My friend Kuang lived in Beijing for 3 months. I asked him to describe it. He said that he missed telling jokes. This was because many jokes do not translate well to different cultures or languages.

Now, I find it is very true. Also, I need to speak very slowly and with simple words and vocabulary. I try to use Simple English when I speak. It is very slow and I am frustrated because the meaning is sometimes lost. It is also very tiring to use Simple English, because it is not natural. Also, jokes in Simple English are very difficult.

Today, I gave a performance review to a co-worker. I forgot to use Simple English. So they spent much time trying to read it. I did not have the opportunity to re-write it because it was already submitted. It made me very very sad that they probably will not understand all the suggestions I made.

I like being with English friends. It is more natural and comfortable. But sometimes it feels strange and I need a little time to readjust, because I am not accustomed to speaking quickly. I am also not accustomed to using complicated grammar. When I remember that I can tell jokes, it seems very strange. I am not accustomed to using cultural references (eg: “short bus”, “green-eyed monster”) anymore.

I wish Chinese people would speak Simple Chinese to me.

Yes, you read that right: Albert and I took a sidetrip to Chengdu Thu May 1st (labour day) through Sun May 5th (8 days before the earthquake). It’s surreal to be uploading vacation pictures and writing a frivolous blog about an area which will likely see over 50,000 deaths related to the earthquake. I wonder if I’ve met 50,000 people in my life yet.

Chengdu is located in the fertile Sichuan (sometimes spelled Szechuan) Province, approximately ~1000 miles to the southwest of Beijing. Since we had a 4-day weekend, Albert, our co-worker Matt, and I decided to fly there and spend the weekend exploring the area’s sites.

We spent Thursday mostly in transit (2 hour plane ride to Chengdu, 1/2 hr taxi to Chengdu’s bus station, another 2 hour busride to the city of Leshan, then a 1 hour car ride to the base of Mount Emei), but took a little time to stop by the Leshan Giant Buddha. Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of time it’d take to wade through an entire nation-ful of determined tourists, so we only had enough time to race up the mountain and to see his head — we didn’t climb down the cliff or cross the river to get a full body view. Note that the coloured splotches behind the Buddha’s head are tourists; this should give you an idea of its size!

We spent Thursday night at the base of the sacred Buddhist Mount Emei (~3345 ft). The goal was to spend all of Friday and Saturday climbing to the Jinding summit (~10,168 ft), spending the night at the closest monastery we could get to. In case this is starting to sound a bit rustic: don’t worry, it’s not. The entire trail is wide and paved, and you’re never more than 45 mins from the closest restaurant / snack & supply store.

We started at the famous Wannian Temple, where we were deterred from entering by the ridiculous crowds of tourists. In fact, the start of the hike was quite discouraging: surrounded huge crowds of rabid tourists and fearless monkeys (at one point, I actually got jumped on by 3 monkeys who pawed through my pockets; not even screaming and shaking would get them off. Fortunately, Matt and Albert were stopped from hitting the monkeys by a nearby sedan-chair operator; otherwise the monkeys might have turned violent). But after several hours of gaining, then losing, then gaining, then losing, then gaining, then losing elevation, we outpaced the tourists (but not the monkeys) and had the mountain more-or-less to ourselves. It was green, and huge, and misty, and punctuated by precariously-perched monasteries; the whole mountain was marvelously and refreshingly different from the Beijing concrete jungle.

Did I mention that we climbed over ~7000 ft of stairs in two days? It sucked. No, seriously: it sucked:

By the time we stopped for the night (note, this is a representative monastery; ours was under construction at the time and not as photogenic), we were exhausted. We paid 15 RMB each for an all-you-can-eat vegetarian Buddhist dinner (the chef was horrified at the amount of food that “the foreigners” were gobbling down) before crashing for the night.

The part that confuses me is that, throughout our night at the monastery, we heard almost a dozen groups of energetic college students giggling as they raced up the mountain to be at the summit at sunrise. Where the got the energy, I don’t know, but I eventually got so fed up that I donned my dad’s industrial-strength earplugs to try to catch some sleep. No luck; the monastery started belting out Cantonese (!!!) Buddhist music at 7 AM, and by 8 AM they were asking Albert whether the rest of his lazy foreigner friends were awake yet. We bolted down the unusually large breakfast and blearily resumed our trudge up the mountain.

To add insult to injury, it started raining. I’d forgotten to re-waterproof my rain jacket before coming to China, so it quickly became a sponge (this is a birthday present hint!!). We kept hoping to ascend through the clouds (Jinding summit is supposed to peek out over a sea of clouds) but we couldn’t shake the rain. Matt kept hoping that if we kept moving fast enough, he could stay warm enough to not need his rain jacket.

We all were wrong. By the time we reached the summit, Albert and my bag had soaked through. And it was cold. We stopped at the obligatory summit restaurant, ate an obscene amount of food, rudely laid out our clothing to dry over 3 tables, and clustered around the steam table in an attempt to warm up. In the end, I put on every semi-dry piece of synthetic clothing we had (something like 3 soggy t-shirts + one damp long-sleeved shirt) and huddled under my umbrella; Albert took all the dry clothing we had (1 cotton shirt at the bottom of the bag) and the waterproof jacket; Matt toweled off; and we headed back outside to the mist.

We never did shake off the clouds. There was some sort of golden shrine at the top of the mountain; we never saw it clearly. There’s also apparently an amazing view of a sea of clouds; again, we never saw it. What we did do was take a few desultory photos and pile onto a warm bus that whisked us down the mountain we’d so laboriously climbed up. Check out the photos of my oh-so-stylin’ outfit:

We spent that night at Chengdu and set out on Sunday to see the Dujiangyan Irrigation System World Heritage Site. I’d mentioned earlier that Sichuan is one of the most fertile parts of China, and this over-2000-year-old still-in-active-use irrigation system is why. You really ought to read about it; it’s quite ingenious. It’s entertaining to me that, given a choice between climbing Mount Qingsheng (a famous Taoist mountain, to add to our holy-mountain collection), visiting a world-famous panda research base, a superbly-preserved Qing dynasty town, or the archeological site featured in the Seattle Art Museum, the 3 geeks choose to go to a big ditch. In our defense, however, it was really really neat.

Anyway, we left Dujiangyan Sunday afternoon, flew out of Chengdu that evening, and by nightfall I was back in my swanky western-style apartment, washing sweaty trail clothing in my expensive western-style washer/dryer. 8 days later, Dujiangyan became the closest major city to the worst earthquake China has seen in almost 30 years.

( an anonymous little girl whose photo we took at Dujiangyan. Many children were killed when their schools collapsed on them during the earthquake. I hope she’s ok. )

For the most part, my brain has gotten used to living in a foreign country. It doesn’t howl “THIS IS WEIRD, GET ME OUT OF HERE” so much as it constantly mutters “I wish I knew what was going on”. With a few exceptions such as the one noted by Albert in his excellent post (”The last 2 months had conditioned my brain into expect to not understand the conversational sounds around me. In Hong Kong, I could suddenly understand everything. It gave me a headache, and it literally took me a day to relearn to filter out casual conversation…quite a weird experience.”), I don’t find myself fazed very much anymore.

Here, then, is a list of the unusual things that made me do a double- or a triple-take in the past month.

• Labour day in China always falls on May 1st. This year, May 1st was a Thursday. In the United States, this would mean that Friday would become a de facto holiday (ie, people would take an extra vacation day, or not show up to work at all), yielding a 4-day weekend. In China, the government merely shifts “the weekend”: you get Friday and Saturday off but are expected to come to work on Sunday. And you know what? That’s pretty much the way it happened.
• Addresses on envelopes. I seem to be ok with driving directions in chinese, but my gut reaction whenever I see an envelope addressed in Chinese is just plain bizarre. My brain completely forgets that I’m in a foreign country, speaking a foreign language, and starts flipping out. How do these bits of paper get delivered when all the addresses are written in crazy language? How does the postal system refrain from collapsing into complete chaos when everybody is using this NONSENSICAL CHICKEN SCRATCH?!?!?!. And then I get a hold of myself, remember that it’s not crazy chicken scratch to 1.3 billion people, and laugh at how my emotional irrational side goes on these crazy tirades.
• I grew up along the Ring of Fire, so at some point my crazy brain associated earthquakes with coastlines. When reports of a huge earthquake in the Sichuan Province (a deeply inland province) began to surface, my gut reaction was to think “that’s silly, earthquakes can’t possibly occur that far from water!”. But then I remembered that the Tibetan plateau (which Sichuan abuts) is really really high because — surprise! — two tectonic plates are crashing together there, and my brain decided to stop yowling.

It occurs to me that this post might be better titled “why I have a weird brain”, but there you have it: sometimes, even when you’re intellectually equipped to live in a foreign country, silly innocuous things will happen to make you realize that you’re very far from home, and you’ll marvel once again at the world’s infinite variety and your incredible fortune at being able to see it.

My deepest thanks to all the friends and family who asked whether Albert and I were still safe and alive in Beijing. We’re doing fine, and the Sichuan earthquake’s impact in Beijing was minimal at best. I was in a meeting on the 3rd floor of my office building and didn’t notice anything, although a co-worker working on the 10th floor did feel some shaking (and attributed it to a broken chair). Please redirect your thoughts and prayers to the victims in the Sichuan (sometimes spelled Szechuan) Province who are only now beginning to grasp the magnitude of the disaster which has befallen them.

On a slightly more light-hearted note, however, I wanted to point out that Beijing is approximately ~1000 miles away from the epicenter of the quake; asking us about the earthquake is like asking a Seattleite whether they felt an earthquake centered in San Francisco. I’ve been told that some of the news sources in the US are interspersing photos of Beijingers evacuating their buildings as a precautionary measure with photos of collapsed buildings in Sichuan (which sounds like irresponsible journalism to me), so some amount of confusion is unsurprising. But I just want to point out that while this map looks small, China’s still geographically one of the largest countries in the world!

On the subject of homesickness, I’ve discovered that many of the old Almost Live! skits I grew up watching have been uploaded to Youtube. It even has my two all-time favourite skits “The Streetwalking Lawyers Of Aurora Avenue” and the “Used Men Lot“.

Warning: if you didn’t live in Seattle during the early 90s, you’ll miss many of the jokes. Almost Live! makes heavy usage of references to local stereotypes and then-current events.

As the season gets warmer, Albert and I have been watching Beijing’s air get worse and worse.

On the innocuous side, we’ve begun seeing what looks like cotton balls begin to float down the streets in giant swaths for the past week. Click here for some photos (and a link to sex-changing trees!) about this cottony pollen.

On the this-would-never-work-in-America side, the Beijing government is removing 50% of cars from roads, closing gas stations, forbidding spray painting, banning construction, moving factories, and more. All this in an attempt to improve air quality during the Olympic games. I wonder if these restrictions will continue in September 2008, after the Olympics end. Link to China Daily, and another link to The Guardian.

Albert and I were observing to ourselves that air quality this week has been very very good, due probably to the unusually heavy rains this weekend (click here to learn about Beijing’s weather control office); you could even see the mountains right outside of town! Last night, however, we were hosting some fresh-from-Seattle friends who commented that our standards for air quality have fallen drastically in our 2.5 months here; they thought the air was “dusty” and “a bit polluted”.

In other news, pictures of Lake Washington and Mount Rainier make me homesick.

Albert and I are here on a short-term business visa, which states that we our business cannot extend longer than 30 days; longer than that, we would need to return home. Practically speaking, it means that have to take an international weekend vacation once a month.

Last month’s trip was to Nara, a medium-sized city in Japan famed for its beautiful historic sites and a public park full of small deer you can feed and pet.

The deer park is plastered with signs warning you not to feed the deer anything but the recommended deer crackers, but clearly the deer haven’t read it; they feast on anything from chains to purses to the terrified cries of the young Japanese children they chase around the park.

Nara in particular, and Japan in general, was a nice vacation to Western standards of cleanliness and service. China has a lot of cheap labour (resulting in a glut of doormen and sparkling floors scrubbed hourly), but it lacks the polish that the Japanese bring. The Japanese understand details such as the necessity for high-quality grout or the downside of over-crowded subway trains. “Polish” isn’t something you notice explicitly, but when it’s gone you find yourself oftentimes wondering why you’re always tripping on the sidewalk or why you hate riding the subway.

(in osaka, certain subway cars are reserved for women only during rush hour, so that they don’t have to endure groping from male passengers)

(vending machines can dispense both hot and cold beverages; i can buy drinks 24 hours a day, and even better, it won’t scold me for not speaking chinese!)

—–
This month’s trip was combined with the 3-day weekend (the Qingming Festival). Albert and I spent the long weekend in Suzhou, a small city just outside of Shanghai renowned for its exquisite period gardens, before continuing on to spend the remainder of the week in Hong Kong.

Both Shanghai and Suzhou are in the Yangtze River delta; Beijing is on the edge of (or inside, depending on whom you talk to) a desert. After 2 months of living in Beijing, the lushness of Suzhou/Shanghai flora and the plethora of canals was mind-boggling. Flowers?! Canals filled with water?!?! Impossible. Shanghai and Suzhou also served as an interesting contrast to themselves and also to Beijing; Beijing is a large city trying to modernize; Shanghai’s recent history has been significantly influenced by Westerers, so it’s modernization need is less. Beijing is a city of construction dust and half-completed skyscrapers; Shanghai is a city of brisk Chinese dashing from efficient subways to record-breaking towers. Suzhou is neither of these; as a smaller city, and one that’s not undergoing the rapid modernization that Beijing is forcing itself through, Suzhou retains more of its older architecture and laid back culture. Even neglecting its famous gardens, I highly recommend it as a side trip.

   
(this skyscraper-free panorama is unheard-of in Beijing)

By the way, the famous Suzhou Master of the Nets Garden is not to be missed. “Exquisite” and “precious” ran through my mind over and over while we were there; the garden is tiny, every detail is planned and made perfect, and it practically revelled in its own perfection. Unfortunately, our camera died that day so we only have a few pictures:

After Suzhou, we headed to Hong Kong (which is technically “outside” of China due to the “One Country, Two Systems” policy). We ended up staying a few additional days in Hong Kong to apply for a long-term visa for China (which would put an end to our monthly international trips …) and as a result worked out of the local sales office in Hong Kong. This is an amazing office (scuttlebutt claims it’s also one of the most expensive per square foot, which I find completely plausible), with a million-dollar view of the Hong Kong harbour and Kowloon Peninsula.

(Albert’s “corner office”)

(the view from my desk)

(a traditional chinese junk in the harbour. the distinctive shape of its sails are partly hidden by the ship behind it, but the sails were for show anyway; this was a motor-powered tourist boat. Very few, if any, junks still sail in Hong Kong)

Unlike Nara and Suzhou, we mostly worked, ate, and shopped in Hong Kong. Both Albert and I have been to Hong Kong multiple times, so we spent most of our time visiting family, as well as eating food (eg, wonton noodles) and buying supplies (eg, English books, Cantonese movies) that we couldn’t get in Beijing . One of our favourite meals was the plate of fried clams and a plate of fried beef noodles that we bought from an outdoor restaurant; two enterprising restaurant owners cordoned off a section of road and we slurped their excellent food alongside ice-cold beers in the sweltering Hong Kong night. It was marvelous.

—–

Linguistically, both the Nara trip and the Hong Kong were absolutely fabulous. In Beijing, I know just enough Mandarin to be frustrated in day-to-day life (it’s like being in the US and only knowing the words “the’, ‘and’, ‘hello’, and ’sorry’; you hear them all the time, but you can’t string enough words together to make sense). Living here, with its daily head-butting against a currently-insurmountable linguistic wall, is wearying and stressful.

On the other hand, in Nara I didn’t know anything about the local language and there was really no point in attempting to learn it on a weekend trip. Giving up all hope of understanding what is being said was liberating and indescribably relaxing; I loved it. I could talk to a random Japanese person without first needing to compose an elaborate apology in Chinese for my awful language, or struggling to understand what they meant by “ti gong”.

Hong Kong was the opposite experience from Nara. In Hong Kong, the prevailing spoken topolect is the one I grew up speaking (Cantonese); so although I’m not fluent, I can hold simple conversations with locals. After a month of being almost mute and dumb, the cacophony was literally debilitating. Having unconsciously taught ourselves to ignore the speech around us in Beijing, Albert and I found ourselves in the odd position of being unable to filter out any speech in English or Cantonese when we arrived in Hong Kong. Not being able to shut out the myriad conversations, the sweet nothings murmured into cell phones, or the scoldings of an exasperated parent was overwhelming and exhausting. However, we settled back into Cantonese after a day and quickly rediscovered the joys of casual conversation; I had forgotten how isolating it was to be unable to converse with random folks on the subway or say “thank you” to the cashier. I loved not being mistaken for a linguistic idiot, and was both sad and reinvigorated upon our return to Beijing.

On the earlier subject of shopping malls: I read a magazine article several years ago wherein the author proposed that America’s culinary innovations were to be found in its strip malls (not high class shopping malls; he meant the tiny shops accompanying the Wal-Mart megalith in the sea of parking lots). The argument was that strip malls represented cheap and high-turnover retail real estate, making it the perfect place for novice chefs to experiment; an amateur chef could turn pro easily in the inexpensive and readily available strip mall real estate. My question to you, dear reader, is this: which restaurant do you consider the most innovative/novel/interesting? which restaurant do you consider your favourite? Where are they located?

On the subject of meals, Albert and I have been occasionally surprised at foods which are considered “high class” here. Most surprising to me has been the mystique surrounding Italian food. In the US, we tend to consider French cuisine to be “high class”; pick a random French restaurant in your neighbourhood, and it is likely to be a formal sit-down establishment that you’d save a little money for. Even so-called “peasant food” takes on an aura of sophistication if it’s French and you’re in the US; for example, rustic sandwiches served on “artisian bread” and served with a lovely soup that some chef has agonized over for several hours. My experience with Chinese “Italian food” has thus far been the same: I have yet to see an Italian restaurant that isn’t in a big beautiful building, that isn’t large and grand and able to rise above its dirtier restaurant cousins. Even Pizza Hut, that ultimate American symbol of low-class fast food, becomes an upscale restaurant boasting menu items such as smoked salmon spinach linguine or herbed pizza.

(Pizza Hut ad for its seasonal pizza: “Feel Rosemary, Feel Spring”)

(Hong Kong’s Pizza Hut features crawfish and clam angel hair pasta in lobster sauce, wild mushroom risotto, salad, and a beautiful minestrone)

On the other end of the spectrum is low-class food made into high-class food. Last month, Albert and I were walking through our neighbourhood when we noticed a huge crowd of people pushing their way into an overwhelmed store.

(the crowd had mostly dispersed by the time I took this photo)

Upon closer examination, we discovered that people were exiting the store clutching beautiful cardboard boxes tied with pink ribbon or absolutely amazing small paper bags (we later bought one of these bags, and I have literally not seen higher-quality food-service paper, though I have seen similar quality stationary for sale in high class writing supply stores). Naturally, we pushed our way in and purchased one of these amazing yams for ourselves.

(the woman in the background is holding two ribbon-wrapped yam boxes)

Keep in mind that you can buy a roasted yam from a streetside vendor here for 2 or 3 RMB (accounting for cost-of-living and exchange rates, that’d be equivalent to $3 USD in buying power; think of it as a $3 hot dog in New York City). So the fact that we paid the equivalent to of $20 USD for a single yam should give you a sense for the price of this yam. It was probably a third of the size of my head, which would account for some of its cost, but was it worth it? Well, it was absolutely delicious, and — being a foreigner here — pretty cheap (it cost me ~$2.50 USD) so I’m definitely going back. But I have no idea how the average citizen could afford to buy this as an everyday food. Perhaps, like Pizza Hut, high-class yams require saving money for the occasional splurge.

(compare yam size to my head size)

(delicious fragrant flesh with a crisped sweet skin. What’s not to love?)

This article is nominally about shopping malls in Bangkok, but most of its descriptions can be applied to Chinese and Hong Kong malls as well. Specifically, shopping malls are places to get American-levels of cleanliness, air conditioning, and food. Need a relatively clean bathroom? Go to a mall. Want some decent local food that’s guaranteed to have been cooked under a roof? Go to a mall.

The description of food courts is pretty much spot-on: unlike the US, food courts are a pretty reliable place to get good (or even great) food. And, yes, most of the malls I’ve been to require that you purchase food using a stored-value card instead of cash. Personally, I find that having food-handling employees touch a stored-value card frightens me less than having them touch cash; they may be equally germ-encrusted but at least the card has less visible dirt.

I haven’t seen a Chinese mall with teeth whitening or botox, however. Most malls I’ve been in seem content to restrict themselves to selling name-brand luxury goods (ie, foreign); eg, coach purses or nike shoes. Walking through them, however, I wonder how much shopping malls exacerbate the tension between China’s lower and upper classes. Unlike the US, there is virtually no middle class in China; I wonder what it’s like to walk through these gleaming, air-conditioned, unrealistically clean spaces if you go home to an uninsulated 15′ x 15′ single-room kitchen/bedroom?

If you’ve traveled through Asia, then you’ve probably realized that everything here is much …. well … cuter. In fact, it’s not just cute, it’s oftentimes logo’ed; Snoopy, Mickey, (Disney) Pooh and friends, Hello Kitty, Mashimaro, and — very bizarrely — Jack Skellington. Walk down a street and you’ll see logo’d wallets, umbrellas, shirts, baby carriages, cars, sink strainers, crackers, milk bottles, milk, crackers, lipbalm, shampoo, etc. Basically, if you can think of it, there’s probably a Snoopy version somewhere in Asia.

Someone once asked Albert “why does everything in Asia have to be so relentlessly cute?” to which he replied, “why does everything in America have to be so ugly?”. I have to agree; one’s tolerance for cuteness is culturallly dependent, and I kind of like the higher cuteness levels in Asia. Sure, if you’re not used to it, it’s a bit jarring to see bland 40-year-old businessmen toting a purple Pooh notebook, but I for one can get used to having all this cuteness all the time.

In case you can’t wrap your head around the idea of a life surrounded by cute things, let me show you a few pictures from the Hello Kitty section of a Japanese “dollar store”. I highly encourage you to click through and take a good look at some of the items on the shelves:

(Part of) the Hello Kitty household supplies rack

Hello Kitty shoe horns (I think)

Hello Kitty earplugs

Not sure what this is. Some sort of filter or net?

Sink strainer and various wall/door/closet hooks

One final point: as far as I can tell, Hello Kitty’s usage as a decorative item is similar our usage of hearts or flowers or stars: a completely personality-less way to cute-ify your product. Whereas in the US you might add a few flowers to your new chapstick logo, here the trend seems to be Hello Kitty. As you can imagine, this can result in some fairly jarring product matches, such as Hello Kitty maxi pads:

(don’t worry, she doesn’t have to suffer the humiliation of having women bleed all over her face; I bought this package for the sole purpose of verifying this fact)

Once more, I’d like to direct my readers to Blogging Beijing, this time to his excellent post about commonplace Chinese perspective on the current events in Tibet.

As tax season approaches, I’ve had all 3 of my expat co-workers fly home at one point or another to do their taxes. We were fortunate enough to leave late enough in the tax season to be able to photocopy most of the documents we needed before our departure (it helps to have vigilant in-laws to scan and email the late-arriving documents, too [thanks so much, you guys!!!!!])

Which makes me question how often I should come home. On the one hand, I’m not a big fan of losing 2 days of my life in transit (Hainan Airlines’ soon-to-be-launched direct flight from Beijing to Seattle will help reduce travel time, but it’s still a lot of time). And while I do miss certain aspects of living at home (eg, being able to drink water from the tap, not having to feel defensive that every person with whom I have a financial transaction is trying to rip me off, seeing friends and family on a regular basis), being in Beijing has been mostly positive. I love the food, I love the convenience of the food, I can almost deal with the climate and air quality, I’m very very slowly learning Chinese, and I love the experience and (yes, let’s be frank) exoticness of everyday tasks like riding the bus or buying groceries.

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned that my wallet disappeared last month*, but I’ve been tempted to come home to straighten out some of that mess. If I’m honest with myself, I’ll admit that some of that temptation is homesickness and a desire to see friends/family. So, as I jealously watch my co-workers flit across the Pacific Ocean, I keep asking myself: “how often should we come home? how often is too often? how often is not enough?”

–
* Incidentally, the best travel advice I’ve ever received was to split your luggage as much as possible. Eg, half of all Albert’s clothing (shirts, pants, underwear, shoes, etc) were in my checked-in luggage and half of mine was in his; we also carried a full change of clothes in our carry-ons. Similarly, half of my wallet contents were in the hotel safe and half were in the wallet. So even though my wallet’s gone, I still have half of my ID, ATM cards, credit cards, etc. This tip saved made losing my wallet merely “inconveniencing” instead of “disastrous”, and I’m here to pass on that tip to you.

Have I ever mentioned how much I truly detest vanity sizing? I understand the appeal of being able to saunter up to a rack of so-called “size 6″ pants and have each pair fit perfectly, but the least this industry can do is standardize what they consider to be a “size 6″. It drives me utterly crazy that I have to remember my clothing size on a store-by-store basis. Every time I go buy slacks, I have to ask myself “am I a size 4 at this store, or was it at Store Y that I’m a size 4? Oh well, guess I have to try them all on again”. I know it’s too much to ask that women’s clothing be sold based on actual body measurements, but every time I go shopping for men’s slacks I’m filled with jealousy at how simple the process of determining fit is.

Speaking of clothing, here’s an interesting but old article about American appetites for clothing and (tangentially) sweatshop clothing. Did you know in 1995, the average American bought ~28 items of clothing per person whereas the average Chinese bought 2? Talk about buying more than we need!

There’s a Chinese dish here that I can’t get enough of.

It’s a deceptively simple dish: tomatoes fried with eggs. It looks like this. Notice how silky smooth the eggs are. And the just-a-little-sweet tomato juice pooling at the bottom. And the hint of green onion to add a gentle kick to this otherwise divinely mellow dish.

I’ve tried making it, but something’s always wrong: the tomatoes don’t release their liquid. The eggs don’t have the slippery-smooth texture. The eggs cling to the tomatoes instead of forming beautiful smooth chunks. This is the epitome of throw-it-together-at-the-last-minute homestyle food, and I can’t make it. Oh, the crushing shame!!!

Albert and I have resorted to canvassing local restaurants for this dish. It’s not as simple as you might think; tomatoes have (at current count) 3 different names: 番茄 (”fanqie”), 西红柿 (”xihongshi”), or 圣女果 (”shengnuguo” aka “saint’s fruit”). And the “fried egg” part of the dish name varies too: sometimes it’s 炒蛋 (”with fried egg”), sometimes it’s 炒鸡蛋 (”with fried chicken egg”), sometimes it’s just 鸡蛋 (”with egg”). I’m sure there’s more variants, but that’s the only ones I know of so far. When it takes me about 1-2 seconds to read one menu item, you can see where searching for this dish becomes difficult!

I’ve decided that, if I ever become president of this country, I will decree standardization of the homely tomato and this dish’s name.

Incidentally, fruit here is amazing. People who are familiar with my eating habits know that, while I don’t hate fruit, I also don’t go out of my way to seek it out, wash it, peel it, and eat it. That’s not the case here. Fruit in China is fantastic, and I don’t know why. Every bite is a flavour explosion, the mixture of texture and oh-so-delicious juice practically divine. I saw two women eating tomatoes like an apple this morning, and I started drooling. I even woke up from a fantasy about eating a oranges a few weeks ago.

Try slipping in "protasis" and "apodosis" into casual conversation some time. It's fun :)

I thought this was an interesting counterpoint to several standard “truisms” that people state about China: that China’s rural populace is doomed to a lifetime of hopeless grinding unvalued labour, that there is a malevolent all-powerful government out to screw its people as much as possible, that cheap labour is limitless:

A crude form of democracy is emerging in China as labour shortages bite, writes John Garnaut.

I've always wanted to register a domain based off my name (eg, htang.com), for the sole purpose of creating an email address of the form "eponymous@<domain bearing my name>"

How many people even know how to spell "eponymous", much less get the joke?

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog. I had initially promised myself that I’d write a substantial post (not just dump links or IM chat transcripts) about once a week. Since my last substantial post was dated February 20th, this means I’m behind by 3 posts.

I’m hoping that, if a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps this photo post will help me catch up a little. Click on the small images to see bigger versions.

When Albert and I first arrived (in the middle of the week-long Chinese New Year festival, called “Chun Jie” / “春節” or “Spring Festival”, we were taken aback by the clarity of the air here, as compared to our previous two visits to Beijing (both during Beijing’s muggy summers); even our local friends remarked at the unusually nice air quality. The air was unaccustomedly dry and very cold by standards at home (approx -4 - 0 degrees Celsius). For Albert and I, it meant that I complained incessantly about my crispily dry and unmanageable hair, and Albert gave his ears an extremely minor case of frostbite.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have begun taking photos to document the variable air quality in the area. Here’s a few that I’ve taken so far:

Facing north on a relatively clear day (still not as clear as when we first arrived, but I didn’t think to take any photos)

Facing northwest on a relatively clear day. Note the Fragrant Mountains (”香山”) just outside the city

Facing south on a relatively clear day

This is the same north view as above, but on a day typical of what I experienced in my previous Beijing visits

Same northwest view as above. Where are the mountains?

Same southward view as above. Many details visible in the previous photo are obscured.

Living in such a permanently cold environment is novel for me, and I was childishly excited about such rarities as perma-frozen streams. I was interested at how shrubs and trees seem get wrapped in a cloth or tarp, which was different from our previous trips’ experiences. To this day, I’m still not sure whether this is an attempt to help these plants survive Beijing’s harsh winter, as not all coverings were removed when the weather got warmer. I was even tickled to see old men fishing from their perches on backless wooden stools in these streams, though I’d be personally terrified to eat the results of their catch: in typical Chinese fashion, most such streams and ponds were covered with litter. Plastic bags, aluminum cans, subway tickets, and other such human detritus covered the ice surface even in such tourist traps as the Forbidden City (I had half-expected Beijing’s army of street cleaners to be expand their litter-collecting and shrub-washing duties to include climbing down onto the ice and picking up litter, especially since their normal shrub-washing duties were made obsolete by the yards of cloth covering most living things).

Hedges and shrubs covered by green cloth. Cloth seem to be favoured by nicer shopping malls and office parks; red-white-and-blue striped tarpaulin appeared more often elsewhere.

Those aren’t seat cushions, they’re covered shrubs! I took this photo about a week too late; it had already gotten warm enough to run a water fountain. The previous week, the fountain was dry, and property management had chosen to fill the dry fountain with — I kid you not — a dozen sun-faded and Beijing-dust-covered Christmas trees.

Peonies wrapped in straw. The ones in the foreground have started to sprout and have burst out of their straw coverings, but the ones in the background are still tied with twine.

About a week or two after we arrived, it began getting noticeably warmer. Temperatures soon stayed consistently above freezing, streams thawed (taking their blanket of litter to the bottom of the streambed), and almost immediately trees and flowers began to bloom. Well, those that were freed from their cloth wraps, that is

Workers removing the covering from a hedge.

Along with transferring to a new office, comes the challenges of getting one’s workspace set up to their standards. Co-workers and classmates know me as someone who is pretty picky about keyboards and keyboard layouts. Here’s me being finicky about my mouse:

Hannah: omg, i’m so dumb
Albert: ?
Hannah: I’ve been been irritated for almost 2 days that work issued me a mouse without a scrollwheel
Albert: ..ok…
Hannah: I just looked at the mouse.
Albert: uh oh…
Hannah: it has a scrollwheel.
Albert: wow.
Albert: is it in a weird place?
Hannah: nope, it’s in the standard position on the mouse.
Albert: oh.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted (the original thought had been to update once a week, but laziness intervened).

Both USB ports on my personal laptop died. It might not have been an issue, except that I deliberately brought the laptop in place of the 20-bajillion chargers for all our personal electronics (ipod, e-book reader, etc). So Albert and I spent most of this weekend trying to fix or work around it. I’ll try to post a rant about it later.

Air quality here is extremely variable. On some days, the sky overhead actually looks blue but the lower sky will be brown (and the transition between sky and ground will be invisible); on other days, the sky will look brownish but you can see the horizon and the not-so-distant mountains; on still other days, you’re lucky if you can see 3 blocks away. The weird part is that you can have a blue-sky day followed by a 3-blocks-away day followed by a clear-horizon day. I don’t get it. I’ve started taking pictures of the skyline from a reference location to see if I can discern a pattern.

We’ve seen two Priuses since arriving almost 3 months ago. Both of them were sighted in the Zhongguancun area (Beijing’s technology hub). Given the ratio of non-Prius-cars to Priuses we’ve seen, I wonder if the two we saw were imported by wealthy locals or expats?

Lastly, I leave you a link to Blogging Beijing, provided by the Seattle Times. Hopefully Daniel can post more regularly than I!