The next day was our last in Beijing, and the conclusion of our practice teaching was kind of an anticlimax: our kids were too busy practicing the English skit they were going to show the school officials later in the day to pay attention to whatever lesson plan Benj and I had worked up for them. So we just sat back and watched them sing Disney songs for a period, then went off to take our own dust-up examinations. That evening would end in a Chinese banquet room receiving our fancy TEFL certifications disguised in PKU diploma cases and with us trying dishes that later necessitated my first tryst with Immodium.

The day afterwards we all tousled out of bed and rolled to the Forbidden City. We only had an hour to tour the place, so we essentially made a straight line from its northern gate to the Tiananmen side. I did remember seeing these places before with my family in a summer of 2006 and before again when I was five, but I didn’t reflect much on any of it. The whole group was just a bit antsy to get on with the day and into the train, especially because our hotel rooms were now off limits to us and our things stored away in a temporary area.

We’d been warned a lot about how busy and rife with thieves the Beijing train station would be, but overall it turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax. The train ride itself might have been notable, but I was asleep for most of it, tucked away on a hard board that served as the middle bunk. Each train car had separating walls that divided the car into open compartments, with three bunks attached to each side of the wall (making for 6 bunks per compartment). Things were very cramped, but clean enough, and I spent most of the 24 hours lying inserted into the bunk (it wasn’t tall enough for me to sit up in) and trying to jot down a plot outline for my novel. Everyone was very happy to get off the train a day later!

(I did see the Chinese landscape pass by from the train window, and most of it was rural. The skies cleared after the northern areas and the scene looked actually very beautiful – blue skies with white clouds over green terraced farms and rolling forest hills. I was curious about whether we ever passed through Fujian, where our family descended from, but I couldn’t tell.)

Edit: I guess we didn’t pass through Fujian after all. Here’s the map:

View Train Ride! in a larger map

We got off the train at about 9pm at the Shenzhen railway station. Didn’t see the hookers that I was told to expect. We swam through more crowds of people, emerged into the Shenzhen night (muggy as hell!) and bussed over to the hotel where we’re currently at, which is somewhere in the Futian district (or is it Luohu? I’m getting them mixed up). Here we are getting health examinations, signing work forms and being interviewed by the Shenzhen police bureau. By Saturday we’ll know for certain where we are working and we’ll be shipped off to those locations too.

I know that I’ll be working somewhere in the Nanshan district, as those were the papers I was signing just earlier. More specific knowledge will have to wait till Saturday, it seems.

Start!

Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with and hash together.  Try playing with it; my labels might not give enough information, but I’m just testing to see if embedding this will even work at all.

View Beijing in a larger map

So right, like I said the other day, acrobats, at Beijing’s Tiandi (Heaven and Earth) Theater.  I’d seen these types of performances before on television with my parents, but it was a lot different and way more breathtaking in person.  Seeing a human bend into ridiculous contortions on TV is easy to reconcile in your mind as more media magic, but when it’s happening right in front of you, you might start to consider it more carefully.  Some people were satisfied to consider just the sexual potential therein (hi Kami, this is what you get for stalking my blog).  But seeing a dozen girls jump on a bicycle and spread their arms to look like the many-armed Boddhisatva of mercy Guanyin jarred me because it seems that for these performers, there is no mercy.  Their training has to be rigorous and unforgiving to get them to this point, and after one child acrobat fell off the shoulders of one guy standing on top of another, we all winced thinking about the chastising he would probably get after going off-stage.  It was the only error of the performance, and immediately afterwards they cut the music, tried it again, and successfully tossed the child onto the standing human totem pole.  In dead silence.  Maybe this is why Guanyin and her concept of divine mercy is so revered by the Chinese.

(Which do you think is more important – justice or mercy?  I pick mercy as a personal preference knowing full well the value of justice.  My choice reflects the direction I’m taking my life and career in, and I think my family as a whole leans towards that end of the spectrum as well.  It would explain why so many of us enter the medical field, and why generation after generation we keep finding ourselves repelled from China, from one revolution to another.)

Anyway.  No mercy for the Chinese acrobats, but at the same time, sublime perfection in their combined performance. The jumpers lept through rings stacked two meters high, the climbers adroitly hopped between poles, and the bicycle girls all somehow managed to avoid crashing while mimicking something celestial.  It made me feel that despite – or probably because of – their individual sacrifices and sufferings, the Chinese people can be proud of being Chinese because they know that in the uniquely agonizing purity of their labor they can achieve superhuman feats.  (I wonder if this sort of ethic was born from Mao’s communism, or whether Mao’s communism was born from it.)  But this pride is very necessarily a collective feeling, because the sheer majority of individuals in China never get to this point.  The victory of a few automatically belongs to all, and justifiably so because the intense competitive pressure from such a vast population, like a pressure cooker, is what created such transcendents in the first place.  From my talks with a few other Chinese-Americans who have advised me on the worst of what to expect when it comes to treatment here in China, I’ve been told that a common reaction to our new citizenship is disbelief – not so much that we are or became American, but that we are not of and are no longer bound to China.  “But you are still Chinese, so you should speak the language,” many ABCs have been flatly told by intractable local Chinese.  After seeing the acrobats, I think I understand a little more what we as wayward huaqiao have lost, even as we gained personal freedoms and individual opportunities.

Anyway, that was Monday night, after which a ton of the other teachers went to the beer gardens and got uproarusly drunk.  I returned to the hotel and talked about postcolonialism with some Vassar kids.  Go figure.

The next day I went with those guys to the 798 art district – our only day off (we’re back on the job now today).  I’ll post about that later, along with some pictures of it.   I have to run back to Chinese class now!

We eventually achieved success (I went into the circle with the prompt “I am Chinese” – ha, you little goblins, I got you) and the class opened up a bit more, making for a surprisingly enjoyable experience.  I will report more on that later, but I want to describe some more adventures in broken Chinese first.

At lunch, I met one of the other sole ethnics among us, an Indian (or so I will hazard to guess) girl named Kamolika.  Together we tried to find something to eat but quickly got lost in Beijing University’s gigantic campus.  Kami found her lunch before I did, and started into it while I puzzled over a map on the sidewalk.  Giving up, I decided to finally resort to what I had been dreading.

Two Chinese ladies passed us by.  “Please, do you know where we are?” I called out, pointing to my map, to which they replied “We are on blah blah street.” I adopted a sad smile and said “I don’t know where that is.” The more compassionate of the two came over to point at the map.  Kami looked at me and sincerely complimented my Chinese.  My ancestors turned over a bit in their graves.

Afterwards I went in search of a new book bag, as the one I had brought from the States had turned out to be too small for my textbooks.  Kami followed, but stayed on the steps outside the shop to finish her lunch while I went inside and downstairs to finagle the transaction.  Only when I was inside did I realize the full magnitude of what I had just done: I had exposed myself to the Chinese locals without my insulating retinue of white people for the first time.

I found a briefcase, approached a girl at the counter who didn’t seem to be paying much attention and gave it a shot.

“Miss, where do I pay for this bag,” I asked.  Or at least attempted to ask.

“Oh, blah blah blah pay for it here,” she replied.  This seemed encouraging – not only had I received a response, but I had actually understood it.  Well, all the important parts, anyway.

“Ah, okay.  Thank you.  I am sorry that my Chinese is not very good,” I hedged.

“Oh your Chinese is just fine!” she lied politely.  “Are you blah blah?”

“What?”

“Are you a blah blah?”

“Um…sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Here, I will write it for you.” She excitedly scribbled some Chinese words on a piece of paper.  Another female coworker scowled at her.

“Here, can you read it?  Blah blah.”

“Oh no…I’m from America,” I guessed.

“Waaaaah!” she enthused.

She then proceeded to gesture to her other bored coworkers to hurry up with the change, and excitedly whispered to them “He’s American!” In a pique of bored annoyance one hit her shoulder in admonishment.  She turned back to me and asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I am an English teacher.”

“Waaah!” I took my bag, and another exasperated coworker hit my conversation partner again.

“Thank you,” I managed.

“Bye, teacher!” she giggled.

I rejoined Kami at the steps.  “I think I was just being hit on by a shop clerk,” I offered.

****

Later that evening I decided to try my luck again, and entered Beijing University alone.

The guard immediately asked me for an identification, something he hadn’t done previously when I had walked in with the other CTLC teachers.  I actually didn’t understand his grunting order at all, but I had taken it into consideration before I had left, and so I pulled out the teacher badge I had tucked into my bag.  He nodded and I entered.

I walked for a long time without anybody so much as giving me a sideways glance.  That hadn’t happened at all in the last few days.  I may get a lot more shit and endure some unique problems that the other teachers won’t ever deal with, but I can do one thing better than they’ll ever be able to.  I had blended into China.

…which I didn’t expect would really work, so I did my best to keep my mouth shut and wait till I could hear somebody talking shit behind my back.  Either nobody did or I just don’t know what shit sounds like yet.

I wandered around until I found what I was looking for – the only money exchange place I was willing to try, as it had been recommended by the program coordinators.  And next to it, the phone card stand.  The bank was barred shut for the night, so I walked over to the phone guy and tried again.

“Hello, I have a phone but no card.  Can I get one here?” I tried to ask.  However, I believe that it came out more like “Hi I have a phone but I don’t have a blah blah.  Can I buy a mumble mumble here?” I should probably learn the word for SIM card.

He was game, though.  “Yes, you can blah blah.  Will you be using it throughout China or blah blah just in Beijing?”

“Just in Beijing.”

“How long will you stay in Beijing, and will you be coming back?” He was very polite in merely assuming to his knowledge of my alien status.

“Two weeks; I won’t come back.”

“Alright.  I need you to look at this blah blah.” He shoved a pamphlet over to me.

“Sorry, I can’t read it,” I offered.  He waved his hand.  “I will tell it to you.” He took the pamphlet back and began writing English words very carefully on the back.  200 minutes for 200 RMB.

“I don’t have much money because the bank next to us is closed.  I will have more tomorrow,” I think I said.

“Well, I can give you 150 minutes for 150 RMB,” he bargained.

“I only have 100 RMB.” I really, really hoped that I did indeed have that much in my wallet.

He grumbled a few incomprehensible things about only getting 80 minutes for that and then did some phone magic.  I handed him my 100RMB.

“Duo xie,” I thanked him.  “Duo xie,” he grunted back.

I walked back towards the hotel wondering how badly I had just been ripped off.  I noted to myself that if I were to ever try a transaction again in Chinese, I would have to model the circumstances more around my first conversation of the day and be careful to pick nonattentive and slightly overweight young girls with ridiculous pigtails and an American fetish as negotiation opponents.

China will make me a better person.  Sure.

Travelling as a pack, the Great White Migration + That Random Asian Kid Moving With It walked hesitantly through the Beijing University campus today, eventually ending up in its Democracy Building (I don’t know) for a few hours of training orientation. These next two weeks will be intensive TEFL training, and I’m already seeing a disconnect between the desires of what most of us want (to learn Chinese) and what our job wants us to do (to teach English). I am here secondarily for the teaching and mostly for the Chinese thing, but it’s already interesting to think about all the activities, strategies and communication skills I’m going to have to become fluent in first before I can start thinking about becoming fluent in Chinese. All those teachers out there reading this please duly receive my mad props.