I JUST GOT CHASED BY DOUCHE AT THE MALL!

So it's Friday afternoon here and since our regular classes were canceled today Jessica and I thought it would be a good day to take a taxi out to Carrefour to buy some foreign products (mostly just cheese and gin). Walking through an underground mall area to get to the entrance we encountered a promotional display and several pretty ladies in uniforms giving out samples and information. We couldn't tell what the product was, aside from noting that its English name was "Gayo", but I spied two figures costumed as what appeared to be giant white lotion dispensers about 30 feet away. Jessica thought they were just inflated parachute-material displays, but I was certain they were interacting, and sure enough, as we got closer, we saw that they were trying, as much as their immobility-inducing Michelin Man-esque suits would allow them, to chest-butt each other. Obviously, I was delighted by this, and stopped to chuckle and point. Big mistake. Turning around, one of the figures spotted me and started towards me with all the bumbling grace of an astronaut in low gravity. I, naturally, started backing away. The bottle picked up speed and began bounding towards me. I turned, giggling nervously and began to walk away. The bottle continued its pursuit. Jessica had moved away from me a little on realizing that I had become a target. I kept walking, looking back to realize that the bottle was closing in, and was now close enough for me to decipher the elegant cursive on its abdomen reading: "GAYO Feminine Wash".

But why was the douche still pursuing me? I didn't understand. I don't mind a good-natured chest-butt now and then, but would I be required to buy douche afterwards? I started to run, and easily created a safe distance between us. Once we rounded a corner Jessica and I nearly collapsed in hysterics, and I barely managed to choke out "I just got chased by douche", over and over again.

So yeah, maybe I shouldn't have given the punchline away so quickly, but it was quite the way to start an afternoon.

SOMETHING TO PONDER

As I was riding my bike to school today through the hutong* (胡同) I was interrupted in my daily apprehension of the battle for smell supremacy between the public toilet and the street stall of baked goods (wherein I wonder whether feces will triumph over sugary muffins or if they will continue to commingle in an eternal stinkfest). I recalled a sight from last weekend's errand running that had shocked and distressed me. It seriously 引起了我的震惊, if you know what I mean.

Waiting for Jessica at the grocery store on Sunday I saw a young Chinese man wearing a purple camouflage hoodie with large letters printed on the front spelling out RAPE. I first tried to get Jessica's attention to ascertain whether she was left similarly speechless by the sight, but when I could not, I just stood and stared and wondered. What possible reason could there be for this item of clothing to exist? Here are a few I have considered:

A) It is an intentionally transgressive statement about war and sexual violence [see also Mackinnon 1990; Enloe 2003]

B) It was intended to read "GRAPE" but is missing a G / intended to read "RAP" but with an extra E.

C) It was produced and retailed by a native English speaker who likes to play sick jokes.

D) It was intended as consciousness-raising technique. This isn't as far out as you might imagine. A classmate and I in Ann Arbor were once aghast to see a young man wearing a t-shirt that read "I heart Michigan vaginas", but it turned out to be promoting a rape crisis hot line (although, come to think of it, that still doesn't entirely explain the sentiment).

E) It is an intentionally transgressive statement about consumerism and the plunder of natural resources.

Geez, I don't know. I'm so confused. Maybe a nice massage would help...

Probably not. Yes, this is for what you think it is for. This sort of business card gets left stuck in the door to our place every few weeks or so, along with the endless take-out menus for Korean food or pizza with really strange toppings (mayonnaise, bulgogi, or peaches anyone?). We generally pass them on to 丁丁(Ding Ding) and 继磊 (Peter)，our classmates and neighbors in an adjacent building with an unexplained deficit of call girl flyers.

*a hutong is an old narrow alleyway lined with one-story brick buildings. It is the traditional type of housing in Beijing, but the majority have been razed to make way for wider streets and newer, taller buildings. They are now mostly home to Beijing's poorest residents and are sometimes used as shortcuts from the traffic-clogged, exhaust-polluted streets.

XI'AN - 西安

School field trips are awesome and much too rare. How come we never get to have them in graduate school? (I'm not counting last year's jaunt to Nashville, Indiana, though the company couldn't be beat). Although our trip was kind of disorganized and rushed and included only one night in Xi'an, being able to walk/wobble through the train cars and see almost all of my fellow students and our teachers and administrators, eating noodles, drinking beer, playing Uno, or just shooting the shit with random Chinese folks was an event of its own. Also, I got to see the freaking Terracotta Army! NEAT!

I wish I had more historically relevant material on the 兵马佣 (bing ma yong), but I'm sure you can all find that yourself. What I can give you is some exciting first-hand pictures. I'm sure this won't have been the first time any of you have ever see Emperor Qin's Army of Terracotta Warriors, but who knew they were housed in what appears to be a giant Olympic Swimming Stadium? I honestly kind of expected that they were still underground like the Egyptian tombs I visited in Cairo a long time ago.

There are indeed thousands of them, most still buried, and it's true what they say about how every single human figure and horse is different from every other - different facial expressions, physicality, hairstyle, etcetera. It really is, as an older American gentleman near me whispered into the microphone of his camcorder as he slowly, slowly, slowly panned across the length of the hall: "truly incredible". I pity his poor family and friends. They've got an awfully slow ride ahead of them.

The whole place also had a very distinct smell, rather like you would expect an old, cold, pottery studio to smell, but still surprising to encounter.

Here are some of the still partially buried figures, notable not only for their archaeological value and for illustrating how much work has already gone into reconstruction, but also for their rich metaphorical content, seeming to emerge from the clay all crumbling, broken, and headless.

I'd make a terrible historian as I am far too mushy-headed to labor over careful analyses of dynastic balances of power and would much rather ruminate over the magnificent creepiness of this great monument to human pride and cruelty. The most affecting part of seeing the Terracotta Army for me was the way all these thousands of soldiers, representing who knows how many thousands of hours of labor all faced forwards, marching ahead in place towards nothing at all, towards a stone wall...

There is of course a great intimacy with history that you cannot escape in such a place, and here that history includes the tragic and macabre stories of those craftsmen and horses who built the army and were buried alive with it. This may be one reason why the place is so compelling and affecting, but I think that regardless of whether you know anything about the history of the site (and I know very little), both its sheer scale and all those careful renderings of soldiers in battle formation give some sense of the futility of war and empire and man's desire for immortality. Or something like that.

Damn. Leave it to the Chinese to construct elaborate conceptual art in the guise of burial grandeur more than 2,000 years ahead of its time!

I don't remember what I was thinking here -perhaps considering the possibility of a Terracotta Warrior Halloween costume or wondering if someone nearby had a nip of whiskey for me?

Aside from the three main pits, there was also a modest museum on the grounds, as well as some warriors removed from the rest to enable a closer look.

Having arrived in the morning, we spent several hours enjoying the halls and exhibits and were then delivered to a dismal lunch of bleached rice and wheat products, fatty starchy meat, and oily vegetables. Our next stop was the Huaqing Pools 花清池, a favorite retreat for Tang dynasty-era emperors and their concubines.

Unfortunately I didn't understand much of what the guide was saying and the pools themselves were rather unimpressive looking without the historical background.

The scenery was nice though.

And the adjacent Huaqing gardens, constructed somewhere in the 1930s, were tranquil in a very typical Chinese way, a style which I might add, is complemented perfectly by ice cream.

From the pools, we were shepherded back to the actual city of Xi'an, which is some distance from the Terracotta Army but holds its own draws. Though probably half the size of Beijing, Xi'an is a massive city, and a surprisingly pleasant one at that. With a population almost equal to that of New York, it has a flashy downtown with lots of upscale housing, shopping,

and, from the looks of it, an exciting night life:


The phrase at the bottom of the sign reads "Friend-making clubhouse at half past eight". Unfortunately I never got around to taking a picture of the "Hot Dance Club" near our hotel, and worse, I never got to go.

One of my classmates made the apt comparison that Xi'an is a little like the Chicago of China. It doesn't get as much attention as the coast but has a glorious history and a lot to offer and always seems to be the exception made when the center of the country is written off as backward and boring. It is also the capital of the province of Shaanxi and the best part of it.

And now, because I am lazy, an excerpt from Lonely Planet China:

For more than two millennia, over a dozen dynasties rose and fell in Shaanxi... Two centuries before Homer penned the Iliad and the Odyssey (and Rome was founded), five centuries prior to the Buddha's enlightenment, Xi'an was already a classic world city.

The old city wall still stands solidly in the center of the city and we were taken there to explore a little on our own when we got back into town.

It is actually possible to bicycle all the way around the wall, which would have been fun, but there wasn't really time. So we just wandered around.

We saw these huge kites in a few places in Xi'an. They went on for ages and rose impressively high into the sky, looking quite beautiful and a little lonely.

Here are my dear classmates Mo Ran/摸然/Bernie and Ding Ding/丁丁/Michael hanging out at the wall. I have no idea what the hell they are doing in this photo, but don't they look like charming fellows?

For dinner, Jessica and I made our way to the Muslim quarter with a few other classmates. This was her fifth visit to Xi'an and so I elected her tour leader for all times that we were not with the group. She took us to a Xinjiang restaurant on this street, 北院门 (bei yuan men) which had some of the best food I've had since coming to China: perfectly spiced noodles, garlicky naan-like bread, lamb skewers for the meat eaters and a few other things I devoured in hungry haste and cannot now remember.

We went back to the same restaurant for lunch the next day and spent more time exploring the street and nearby areas. The night before had been the first day of Ramadan and as we wandered down the market alleyways we kept running into a cluster composed mostly of men and children who would set upon a table prepared with food, devour it with much gusto and noise and then quickly move on to the next. I have no idea what the significance of it was, but it was apparent everyone was having a grand old time.

It was nice to get the cultural experiences out of the way though, so we could spend the next afternoon doing a little consuming.

No, I didn't buy any birds.

Nor did I buy any calligraphy brushes, but don't they look appealing?

We did spend quite a while at the dried fruit market where we found some natural, unsulphured pineapples, dates, persimmons, kiwis, apricots, and mysterious others. We also saw a rather nasty fight break out between a few of the vendors and spread to a larger group. As far as we saw only guy ended up with a badly swollen face but we didn't stick around to watch.

I dropped a couple of hundred RMB at this teashop overlooking the fruit market. I bought another nice fat brick of Pu'er like I did the first time I visited a tea shop in China, but this time I got to talk teas with the shopkeeper (who Jessica knew from a previous visit) and not rely on a translator. We lingered tasting jasmine pearls, oolongs, white bai hao, lychee black tea, flowering peonies, and chatting with our small friend here in the yellow sweater. Small children in China get bundled up in padded clothes in the winter and it causes them to waddle around like tiny, cushioned linebackers. I wish they made those quilted clothes in my size. I could have used them on the train ride home...

JUST FOR FUN!

Here are some pictures of the view out my bedroom window with and without pollution. The first is a pretty average day, the second a late afternoon just after a good rain. Pollution is bad. Seeing mountains is good. I could spit out a bunch of scary statistics about air quality in China, but then that wouldn't be much fun, would it?

After midterms tomorrow the school is taking us on a trip to Xi'an to see the terracotta warriors (all 6,000 of them!).

We are taking overnight trains in both directions and I am much looking forward to a couple good nights of train sleep and Chinese dreams. There will be a full report upon my return.

MISADVENTURES IN (Inner) MONGOLIA

Arriving at the airport on Saturday we discovered that our ticket for 内蒙古 had been misprinted and that our flight left from another airport. There wasn't time to make it so we changed our tickets to fly out two days later and tried to make the best of it by making a trip to the nearby IKEA instead. We had a hard time explaining to the taxi driver where we wanted to go as neither of us knew the Chinese name, but we knew it was just off the freeway and tried to describe the big blue building full of foreign furniture. "That's not a foreign company!" the driver insisted.

Once there we bought some stuff, observed the Chinese middle-class planning their children's bedrooms, poked bedding, and ate salmon. We spent our extra day puttering around the house, having a classmate over for dinner, and enjoying English-language music. Before we knew it it was time to go to the airport again.

It came as a surprise that much of Inner Mongolia looks a lot like Nebraska.

Hohhot (pronounced Huhehaote in Chinese) is a sleepy little city by Chinese standards, but still bustling and chaotic.

We spent the afternoon walking around and I became slightly obsessed with this eagle above the main square and with the fantastical towers on the skyscraper behind it. Much of the town was quite dreary, as we had expected.

This was the view from the back of our hotel.

For some reason, there were billiard tables outside all over the city. Usually there were young men playing pool at them, but I was too embarrassed to ask if I could take their picture and found an unused pair instead.

As with everywhere else in China, there were many small and large clusters of old men hanging out, smoking, and playing mah-jong, and lots of small dogs hoping someone had dropped some food nearby. [You can't quite see it from this angle, but the one dude had a tricked-out wheelchair/bicycle thing, I guess so that somebody else could drive him around]

There were also a lot of these tricycle vans around. I don't know why.

In the evening we met up with four other classmates who had arrived the day before and ate dumplings at a restaurant with private rooms with such intriguing signs on the doors as these.

I think you can guess where I would have liked to go.

The next afternoon we all boarded a minibus to take us out to the caoyuan (grasslands). The drive was pretty.

Sorry to give you a seizure, but I really like these blurry action shots.

Jessica and I had wanted to go further out, but our classmates booked the trip and so we ended up in this yurt village. We didn't much like it.

Lunch was awful, and dinner was not improved by the beheading of a roast lamb in front of an enthusiastic audience of Chinese tourists. The facilities were repellent and led us all to limit our fluid intake so we could avoid using them. The yurt was not only lacking the Romantic Qing Cheng we had hoped for, but was dirtier than we had expected. The wholesale butchering of traditional Mongolian culture (a shot of baijiu, or 'white spirit' as we arrived, wrestling at 6pm and karaoke by Han Chinese in gaudy costumes after dinner) was less offensive than just plain silly. Also, it was cold. I decided against riding the horses as they were much too skinny and were almost certainly mistreated by their handlers. They all looked like sad little Eeyores.

While our classmates went riding Jessica and I went walking for a few hours on the grasslands, which were lovely and immensely peaceful. I took in big gulps of the clean, sweet air and looked across the horizon for things to explore.

We found some sheep.

And walked up the tallest hill to figure out what this was.

It seemed to be a stone temple of some sort -- those are Tibetan prayer flags on top. It was all very stark and beautiful. We sat on the rocky soil and felt the cool wind blow. I wanted to whistle a little but Jessica hates it so I was quiet.

The next morning we were up at 6 for another unsatisfying meal (in which we thought we identified the lamb from the previous evening), departing for the desert around 7:30. The light was soft and warm on the mountains.

A little after 9 I was roused from a drowsy sleep to the guide telling us we were stopping in a village for a quick stretch and toilet break. As most of us were waking slowly there was a sudden flash of movement and some shouting and commotion and then suddenly the realization that the van had just sideswiped a family on a motorbike. The van stopped. We all turned in horror to see the mother off the bike, face contorted in fury and pain while the father and daughter were astride the bike which was lying on its side on the road (which thankfully was dirt and not concrete). The little girl was crying and obviously in shock, but she and the father both seemed okay. We were all incredibly relieved that everyone got up okay and that there seemed to be no major injuries.

The driver and guide got out of the van right away and began arguing with the injured family. Almost immediately, a crowd of 15 to 20 villagers gathered around. At first we all stayed in the van, thinking the presence of foreigners would only worsen the situation, but after 10 minutes or so we slunk out and tried to make ourselves scarce. We saw the driver offer a stack of money to the family but it was rejected. Shouting and arguing went on for another 10 or 15 minutes as we slipped off to a nearby field for toilet breaks, admired the tranquil scenery, and tried to take it all in.

Suddenly a car drove up and a handful of men from the group pushed and shoved our driver and guide in. We all got a bit freaked out, but were helpless to do anything but watch. The driver and guide demanded to be let out of the car and began arguing with the group again, but then three of the local men forcefully shoved the driver back in again. We didn't know what the hell was going on, and we didn't like it. It looked an awful lot like our driver was getting taken away to get beaten up and suddenly the whole world felt a lot more menacing and unsafe. We sent the two best Chinese speakers as emissaries from our group to investigate the situation. By talking to some of the villagers and to the Korean family that was sharing the van with us we learned that the driver had been taken to the hospital where the family was going. The guide had talked his way out of it since he technically was not involved, but as he couldn't drive he spent the next quarter of an hour making calls on his cell to find a new driver. Eventually a motorcycle arrived carrying the new driver and we all piled back in and headed to the local hospital.

At the hospital we waited for the girl and her mother to be treated, and then stood around as a few of the men from the village crouched in a semi-circle outside the hospital to negotiate with our driver and guide. The hospital expenses had been about 60 USD and the bike repair was expected to be much less, but the family was asking for a lot more, about 400 USD, or roughly a year's salary in the countryside or a month's salary in the city. Around 1:30pm they finally settled and relations suddenly became amicable, even friendly. Half of our group went exploring the town in search of food and we all devoured it hungrily. We got to the sand dunes quite late and with much diminished enthusiasm, but were all in agreement that the experience, though distressing and unpleasant, had been, sociologically speaking, very interesting to witness, and seemed to have ended as well as was possible.

The dunes:

The camels:

I couldn't resist a camel-top view and a brief trot out on the sands...

Nor could I turn down the opportunity to go sand-sliding. This is my classmate Leslie starting out down the very steep hill. It was fast and fun, even though I wiped out about 25 feet from the bottom and had to run/roll down the rest of the way.

We got back to Hohhot in the early evening, exhausted. Because the trip had been, well, a bit sucky, and because we knew there was work to be done before the weekend was out, Jessica and I decided to change our tickets and fly back the next day. We arrived safely in Beijing yesterday evening, and, surprisingly and happily, it felt like home.

Postscript: Returning to school on Monday I asked a classmate about his holiday in a village in Guizhou distributing books collected by the Yale Book Club to local children. He spoke of poisonous snakes, a corpse in the river, pigs being slaughtered during dinner, and seeing a headless chicken knock over a dish of its own drained blood. He totally wins.