This is out of order, but I’ve long since given up trying to stay organized. ;)
Spring Festival isn’t confined to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The sixth day of the new year is the last day of one phase of the celebrating; almost everyone is off work for those six days but most people go back after that. There’s also the Lantern Festival, which happens on the fifteenth. Not the fifteenth of February, but the fifteenth of the new year, which is the time of the full moon.
There have been fireworks going off here since I came. For the first few days there were many street vendors selling holiday souvenirs and decorations and a dazzling variety of fireworks. We bought some and took them to Yanfeng’s family’s celebration, where they became part of a much larger supply.
On that first weekend, there was noise from firecrackers around the clock. It intensified on the Saturday (New Year’s Eve) and became constant and ubiquitous by Saturday evening. All over the city, boys and men (yes, I saw lots of girls and women spectating but I never saw one light a fuse) were out in the streets lighting stuff that would be illegal at home. From where we stood outside the alley to Yanfeng’s parents’ house, we could see fireworks all over the city that were at least as elaborate as the ones in Winthrop, Maine, on the Fourth of July. All these were being set off by private citizens.
This Sunday, for the Lantern Festival, the city government puts on its own (reportedly amazing) fireworks display at Century Park downtown. Amongst us foreigners (Jamie, Marien, me) there isn’t a lot of enthusiasm for going into the crowd that will be there, with -- still and again -- lots of boys setting off firecrackers all over the place. We haven’t decided what to do yet, if anything. It seems like a shame to miss the occasion, but besides the issue of crowds+fireworks, we would probably have to walk there and back and I don’t think my knees are up to it. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, as in so many other areas, there is a much more laissez faire attitude toward activities that would give a lot of Americans heart palptations from the safety point of view. When Jamie and I were walking to the pagoda the other day we passed a group of little boys, maybe 5-7 years old. Most of the boys were covering their ears with their hands while another little boy stuck a firecracker into a crack in a brick wall, lit it with a cigarette lighter, moved all of a foot or so away himself, covered his ears, and waited for the bang.
Nobody got hurt. (This time, anyhow.)
Meanwhile, at the end of the same street, I saw a woman riding a motorbike with a little kid on the back. The little kid was holding onto an even smaller kid. No one had a helmet, to say the least.
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Friday, 26 February 2010
Eating out
There’s a wide range of eating options. At the “low” end there are street vendors selling cooked food. Lots of them sell meat on skewers, some (surprisingly to me, especially in February) sell corn on the cob, some sell roasted whole sweet potatoes. And that’s a very partial list. We haven’t bought anything on the street, but as I wrote in one of the Beijing entries, we have eaten food from places that were no more than a hole in the wall.
A step up from street vendors is a style of restaurant that has a few tables and sells steamed buns, soups, maybe dumplings, and I don’t know what all else because I can’t read the menus and Jamie and I like steamed buns, egg drop soup, and dumplings so much that we never order anything else. Or check that, we haven’t ordered dumplings yet because the place we’ve been going to hasn’t returned to full swing after the holiday period, and even now his favorite place hasn’t reopened; it’s doing the spring cleaning that traditionally accompanies the holiday.
Steamed buns are little balls of a flour dough with a meat filling (pork, usually). Eight or ten at a time are steamed in bamboo containers. The egg drop soup also contains herbs, including cilantro, and “fungus,” which doesn’t correspond to anything very familiar, but you can think of mushrooms to get in the ballpark.
About the “sanitary” customs, the less said the better. In small restaurants in Yulin, there’s a little roll on the table off which you tear a piece to use as a napkin (the paper is stretchy and a couple of inches wide). When you’re done with it, you throw it on the floor. Whether it would be impolite to leave used napkins on the table, I don’t know. There is typically also a bin of chopsticks -- we always take the disposable ones. There’s a bottle of vinegar and a bowl of chopped hot peppers in oil (they remind me of dad). You get a tiny bowl into which to pour your condiments, then dip the steamed buns into the bowl.
There are also bigger, nicer places, which have not only an open dining area but a lot of private rooms, which people here prefer. Food is served “family style.” All the serving dishes are in the center of the table (maybe on a lazy susan), and everyone takes what they want with their own chopsticks. There are no serving utensils except the ladle for soup. Each person has chopsticks, a little plate, a teacup, a small drinking glass, and a soup bowl and spoon. The soup bowl can be used for soup (which is the last course here, not the first), or rice. No napkin is provided. We keep packets of tissues in our jacket pockets for this and other reasons.
Jamie, Marien, and I were at dinner a few nights ago. We ordered three or four dishes to share, but we were still hungry when we had finished them. We tried to order another dish that we thought we’d all like, but the waitress said it was a cold vegetable, and all our vegetable dishes had been cold, and we should order a hot vegetable now. Jamie says this is one of many food customs (and perhaps superstitions) -- but he doesn’t (and I don’t) know much more about them.
With the odd (and I mean odd) exception here and there, I like everything I’ve eaten, and some of it I could eat every day. I decided ahead of time that there was no way I was going to be able to indulge all my food sensitivities here, so I would just try to eat anything that was served. So far so good, knock on wood.
A step up from street vendors is a style of restaurant that has a few tables and sells steamed buns, soups, maybe dumplings, and I don’t know what all else because I can’t read the menus and Jamie and I like steamed buns, egg drop soup, and dumplings so much that we never order anything else. Or check that, we haven’t ordered dumplings yet because the place we’ve been going to hasn’t returned to full swing after the holiday period, and even now his favorite place hasn’t reopened; it’s doing the spring cleaning that traditionally accompanies the holiday.
Steamed buns are little balls of a flour dough with a meat filling (pork, usually). Eight or ten at a time are steamed in bamboo containers. The egg drop soup also contains herbs, including cilantro, and “fungus,” which doesn’t correspond to anything very familiar, but you can think of mushrooms to get in the ballpark.
About the “sanitary” customs, the less said the better. In small restaurants in Yulin, there’s a little roll on the table off which you tear a piece to use as a napkin (the paper is stretchy and a couple of inches wide). When you’re done with it, you throw it on the floor. Whether it would be impolite to leave used napkins on the table, I don’t know. There is typically also a bin of chopsticks -- we always take the disposable ones. There’s a bottle of vinegar and a bowl of chopped hot peppers in oil (they remind me of dad). You get a tiny bowl into which to pour your condiments, then dip the steamed buns into the bowl.
There are also bigger, nicer places, which have not only an open dining area but a lot of private rooms, which people here prefer. Food is served “family style.” All the serving dishes are in the center of the table (maybe on a lazy susan), and everyone takes what they want with their own chopsticks. There are no serving utensils except the ladle for soup. Each person has chopsticks, a little plate, a teacup, a small drinking glass, and a soup bowl and spoon. The soup bowl can be used for soup (which is the last course here, not the first), or rice. No napkin is provided. We keep packets of tissues in our jacket pockets for this and other reasons.
Jamie, Marien, and I were at dinner a few nights ago. We ordered three or four dishes to share, but we were still hungry when we had finished them. We tried to order another dish that we thought we’d all like, but the waitress said it was a cold vegetable, and all our vegetable dishes had been cold, and we should order a hot vegetable now. Jamie says this is one of many food customs (and perhaps superstitions) -- but he doesn’t (and I don’t) know much more about them.
With the odd (and I mean odd) exception here and there, I like everything I’ve eaten, and some of it I could eat every day. I decided ahead of time that there was no way I was going to be able to indulge all my food sensitivities here, so I would just try to eat anything that was served. So far so good, knock on wood.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Sightseeing
On Monday the same foursome that shared the birthday dinner went on a sightseeing excursion just outside Yulin. We took a cab to a place called Zhen Bei Tai, a fort located a few miles outside Yulin on the section of the Great Wall that runs just north of the town. In this stretch, as for a lot of its length, the Wall has crumbled almost into invisibility (see pictures here), but the fort still stands tall and it’s possible to climb to the very top of it, which we did. Slowly, in phases.
It was fun to get outside the city and to get a sense of where it sits geographically. To the north and northwest there is nothing but dry, reddish, desert-like empty land -- all the way to Inner Mongolia. To the southeast is Yulin, sitting in a bright haze of dusty air in the springlike weather. To the east there is construction -- Jingjing said some of it was housing and some might have been factory buildings. There are still people living in cave houses not that far from Yulin, but the government is building housing and trying to get the people to move out of the caves. Jamie saw some of the cave houses on his hiking trips last spring.
From Zhen Bei Tai it was maybe a fifteen minute walk back down the hill to the main road, then down another side road to a place called Red Stone Gorge. This is a spot where a river has carved a gorge, into the sides of which caves have been cut, and onto the sides of which inscriptions have been carved. Inside some of the caves are Buddhist statues, and the ceilings are painted with symbols, some of which seem to be from the Chinese “Book of Changes” (an ancient book), and many others of which I didn’t recognize (not surprising). In one of the caves, all the statues were female, and Jingjing said this was a place where women would come to pray for a healthy child. Each statue was holding some kind of tool or scroll.
These “caves” are cut into the rock and range in side from small to very spacious. They are dry squared off, and not anything like what I pictured last year when Jamie said he had seen places where people lived in cave houses. They could be made quite comfortable (no indoor plumbing, I dare say), especially since they would be cool in the summer and relatively warm in the winter.
My camera ran out of memory halfway up Zhen Bei Tai, so I don’t have pictures of Red Stone Gorge. My traveling companies took some pictures, so I’ll post some as soon as we trade our pics around.
After all this walking we were dusty and hungry, so we caught a bus (my first bus ride) and went downtown for dinner. The streets were jam packed with people, unlike on the day when Jamie and I walked there last week. This was apparently a more typical day, even though it was also a work day for most people. There were people in the park, some of whom were flying kites. There were street vendors selling kites right outside the park. I bought a couple of small ones that with any luck will fit in my suitcase.
It was fun to get outside the city and to get a sense of where it sits geographically. To the north and northwest there is nothing but dry, reddish, desert-like empty land -- all the way to Inner Mongolia. To the southeast is Yulin, sitting in a bright haze of dusty air in the springlike weather. To the east there is construction -- Jingjing said some of it was housing and some might have been factory buildings. There are still people living in cave houses not that far from Yulin, but the government is building housing and trying to get the people to move out of the caves. Jamie saw some of the cave houses on his hiking trips last spring.
From Zhen Bei Tai it was maybe a fifteen minute walk back down the hill to the main road, then down another side road to a place called Red Stone Gorge. This is a spot where a river has carved a gorge, into the sides of which caves have been cut, and onto the sides of which inscriptions have been carved. Inside some of the caves are Buddhist statues, and the ceilings are painted with symbols, some of which seem to be from the Chinese “Book of Changes” (an ancient book), and many others of which I didn’t recognize (not surprising). In one of the caves, all the statues were female, and Jingjing said this was a place where women would come to pray for a healthy child. Each statue was holding some kind of tool or scroll.
These “caves” are cut into the rock and range in side from small to very spacious. They are dry squared off, and not anything like what I pictured last year when Jamie said he had seen places where people lived in cave houses. They could be made quite comfortable (no indoor plumbing, I dare say), especially since they would be cool in the summer and relatively warm in the winter.
My camera ran out of memory halfway up Zhen Bei Tai, so I don’t have pictures of Red Stone Gorge. My traveling companies took some pictures, so I’ll post some as soon as we trade our pics around.
After all this walking we were dusty and hungry, so we caught a bus (my first bus ride) and went downtown for dinner. The streets were jam packed with people, unlike on the day when Jamie and I walked there last week. This was apparently a more typical day, even though it was also a work day for most people. There were people in the park, some of whom were flying kites. There were street vendors selling kites right outside the park. I bought a couple of small ones that with any luck will fit in my suitcase.
Monday, 22 February 2010
Bargaining
Lots of things in China are not sold at a set price; there’s an expectation that buyer and seller will dicker. Sometimes it’s clear which system is in use -- in the grocery store, for example, prices are fixed. In fact, in the grocery store, prices are in the computer. If, at checkout, the computer doesn’t recognize a bar code, the checkout person can’t sell the product. You can see a little pile of items accumulating on a nearby counter, where the clerks throw what they can’t get a price on. It’s not clear to me why, in that situation, the checkout person doesn’t just call for a price like they do at home -- it’s not like there aren’t lots of store employees standing around with time on their hands to make use of by staring at foreigners. ;) I’m sure there’s a reason, I just don’t know what it is.
When the price isn’t fixed, a further complication for the inexperienced visitor is that different markets, and even different vendors, seem to enter the bargaining process/game with different unwritten rules in mind. I have rarely been in situations in life where I’ve had to bargain, but my impression of a “classic” bargaining situation is that the buyer and seller both start the game by suggesting prices that are either lower (the buyer) or higher (the seller) than they’re willing to settle for in the end. Then there’s a back and forth that involves some lowering on one side and some raising on the other, until some number is agreed upon, which (in my fantasy) is probably a lot of the time about halfway between the original offers.
Well, it may not work that way at home a lot of the time either -- I don’t know, maybe I’m too naïve. But it definitely doesn’t work that way here. Or rather, it works that way now and then, but it works every other imaginable way too. Depending.
It’s “depending on what” that isn’t clear, except that the first rule, everywhere there’s bargaining, seems to be “soak the tourists.” Or maybe it’s “soak the ignorant,” that is, anyone, tourist or not, who’s ignorant of the process and/or ignorant of what things should really cost.
A typical example is a blue hanging (very cheaply made, but gorgeous colors, and I wanted it, okay?) that I bought when we came down from the Great Wall. Jamie asked the woman at the stand how much she wanted for it, and she said 150 (150 yuan). He said that was too much and we started to walk away. She then said 100 and Jamie again said it was too much and we started to walk away. He asked me in English what I was willing to pay, and having been through this a bunch of times already I said 20. (He thought it should have been about 3, but we didn’t try that number.) When the seller asked what we were willing to pay, Jamie said 20. The seller said no and started to go on about how that wasn’t enough, she couldn’t make any money that way, etc. (Some of them actually get tears in their eyes when the sob story starts.) She may have then offered 30 (I don’t remember for sure). Jamie said no again and we started walking. Then she called after us, “Okay, 20.” Just like that.
I’ll say more about bargaining when I write about the “antiques” market in Beijing, but meanwhile, the souvenir sellers at the Great Wall are class by themselves. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sad that the place was so uncrowded the day we went. If it had been more crowded, there would have been a lot more souvenir sellers; as it was, a lot of the booths were shuttered. But if it had been more crowded, there would have been more tourists to serve as targets of the sellers, and we might have been able to get by them with less hassle.
They are very aggressive. They stand in your way to prevent you from walking past, and if you start to walk past they put their hands on you and physically try to keep you there. They say a couple of words of English, including “dollar” -- they kept saying they were selling t-shirts for a “dollar.” We weren’t sure whether this meant they actually wanted a dollar bill -- technically, that’s illegal -- or what. I was glad Jamie was there to warn me ahead of time about the onslaught, and to steer me past the booths. It feels weird to me to be getting into the habit of constantly ignoring people -- both vendors and the people who stare at us all the time. But the vendors are in a sense just playing a game that I don’t know how to play, and the people who stare at us -- well who knows, I suppose there are a lot of different motivations for that.
When the price isn’t fixed, a further complication for the inexperienced visitor is that different markets, and even different vendors, seem to enter the bargaining process/game with different unwritten rules in mind. I have rarely been in situations in life where I’ve had to bargain, but my impression of a “classic” bargaining situation is that the buyer and seller both start the game by suggesting prices that are either lower (the buyer) or higher (the seller) than they’re willing to settle for in the end. Then there’s a back and forth that involves some lowering on one side and some raising on the other, until some number is agreed upon, which (in my fantasy) is probably a lot of the time about halfway between the original offers.
Well, it may not work that way at home a lot of the time either -- I don’t know, maybe I’m too naïve. But it definitely doesn’t work that way here. Or rather, it works that way now and then, but it works every other imaginable way too. Depending.
It’s “depending on what” that isn’t clear, except that the first rule, everywhere there’s bargaining, seems to be “soak the tourists.” Or maybe it’s “soak the ignorant,” that is, anyone, tourist or not, who’s ignorant of the process and/or ignorant of what things should really cost.
A typical example is a blue hanging (very cheaply made, but gorgeous colors, and I wanted it, okay?) that I bought when we came down from the Great Wall. Jamie asked the woman at the stand how much she wanted for it, and she said 150 (150 yuan). He said that was too much and we started to walk away. She then said 100 and Jamie again said it was too much and we started to walk away. He asked me in English what I was willing to pay, and having been through this a bunch of times already I said 20. (He thought it should have been about 3, but we didn’t try that number.) When the seller asked what we were willing to pay, Jamie said 20. The seller said no and started to go on about how that wasn’t enough, she couldn’t make any money that way, etc. (Some of them actually get tears in their eyes when the sob story starts.) She may have then offered 30 (I don’t remember for sure). Jamie said no again and we started walking. Then she called after us, “Okay, 20.” Just like that.
I’ll say more about bargaining when I write about the “antiques” market in Beijing, but meanwhile, the souvenir sellers at the Great Wall are class by themselves. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sad that the place was so uncrowded the day we went. If it had been more crowded, there would have been a lot more souvenir sellers; as it was, a lot of the booths were shuttered. But if it had been more crowded, there would have been more tourists to serve as targets of the sellers, and we might have been able to get by them with less hassle.
They are very aggressive. They stand in your way to prevent you from walking past, and if you start to walk past they put their hands on you and physically try to keep you there. They say a couple of words of English, including “dollar” -- they kept saying they were selling t-shirts for a “dollar.” We weren’t sure whether this meant they actually wanted a dollar bill -- technically, that’s illegal -- or what. I was glad Jamie was there to warn me ahead of time about the onslaught, and to steer me past the booths. It feels weird to me to be getting into the habit of constantly ignoring people -- both vendors and the people who stare at us all the time. But the vendors are in a sense just playing a game that I don’t know how to play, and the people who stare at us -- well who knows, I suppose there are a lot of different motivations for that.
Money
For those of you who don’t work in international compensation and/or don’t travel out of the country, a note about money and prices as a preliminary to the next post, which will be about bargaining:
The unit of currency in China is called, in daily life, the “yuan.” (More formally, it’s called “renminbi.”) China keeps the relationship between its currency and the dollar more or less fixed; the exchange value doesn’t “float” completely freely like that of most other currencies. The exchange rate is around 6.8 yuan per dollar, i.e. when you exchange money, you can “buy” about 6.8 yuan for a dollar, or a dollar for 6.8 yuan.
Most things cost a lot less here than at home as measured by how many dollars I need to get enough yuan to buy them. By contrast, when I went to London and Brussels in 2008, a lot of things cost more than at home. The exchange rate is only a part of the reason for the differences; the cost of living in general is another part. It’s very complicated -- otherwise I would have to find a different line of work. But as far as traveling goes, at the moment it’s expensive for Americans to travel in Europe and cheap for us to travel in China. (Getting here is another story.)
The cost of food here is shockingly low if you measure it in terms of the dollars I need to spend to get enough yuan to buy the meals. Jamie and I can go out to one of the little restaurants near the campus and get enough steamed buns and egg drop soup to keep us going for a lot of the day -- for 8 yuan, or a little over a dollar, apiece. On the other hand, wages in China are proportionally lower, so the meals don’t seem as cheap to local people. Vice versa (at least as to the meals) in Europe. Eating out in London was very expensive, and not just because the dollar was weak versus the pound at the time. (Take-out (or take-away, as they call it) was cheaper than eating in a sit-down restaurant, so that’s mostly what Maddy and I did on that trip.)
Sunday, 21 February 2010
The Year of the Tiger
Tonight four of us went out to a nice restaurant for hot pot, Yulin style. This time the pot in the center of the table was heated by a gas burner underneath, unlike the one in Beijing. It was divided in two, and both sides contained water flavored by a mix of spices, some recognizable (slices of ginger) and some not. One side was mild-flavored, the other spicy hot, with lots of little red peppers floating around in it.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that in nicer restaurants, the wait staff (whether one person or several, like tonight) stands by the table while you peruse the menu and decide what to order. Tonight we had three foreigners (besides Jamie and me there was Marien, who is from the Netherlands and teaches English here) and Jingjing, who is from Yulin and is a senior English major at the university.
The head waiter gave us a sheet of paper with dozens of things to choose from that we would eventually cook in the hot pot, and with Jingjing facilitating we chose:
mushrooms
beef (very thin slices)
mutton (ditto)
tofu
lettuce
potato slices
sweet potato slices (but pale, not like ours)
2 kinds of noodles (lucky, for birthday celebrations)
fish balls
quail eggs
chicken eggs
We were each given a small bowl with a peanuty sauce in it, plus there were little plates of condiments to add to the sauce: chopped cilantro, chopped scallions (or something similar), a red sauce, and a green sauce. We also added some broth from both sides of the hot pot to our dipping bowls and stirred everything together.
Tea was brought (which is only automatic in nicer restaurants, oddly enough given the custom in Chinese restaurants at home), and we also had Sprite and beer.
The items we had ordered came several at a time, and we put two or three kinds of things in the hot pot at once. One kind of noodle looked like spaghetti (but didn't taste like it), and one was a translucent, wide, flat, chewy potato-based noodle that I’ve been fed a bunch of times here and like a lot. Noodles were saved for next to last, just before the chicken eggs.
As you can imagine, this meal went on for a long time, until we were all too full for another bite.
Back outside, for the first time since I’ve been here we didn’t get a cab right away. Every cab that went by already had someone in it, and although there’s a shortage of cabs here, so they often pick up a second fare when they’ve already got a first one, with four of us only an empty cab would have stopped. We finally gave up, and Marien and Jamie started to walk back to campus on the assumption that Jingjing and I would get a cab more easily by ourselves. And then, of course, one came along immediately, and we had the driver pick up Jamie and Marien as well.
Back at Jamie’s apartment -- cake and ice cream. :) The bakery had provided a gizmo that opened up into a Chinese lotus flower with a little candle on each petal, and played a tinny “Happy Birthday.” Jingjing added a Chinese verse to the singing, and a good time was had by all.
There are pictures, but they’re not on my camera, so I’ll have to wait to post them.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that in nicer restaurants, the wait staff (whether one person or several, like tonight) stands by the table while you peruse the menu and decide what to order. Tonight we had three foreigners (besides Jamie and me there was Marien, who is from the Netherlands and teaches English here) and Jingjing, who is from Yulin and is a senior English major at the university.
The head waiter gave us a sheet of paper with dozens of things to choose from that we would eventually cook in the hot pot, and with Jingjing facilitating we chose:
mushrooms
beef (very thin slices)
mutton (ditto)
tofu
lettuce
potato slices
sweet potato slices (but pale, not like ours)
2 kinds of noodles (lucky, for birthday celebrations)
fish balls
quail eggs
chicken eggs
We were each given a small bowl with a peanuty sauce in it, plus there were little plates of condiments to add to the sauce: chopped cilantro, chopped scallions (or something similar), a red sauce, and a green sauce. We also added some broth from both sides of the hot pot to our dipping bowls and stirred everything together.
Tea was brought (which is only automatic in nicer restaurants, oddly enough given the custom in Chinese restaurants at home), and we also had Sprite and beer.
The items we had ordered came several at a time, and we put two or three kinds of things in the hot pot at once. One kind of noodle looked like spaghetti (but didn't taste like it), and one was a translucent, wide, flat, chewy potato-based noodle that I’ve been fed a bunch of times here and like a lot. Noodles were saved for next to last, just before the chicken eggs.
As you can imagine, this meal went on for a long time, until we were all too full for another bite.
Back outside, for the first time since I’ve been here we didn’t get a cab right away. Every cab that went by already had someone in it, and although there’s a shortage of cabs here, so they often pick up a second fare when they’ve already got a first one, with four of us only an empty cab would have stopped. We finally gave up, and Marien and Jamie started to walk back to campus on the assumption that Jingjing and I would get a cab more easily by ourselves. And then, of course, one came along immediately, and we had the driver pick up Jamie and Marien as well.
Back at Jamie’s apartment -- cake and ice cream. :) The bakery had provided a gizmo that opened up into a Chinese lotus flower with a little candle on each petal, and played a tinny “Happy Birthday.” Jingjing added a Chinese verse to the singing, and a good time was had by all.
There are pictures, but they’re not on my camera, so I’ll have to wait to post them.
Friday, 19 February 2010
Yulin: The Organ Grinder's Monkey
Jamie said that Yulin would be different from Beijing, and guess what, it is. It is a different landscape, for one thing, but right now I want to talk about how people react to us.
Early on in his stay in Yulin, Jamie wrote that on the street he sometimes feels like he’s a on display rather than being seen as a real human being -- I called it being the organ grinder’s monkey. Now I’m seeing it first-hand every time we go out in public.
In Beijing, even in the neighborhood of our hotel where there were hardly any other foreigners around, people didn’t pay much attention to us. Beijing is a city of 15 million people, so I suppose they’re urban/urbane and absorbed in their own bustle. Sometimes people gazed, but they really didn’t seem all that interested in us. Sometimes they were a little surprised that Jamie spoke Chinese, but even that didn’t cause much of a stir. Once, in the place where we ate most of our breakfasts, I attempted to say “thank you” in Chinese, and even though it’s a hard word because it has a sound that we don’t have at all in English, the young man behind the counter laughed and said (in Chinese) that my Chinese was very good. (That is not the consensus opinion.)
Here in Yulin we get stared at constantly. We went into a little fast food joint one day (imitation Western food; I’d much rather eat local food but we couldn’t find anything open because of the holiday), and the young folks in the booth behind us laughed out loud. Later I nodded and said hi to them and they were perfectly friendly; the staring doesn’t seemed to be hostile, because every time I’ve smiled at or spoken to someone I get a friendly response. In the grocery store one day, I had a few moments of rare separation from Jamie when I waited in the produce section with our vegies (you have to have them wrapped and weighed before you leave the section), and he went off to grab something else that also needed to be weighed. Three women who worked in the store were just standing around staring at me, so I said “ni hao” (“hi” in Chinese), and that set them all smiling and talking to me a mile a minute, and of course I couldn’t understand any of it, except that I caught the word “mama,” which, amazingly enough, means “mother.” I tried to say (in Chinese) that I don’t speak Mandarin, but either they didn’t understand my pronunciation, or they didn’t really take it in, because they kept right on talking. When Jamie came back we were able to have a little conversation that mostly consisted of saying hello and Happy New Year. Elsewhere in the store a man with a little boy in tow said “Happy New Year” (in English) and we returned the greeting and everyone smiled and that was nice.
One day on a walk we ran into an elderly man Jamie knows, a retired farmer who lives around here and walks very slowly with a cane, and with him I had a nice little chat with Jamie’s help as interpreter. He asked me what I think of China so far and I said that it’s amazing and interesting and that I have so many impressions I can’t even sort them out. He was very sweet, as are all the older folks we’ve talked with, mostly meaning the men at the guard house near Jamie’s building, who are just tickled that his mother is here.
On the day of Spring Festival we walked to the nearby shopping district. We were about to cross a street when a guy stopped his van, rolled down his window, said “Hello” in English, then asked Jamie in Chinese why he hadn’t gone home for the holidays. Jamie shrugged and said his mother had come here. That seemed to satisfy the man, who then said “Happy New Year” in English and drove off. He was a complete stranger.
Sometimes people say “hello” and just laugh. I have to battle a tendency to be offended or alarmed by this, but Jamie told me a story about being in the park one day and having a young couple who were walking near him look at him and talk and laugh. Since Jamie, unlike me, can understand Chinese, he was able to pick up that they were laughing because neither one wanted to be the brave one and try to speak to him in English. So their laughter was at themselves, not at him.
I am working on my own reaction to the staring. If I’m tired and crabby, I tend to keep my eyes down so I don’t see it and therefore have nothing to react to. If I have more mental energy, I tend to greet some people and not others. Sometimes they look away, sometimes they just keep staring, but far more often they get a big smile and say hi back. Not infrequently, someone will walk by us, staring, and then when we’re out of eyeshot and walking in opposite directions, say “Hello” -- usually with a laugh. I’m not sure what this is about, and I keep fighting the tendency to do a little mind-reading. The smiles and greetings that usually come when I say hi help with that.
Thinking of home - without a doubt, people who look “different” (by any number of measures) can get treated oddly or offensively in the U.S., and probably everywhere else on earth. On the other hand, in a lot of the U.S. these days the population is so diverse that though there is always the potential for a reaction to someone “different from me,” there’s no way to define “different from ‘all the rest of us’” because “all the rest of us” are a crazy quilt from everywhere. In China, it’s still overwhelmingly Chinese people, and it seems like it will be a very long time before that changes, if it ever does. Especially in a frontier outpost like Yulin.
Early on in his stay in Yulin, Jamie wrote that on the street he sometimes feels like he’s a on display rather than being seen as a real human being -- I called it being the organ grinder’s monkey. Now I’m seeing it first-hand every time we go out in public.
In Beijing, even in the neighborhood of our hotel where there were hardly any other foreigners around, people didn’t pay much attention to us. Beijing is a city of 15 million people, so I suppose they’re urban/urbane and absorbed in their own bustle. Sometimes people gazed, but they really didn’t seem all that interested in us. Sometimes they were a little surprised that Jamie spoke Chinese, but even that didn’t cause much of a stir. Once, in the place where we ate most of our breakfasts, I attempted to say “thank you” in Chinese, and even though it’s a hard word because it has a sound that we don’t have at all in English, the young man behind the counter laughed and said (in Chinese) that my Chinese was very good. (That is not the consensus opinion.)
Here in Yulin we get stared at constantly. We went into a little fast food joint one day (imitation Western food; I’d much rather eat local food but we couldn’t find anything open because of the holiday), and the young folks in the booth behind us laughed out loud. Later I nodded and said hi to them and they were perfectly friendly; the staring doesn’t seemed to be hostile, because every time I’ve smiled at or spoken to someone I get a friendly response. In the grocery store one day, I had a few moments of rare separation from Jamie when I waited in the produce section with our vegies (you have to have them wrapped and weighed before you leave the section), and he went off to grab something else that also needed to be weighed. Three women who worked in the store were just standing around staring at me, so I said “ni hao” (“hi” in Chinese), and that set them all smiling and talking to me a mile a minute, and of course I couldn’t understand any of it, except that I caught the word “mama,” which, amazingly enough, means “mother.” I tried to say (in Chinese) that I don’t speak Mandarin, but either they didn’t understand my pronunciation, or they didn’t really take it in, because they kept right on talking. When Jamie came back we were able to have a little conversation that mostly consisted of saying hello and Happy New Year. Elsewhere in the store a man with a little boy in tow said “Happy New Year” (in English) and we returned the greeting and everyone smiled and that was nice.
One day on a walk we ran into an elderly man Jamie knows, a retired farmer who lives around here and walks very slowly with a cane, and with him I had a nice little chat with Jamie’s help as interpreter. He asked me what I think of China so far and I said that it’s amazing and interesting and that I have so many impressions I can’t even sort them out. He was very sweet, as are all the older folks we’ve talked with, mostly meaning the men at the guard house near Jamie’s building, who are just tickled that his mother is here.
On the day of Spring Festival we walked to the nearby shopping district. We were about to cross a street when a guy stopped his van, rolled down his window, said “Hello” in English, then asked Jamie in Chinese why he hadn’t gone home for the holidays. Jamie shrugged and said his mother had come here. That seemed to satisfy the man, who then said “Happy New Year” in English and drove off. He was a complete stranger.
Sometimes people say “hello” and just laugh. I have to battle a tendency to be offended or alarmed by this, but Jamie told me a story about being in the park one day and having a young couple who were walking near him look at him and talk and laugh. Since Jamie, unlike me, can understand Chinese, he was able to pick up that they were laughing because neither one wanted to be the brave one and try to speak to him in English. So their laughter was at themselves, not at him.
I am working on my own reaction to the staring. If I’m tired and crabby, I tend to keep my eyes down so I don’t see it and therefore have nothing to react to. If I have more mental energy, I tend to greet some people and not others. Sometimes they look away, sometimes they just keep staring, but far more often they get a big smile and say hi back. Not infrequently, someone will walk by us, staring, and then when we’re out of eyeshot and walking in opposite directions, say “Hello” -- usually with a laugh. I’m not sure what this is about, and I keep fighting the tendency to do a little mind-reading. The smiles and greetings that usually come when I say hi help with that.
Thinking of home - without a doubt, people who look “different” (by any number of measures) can get treated oddly or offensively in the U.S., and probably everywhere else on earth. On the other hand, in a lot of the U.S. these days the population is so diverse that though there is always the potential for a reaction to someone “different from me,” there’s no way to define “different from ‘all the rest of us’” because “all the rest of us” are a crazy quilt from everywhere. In China, it’s still overwhelmingly Chinese people, and it seems like it will be a very long time before that changes, if it ever does. Especially in a frontier outpost like Yulin.
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