endings

My time in Beijing is nearing its end—my last days here are usually a greatest hits tour of friends, places, food.  And while I’m terribly eager to return to my husband and dog, to my home and its many comforts, to friends, to family, I am inevitably thinking of all I will miss here. 

• sights like this (China’s National Center for the Performing Arts):
  

o    

• the opportunity and joy of needing to be a bit more awake and aware just to get through the day, to really have to pay attention to avoid small inconveniences (a missed subway or bus stop) as well as major mishaps (for instance, anything that could lead to a run-in with the authorities)
• small grumpy dogs riding around in bicycle baskets:

  

• negotiating and understanding a different political system and also trying to carefully observe its outward manifestations, as that is my bread and butter.  For instance, this sign spotted today in the subway, highlighting the need for better legal consciousness:

Sadly, those who most need legal consciousness in this society are not those likely to be riding the subway, but those riding around town in shiny black Audis and Mercedes with blacked out windows.

• excellent coffee shops on every corner (Meadville, I'm talking to You.).
• sights like this, at the Lama Temple.  I especially appreciate the guy on the right making his most cherished prayer wishes especially clear:

• the challenges of thinking and expression in a foreign language, imposing an economy of words, the need to convey meaning with only the words you might have available to you.  Come to think of it, that might help explain signs like these:

•  have I mentioned the food yet?
• my lovely, incredibly generous friends:
  

• cats hanging out in the above-mentioned cafés:

• buying bubble tea and getting to watch a short film, strangely resembling an airline safety video, with an oddly subversive pro-Taiwan message:

   

• random occurrences like at my dinner this evening, when this man showed up with his 12-year old nephew, urging him to practice English with me, creating an instant opportunity for cross-cultural understanding and kindness:
  

I'm still mulling ways to continue blogging from the coziness of home...stay tuned!

signs

I have long said that China is a country that would really benefit from having two expert services on retainer.  The first is a really good public relations firm, qualified professionals who could tell China that calling people like the Dalai Lama things like “a wolf in monk’s clothing” probably does not do much for its overall international reputation.     

Also, these specialists could come up with a better slogan for China’s new regime than “the Chinese dream.”  Posters promoting this goal are all over the city, for example in Beihai Park:

The meaning, or lack thereof,  of the Chinese Dream has already been the subject of analysis by foreign observers like Ian Johnson of the New York Review of Books.   I do have one friend, a member of the Communist Party (are you listening, dear NSA?), who takes it somewhat seriously, but otherwise it’s become something of a joke, largely because of its utter unoriginality.  

Yet I’ve also spoken with numerous Chinese friends who all say that China does in fact increasingly resemble the United States, which is something I’ve also been saying for awhile.  This country’s chosen model of development, especially here in Beijing, looks a lot like the American way in certain crucial aspects.  The logic of life in middle-class, urban China is devoted primarily to making money and buying stuff, which seems to me to be the overall purpose of American society as well.  Life in Beijing is increasingly characterized by suburban sprawl, automobiles, consumerism, and overwork.  Everyday, packs of young men go around and use ever more of China’s precious trees to blanket subway cars with flyers advertising the latest housing development.  Today’s was an apartment complex that seemed to think it was an asset that it is located 70 kilometers (about 45 miles) from the Beijing International Airport.  Did I mention suburban sprawl? 

(I will allow you to do your own reading and draw your own conclusions about questions of similarities relating to civil liberties, democracy and elections, and inequality in China and the United States.)

The other service from which I’ve thought China could really benefit would be that of an army of proofreaders.   I won’t dwell here on the infinite number of amusing/totally misguided signs you can find here.  Some of you have already seen some language from menus.    I also like the English rendition of this restaurant’s name (which more literally can be translated as “spicy mother-in-law”):

In a public restroom was this:

 

Yet, the more I’m here, the more I find these charming and hope they don’t go the route of grammatical correctness.  

More serious are the ones in Chinese, like this one:

It was posted in the window of a restaurant, advertising for servers and people to work in the kitchen for about $350-450 per month, likely working 7 days per week with long hours.  I'll let you try to figure out the hourly wage.

Finally, there is this encouraging sign for those of you who know of my concern for elephants and the illegal trade in wildlife products:

 

Hopefully this mother's elephant's conversation with her calf on a subway platform sign is self-evident to all--"ivory belongs to elephants."

real

Some of you may recently have seen this photo circulating on various news-related websites (and on my Facebook page):

This image of a ghostly man hovering over an impossibly tiny old woman was in short order revealed to be a badly photoshopped effort by local officials to show how much they care about the laobaixing, “the old hundred names” or the ordinary people here.  Alas, this was not the first such “photoshop fail” as also recently there was this:

Which subsequently became something of a meme, with the Chinese internet featuring examples like this:

and this:

China is of course notorious for producing things of dubious authenticity.  The famous/infamous artist Ai Weiwei has even named his architectural/design studio FAKE Design  (in Chinese, pronounced fa-ke, which of course sounds like a Bad English Word). When he was detained, allegedly for tax evasion, in 2011, he started calling the situation the “Fake Case.”   And, recently and relatedly, The New York Times featured an extensive report regarding the plague of forgery in China’s increasingly profitable fine arts market.

Apparently this art forgery has even produced tragic consequences.  More widely, the problem of fakery in China is especially prominent and dangerous with respect to food products.  For instance, Chinese products are killing our dogs. (Our dogs!)  Worse, even to dog lovers, was the the notorious case a few years ago of Sanlu dairy, which spiked its infant formula with melamine to raise protein measurements, killing and sickening larger numbers of babies here.    Now apparently even bubble tea is dangerous.  (Bubble tea?!  Are you f---ing kidding me!?) 

For these and other reasons, many people here consequently do not trust their own economic and political institutions.  Importing infant formula after trips abroad is a popular pastime.  There are numerous potential ways to interpret these events, partially depending on one’s own political inclinations.  I lean towards attributing many of these problems to the high rate of economic growth here.  It is literally out of control, toxic to all who spend time here and of course most so to those who have no way of coming and going as I do.  I am here partially doing research on volunteers in environmental organizations and one of the leading reasons I’ve heard for becoming involved in such activism is rising rates of cancer. 

But what to do if your entire society is cancerous?  When the toxicity has spread from the literal air that people breathe to social and political trust? This apparent breakdown in social trust is largely a result of two factors.  First was the utterly destructive force of the Cultural Revolution.  And then, pretty much right after that, was the creation of a winner-take-all market economy.  Where are people supposed to get their sense of meaning, of value, of social responsibility in this poisonous blend of lost values and solely profit-oriented activity?

Yet, I do not want to solely dwell on negatives, as we can rely on the American media to do that just fine.  As I’ve said already, there are good and courageous people here who are seeking to change things.  In fact, the mode of relating I encounter here seemingly more than any other is simple kindness.  Daily I encounter people willing to smile, to help, to offer a compliment about my ever-evolving skills with the Chinese language.  The other day, a man claimed that my Chinese was better than the woman working the cash desk in his little shop.  I asked where she was from and he said “China!”  Then I said, no, “where is her hometown?” and he said, “Hunan!”  A southeastern province where the Chinese is not exactly biaozhun or “standard” (which really just means “as it is in Beijing, the city that is so dominant in this massive country that the whole country is one time zone, Beijing time, lest you provincial types and ethnic minorities forget where The Man really resides”).

Could this all just be “fake” as well?  I’m sure that some of it results from my status as a visible foreigner, sometimes the only one around.  It could just be superiority or disdain (“look at the foreigner trying to speak our language!”) rather than kindness.  But as an academic I must too often swim in the slimy waters of Unctuous Elitist Condescension, so I know that when I see it, and, whatever this is, it is not That. 

I confirm that suspicion by a correlate experience, that of the actual existence of honesty in this country.  Despite all of the deceitful and sometimes outright malicious behavior I’ve already discussed, I also daily encounter people of incredible honesty.  Once it was a man selling me oranges in the produce market—the cost was 9 RMB and I gave him a 10 and asked him to keep the change, so he put an extra orange in my bag.  Or the guys from whom I sometimes buy my breakfast pastries (or bing 饼!) in the morning on my way back from running in the park.  Two bing are 1.8 RMB—they could just charge me 2 and I’d not ever know or care about the difference (which is about 3 cents), but they still charge me that 1.8.  Or, yesterday, I was trying to feed two small, lost, stray dogs on the street and saw that someone else had the same idea:

And, finally, yesterday there was this.  A man near the art museum doing water calligraphy on the street offered his brush to me so I wrote, “China is good” (see, totally impressive Chinese language skills!):

He responded with “American friends are good”:

These gestures, of kindness, of honesty, of compassion, give me hope that good exists all over the place here.  You just need to take the time to find it.

edifices

Photo evidence!

Here I am with my friend Lijuan, who came with her husband to cheer me at the finish. Later, they took  me to a buffet in a fancy hotel, featuring both Western and Chinese food, so I could have the traditional post-marathon binge.  A good friend, indeed.

A couple things I forgot to mention in my first list of thoughts, in my post-marathon haze of endorphin rush/depletion.

During the race,  someone was setting off bunches of fireworks around mile 8, for what reason I’m not sure.  General celebratory glee? 

The photo with which I ended my previous marathon-themed post received much attention throughout the Chinese internet world.  Apparently a popular search on Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, was 尿红墙, or "urine red wall."  One of my friends just today said, "How was the marathon?   I hear there was a problem involving toilets."

The finish—how could I have forgotten that?  Totally memorable, occurring on the plaza between the Olympic Stadium (the “Bird's Nest”) and the Water Cube swimming facility, the two most architecturally memorable parts of the Beijing games.  I have a terrible memory, but still vividly recall my first sighting of the Bird's Nest as it was under construction in 2007.  I was here on sabbatical, on a bus going along the North 4th Ring Road when we passed it.  I was utterly dazzled by the sight of it, this majestic structure going up amidst the mostly blah, dreary Beijing apartment blocks.   Here it is again:

 

This was one of the first of the new wave of Beijing architecture, with much of the city still unexciting today but punctuated by occasional breathtaking or just strange edifices, the most famous example of which may be the new China Central Television (CCTV) Building.

You are not mistaken, it does resemble a pair of pants.

Yet, grandiose architectural statements have been a part of the People's Republic since 1949 when Mao mounted the Tiananmen Gate and declared that "The Chinese people have stood up!"  One of his first projects was to destroy what was left of the Beijing city wall to build broad socialist boulevards, along with creating Tiananmen Square as a place for gatherings of mass politics.  (Interestingly, the critic Dai Jinhua writes that the word often used for "shopping mall" in Chinese these days is the same as that for "Square" or "public plaza," 广场.  There is much to make of that in terms of the shift in China in the past 30 years from a highly public to a privatized society.)   Amusingly but also tragically, apparently the current set of architectural statements have made a positive impression on at least one audience, the North Koreans, as shown in these propaganda posters from Pyongyang:

No Mao suits or Young Pioneers were actually sighted amidst the sea of yellow race shirts at the marathon finish line.

FOOD

I shall post another marathon-related blog when I have more photos.  Here is one taken by these nice ladies at the finish:

In the meantime, why don’t we talk about food?  I’ve certainly been consuming enough of it, and in fact it is one of the chief joys of spending time in China.  The traditional greeting in China is “你吃过了没有?”  “Have you eaten yet?”  I think it hearkens back to the days when food was scarce here and people often didn’t get enough to eat, but it also reflects the courtesy prevalent in Chinese culture.  I often take the question a little too literally and respond, “Yes!  I’ve just had lunch!”  or “oh my, of course, I’ve just had the best _______ (fill in the blank with whatever delicacy I’ve just enjoyed)!” You are supposed to leave food behind, to be polite and show your host fed you enough, but apparently now there is a bit of a “clean your plate” push going on. 

Food is central to the corruption epidemic and endemic in China today, so much so that the anti-corruption campaign initiated by new head honcho Xi Jinping has received the tag line of “three dishes and a soup.”  However, savvy netizens, through close analysis of photos of elites supposedly hanging out with the masses, sometimes notice that such frugality is not necessarily always happening.  It does seem that certain efforts might bear some good results, as apparently the demand for shark fin soup is in decline, which may also bode well for the tragically booming trade in ivory. This could be at least in part the result of celebrity campaigns against demand for products of wildlife crime headed by Jackie Chan and Yao Ming, as seen in these posters from a subway station:

But, back to the cheerier topic of food.  Apparently Julia Child once said that she could eat in China for the rest of her life and never grow tired of the food.  It is true that a typical menu here can be 50 pages long, albeit like the 50 pages of a children’s book with lots of pictures.  The pictures are great, as they allow me to order a much wider array of dishes.  Otherwise, without pulling out a dictionary, how might I really know what this is?

 or this?

How can you go wrong?  I actually prefer the simpler food, the common dishes that people eat daily but are not the fancy, exotic banquet fare.  I Love It.  (And, please know that it bears little resemblance to the slop that passes for Chinese food in many American Chinese restaurants, especially any of those with “buffet” in the name.)  Take, for instance, my dinner last night which cost a total of about U.S. $6:
 

A delicious cold dish of  spinach and peanuts marinated in vinegar and garlic and chili peppers, and guotie, Taiwanese-style dumplings.  These are extra special, because they take the deliciousness that already characterizes the Chinese 饺子(dumping) and add amazingness on top of it by frying them.   Wow.  And beer, which goes so well with the food here that I don’t feel the least bit bad about drinking alone when necessary. 

Two other things.  Now that the weather is cooling, the little lap dogs that dominate the canine scene here are appearing wearing t-shirts and sweaters.  Most of them. I’d say the proportion is about equal to that of those who wore the yellow race shirts in the marathon.   This has nothing to do with food, really, except that our dog, Abbey, refers to such creatures as “snacks in wrappers.”

And, finally, since we were briefly on the topic of Yao Ming, this is How Tall He Is:

The relation of this to food should be self-evident.

happiness

A few summary points from today’s event, with photo accompaniment.  Because I made the ultimate mistake of not carrying a camera, I shall use photos stolen shamelessly from the Chinese internet.* Some friends took pictures of me at the finish and I hope to post those later.

Some benefits of running the Beijing Marathon (some probably also offered in other Chinese races):

o    Being frisked by the People’s Armed Police when going to the start area (except the second they noticed I was a foreigner I was somehow exempted from this).

o   The perky Chinese exercise instructors leading everyone in “warm-up” exercises that resembled an aerobics class.  I sat that one out.  Who the hell wants to do aerobics before running 26 miles?

o   The palpable joy felt by all at the starting line.

o Starting out next to Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum, and then passing under his ever-watchful eyes, and wondering what the guy would think of the whole thing.

o   The first two miles or so along Chang’an Avenue (the Avenue of Eternal Peace), with all five westbound lanes closed for runners.

o   Approximately 2/3rds of all runners wearing the race shirt, this year a cheery bright yellow color (hard to miss in the above photos, yes?).

o   Cheering sections shouting 加油 (“step on the gas”) along with way, with the occasional woman shouting into a megaphone sounding like Chai Ling in the film Tiananmen.

o   Other cheerers yelling, “外国朋友加油” (“Step on the gas, foreign friend”).

o   People running along with music emanating audibly from unknown places on their bodies.  I was especially thrilled to hear my Favorite Chinese Rock Song Ever (with the caveat that I don’t actually know that many Chinese Rock Songs), the probably clichéd but still amazing “I Have Nothing” by Cui Jian.  It was the anthem of hope and protest in China in the late 1980s.

o   The course being marked in kilometers rather than miles (I am aware that it probably is only the US and UK that mark their race courses in miles), thus leading to the disheartening realization that, for instance, you’ve already run 12 km but still have 30 to go.

o   The large number of people running the whole race with the race drop bag on their backs rather than turning it in to be picked up at the finish.

o   The barefoot running team, all wearing little bells around their ankles making a lovely rhythmic sound.  Here is one such man at the finish, continuing his delightfully eccentric behavior.

Some things more universal to the marathon experience regardless of location:

o   The sound of 60,000 feet pounding the pavement at the start.

o   The self-talk going something like “Only 20 minutes till my next gel!  Only 90 minutes till I can take another ibuprofen!”

o   The inevitable betrayal by some body part when everything thus far has been going well.  This time, it was my breathing.  Around 22 miles or so I suddenly had a hard time getting a breath.  I’d like to say it was the fault of the Beijing air, but today was probably the best air day here since I arrived (at the time of the start the AQI was 91, only “Moderate” in terms of its risk level).  So alas I cannot blame the air for my end of race trouble and instead see it as the nearly-eternal dilemma of running long distances, expecting that a wall will be hit, just not knowing which one it will be.

o   The ultimate male privilege being manifested with men getting to go to the side of the course pretty much anywhere to take a leak.  This fact was apparently one of the top attention-getters for Chinese news media, as these photos have appeared on numerous websites here: 

In case what is going on there is not totally clear, here is another, with special Beijing flair, and lots of yellow t-shirts.

_____________________

*If you are the sort of person to care about trifles like intellectual property, good luck finding someone here who would agree.