Dajia Hao! (Hi Everyone!)

Welcome to my Beijing blog! Apparently there is already someone here blogging using the name “sharoninchina” so “runningwhilesmokingcoal” is my chosen name. To avoid any James Frey-like episodes, I’ll immediately admit that my blog title is inspired, to put it mildly, by the section in the “Insiders Guide to Beijing” listing some running routes in the city’s downtown, which begins with “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Why not just run on the treadmill while smoking a brick of coal?’ It’s true that the city’s typical air pollution levels make jogging in Beijing akin to suicide in spandex, but do you know where to go when the sky turns blue?” Of course, similar thoughts have partially inspired this blog—how exactly does one train for a marathon in a place where mere breathing to exist can be rather perilous?

One thing I’ve thought about doing is providing a little Chinese lesson in each entry, via a “word of the day.” Today’s word is shicha, which, using the proper characters, means “time difference.” (Cha can also mean “to fall short” or “not up to standard; poor” according to my dictionary.) The Chinese also refer to jet lag as shicha. Shicha is why I have not yet actually run in Beijing since my arrival. Shicha is why I’ve been awake half the night since arrival.

Today, however, I did walk from where I’m staying to the travel agency to register for the marathon. It somehow seemed inappropriate to take a taxi for this sort of task. I will confess to also being aware that the travel agency was relatively close to my abode, “close” in Beijing being something like a 4 mile walk. Beijing is a very sprawling city—what looks quite close on the map can in fact be 4 miles away. There ensued much fun, including the discovery that the girl at the travel agency attended China Women’s University, where I am based doing my research. She actually has a degree in social work—I didn’t ask her if she is in fact not really working as a travel agent at all, but instead doing some sort of surreptitious, therapeutic, participant observer fieldwork registering people for a marathon involving over 7000 steps and also taking case notes on them (she did have to step into a back room several times during the process, though I did not see anything that could have been a one-way mirror). Then again, perhaps working in a travel agency was just a logical, post-social work degree career choice for her. I won’t even begin to describe my quest for the equivalent in Chinese cash of several hundred dollars for the race fee—you’d think something like a travel agency would take credit cards, even here, but no, that would make things far too simple.

“Running while smoking coal” is, alas, a potentially accurate description of how training here will be, once I actually do some. When the plane landed in the city on Monday evening, I swear that my eyes stung when ambient air was allowed in—this was perhaps a psychosomatic reaction to arrival here, but I think it was just instant awareness of the pollution.

I will post as much as I can here—the Internet connection is rather slow, something I could complain about at length, but as I’m here ostensibly to do research on disadvantaged rural women, I’ll refrain.