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.

I'M AN ALIEN, I'M A LEGAL ALIEN

It feels kind of old-school to be in a place where in lieu of the panopticon and broad internalization of state and social controls, you simply have the very interested eyes of the state following your every move. I have had to hand over no less than 12 passport-sized photos to various authorities since I got here and it kind of creeps me out that there are tiny images of my face in files all over the city. This week finally saw the completion of registration with the Chinese authorities and the attainment of an "X" visa, a process with a mind-boggling number of steps which our welcome booklet from school devoted a full seven pages to explaining. I have found myself thinking a lot about Milan Kundera's books lately and the way they described life in Czechoslovakia under socialism. There is something very vulgar and yet so commonplace about state intrusion into personal matters that he captures very well.

If this feeling was slight at first, it was put in boldface by the physical exam segment of the registration process. Visitors staying in China for more than 6 months must all pass a physical exam and in Beijing this is administered by the Sanitary and Quarantine Office, which in classic China-style is only open from 8am till 10:30am, Monday through Friday. Thus the week before school started, all the foreign students had to spend a morning crowded into a small waiting room which doubled as a processing area. We could easily overhear the nurses doing short health interviews, which mostly seemed to involve asking us loudly if we had syphilis. That was my first hint that the privacy and confidentiality taken for granted in the U.S. wasn't really done here.

After they took our forms, passport-sized photos, and cash, we entered a large room with about eight doors leading to smaller rooms where we had our blood pressure taken, heart listened to, height and weight tabulated, and blood drawn, all with open doors and lines of foreigners leading into them. I really cannot stress enough how strange it is to be in a line with strangers from around the world, holding a vial that will soon be filled with your own blood, and how effectively it makes you feel like China's bitch.

My roommate Jessica was with me at the Quarantine Office, and as usual, made the ordeal infinitely more bearable with her wicked and wry sense of humor. At this point we had known each other for less than ten days, but I was already very familiar with her "I can't believe this crap" expression, glimpsing it on her face as I entered the ECG room as she was exiting and she grumbled "you're gonna have to show em your titties." And indeed I did, being ushered in and directed to the table, told to lie down and remove my shirt and bra, fitted with plastic electrode thingies, given a print-out of my heartbeat, and sent on my way. It couldn't have taken more than 45 seconds and was so impersonal and awkward that we were all a little dazed as we proceeded downstairs for our chest x-ray.


At the final processing point we tried to turn in the ECG print-out, but were told that it was a 'gift' for us to keep. Wow, thanks!

Anyway, it is all done now, and now I have this:


Good thing too, since I'm boarding a plane in a couple of hours for Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. No, I haven't gotten in trouble with the police, but next week is a national holiday and we wanted to take a little trip. Since a couple other hundred million people had the same idea, we weren't able to book tickets for our first choice, Chengdu, where legend (and the Lonely Planet guide) has it, you can hold a panda (yes, HOLD a freaking PANDA!) for about seven U.S. dollars. Anything comes a distant second choice to that, but we are quite looking forward to grasslands and yurts.

And don't worry, finances willing, panda holding has been rescheduled for February.

cat (and turtle) of the month

SCHOOL, SNOBS, AND STATE-APPROVED DISCOURSE (now censored!)

note: because I really don't want my IUP experience to turn all Harriet the Spy on me, I've taken the step of editing out or anonymizing certain identities in the following. Not that I don't have love for all of my classmates, but I just don't want to take the risk of anyone taking things the wrong way...

Tsinghua is one of the top two universities in China and its Chinese language program is both prestigious and grindingly tough, thus attracting snobs, nerds, and combinations thereof.

Ahem.

I favor my nerd side of course, and try desperately to suppress the part of me that wants "I went to the LSE" subtly tattooed on my face, but I like to think this is mostly reactive. Sometimes you need to pull out the big guns to make jerks take you seriously or, less cynically, sometimes you need to employ shorthand that signals your capabilities. Do I wish I lived in a world where I didn't need that? Yes. Am I happy to be going to one of the best universities in China? Abso-frickin-lutely.

My advisor attended this program as a grad student and since she recommended it I have planned and plotted to attend. In addition to whipping my Chinese into shape, my advisor also told me the program would be a good place to meet future colleagues since my department doesn't have any other anthropologists specializing on China. There are indeed a few other anthros here, though their topics are very different from mine. One woman I hung out with last week will be working with Chinese Muslims and got her first subscription to the American Anthropological Association when she was 14. Most of my classmates, however, are doing more of a political science or history sort of thing.

In total there are about 45 students in the program, approximately 65/35 male/female and probably 80% graduate students, the remainder being post-undergrads and "unaffiliated scholars". Most are from fancypants Ivy League schools and they want you to know about it. Yale, Stanford and Harvard are all well-represented on my classmates t-shirts and schoolbags, and I cringe and giggle inwardly whenever I see one guy wearing his Stanford flip-flops.

Although it is a very clique-ish place, I hope to do some infiltrating and get on good terms with everyone, not only for the sake of politics, but also because I truly want to understand how people from various social groups understand themselves: how they view their own position and purpose in society, and how they justify their place in a very unequal world. We all have to decide on or negotiate a position that allows us to live our daily lives without thinking overly about our social positions vis-a-vis others, allowing us to say, buy a new t-shirt or electronic device instead of donating the same money to fight malnutrition or elect non-bastards. I've done plenty of this myself, but I also don't ever wish to live a life of luxury and don't know how other people can. I imagine their justifications, conscious or not, to be far more elaborate, but I haven't really spent much time with the moneyed class and really I'm just very curious.

Research specimen A I shall refer to as "Loafers", on account of his habit of wearing soft calfskin footwear (sans socks) in colors such as eggplant and chocolate, whilst wearing an expression that can only be called louche. The first time I met the young Loafers, a recent Princeton graduate, we were all in the midst of apartment hunting and he told my roommate and I that he wasn't staying at the (very nice) $40/night hotel the school had booked for us because "he wanted to stay somewhere decent". I never would have believed that such a person existed outside of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, but now I totally hope we're going to hang out.

Moving to urban China, where reality, in the form of harsh smells, traffic, filth, rudeness, and lots of hacking and spitting, comes at you full force, seems a strange choice for rich, privileged kids so very out of touch with it. One of my classmates is a very sweet girl who was initially going to be one of my roommates. She grew up on Park Avenue and told me her father had given her a lecture on real estate investment when she was eleven. She never received a lesson on operating spray bottles however, as I had to teach her to turn the nozzle on the windex 90 degrees in order to wash her windows (which she had also never done).

She's still a capable girl though, and in a few months will be doing Fulbright research in Sichuan Province on government-sponsored Han Chinese migration, similar to that in Tibet, but the subject of far less popular or scholarly attention. Before my friend could get her proposal past the Chinese review board, however, she was instructed to change the term "settlers" to read "brave pioneers".

This seemed absurd to me when I first heard it, but the passage of a few weeks has made me more accustomed to sanitized statements and less aware of the absence of internal political critique. Much of this occurred during the first week and a half here when we were taking taxis all over the place to look at apartments, buy stuff, and get to school. Drivers often relished an opportunity to rant about Bush and to criticize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but if we tried to chime in, we were inevitably asked how we could dislike our president when we were Americans and he was our president.

Uhhhhh....

One evening our taxi just barely missed hitting someone who had just abandoned a scooter in the middle of the road in order to flee on foot from the pursuing police. All us foreigners were freaked out and confused by the scene, but the driver shrugged it off, saying simply: "If he was a good person, why would the police be chasing him?"

I've heard so much more that taxes, vexes, or simply paralyzes my poor brain. I really should devote a whole post to my textbook, which so far has explained to me that class has almost disappeared in modern China and that female infanticide is just an occasional, admittedly unfortunate, side effect of population control policy. You can imagine that my teacher was not overly impressed when, during a presentation, I brought up the issue of forced sterilization in the countryside, and only slightly mollified when I said "in the past, of course, not any more".

Give me about another 9 months of this and I too will be able to write up a proposal that will pass Party review!

COUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

My new apartment in Beijing is the swankiest and most luxurious place I've ever lived. We're talking security guards, underground garages (for bikes too!), marble-topped tables, and all that is shiny and new. Witness:

We're about halfway up.

Here is the living room. It is much brighter than this in actuality but the camera was being weird. The walls are still quite bare, but it'll get there.

These windows overlook the central courtyard for the complex, bordered on the other side by the dorms for the adjacent forestry college.

The dining area and the pitifully stocked bar are connected to the massive living room. It's a little overwhelming to have all of this space, especially since any time I'm not at home bodies and vehicles of varying kinds are always multitudinous and usually in too-close proximity.

Note the stainless steel cabinets and the Mark Siano Soft Rock Spectacular flyer on the fridge. Fancy AND timely!

The kitchen looks small here because we had to move the fridge into a strange position. It formerly occupied a small room of windows which lies between my roommate's bedroom and the outside (we think it was designed this way to enable supervision of children). Although we agreed that it would surely be quirky for me to be able to wave hello to Jessica studying at her desk while I was grabbing a beer, we also thought it might lead to her wanting to throttle me. This arrangement is much better.

The bathroom. Almost every "shower" in China is like this one. Its a little gross if you haven't grown up with it but it certainly makes it easy to keep the bathroom clean.

The ginormous hallway leading to my bedroom. All our shoes live in the fold-out cubbies on the left and we wear slippers around the house to keep out the city filth. All ye who plan to come visit best send me your shoe sizes.

My bedroom, which is clearly awesome. The windows overlook the manicured grounds of the Institute for Research on Semi-Conductors, as well as a lot of other tall buildings and construction cranes. Supposedly you can see the Summer Palace on clear days, but no word on when there might be one of those.

The Summer Palace isn't actually too far though. I took a cab there last weekend to go out on the lake with Vanessa's friend Oliver and some of his classmates. The group was a bit rowdy, perpetually trying to crash into other boats and even docking briefly for a beer run, but it was so pretty and pleasant that it didn't matter.

The boats:

(We had the green-topped kind that seated six)

The dock:

The setting sun:


[Sorry to disappoint, but this post doesn't actually contain any hidden dragons - I just thought it would be a better title than "The Scarlet Pleather."]

I'M SPEAKING CHINESE (sometimes with tones even) !!!

Remember that scene in What About Bob? where Bill Murray is tied to the mast of the sailboat and screaming "I'M SAILING!" with obvious delight? When my studies are going well, I sometimes feel a lot like that.

Come to think of it, my teacher is also a strong advocate of taking 'baby steps'. Are there any other my life/Bob Wiley parallels that I should know about?

ICH BIN EIN BEIJINGER

Beijing isn't exactly the most welcoming city in the world but after one long, frenzied week I've got a little piece of it to call my own. The settling in will take a little while longer of course and I can't help but expect more complications. Modern China manages a remarkable combination of the bureaucratic excess of socialism and the rapaciousness of cutthroat capitalism so this last week has been a haze of filling in forms, waiting in lines, and trying to not get ripped off or involved in anything shady. I've been looking at apartments with a classmate while staying at the hotel closest to school and twice we actually checked out and stored our luggage, intending to move later that day, but both times the deal fell through. Third time's the charm I suppose, and we are starting to trust that we might actually stay in this new place. Although we ended up paying more than we had hoped and had to drop a roommate when we couldn't find any decent 3-bedrooms, the place we ended up in is excellent: on the 9th floor in a very new complex near a great neighborhood, huge, luxurious, and damn comfortable.

I wouldn't have thought of China as particularly energy consciousness, but surprisingly, many of the places we looked at this week had sound-activated lights in all the hallways. It seems that The Clapper is alive and well in China. You will be glad to know that the light outside our door responds not only to the clapping of hands and the stamping of feet but to burps of adequate volume. I think I'm going to like it here...

p.s. Turns out I can't view my blog from China but can still post to it. Your comments get sent to my e-mail address and I haven't yet figured out a way to respond to them, but please keep them up! I love thinking that I am writing to y'all directly rather than just posting to the vast and lonely interwebs.