends in unfamiliar places. There is also the question of what kinds of activities are suitable to do with students and which are better reserved for friends. The difficulties arise when those lines start to get blurred, which I think is very easy in a place like Taigu. The students are all so approachable, and in some ways, you feel so lonely and inside yourself as it is, that you can’t help but try to forge friendships. Wednesday night in Taigu is German night, which basically entails all of us going to Matthias’ house after dinner, eating lots of German snacks, talking with Chinese students, and drinking beer. As ordinary as it sounds, it’s actually a great way to break up the monotony of the week. I only have to teach one class on Thursday before the long weekend, and so it feels like quitting time at the end of the workweek. On multiple occasions now, though, I have seen students of mine there who either know Matthias or are friends with some of his students. But so far it hasn’t been an issue. We drink and talk together, and the nature of our relationship is understood as one that exists strictly outside of the classroom. And on Monday, we are back to being teacher-and-student in class as if nothing else ever happened.

Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), Taigu night life has revolved principally around the presence of alcohol. Shansi wasn’t joking when they said that people from Taigu love to drink. I guess when you live in the middle of nowhere for long enough, you’ve got to find a way to occupy your time. Alcohol is ordered at almost every dinner, and when we’re not in the midst of traveling, it tends to dictate a fair bit of our weekend shindigs. But as time goes on, it’s becoming just as easy not to take part in drinking if one so chooses (though it is a little harder if you are a man). We haven’t yet had the all-too-infamous banquets with our Foreign Affairs Office superiors, but I am fairly certain that those will be an entirely different animal.

It’s not to say, too, that all of our free time is absorbed in crazed debauchery. We’ve been watching a lot of movies together, and thanks to Nick (who owns one here), playing a decent amount of Xbox. When I’m not hanging out with the other guys, Anne and I have also been doing more introspective things on our own. We did a little bit of painting early in the semester—a big deal for me, as I haven’t touched paint in close to two years—and did a little cooking using some ingredients we bought in North Yard. We’ve also spent a lot of time writing—finding time to make deadlines and workshop poetry and nonfiction pieces with each other. It's nice to have another writer here to bounce ideas and first drafts off of, sifting through stacks of papers over tall, steaming cups of peppermint tea. Generally speaking, though, lesson planning takes up the vast majority of my time during the week. The four of us frequently try to do it together—so much so that the term itself is now etched in euphemistic lore. I often find myself rifling through Ben’s old teaching binder, burying my head in textbooks from the bookshelf, and cycling through a half-dozen ESL teaching tool websites, searching for the perfect next lesson. So far, I’ve had a good amount of success—there is a certain chronology to the lessons I’ve laid out, and I am trying to scheme big picture themes instead of haphazardly picking unrelated topics out of a hat. Most important of all, the students seem to be reacting positively to what they’ve been learning.

An artistic rendering of my first work of art in almost two years. It is intended to be the first in a series of paintings dedicated to all four elements.

It’s hard, I think, for Anne being the only female presence here, and even for me, as I am much more accustomed to having female friends than male. For both of us, though, it’s been a learning experience, and it’s nice to have to adapt to a slightly different sort of lifestyle, both with respect to people and place. It’s nice, too, when that lifestyle gets a bit of a shakedown. In the past two weeks, we’ve had two guests come into town—the first was Ezra, a classmate of mine at Oberlin and a mutual friend of Nick and Anne’s, who came for a few days en route to Qinghai in Western China to do some English teaching of his own. The second was James’ cousin Nate who stayed with us for a week and earned his keep as a second English teacher in James’ classes. Nick also recently celebrated his birthday, as did a couple of Anne’s former students. Birthdays in China are often met with a combination of karaoke singing at KTV, an absurd amount of drinking, and eating cake with a near-diabetes-inducing icing-to-flour ratio (which you later use to smear all over the birthday recipient’s face).

Today is National Day in China, a celebration of 60 years of Communist rule. Flags are draped on every doorpost, buildings are decked out in colorful lights, and red is displayed prominently on everything from clothing to billboards. Hand-lit fireworks have been going off all day like gangbusters, and every TV channel has been blaring the military review—complete with tanks, fighter planes, and warheads, all parading down the streets of Beijing. For the last couple of weeks, many of the students have been practicing for speech and choral performances on campus, espousing the tenets of Chinese nationalism on auditorium stages, which are packed with spectators in the evenings. But most pertinent to all of us foreigners, it signals the start of a ten-day vacation. Many of the students have already left to go home and spend time with family and friends, and they, like all of us, are excited about the break from classes. Anne, Nick, and I are all going down to Kunming to visit Adam and Alex, two other Shansi Fellows staked out in the south of China. I’m so excited about the eight days we will spend there, and though I will be more out of contact than usual, I am sure I will have that much more to write about when I get back!

Participants practice the tradition of flag-raising at Yangren Street in Chongqing Municipality (photo courtesy of msnbc).

Discovering Judaism in Rural China

By sundown tonight, I will have fasted for 24 hours. No, it’s not for a traditional Chinese celebration (what Chinese holiday involves the absence of food?), nor is it for some outlandish dare conspired by my co-Fellows. In the Jewish calendar, today is Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement—the holiest day of the year for religious Jews. That’s wonderful, you might say, but what does that have anything to do with me?

Not many people know that I am a quarter Jewish. From time to time, I even forget myself. Because I’m Jewish on my father’s side, some stauncher Jews have written me off as not technically being Jewish at all. There is that, coupled with the fact that I could never stand on a level playing field with my predominantly Jewish classmates in high school. There was Jewish school to contend with, the flurry of bar and bat mitzvahs, and the high holidays that were always observed as school recesses. Needless to say, I had almost none of that personal exposure to the religion. My relationship to Judaism peaked at age six when I celebrated Passover at my Uncle Ben’s house in Upstate New York. All I remember about the occasion, though, was searching feverishly with the help of my cousin and my sister (presumably for the Afikomen), and drinking grape juice disguised as wine at the dinner table. Since then, I have celebrated Hanukkah on one occasion with my dad and my sister (mostly as an excuse to light the menorah my dad inherited from his mother), and have pieced together the rest of my Jewish identity from what I’ve learned on Seinfeld.

But my estranged relationship to Judaism is less a product of my upbringing than it is a reflection of my own interests. I can’t blame my dad for not better exposing me to Jewish culture because I never expressed that much interest to begin with. The intense Judaism of my high school intimidated me, and because I felt that I could never match that level of devotedness and intensity, I chose to down-play that part of my identity. Not to mention that many of my classmates were self-righteously and conceitedly proud of their heritage—flaunting their Jewishness as unabashedly as the Tiffany bracelets around their wrists. It’s not that I was ashamed of being Jewish—quite the contrary. I took my heritage to heart and poured over the histories of Jewish people as if they were uniquely my own. But high school was also a mini-turning point for my identity—and one that was quickly capitalized on at Oberlin. In my grade in high school, I was one-half of only 1 ½ Asian Americans—the other being my best friend—and I realized then that we were something of a rare breed. The familiar “fight or flight” mentality colored my consciousness, and from 7th through 12th grade, we were inseparable, reveling in our common ancestry.

Or at least a part of mine. College represented a continuation of my Chinese-soul searching, largely due to the strength of the Asian American community—four years of meetings, biennial conferences, and annual heritage months, that culminated in my eventual study of Mandarin. It’s what brought me to China in the first place, but all along the way, I’ve felt like a part of my identity has been conspicuously left behind. It seems incredibly ironic to me that it took living in China to finally get in touch with my Jewish side in a way that a New York City upbringing did not.

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that outside of me and Anne, there are no Jewish people in the entire city of Taigu. This fact alone takes off a lot of the pressure associated with not feeling “Jewish enough.” Now that I am surrounded by Chinese people, I again feel like the outsider, this time in my Asian American skin. I am neither American enough nor Chinese enough, so, I figure, I might as well be Jewish. If only the same mentality could be applied to my eventual application to Birthright Israel—so long as it doesn’t go bankrupt first. But the reaction towards Jewish people is very different here then back home. It seems that the very same stereotype used against Jews in America (money-grubbing, good businessmen) is actually used in China to one’s credit. Chinese admire Jewish smarts and shrewdness, and in many ways, the two cultures are parallel in their adoption of these traits. It is said that people who are part Chinese and part Jewish are looked upon very fondly here, and I hazard to agree, despite some discomfort on the actual reasoning behind it.

With my newfound Jewish pride came, of course, the necessary initiation. With a bris or bar mitzvah almost certainly out of the question, it fell upon two major holidays in September to give me a proper induction into Jewish culture. Luckily for me, Anne is as close to a “practicing” Jew as I will meet for the next year and is thus certainly more knowledgeable and more experienced with such ceremonies and traditions than I. We missed the apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, but we were determined, at least, to repent properly, even if we couldn’t attend services. The idea of fasting for me was not an easy one. Simply wrapping my mind around it was a challenge. Why would I willfully deprive myself of food, and at what cost to my body and my mind? I have always held fast to the importance of eating and maintaining a healthy diet. If my absurd ratio of blog posts dedicated to food isn’t indication enough, it was also one of the key pieces of advice I gave to incoming first-years during my senior year at Oberlin. During Orientation at the start of the fall semester, I was given the opportunity to sit on the “Many Voices” panel, which, as any Oberlin student will tell you, is a mildly boring but (hopefully) equally engaging introduction to some of the diverse student voices at the college. Rather than talk about the merits of sleep, doing homework on time, or cultivating good friendships, I urged them to always eat breakfast and to never skip a meal—tenets that I still strive towards in my own life.

But I decided that if I was really going to do this, at the very least, I needed a good reason. And, eventually, I found it—not only would fasting be a good discipline for myself, but it would also be a reminder of how many people in this world go hungry every day and have no choice but to experience on a daily basis what I am merely dabbling willy-nilly with for one day. Eating three meals a day is a privilege, and certainly one that after this experience, I will not take for granted. There was also the motivation of Anne herself, who has fasted on Yom Kippur for most of her adult life. Fasting together was something of a bonding experience that made it that much easier to accomplish, rather than if had I chosen to embark on this mission alone. There are also people who fast all the time, perhaps unconsciously, or those who think little of it—skipping breakfast and then forgetting to eat lunch. I knew for myself though, that this would be a challenge, as meals are rarely the sorts of occasions that I fail to remember.

If the last 24 hours have taught me anything else, it’s that starvation dieting is almost certainly not for me. The day started out fine, as I woke up early to finish lesson planning and walked over to my 8am class without a hitch. As luck would have it, the subject for this week was a continuation of the lasts—a lesson dedicated to American food—and I did my best to fritter away the time despite the constant shouting out of ingredients, names of restaurants, and food descriptors. It helped that in my first class, a lot of the lesson was about the pitfalls of American fast food and its affect on childhood obesity, an easy way for me to make a mental plug for my own dismissal of eating for the day.

After class and heading into lunch was when it really started to hit me. I missed my daily breakfast of bing and a banana, and decided that I was going to cheat and allow myself to drink water, as I am often prone to dehydration even when not bound by a no-food pledge. Without eating, I realized how much additional time I had. Not only that, I began to think about how much time is spent snacking in between meals, and how easy it really is to eat mindlessly whenever a pang of hunger strikes. These feelings don’t spur me too often, but today they certainly made themselves known, prompting me on more than one occasion to hide away the snacks I keep for when I need a quick sugar rush. Even my bottle of vitamins started to look good after a while, and it suddenly felt weird to remind myself not to eat them. Over the rest of the day, I experienced a lot of the normal feelings when it comes to being hungry—light-headedness, dizziness, tiredness, confusion. It felt like being drunk or not getting enough sleep—the same sort-of out-of-body sensation that makes you believe you are someone else. I often felt loopy, as if after a day or two more of doing this, I might start to have hallucinations. Going to teach in the afternoon without lunch was brutal, but at least it was a way to keep my mind occupied on a feeling other than wanting to eat but being unable to.

For my first time trying my hand at fasting, the experience went quite well. With the minor detriment to my ability to teach aside, there was no real harm done outside of that inflicted on my stomach. The feeling during the fast was both comforting and painful. My ability to concentrate and focus was raised to a much higher level than I anticipated, and it was interesting to discover how much I sometimes use food to reward myself for completed tasks. With no future incentives to distract me (save for the point at which I would be able to eat again), I felt that I could really live in the present, feeling each minute pass as though it were infinite. Not only that, but I felt incredibly accomplished at having set out to do something that I didn't think I ever could. At 7:30 sharp, we all went out to dinner to celebrate, and there was an almost euphoric quality both to the conversation and to those first few bites. Your mouth gets used to chewing again and your stomach starts churning out the acid it has been gurgling at you for the better part of the day. Like a meal after a bout of intense physical exertion, the food tasted spectacular, regardless of what we were actually eating. Anne and I looked at each other with wide eyes and even wider grins—the taste of food passing over our lips and the warmth and color returning back to our skin. Inevitably, I ate too much, and as we left the restaurant, my stomach started to feel sick again—this time not from an absence of food, but the feeling that perhaps I should start to fast anew.

Climbing That Other Great Wall: 北京 (Pt. II)

As strange as it is to say, my disposition toward Anne’s relatives was almost viscerally familiar—one that had evolved after years of careful study with my own extended family. This is fitting given Anne’s own background as a quarter Chinese, and also explains why she has relatives living in Beijing. Each conversation began the same way: her great aunt posed a question, and I, as the dutiful and polite guest, was naturally expected to respond. Her husband, like most older males in my mother’s family, preferred to stay reticent, but I could tell she herself was excited. Here I was, another part-Chinese, her kind, the kind of person she could joke around with and not worry about offending. She wore a face I knew well—beady eyes, a wide grin, the kind of head nod that will egg you on despite reservation. And almost reflexively, I was all but ready to deliver the culmination of my childhood knowledge of Cantonese—the perfected smile-and-nod routine—until I realized that I could understand her. Or, perhaps—more accurately—that I should have been able to.

For she was not speaking Cantonese, the bane of my childhood insecurities, but the very language I had been studying for over a year. Not only that, but she was speaking the most standardized regional dialect. And still, there was nothing. My head registered sounds but no meaning—a garble of tones and nonsensical word pairings. I managed to half-register a reply before sinking back down in my chair. For a time, a few short exchanges were all it took to shatter any hopes I had hindered on my study of Mandarin. It was such a debilitating feeling to have to disappoint someone—and to do so in their native country, no less—not for lack of effort, but out of sheer ineptitude. As she began to realize what transpired, I saw the familiar sag of the face, the smile drawn downwards, air blown out from between her lips, as if to say, “just another American in China, and he can’t speak Chinese.” It was particularly hard looking like her; all the familiar marks of a Chinese but without the means to communicate.

It’s difficult for American-born Chinese who can’t speak their familial tongue. It is like an entire life spent being perceived one way and constantly underperforming those expectations. In practice, it’s not nearly that dramatic, but it certainly feels it at times. I’m perhaps luckier in that I don’t always look Chinese, at least to many people here. It’s only when I am a little more explicit that it seems to register. And as proud as I am of my heritage, it’s sometimes easier to pass simply as American—with no hopes latched on my presumed knowledge of Chinese language, custom, and mannerism. In this way, no one has to get hurt.

The Great Wall, as seen through one of its watchtowers.

After dinner, the five of us went back to Anne’s great aunt and uncle’s apartment. This too was like entering a parallel universe. Anne’s relatives, like my own, speak Chinese—this time a different dialect—but I still could not understand them. They live in an apartment, strikingly similar to my aunt’s house in Queens—but in Beijing. I’ve come to the conclusion that older Chinese people must actually share a similar lifestyle, in the same way that classic older white suburbanites do. Trading in the sticky plastic coverings that overlie couches and the slightly dingy, off-color window draping, older Chinese couples might superimpose excessively large pieces of furniture in cramped quarters, and year’s worth of boxed belongings, stacked floor to ceiling behind long pieces of fabric. I am no stranger to this lifestyle. I remember well the tiny outdoor porch where my aunt used to hang clothes and store bulky appliances, the living room that smelled of carpeting and stale air, and her kids’ bedrooms, which, after long years without use (her kids are now grown-up with families of their own), had become part-time capsule and part-storage closet. I remember how every inch of space was monopolized, and the way each saved item functioned like a comforting reminder of the past. Living through the Cultural Revolution seemed to make Chinese perpetual pack rats in the same way it did for Americans who were alive during the Great Depression.

At Anne’s great aunt’s apartment in Beijing, I was guilty of a little snooping. I had to prove whether or not my theory was correct. And indeed, there was something of the familiar—her great uncle’s study, where I stayed for the duration of the trip, had tables and bookshelves bursting with old magazines, newspaper clippings, and expired advertisements. There, too, were the same antique lamps, the coarse wool blankets slumped over the bed and chair, and the crinkly old wallpaper that hung ominously like a too-big coat. We wore slippers in the house, ate communally at a makeshift dinner table in the living room, and always tried to look busy. On my first night, we went shopping in the local area and stumbled upon a cheap retail store that was selling two pairs of jeans for a 100 yuan (about $15). Anne, Lynn, and I each bought a pair before stocking up on snack supplies and water at a convenience store. We would need some fuel for our trip to the Great Wall with a couple of Anne’s Oberlin friends the next day.

Despite the infamous Beijing smog, the Great Wall was still a sight to behold.

Sleep was in short supply as all three of us were out of bed well before 5:30 and on a taxi on our way to the youth hostel where Anne’s friend Anna and her boyfriend Sam were staying on the other side of Beijing. We were lucky that their hostel had trips running out to the Great Wall on a nearly daily basis and we just happened to pick a good day to join up with them. The whole ordeal was a little pricey, but it included all of the necessary admission tickets for the wall (they charge you at junctures spaced somewhat arbitrarily throughout) and the roundtrip bus ride, which took just about three hours each way. It was great to be able to “talk Oberlin,” even though it was with alums who I had not known previously while at school, simply because the shared experiences that bond Obies are enough to fill tomes of their own.

Before I delve any further into my actual account of the Great Wall, though, I thought I’d start with a small disclaimer. I often feel like most accounts of Westerners describing the majesty of a foreign, daresay “exotic,” place are met with no small degree of orientalism and essentialism. I was somewhat conscious of it when I was in Japan, but even more so here. It is so easy to write off the most surreal experiences with phrases that heighten the value of a sight as a result of its foreignness, or perhaps in this case, its Asian-ness. Not to mention that after a time, every temple and palace begins to take on the same aesthetic. As such, I will try to refrain from using the kind of language that might be indicative of such sights, though, in all fairness, it is hard to talk about the Great Wall without paying homage, at least in some part, to China itself.

Not knowing the specifics of the Beijing itinerary before packing, I was somewhat at a loss for proper hiking attire. More than that, I figured a weekend rendezvous in posh Beijing would be the perfect place to break in the new shoes I had bought just one day before leaving the states, and which I still had never worn. Needless to say, the 8 km tour of the Great Wall put a small dent in that plan. But shoes aside, the trek was great. For those of you who have also scaled at least part of the manmade behemoth, we went from Jinshanling to Simatai, a stretch of over 30 watchtowers that the tour books touted as one of the “least touristy” sections of the Wall. And for all intents and purposes, they were right—the only other foreigners we saw for the entirety of the four-hour jaunt were those that accompanied us on the bus trip up there. It was hard not to marvel at the incredible scale and majesty of it all. The walk was surprisingly exhausting, and consisted of numerous breaks from the climbs and descents that characterized each tower. The snacks we brought proved incredibly fruitful, and included crackers, dried fruit, nuts, beef jerky (famous in Pingyao), and, of course, plenty of water.

One of the only drawbacks to the entire experience, however, was the rampant number of vendors pushing their wares on various passersby. As foreigners, it makes sense that we look like huge dollar signs, but it was so discouraging to have scores of old women follow us for literally minutes, making small talk and complimenting our Chinese, before eventually asking us to buy their things and the five of us reluctantly having to turn them down—one at a time. This whole process became exhausting quickly—we could hardly go an entire watchtower without running into another vendor, selling everything from food to postcards to incredibly kitschy “I Climbed the Great Wall” t-shirts, available in a myriad of colors. There was one particular juncture that was slightly harrowing to traverse—the Wall basically let off at a window that was about ten feet off the ground without much of a landing save for a small platform located a few body lengths to the right. It was at this precise location that a very prudent saleswoman set up shop, essentially “saving” tourists by grabbing their arms and swinging them over to safety, and in the process, guilting those same tourists into opening up their wallets. We left with a couple American dollars worth of overpriced water and postcards. After all, how, ethically, could we refuse?

Nearing the end of our hike, there were quite a few sections of the Wall that were being outfitted with new bricks and cement as a result of erosion.

Another three-hour bus ride and a quick dinner later, I got back to Anne’s great aunt and uncle’s place that night feeling like my feet were on fire. I kicked off my shoes, slid on a pair of slippers, and waited for my turn in the shower. It was then that I began to understand some of the differences between this apartment and my aunt’s house in Queens. As Americans, no matter how hard we may try to avoid it, the agents of Westernization plague our everyday lives, from where we eat to how we use the toilet. Though not the case with regard to most everything else, in the case of the latter, China has in large part been able to bypass the globalization bug. China is notorious for its public squat toilets, especially where I live in the countryside, where all manner of refuse are contained atop a raised basin before being sloshed down to a hole in the ground. In many ways, it is more hygienic—never making direct contact with a seat saves countless millions of germs from being spread—but the regular lack of sinks and toilet paper seems to compensate for that pretty well.

And so, even despite knowing this, it still managed to shock me that instead of a traditional Western shower, I found myself standing in a bathtub almost comically small for my size, holding a bucket of luke-warm water in one hand and a fussy showerhead in the other. In that instant, the comforts of American hygiene fell away, and I had to laugh at myself just a little, squinting through the screen of an open window that surely someone across the street was having a fun time admiring. I managed to hose myself down without making too much of a mess, and with no small degree of grace, hoisted myself out of the tub and back to bed, where I slept as soundly as I could have hoped—all things considered.

Beijing State of Mind: 北京 (Pt. I)

Not yet one full week into my two year commitment in Taigu, and I was ready to leave. Maybe the rain was starting to get to me, or the air, or the overwhelming feeling of being an outsider in this country. Whatever it was, there was hardly an escape. The days that lingered on did so without repent, and I didn’t want to burden my Senior Fellows with the grief and trouble of entertaining me when there was nothing for me to do. I figured that learning to cope with bouts of boredom and loneliness were all part of the necessary culture shock experience, but already my patience was beginning to wear thin. I was anxious for James to arrive, and for classes to start, but, at the same time, I was intensely scared of those same inevitabilities.

Without many other options, I tried my hand at simply living in the present. Fortunately for me, Anne mentioned after a few days that she would be going to Beijing to visit some friends before classes were to start. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity. The trip would figure nicely under the umbrella banner of past travel experiences with friends—as did the nature of my friendship with Anne in general. Over the greater part of the first week, we had been spending a lot of time together—not surprising, given that I am known to fall under the guise of strong female figures when experiencing a new place. Such was the case at Oberlin (Cheska), studying abroad in Japan (Katie), and even this past summer at Cornell (Jannine). There’s something about female friends that put me at ease and bring me a great deal of comfort in unfamiliar surroundings—perhaps a microcosm of my general approach when it comes to the majority of the friends that I keep. I also knew, however, that these kinds of friendships can sometimes become stifling and overwhelming—that two people can grow tired of each other in the time it takes for them to be propelled towards one another in the first place—an oversight that has endangered some of my friendships in the past. I recognized this, and tried to preempt it—devising my own itinerary for the time that Anne might be spending time with friends, and selling myself on introspectiveness for large parts of the trip.

Anne and I would be joined by her Chinese friend Lynn (who I mentioned briefly in my first China post) for four days in Beijing. The two of us would be staying at Anne’s great aunt and uncle’s house, thus saving ourselves the trouble of finding and paying for a hostel, while Lynn would be staying with her boyfriend who works in Beijing. I was excited and nervous at the same time. Though Taigu life was bearing down on me, I felt like I still hadn’t fully settled and that the few roots I had planted would be quickly wrenched from the ground. Unlike all of the other Fellows, I hadn’t spend significant time in Beijing (or any time for that matter, outside of my three-hour layover), and so I was also skeptical of my own ability to navigate in a big city without a commanding knowledge of spoken or written Chinese. More still was the issue of money, and (more specifically) not having very much of it, because institutions that accept credit cards, both in Taigu and beyond, are still something of an anomaly in China. But these hindrances aside, I was excited for the change of pace, and the chance to experience a city that many have compared to Tokyo and New York—at least one of which I am incredibly fond of.

One of the scenic posts in Taiyuan, which we perused before boarding the fast train to Beijing.

Our journey began at 7am sharp—with just enough time for me to pack, change, and get to the train station headed first toward Taiyuan, and then by fast train to Beijing. We arrived in Taiyuan in time for breakfast—a short meal of rice porridge or zhou, this time sweetened with fruit, as I had never experienced before—and had a decent amount of time to kill. After some window-shopping and clothes-trying—done largely to humor the whims of store employees eager to impress some Chinese fashion upon me—we went to a big park to sit and relax. Park culture, as I had learned from textbook readings over the summer at Cornell, is very big in China. Most parks are free, but other well-known ones run a few yuan. This particular one even featured a small amusement park—a miniature Coney Island, complete with a tiny rollercoaster, merry-go-round, and a few carnival games sprinkled amidst food vendors and other stands. When I relayed the advice I had gleamed from the text to Lynn—that visiting small Chinese parks is a great way to observe the daily life and customs of Chinese people—she laughed at me. No one goes to parks to observe natural life, she told me. Rather, people go there to live their own lives and heed their own habits, separate from those of others, and in that way, people can enjoy one another’s company more-or-less harmoniously. And for a few hours, under the shade of a few trees alongside the amusement park, we did just that.

The self-contained amusement park, which, inexplicably, had a very A Bug's Life-feel to it.

We eventually met up with the first of Anne’s friends—Acacia, a recent graduate of Shanxi Agricultural University who now works in Taiyuan. We went to lunch, and though I understood only fragments of conversation, it was good to experience an immersive Chinese language environment—something I would encounter time and again over the course of my four days in Beijing. After lunch, we bid farewell to Acacia and the three of us boarded the fast train to Beijing—three hours wrought with small conversation and shut-eye. When we arrived, we headed straight for Anne’s great aunt’s house. Located snuggly in the center of West Beijing, it was a boon to be able to stay so ideally-situated for free. Her great aunt and uncle were incredibly accommodating, and it wasn’t long after we arrived that we were whisked out to dinner at a fancy nearby restaurant. We ordered perhaps more food than I had seen in my week in Taigu up to that point (and we were no eating slouches in Taigu, either), including some of the famed, oft-exalted Beijing kaoya, or roast duck. Needless to say, the food was delicious, and for the five of us—great aunt and uncle included—it was a veritable feast. In typical Chinese fashion, we were urged to eat and drink mercilessly, this time, thankfully without the added ingestion of alcohol. Even still, by meal’s end, and despite a litter of exhausted plates and stomachs, we ended up taking a few whole dishes to go.

A view from the window of the moving fast train of some of China's lesser-known countryside. Much of the land is terraced to provide better irrigation for farming.

(More on childhood insecurities, Chinese apartments, déjà vu, the Great Wall, kitschy t-shirts, the agents of Westernization, and a shocking revelation in Pt. II of this post).