Golden pigs

It is Chinese New Year this week (chunjie--the Spring Festival), when the great migration takes place and everyone returns to their home towns, villages, etc. I’m actually leaving for Japan to get out of China for the holiday, a fact that caused the guy who works in the café in the building where I’m staying to scold me for missing China’s most important holiday. He noted it would be like missing Christmas in the United States, and how fun it is, full of temple fairs and firecrackers and toys and general re'nao-ness (I decided to hold back on telling him that re'nao is not necessarily always a selling point).

We are entering the Year of the Pig, which means everywhere you go things with pigs on them are for sale, including all manner of adorable stuffed pig toys. I find this only slightly ironic, given that, in Chinese “meat” (rou) is basically a synonym for “pork” and that supposedly half of the pigs in the world are Chinese pigs. Apparently this year is also a “Golden Pig” year, which is considered very propitious and which means that lots of couples are trying to conceive to have babies born in the year of the Golden Pig. Schools are apparently preparing for an upsurge in entrants in six years.

Perhaps some of these people are visiting the “Beijing Tian Lun Sterility Hospital,” the advertisement for which I enjoyed so much I decided to share it here. This is an outstanding example of so many phenomena—globalization leading to the mixing of cultures, Chinese appropriation of Western cultural symbols for interesting uses, and of course, rather tolerant interpretations of copyright laws.

Also, people here can only dream of having 12 children. And I have yet to see anyone remotely resembling Steve Martin.

One note on the notorious “one-child policy”: the first products of the one-child policy, which began in the late 1970s, are getting to be childbearing age, and if both members of a couple are single children they are allowed to have two children.

Firecrackers are being sold in stands all over the place—very much like the Fourth of July. This is one reason why I’m glad I am decamping for Japan on Saturday. I’ll be there for ten days, visiting a former student, Kelly Bolen, who is in her second year there on the JET program, teaching English in a small town called Tochio. We’ll be visiting Kelly’s home turf in Niigata and Tochio (I’m excited about her friend the sushi chef!) and then her former host family in Nagasaki. After that we will visit Unzen for some hiking in the national park there. Then I’m going to spend a few days based in Kamakura, which was the 12th century capital of Japan and has lots of Zen temples. It is only about an hour out of Tokyo so I expect I’ll get a day in Tokyo as well.

So this will be my last post for awhile--check back at the end of February for more!

Formidable or terrible?

Yesterday was a fine day in Beijing—very clear, with a blue sky, and temperatures in the lower 40s. You could actually see the Fragrant Hills. Beijing is quite flat, on a plateau, but it has hills to the north (where the Great Wall passes through) and to the west, which are the Fragrant Hills, known in Chinese as Xiang Shan. That is really only significant because Hong Kong in Chinese is actually Xiang Gang, which means “Fragrant Harbor.” I guess fishiness is fragrant to someone.

I ran 13 miles yesterday, in the Yuyuantan Park, another park near here (about 1.6 miles away, according to the TOMS). I wanted to just tune out and wear my iPod but decided not to, partially due to having to deal with traffic to get to the park (fear not, parental units and other folk inclined to worry, I only turn on the iPod once I get to a safe spot) but also because I wanted to really be present on my run. That was a good choice—I had a few interesting encounters. Yuyuantan also features a lake in the middle, bigger than the Purple Bamboo Park—Yuyuantan is 2.4 miles around for one lap. At one end of the lake were people ice fishing, although I’d guess the ice is rather precarious, given all the warm days we’ve had. At the other end were people swimming! Mostly middle-aged men. Some of them started yelling at me that I should be swimming as I ran by, which leads us to today’s Chinese word. I responded to them that swimming was far too lihai for me—lihai being a fairly untranslatable word, kind of like re’nao. It means “terrible, formidable” according to my dictionary. They replied that my Chinese was “lihai.” (I’m hoping here that what they were going for was the “formidable” rather than the “terrible”!). I later stopped for a bottle of water (40 cents, in case you were wondering) and the man asked where I was from. When I replied “Mei Guo (United States),” he said, “People who have been there say it is kind of like tiantang (paradise, heaven).” I replied that we have problems of our own. In Chinese, the word for the United States, Mei Guo, means “beautiful country” and I wonder how literally they take that.

I am actually not always happy to admit being from the U.S. these days, given the lack of popularity of our country overseas, but people are generally kind. A few, lately, have said, “Oh, I thought you looked French.” I’ve been afraid to ask what that means!

Obstacles

I actually ran for five out of seven days in the past week, which is good, because I’ve received word that I am officially entered in the Great Wall Marathon. I’m not sure what the highlight is for me on the verification form I received—it may be the notice that “except free first aid on the Marathon site, we do not cover the cost of transport to hospitals and the ensuing medical treatment there.” Then again, it might be the fact that on marathon day I will have to be at the sponsoring hotel at 2:45 a.m. for transport to the marathon site. I don’t even want to admit that I’ve actually paid a fairly large sum of money for these privileges. It’s a sum close to about two months’ salary for an average Beijinger, and Beijingers earn much more than the average Chinese person.

My runs have been in the Purple Bamboo Park and on the treadmills of the King Gym. The weather here has been unseasonably warm, and so I got outside for some runs over last weekend. The Purple Bamboo Park was crowded, though not with runners. The only other runners I saw were two other foreign women. There was occasional commentary from Chinese in the park, including hearing a little Chinese child saying “Waiguoren dou paobu (The foreigners are all running!)” They probably wondered what we were running away from.

I’ve been reading a lot about “obstacles” for rural women, as in sentences like “Rural women face many obstacles to attain full autonomy.” “Obstacle” or zhang’ai is a good word to use for today’s Chinese lesson, as running in China is often akin to participating in an obstacle course. In fact, that could be the Chinese contribution as a demonstration sport in the Olympics, and they could incorporate other elements of the culture as the obstacles.

So, I think it is time for some reader participation in this blog. If you remember particularly torturous obstacle courses you’ve endured, for instance in junior high school P.E. class (inherently a torturous experience for most of us, I know), feel free to send examples of the obstacles you faced. I will try my hardest to think of the likely Chinese equivalent and post them here.

I’ll start with an easy example. Water obstacles—such as jumping over small pools, etc., would be well-served in our Chinese Obstacle Course by people spitting, and our competitors needing to evade their expectorations.

Creative suggestions welcome!

Magnificent!

I attended my first Chinese wedding today, as an invited guest of another invited guest. I’d say the experience was a cross between “Wedding Crashers” (what else?) and “Lost in Translation.” I think I was the only foreigner there—in a crowd of about 500 or so. The bride was the daughter of a high ranking woman in the military, who has been in charge of the military’s family planning unit. Family planning is omnipresent here, so that even apparently the military needs people to be in charge of it.

Today’s Chinese word is re’nao, which is a word that is very hard to translate into English. It kind of means “noisy,” but in a good sort of way. Chinese people love re’nao, which was in great abundance at this wedding. The bride and groom arrived in a flower-draped Mercedes to lots of firecrackers going off. Then, inside the restaurant, the party started with an m.c. shouting over a microphone and with a familiar tune blasted at full volume. It took me forever to place the song—is it the theme from “Rawhide”? No. “Bonanza”? No again. Wait, I’ve got it, it’s the theme from “The Magnificent Seven,” a tune we were treated to again and again through the proceedings! I don’t really understand why Americans have lacked the imagination to make this song a prominent wedding tradition.

Then, the bride and groom entered the banquet hall, through a floral arch, to a different tune, Sarah Brightman doing “This Love,” which starts with the lyric, “This love…This love is a strange love.” They proceeded to stand on the stage and do all sorts of things—stand in front of a row of sparklers going off, light candles, exchange rings, sip beverages, fill a champagne fountain, etc. Periodically a bubble machine would start up, pouring bubbles all over the happy couple. Later, we ate and listened as various military subordinates to the bride’s mother serenaded the crowd (my favorite: “O sole mio”).

A few wedding photos:

If you look closely, you too will see bubbles.

This indeed is Great Wall wine, with the bride and groom on the label!

One way of hastening “till death do us part”—provide cigarettes on the banquet tables!

Bargain-hunters, beware!

Today you get two new Chinese words! The first is min’gan, which means “sensitive.” This is an important word in China, especially when you are doing research in political science, as there are many min’gan subjects (you can probably guess what some of these are—for instance, Richard Gere). On the other hand, things that might be min’gan in the United States are not at all so here. Random strangers ask you things like “How old are you? Are you married? (If not, why not?) How many children do you have? (If none, why not?) How much money do you make?”

One of the disadvantages of this being a training as well as a travel blog is that occasionally I may need to, in the interests of complete honesty and disclosure, write about some min’gan things—in other words, some of the unpleasant physical aspects of long-distance running, or just running in general. Blisters, chafing in odd spots, etc. are probably the inevitable outcomes of such training. Today was my first run since having that cold, just 5k on the treadmill in the King Gym, but, for today’s other Chinese lesson, let me just say “Tian a!” That means, “Oh, my God,” or, literally, “Sky (heaven) ah!” My run was actually quite good—I felt surprisingly strong and it wasn’t a strain at all to run the 5k in about 27 minutes (fairly fast, for me). But then I got off the treadmill and I felt like my shorts were burning my legs!

Let me explain the origins of these particular shorts. They are from the Yashow Market, one of a few markets in Beijing specializing in export clothing, both genuine and knock-off, and crawling with foreigners. When I joined the King Gym I went there in search of indoor running clothes (or perhaps I just wanted an excuse to shop). So my “Nike” shorts (I think they are genuine, actually, and they cost all of $8) seemed to be fine until I got off the treadmill when they caused my legs to have this burning sensation. So now I wonder, is the clothing at the Yashow Market some sort of military project to test new weapons on unsuspecting laowais in search of bargains?

OK, that is about as “confessional” as these “pages” will hopefully get.

P.S. The burning went away rather fast--I guess that weapon still needs some work.

Logic

I’ve not actually run in five days, as I’ve had a terrible cold. Most of my weekend was spent wondering if I should visit a doctor, and not being very enthused about the options there—either overpriced laowai medical clinic or Chinese hospital. However, I’ve spent much time considering that this could really be a positive thing for marathon training. After all, the air here is so polluted that perhaps running is detrimental to my practically pristine lungs. (Herein comes the “logic” of our title—luoji in Chinese). Perhaps my marathon experience would be best served by as little exposure to that polluted air as possible. However, I’d guess that 10 out of 10 running experts would decree that some running needs to take place, at some point.

So how does one spend a weekend while sick in Beijing, not wanting to leave one’s fairly monastic cell of a room? (OK, so it has TV and internet, but it’s all in Chinese!) Why, watching pirated DVDs, of course! Why don’t we just call this “research on the state of intellectual property law in China in 2007”? According to one of the introductory sequences on one of the DVDs (I think it was “Pride & Prejudice” but they all start to blur together), “You wouldn’t steal a car, You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone…Buying pirated goods is stealing. Piracy. It’s a crime.” Not much irony here, really. Not that any of the DVDs I bought were pirated (The box to “Pride & Prejudice” has a cast list including Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Jon Favreau, Ellen Pompeo, and Joe Pantoliano—it almost makes me want to figure out if any of these people have ever all been in one movie together, or if someone just made a random list of American movie stars--and I use that term loosely. And of course none of them are really in this film.)

To make up for the brevity of today's post, some photos of the "fan dance" to amuse readers.




Bottom photo, left to right: rural dairy mogul (are there any urban dairy moguls, anywhere?), Xie Lihua, laowai.

Palm trees

On Monday and Tuesday of last week I had my first trip to the countryside—to Qian’an in Hebei Province, about a two-hour trip by car from Beijing. Qian’an is apparently a “rich” place in the countryside—it provides much of the iron for Beijing, and has so historically. That is, it has provided useful iron to Beijing, as opposed to the backyard steel furnace variety that was in vogue during the Great Leap Forward (the late 1950s version of tragic Chinese history). I went with my NGO friend, Xie Lihua, and two journalists from her magazine Rural Women. We visited two enterprises run by women and then had dinner in a peasant home. Then to add to the surrealism of the experience, we stayed in the Qian’an “city government” hotel, which would have been equivalent to at least a four-star hotel in Beijing or other large Chinese cities. Apparently Qian’an has used its iron wealth to build nice buildings that they can then host guests in, such as NGO visitors from Beijing, or, even better, officials from Beijing who come to see how hunky-dory things are in Qian’an. My hotel room even had a bathtub, which was a big thrill, along with a scale, which, to my great relief, was not working properly and kept telling me that I weigh 20 kilograms (like 45 pounds—Chinese food can be quite healthy, but not that much so).

It is not quite clear that this would really fool officials, given the general poverty of Qian’an county once you get out of the county town. (And just for some perspective—Qian’an, a “small” county town in China, has a population of over 100,000). At one enterprise we visited, a rural foodstuffs corporation, we asked the average salary received by the rural women working there, and learned that it is about 500 yuan per month. This is the same as I paid for my three-month membership at the King Gym—about $65. And these are “good” jobs, “opportunities” for these women.

No running for me. However, I did get some exercise participating in the “fan dance.” After dinner in the peasant home, we went back by the village where the head also runs a dairy enterprise. She used some of her earnings to renovate the little village square, so that it now includes things like yellow and red neon-lit plastic palm trees (like I said, surreal). Every night, villagers gather and perform the “fan dance,” which involves traditional Chinese instruments and dancing with fans in lines. This can be viewed all over the place on evenings in China—Jim and I used to watch it in our old neighborhood when we lived here. Many participate, though it tends more to older women. In this village, the dairy-farm woman had purchased costumes and make-up for participants. Anyway, Xie Lihua and myself joined in for awhile, to the great amusement of the spectators. Seeing foreigners do such things is rather unprecedented. When I can, I’ll try to post a photo or two.

The following day, I also go to be a laowai (today’s Chinese Word of the Day)—at a forum for rural women village leaders, I got to sit in front with the other “experts” with a placard proclaiming my (Chinese) name. I did not say one word, but apparently my presence was seen as somehow of use to someone.

So, our word today is laowai, a word in Chinese that literally means “old outsider” but is usually just used to indicate that a foreigner is on the premises. It used to be that you would just get on a bus and you’d hear people muttering “laowai” (I always wanted to learn to say “No S---“ as a response). In Beijing you can buy t-shirts that say “Laowai laile (the laowai is coming)” on the front and “laowai zoule (the laowai is going)” on the back. Laowai zoule!

Authenticity

Today, our Chinese word is zhenzheng. It means, according to my dictionary, “genuine, true, real.” Of course, I’m having all sorts of zhenzheng experiences here, like eating zhenzheng Chinese food (no 100-item buffets in sight), riding zhenzheng buses (today, one was so crowded that I seriously wondered how long the oxygen supply would last), and even taking zhenzheng Chinese medicine for the cold I now seem to have (at first, I thought it was just the effects of the air pollution, but no, it’s really a cold). I’m a little worried because the pharmacist (or at least the lady in the white coat in the medicine place) told me to take a total of 12 pills for my first dose of the medication, which seems like a lot of pills. This is a time when linguistic understanding is very important, but the package also seems to agree with her.

However, these are not my only zhenzheng experiences. On Sunday, I had a zhenzheng yoga experience, which you think would be almost impossible in China. However, this one came complete with Real Yoga Teacher From India. I decided to try yoga here in Beijing and wanted to give the Ashtanga class at BeijingYoga a try. Well, let me just tip my metaphorical hat to any of you who seriously practice Ashtanga Yoga. I was still hurting four days after the class. I’d like to think that the class was just really hard due to its really zhenzheng nature, real Indian yogi teacher and all, but I’m not so sure. All I know was that I felt like a totally clueless, absolutely unfit blob. Actually, a blob would have had a better chance of getting into some of those postures. About every other new pose the zhenzheng yogi, whose name was actually Bharath, would offer me a new prop to help me. Here, try this strap! Here, put this towel under your butt—now put this towel under the other side!

I may go back to BeijingYoga again—this was the “Basic Ashtanga” class, and there is actually a “Beginner Ashtanga” class that I may have to venture into instead. However, next I’m off to Yoga Yard to try vinyasa yoga—probably less zhenzheng, since most of the teachers seem to be Chinese or American, but perhaps I’m also just not cut out for certain forms of zhenzheng-ness.

Dentist or margarita?

For Saturday I wanted to run 10 miles. However, I was mostly filled with dread about this prospect. It’s cold here, and I have not seen a single other soul out running. Not one. Not just when I’m myself running, but anytime. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve seen people running for buses, ones that are usually really crowded and hardly have room for any more people, but nonetheless, that is what people here run for.

So I decided to run on the treadmill in the King Gym. Mind you, for some people this is a perfectly reasonable proposition, but for me treadmills are usually associated with generally unpleasant things, like visits to the dentist or grading student essay exams. After my going away party, on a day when I wanted to do a long run, I went out and ran 8 miles on the Ernst Trail in the rain, four of them in the dark wearing Jim’s headlamp, rather than spend that time on the treadmill.

Everything is relative, however, and now the treadmill less resembled a trip to the dentist than something I really like, like a margarita or a new episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” (speaking of which, I saw a set of DVDs here claiming to be Season 3 of “Grey’s Anatomy”, which seems impossible since it is still being televised...). So I did my 10 miles on the treadmill, which was itself interesting. I started and set myself on a pace of just under 10 minutes and felt like I was going really slowly, and then I realized I was—the treadmill measures kilometers. So I spent much of my run doing calculations in my head, which I’m not especially good at. I knew I had to run something over 16 kilometers to make 10 miles so I just rounded it to 17 (apparently more like 10.5 miles). And the treadmill would only let me do a limited time period, so I had to keep resetting it and adding the distance I’d gone in my head. Still, overall a happy experience, and the treadmill will be a good option.

So today’s Chinese word is gongli—kilometer.

Perhaps the highlight of my workout: watching the 20ish Chinese man who ran on the treadmill beside me for awhile leaving the gym and immediately putting a cigarette in his mouth. Doesn’t he know he doesn’t need to do that here? Smoking is free—just breathe!

Written Saturday, 20th January, 9 p.m.

Foggy

The word for today’s Chinese lesson is wu. In Chinese, wu can mean all kinds of things, depending on the character it could mean “five” or “without.” Today, however, wu will mean “fog”—“foggy” is wumengmengde. In my context, I’m not referring to a weather condition, although mornings here can look foggy. I’m referring more to a metaphysical condition—as in, living here is like always being in a fog. Sometimes the fog is heavy, and it is practically dangerous to go out. Things or contexts are so unclear that you are a risk to yourself or others—for instance, there is always the fear of causing some sort of international incident. (OK, perhaps this is a bit of hyperbole.) On other days or in other situations, the weather can be almost clear, though I have to say a day of a perfect blue sky is practically non-existent. “Mostly sunny,” sure, but not totally clear.

Today’s theme is fog because apparently I was pretty foggy for a few days, and then on Friday things got clearer, or at least somewhat so. For the past five days I’ve been walking by this poster in the entryway of the building where I’m living, featuring a life-sized photo of a scantily-clad Caucasian woman holding a tape measure to her bustline. It really made no significant impact on me—I assumed it promised something relating to looking more white and having an altered bustline (whether it strives for more or less of this, I’m not sure). But then yesterday I looked more closely and saw that below our lifesized woman were much smaller photos of treadmills and weight machines (I had really hoped to include the photos here, but the internet connection just isn't allowing it).

The poster is an advertisement for a gym! In the basement of the building where I’m living! Apparently with treadmills! Here I was, in “old Beijing” mode, thinking that I just had to suffer and run amongst the endless concrete and bemused Beijingers, forgetting that China is hurtling into the 21st century by essentially skipping much of the 20th.

So, as it turns out, a 3-month membership to the “King Gym” costs the equivalent of $65. I don’t even have to walk outside to get to it.

More on the King Gym in my next episode…

Written Saturday, 20th January, 8 p.m.