Lao Shi

We stayed at the Howard Johnson Paragon Hotel in Beijing, located across from the Beijing Railway Station and a twenty minute walk or so from Tiananmen Square that felt longer in the cold. In general, we enjoyed our stay and certainly made the most of the breakfast spread; we cut costs by loading up on breakfast and skipping lunch, which our Chinese guide found strange, as lunch is considered the most important meal of the day in China. But there were some sketchy things about the place, like how the price we paid was higher than the price quoted online, or the “private club” on the second floor that was obviously a brothel.

View from my window: The Beijing Railway Station

And there was the Netti pot.

A Netti pot is a yogic sinus cleaning device. It looks a little bit like a genii’s lamp, and you fill it with warm salt water. You insert one end of the pot into a nostril and, with just the right posture, you pour the warm saline into one nostril and out the other. All sorts of mucus and snot and sometimes chunky boogers come out. It takes some time getting used to it (expect a lot of choking and swallowing water at first) and sometimes leaves you feeling a little strange (like when you go swimming and accidentally inhale water) but nothing cleans out my sinuses better, especially from the soot and dirt of China’s air.

So I bring the pot with me to Beijing. In the weeks leading up to our trip I was doing at least a Netti twice daily, sometimes more depending on conditions. I used it my first morning in Beijing and left it on the bathroom counter right up against the mirror, no where near the counter’s edge.

When I returned in the evening I found a note on my room floor that said in her “impudence” the maid had broken my “little white flask.” I am a calm guy and understand that accidents happen, so while disappointed I was not enraged, but I did think the hotel should make some gesture towards compensating me for the pot, especially considering that it was important for my sinus health.

When I took this issue up with the on-duty manager, she told me that the maid who broke the pot would pay me twenty RMB out of her pocket to replace it. I said that was unacceptable for two reasons, one being that the maid shouldn’t have to pay anything, the hotel should pay, and the other being that twenty RMB comes no where near covering the cost of buying and shipping a new pot. I asked to speak to the manager-manager and was shunted up the hotel bureaucracy to a woman who told me that the maid would now pay me 150 RMB to replace the pot, but could not pay me the full value of the pot (which I estimated as twenty USD) because she could not afford it.

I couldn’t get through to either of the managers that it wasn’t right for the maid to have to personally pay at all and that the hotel should take responsibility for the cost since she was a hotel employee. Their attitude implied that because she made the mistake she would be the one personally responsible for it with no greater liability on the hotel’s part. Knowing how cheap and available labor is in China, I became worried as I pushed the issue that the maid would get fired. I feel that in America “the customer is always right” tradition would have resulted in a more active attempt to calm me down on the part of the hotel at large. The HoJo Paragon would want me leaving there crowing about their facilities and services, not posting online about how they were going to make a low-paid employee fork money over for what was surely an accident. In China, the sheer number of businesses, and frequently their close proximity to one another (similar businesses usually group around one another for some reason, so if you want, say, a musical instrument, there is a small area in Puxi that has nothing but music stores) make it so that the attitude towards a business owner to a customer is usually, “don’t like it? Go someplace else.”

Frustrated to see this attitude held at the HoJo, even though it is an international corporation, I let the issue drop, but I plan on writing a strongly worded letter to Corporate Headquarters. I miss my Netti pot!

The Forbidden City is overrated.

When I visited in August, 2005 I walked away with this feeling, and attributed it to travel fatigue and Chinese architecture burn-out.

But after a second visit, I feel the same.

The compound is huge, surrounded by massive walls and made up of 9,999 rooms (only the emperor’s palace in heaven is allowed 10,000 rooms – the emperor’s palace in life lacks one room as a symbol of earthly imperfection). Red, the imperial color, and gold, which means something, abound, whether muted and dull with age or bright with refurbishment. In fact, from color choice to statuary (mostly lions, dragons and turtles – oh my!) to intricately painted ceilings and archways to the number of nails in the massive doors, the City’s design oozes centuries of symbolism, most of the meaning of which is lost on a novice like me. The City sounds grand enough – every room has a fancy name (like the Gate of Spiritual Harmony) and a distinguished history (this room is where the empress so-and-so committed suicide, that room is where the emperor what’s-his-name practiced calligraphy), and it is one of the symbols of Chinese national pride.

So what’s there not to love?

Well, for one you need an informed guide, book or knowledge of Chinese architecture and history to fully appreciate the palace, none of which I had on my current visit. Second, you need to be ready for crowds, especially in the gates leading between courtyards, where traffic jams are a norm. In August the City was claustrophobic; December was more manageable, but by no means empty. But the biggest reason this site is a let down has to do with the purpose of its overall design. The City was meant to make visitors to the emperor feel puny and insignificant. The scale is super-sized, distances between buildings are great, humanity dominates over nature (you see trees only in the imperial garden, and even there their growth is forced into man-made shapes by ropes and cables); the City is a hermetic world-to-itself. It still works. You feel small in the face of a huge governmental machine; chilled.

This is nothing like the Great Wall, which is one of my favorite sites to visit in the world. You can experience the Great Wall first hand – climb it, touch it, run up it, look out the windows, spit off of it, whatever. It’s a real physical as well as historical experience that you can get up-close and commune with, and it appeals to my kinesthetic nature. The Wall meanders through a really beautiful, awe-inspiring landscape in China, and its presence emphasizes the land’s beauty. We were fortunate to have the wall largely to ourselves this visit, but even during the crowded summer The Wall was a fun place to visit.

This is similar, in part, between the histories you see in Philadelphia and New York and that in Washington, D.C. It’s the difference between a living, still-experiencable history, and a symbolic history. One makes you tingle and feel connected to the world at large and the world of the past, and the other gives you a sense of pride or of grandeur.

I’ll take the tingle any day.

One of the biggest differences between Shanghai and Beijing was the number of people we saw in Beijing who looked down-and-out. Of course there are homeless people and beggars in Shanghai – these seem to be two sad features of any urban environment – but in Beijing we encountered some aggressive people who seemed on the edge, more so than any of the homeless people we’ve encounter here in Shanghai.

Walking out of a bar our first night in the ex-pat/touristy Sanlitun area, a kid of around nine or ten grabbed hold of my gloved hand and wouldn’t let go. His face was dirty, he wore a winter coat with no hat and had to have been cold, as we saw him on our way in, which meant he had been standing outside for several hours. “Bu bu, mei-oh mei-oh” I said, two general words of negation that mean “don’t” or “no.” But the kid held on with a tight grip. My dismay turned to frustration turned to anger – one thing I can’t stand is when strangers touch me without permission, it feels so invasive – and I pulled my hand up and away from him. Still he wouldn’t let go. My tone became aggressive and I said something like “get the hell off of my hand,” knowing that he could understand the sound of my voice if he couldn’t understand my words. He was now reaching up with both hands over his head to hold on and my glove was being stretched out between us, slowly slipping off my hand. I felt that small bird of panic flutter in my chest and was seriously considering pushing him away from me with my free hand when he finally let go, enabling me to speed off in front of him.

I hate seeing kids begging, and hate it even more when their parents teach them to grab passersby. Some of that hatred stems from my own feelings of guilt and shame for not helping them and some is directed at society-at-large out of concern for the kids. I like to think that the latter outweighs the former, but I’m not sure. It is one thing to walk past someone asking you for money, but it is much more difficult to ignore your own comparable wealth when the beggar takes you by the hands.
In Shanghai’s French Concession district during the milder months we encountered mothers who would send their kids running after us to grab or pull at our sleeves. Sometimes the kids followed us as we walked, sometimes for blocks, even getting out of eyesight from their mother. Last year, in Beijing, upon leaving the Forbidden City, our group was aggressively hounded by children and mothers who repeatedly tapped us on the shoulder, asking for money, water, food, whatever. Up until the night I just described in Beijing I’ve never been so latched onto before, and it gave me the shivers.

The second encounter involved a man, middle-aged, wearing a plain communist style green winter coat and one of those big fur-lined hats with flaps covering his ears. He was walking down one of the surprisingly dark and empty blocks surrounding Tiananmen Square in the early evening, kicking a metal bowl and mumbling to himself. It was obvious from his tone that he was angry and potentially crazy, and our guide, whom I was walking with, said only that he was saying, “bad, angry things” to us as we walked past. She told me, “he is an angry man. Many people in Beijing are like him.”

He followed along behind us, at first in the street, then on the sidewalk, always kicking that damn bowl. It was really wearing on our nerves. He began to kick the bowl harder, so that it came up to where we were walking, and finally, after a bit of this, it hit Shana’s leg. She impetuously threw the bowl over a construction fence where the man couldn’t retrieve it.

He got pretty upset over the loss of his bowl. He came up and walked along beside us, increasing his volume, sometimes making moves as if he was going to cross our path. We were under some trees and the street was pretty dark, and it looked deserted ahead, so we crossed to find some route of exit. He followed, hounding us at a traffic island as cars sped past in the orange glow of the street lights. Fortunately, taxis stopped quickly, and we took off in two groups, leaving the angry mumbler behind us. We headed out to drinks and dice, but what did the night hold for him?

Sad stories of city life. Could be any city, really.

Beijing Christmas photos have been posted! Follow this link and check out the album on the top right column. More notes from the trip to follow soon…

I’m sitting at home full and happy and have to crow:

Just finished a delicious meal at Crystal Jade, a restaurant located in the trendy, tourist/no-bo (nouveau-bourgeoisie) oriented Xintiandi shopping area, on the edge of the French Concession. Xintiandi (shin-tian-dee) is a newly constructed mall and somewhat European looking alley of bars and eateries that is, in parts, meant to look old – a very Western concept I think. It is home to a Vidal Sassoon (Academy AND Salon, no less), Starbucks, Paullaner Brew House, and other upscale Western or mock-Western joints. It was decked out in full Christmas regalia, including a big Christmas tree next to a huge flat-screen monitor showing ads. (You find tv screens all over the place around here – Nanjing road, the subway, wherever lingering eyes may fall.)

At the restaurant we had several dishes:
Wonderfully tender beef in peppercorn sauce that had nicely sautéed bits of garlic and onion for a little sweet-crunch.

A fantastic soup called “La Mian” Sichuan Style that had a red-curry/peanut based sauce with nice medium-grade noodles, which the waitress snipped at the table before serving us. The broth was at first sweet and peanuty followed by a spicy punch that tingled the back of your throat – mmm, I love foods that are both great tastes and deliver real sensations. I could have eaten a big ole’ bowl of this.

Steamed buns – the traditional pork variety and a special veggie kind with ground up bits of mushroom and some green leafy thing – that went perfect with black vinegar and chili sauce. You can’t beat a good bun.

Wonton dumps stuffed with ground pork and veggie in a spicy chili sauce – I loved this. Slimy and oily, it slipped down real easy with a noticeable bark from the spicy sauce and just enough rubbery give from the noodle and the meat… might not be coming through in my description, but a classic “you can’t find this in America” kind of dish. I wouldn’t eat too much though, as this is kind of food just slips right on through you…

The meal was, like most Chinese food, a bit oily, and like my favorite Chinese food, a bit spicy. With plenty of dumplings and some unusual taste combos that mingled together excellently, this was definitely one to remember.

The topper? On the way home I saw a cabbie peeing right outside of the elementary school, where all the cabs wait for people coming out of the Living Quarter. Have I mentioned how men just whip it out and piss wherever they want? I’ve seen men peeing in the bushes by the canal when running, by the side of the road, and, my personal favorite, right out in Peoples Square on a Sunday afternoon. That would be like pulling off and peeing on the curb at Times Square, which, it should be said, I’m sure happens a bunch. The men don’t even hide themselves – they just pull off and its go time. Only guys though, I’ve never seen a woman do it.

I’ve never seen someone peeing by the school though – you go guy!

As I was walking by he looked me in the eye and raised his eyebrows. Not one to be goaded, I sidled up next to him and made a number two. Those dumplings weren’t just spicy going down…

New Year’s day, 2007, came to Shanghai dreary and grey.

Dan, Aliza, Shauna and I celebrated by going to the Shangri-La Hotel to experience what is supposedly the best buffet in town. I believe it – the place was food heaven, a mini-maze of food stations presenting dishes from around the world that you could graze on again and again, or just have a small taste of and then throw out. True Western decadence.

We sat right by the guy making Lanzhou-style noodles, who we watched whipping long twisted dough-ropes around, slapping them on the table and then pulling them into beautiful long thin noodle bunches with his hands. Not a strand of noodle was wasted. He occasionally stopped this routine to shave thicker noodles off a dough log into the big pot of boiling broth that lay set in the table before him. Shauna sampled the noodle soup and didn’t seem overly impressed, but it was still extremely entertaining to watch this guy do his thing for a while.

After courses of salad (great), sushi (excellent), dumplings (so-so), and a Mediterranean mix of falafel and feta with greens and tahini dressing (mmmm…), and some excellent coaching from Dan on how best to get our money’s worth from the experience(“go slow, take a breather, stretch it out, don’t fill up on water”), it was time for desert.

The desert station featured fountains of chocolates – milk, white and green(?) – that people dipped all kinds of things into.

The pastry counter was, like all pastry counters I think, more beautiful to look at then to taste. Then again, I didn’t actually try any of the food first hand, ‘cause pastries just aren’t my bag. My more pedestrian tastes led to the ice cream bar, where I had a scoop of mocha with toasted pistachios and chocolate flakes, and a return trip for a scoop of green tea with almond slivers and pistachio biscotti. Super rich and gelato-esque, I was creamed with pleasure.

As much as I enjoyed the meal, I would have enjoyed it even more if I came into in top form. I had way way too much to drink on Saturday night and sent myself into a world of pain. My grandfather was an alcoholic, and while I don’t think I have the stamina or desire to ever get to the level he was at – he would go on benders for weeks at a time, be out of work, have hallucinations – sometimes the switch inside my brain that tells me when enough is enough doesn’t kick in properly. I had this problem my senior year in college for a while, and every few years I seem to have some extreme instance where I consume far too much for my own good, experience black outs and memory loss, say rude things that I don’t mean, and, in the worst case scenarios, pass out and wake myself up by vomiting. (Once I didn’t wake up – the morning of New Year’s Day 2003 found me opening my eyes in a puddle of vomit on the bathroom floor. I had passed out laying by the toilet.)

This Saturday it was shots of scotch while having a boy’s night in and watching Jackass 2 and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (both of which I recommend). I got toasted and ate some cold left-over pasta with anchovy-lemon pesto and then we headed out to a bar. At some point in the second half of Harold and Kumar the shots caught up to me and carried me off like a fucking run-away train – I became totally spacey and from here on in the night my memory starts to have holes in it. We ended up at a bar in Puxi and I felt completely disoriented, saying, “I don’t even know where I am right now,” which is an excellent bon mot to remember if you want to make your friends think you have lost your mind. I insisted I was ok getting home, and Dan put me in a cab with directions to Pudong and I passed out for a little bit, but was quickly awoken when I puked a disgustingly warm and sour mash of artichoke and pasta all over myself and the back seat. I remember the cab driver laughing at me – but he treated me well, giving me a bag to hurl more into and (it seems) my proper change back. I was fortunate not to have wound up stuck out on the side of LongDong Avenue.

I woke up New Year’s Eve with a puke stained jacket lying on the floor in the hallway, the rest of my clothes (also puke stained) in a pile in the kitchen and the worst hangover ever. (Oh, and in my haste to get my jeans off (my favorite pair), I ripped a huge hole in the crotch. They seem to be ruined.) A horrible headache made me feel totally nauseous, I had dry heaves and couldn’t keep anything down, but finally, a good lunch buffet and about 40 hours later I started feeling more or less myself again.

In some ways this culminating weekend was emblematic of my 2006. A year with plenty of highlights, but also a year of major disruptions, and one in which I definitely haven’t always handled myself the best. One plus of all this is a drastic paradigm shift in my feelings on aging. A year ago I was looking at thirty staring me in the face with dread, and now I’ve started telling people that I am thirty. I am ready to leave the twenties behind and embrace a more solid and steadily calm life. I used to think that was equivalent to being boring or sleepwalking or not fully living, but that was me falling for the myth that not only our culture at large embraces, but that the American intellectual culture also propagates. Living large and in the moment is often equated with excessive drinking and drug use and making rash decisions with no thought for tomorrow. Whether you’re Spuds McKenzie, Kanye West or F. Scott Fitzgerald, Americans idolize partiers and drinkers. Look at our past two presidents for instance – both seem like party guys in their own way, Clinton more of the long haired hippy smoker and G.W. Bush more of the bright-lights-big-city type.

This experience also makes me realize how unhappy I’ve been in China. Looking back on my over-indulgence in college, drinking seemed related to releasing anxiety about graduating and the whole college experience coming to an end. I’ve had my share of out-of-control-over-indulgence since I came here, which I think has been kind of a blow off valve for feeling penned in, bored and depressed by my living and working community, in addition to the reasons I listed above about my stupid ideas of what it means to be a young, loose, fast-living guy. Not that any of this ultimately excuses me from acting in ways that knowingly hurt myself, just that they help me understand and forgive that impulse.

So my 2007 begins with recognition of a long standing bad habit, a bit of fear over what happens when it goes unchecked, a sense of shame at past-stupidity, and a determination to think before I act thoughtlessly and hurt myself. Things can only go up from here.

Shanghai is like a bowl of spaghetti – a tangle of streets and alleyways piled on top of one another in a big mess, flying highways above, subway and pedestrian tunnels below and a healthy sprinkling of cabs everywhere. Beijing spreads out like a huge grey stain – a grid of humongoloid blocks where life is hidden away behind walls and courtyards, crisscrossed by huge highway-like avenues broken by the occasional curve of a ring-road. The impression is big, dirty and cold.

I traveled to Beijing with Dan, Aliza and Aliza’s sister Shauna for the four-day Christmas weekend; it was a return trip for me, their first visit. I was reminded why, when deciding to live to China, I wanted to settle in Shanghai.

Notice how wide the streets are? This picture nicely shows how the gates leading up to The Forbidden City (which is directly behind the camera) align. Taken from Jingshan Park, which overlooks the Palace, I believe this shows The Gate of Divine Might (?).

Shanghai feels much more vital than Beijing – people are in your face, crowded on top of one another in walled apartment complexes where laundry hangs out over the street and old men lurk about on Saturday afternoons in their pajamas gawking at passerbies. Shanghai life takes place out on the sidewalks among the stores and hawkers and locals spitting and eating and gossiping. Though the city is confusing to navigate at a local level, it is tightly wound around the Bund and easy to visualize as a whole. The subway makes it relatively straightforward to get to the main parts of the city that I usually visit, and downtown Puxi, though large by American standards, is surprisingly walkable, especially for someone used to walking up and down Manhattan. Whether August or December, this place is bustling.

If Shanghai feels like New York, then the quiet boring bigness of Beijing can best be compared to Washington D.C. Walking around some of Beijing’s old hutongs (alleyways) felt like visiting a ghost town, and the streets were spacious compared to the tightly packed Shanghai sidewalks. Where was everyone?

Hutongs being renovated.

It took forever to get anywhere walking, and the subway system, being old, slow and small doesn’t seem to provide a great alternative, so it’s no surprise that Beijing streets were congested with taxis and commuters. (The cabs were cheaper than Shanghai, but stank of asscrack, old greasy food and stale cigarettes. Nasty, sordid little spaces.) Construction sites were as omnipresent in Beijing as in Shanghai as they are in the rest of China, as the city is getting a major face-lift for the 2008 Olympics, which, by the way, was being advertised or touted EVERYWHERE. Aren’t people going to be let down by the whole affair? There’s no way it can live up to the hype. Shanghai’s air seemed goddamn flower fresh compared to Beijing’s – on Tuesday, for example, the smog was a thick foggy blur covering the city, leaving my chest tight and stinging, as if I had smoked too much the night before. The four day visit probably took about four months off of my life expectancy.

Still, Beijing’s Beijing-ness aside, I had a great time with my companions seeing the sites, which were wonderfully empty this time of year (more to come on them later), and it was also nice also to feel a sense of happiness about coming back to Shanghai, which, flawed as it may be, is definitely a better home by comparison. I guess that’s the secret to dealing with domestic blues – just visit an even worse place and be glad you don’t live there.

Has news of this reached the states? On December 26th an earthquake measuring 7.1 or 7.2 (depending on source) hit Taiwan, damaging over half of the fiber-optic cables bringing internet access to Southern Asia.

Hong Kong, parts of China, India and Singapore won’t have complete access for the next week or two. Yesterday I had access to Google and my email, but not much else. Today skype is back up along with most websites, though there is a noticeable delay – as if I’m running on an old time modem. As a result, pages sometimes time out or the style sheets don’t load properly. I have access to my blog but posting takes forever… I may be awhile getting my Beijing pictures uploaded, but I’ll give it a try…

You can read more about it here.

In New York, typical school party fare was pizza, rice and beans, chicken, pasta salads – the usual American stuff. At today’s Christmas party I was treated to:

There were a few other dishes that were also good, a couple of things – some kind of salty fried meat and run-of-the-mill-plain-old fish balls – that I didn’t like, and a great variety of dishes that I didn’t get a chance to try.

I had a picture of this feast and my plate, but through human error, deleted it from my camera before copying it to my computer. Doh! A mistake made as I’m rushing about getting packed and cleaned up before heading out to Beijing for the holiday weekend. Not sure if I’ll get a chance to report from the road, but will surely have some posts next week about my travels. Till then, enjoy the holidays.

On December 18th, the State Council (whatever that is) issued the calendar of holidays for 2007, including days off for New Year – both the Chinese New Year in February, and the Roman Calendar New Year on January 1st. The schedule dictates that Tuesday, January 2nd and Wednesday, January 3rd will be given off, with work make-up days to be held on Saturday, January 6th and Sunday, January 7th.

From an American perspective, this is interesting for several reasons.

First, while having a five day weekend is really nice, being told two weeks beforehand seems short notice. This leaves little time for making travel plans! Second, there is no choice about whether you can take the days off – nationally they are supposed to be given off and nationally you are supposed to work the following weekend to make up for it. This means that, like it or not, you’ll be working nine days in a row. I can’t see Americans buying that. We have privatized our notion of vacations; I use my vacation time when I want to or am able to, and aside from our stand-alone National Holidays, my vacation time is not dictated to me by the government. (Of course, teaching you have pre-set breaks, but I’m thinking more about the private business culture at large.) Finally, what’s up with the “make-up days.” If you want me to make the day up, then why give me the day off to begin with? The government isn’t really giving you days off, they are just re-arranging your schedule.

Our school has decided that we will exempt ourselves from the January 2nd and 3rd holidays, because having students in school for nine days in a row is too long. Are other Chinese schools doing this? Apparently last year Shanghai had a city holiday for three days because of a special World-Expo meeting with many foreign dignitaries attending, and the school was forced to work nine days in a row. Nine days straight would drive me bonkers.

This topic relates to a larger debate in China over “Golden Weeks.” Golden Weeks were instituted in 1999, and involve national week-long holidays around Chinese New Year in February, May Day in May (obviously) and National Day in October. Because the entire nation has off during those times, traveling is hectic, hotels are packed and tourist sites are over-crowded. (Read, for example, about Dan and Aliza’s Golden Week travels.) The government’s rationale for the week-long holidays is that they encourage tourism and promote relaxation. Weekend make-up days are also held around the Golden Week holidays, meaning most people return to work on a Sunday and work the following Saturday (a full 7 day work week) after the holiday. As far as I am aware, unless you are part of the rising middle class in China, government dictated holidays are your only time for vacation.

In other news, The New York Times is running a series of articles on Shenzhen, one of the fastest growing cities in China, and the environmental/social/economic affects of rapid development. Interesting stuff.