学期的结束 (SEMESTER'S END)

Our final exams were held on Friday, thus ending my second semester of classes at IUP and marking the retirement of my very favorite notebook:

Here is the back-side:

Oh I do love me some bizarre Engrish translations! (even if this kind of sounds like it could have been spoken to General Stuharto by Vanessa)

I won't be shedding any tears over the passing of this semester. Honestly, it was a grueling one, and I wish I felt the gains I've made in Chinese were worth all the mental and physical exhaustion of the last weeks. It didn't help that there was only a one-day break between this semester and the last, and so all of us students are relishing the upcoming one-week vacation. Jessica and I are off to Chengdu, Sichuan on Sunday morning. Although it is a little cold there right now, I don't think I can wait much longer to see the Giant Panda Reserve. It seems it is prohibitively expensive (and really kind of foolhardy) to get close to a giant panda, but you can hold a red panda (aka "firefox"), as seen below, for a mere 6 dollars. I know it's kind of wrong, but I don't know if I will be able to resist...

新年快乐

I wasn't going to post on New Year's but there seems to be much curiosity among you as to whether and how the new year marked by the Western calendar is celebrated in China and so I will do my best to explain. In short, the traditional lunar calendar long used by the Chinese, has for practical purposes been eclipsed (ouch!) by the Judeo-Christian one most of us know and love. The Chinese New Year, celebrated in mid-winter (February 7th this year), is known here as the Spring Festival, and while it is a far more important holiday, both culturally and in terms of vacation time, it isn't the peak time for calendar sales.

January 1st is a National Holiday here, but it doesn't seem to have any of the weight or symbolism it does back in the states. There is no talk of resolutions or new beginnings and few fireworks or countdowns. The one thing that remains the same is that many people who normally wouldn't venture an intentionally humorous remark are all over the "see you next year" or "the chapter we studied last year" jokes.

As far as how it is celebrated, all I got from talking about it with my teachers and Chinese friends is that the evening is an opportunity to stay home and watch special programs on TV and the following day there are lots of sales at all the big department stores. Since I spent the evening out, I can tell you that the streets were generally as quiet as usual, aside from the foreigners who were determined to preserve their cultural heritage by getting batshit drunk and hitting on strangers (or fighting about Tibet, as Jessica discovered).

I spent the evening at a rock show, something I have been doing much more of recently. Jessica and I really wanted to see a couple of bands playing at the MAO livehouse and managed to drag our upstanding and scholarly friend Dan along with us.

The purpose of this picture was actually to capture the label of the beer I was drinking, a Chinese brand called SUPER COOL. Unfortunately, it was lost in the glare of my snarl. I took some pictures of the bands. None of them are particularly good, but they'll give you an idea.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were in town a few months ago and you can see Karen O's enormous influence on half of the female fronted bands in the city. The lead singer of this band, Queen Sea Big Shark overdoes it a bit, but they are still fun to watch.

This is Candy Monster. Their sound illustrates the second largest current influence on Beijing bands, which is, for some reason, the Strokes.

This is Hedgehog, who we had most wanted to see. They did not disappoint. The band is a tight little threesome with the most adorable drummer ever, hands down. She can't be more than 4'8", looks to be about 12, and plays like a monster. Unlike all the other punk rock kids in skinny jeans and stripes she wore a little lace-trimmed cardigan and mainlined Coca-cola. She looked like she was having so much fun that it made me believe in music all over again.

Like many popular Beijing bands, Hedgehog sings in English, although their lyrics are often mostly unintelligible. One of my favorite choruses, from the title track of their new album, has a simple message, delivered loudly: "we make noise!, noise hit world!"

We entered 2008 while Hedgehog was playing, but it was the first time I can remember that there wasn't a countdown of some kind. I missed it. I wondered if it would feel like the new year in the morning, once I knew that all my friends had celebrated, but it didn't really. I miss all the old rituals, small as they were. This holiday season has left me feeling rather disoriented, but with sights like these, can you blame me?

圣诞节快乐！

Teddy Bear Christmas tree from the Xizhimen Mall.

Although they have been randomly sighted all over Beijing all month, Christmas decorations appeared suddenly at school on the 24th, the day before our designated "Winter Solstice Holiday". Plastic trees were stood as sentries on all three floors of our campus and boxes of ornaments were left nearby so that we all had the chance to do a little decorating as we rushed between classes.

The teachers didn't really know what to do with the garlands, so they just kind of tossed them on to the trees in lumps.

There was even a wreath and a Santa stocking posted on the bulletin board. What kind of treats do you think can be found in Santa's brain?

(Jessica, who has a strong dislike of being in photographs, is extremely good at getting me to pose for very ridiculous ones.)

Christmas Eve was spent with sushi and a rock and roll show but most of Christmas Day was eaten up by homework and preparation for a speech I gave later in the week. I did take a couple of hours off to wander around the city, hoping I would find some amusing expressions of Beijingers' cheerily ambivalent attitude towards Christmas, or at least some babies in Santa hats. Nothing doing (note to China: Vietnam is SO ahead of you. Get some Santa hats on your babies, and pronto!). At least I was able to get something for everyone on my list at the Xidan bookstore:

And I did find this adorable child while wandering around Tiananmen:
I didn't really take any other pictures. Not only because I figured you had all seen enough iconic images of the giant Mao portrait at the gate to the Forbidden City, but because the lately the air has been so absolutely disgusting, that everything looks gray and dusty and the light is all weirdly refracted.

Here's a little comparison shot of central Beijing from thebeijinger.com:

According to the accompanying post, on a good day in Beijing the Air Pollution Index is between 50 and 150. Numbers over 300 trigger emergency health warnings and recommendations to just plain avoid going outdoors. Yesterday, we hit 421.

There is also a good article on the topic that was just posted on the New York Times website.

So that was Christmas. The 4th one I've spent outside of North America and undeniably the least exciting one yet. It did have its moments though, most notably the receipt of a large box of rad presents on Christmas Eve and attendance at a party hosted by the owners of these shoes:

NERDING OUT ON LANGUAGE (Part 1)

I've always been a huge fan of etymologies, but in English they are sometimes rather hard to track down. Why something is spelled a certain way and what its Latin root might have to do with that or to say about that is rarely apparent (though for the curious and diligent, there are great rewards to be reaped in discovering, via the OED, that 'science' derives from the same root as 'shit'). There is plenty of obscurity in Chinese when it comes to the original meanings and forms of characters, but there are also lots of compelling and often amusing etymologies built right in.

In English we have the term "to butter up", the meaning of which seems metaphorically intuitive and obvious to a native speaker but really, what the hell does an oily preparation have to do with achieving some alternate motive through flattery? Can anyone think of a good reason?

In class this week, I had to try to explain the similar Chinese term 拍马屁 (pai ma pi), or to "pat horse buttocks", to a classmate, who is perpetually doing exactly this in order to get at the delicious cougar snacks he knows I have stored in my locker. "Perhaps your neighbor has a new horse", I told him, "and you want something from him, or maybe just to build good relations with him, so when you see his new horse you pat the horse butt and say: "this horse is very attractive" or something like that. You do this because you have another goal in mind" (incredibly, in Chinese, this probably sounded even more ridiculous).

Another of my favorite Chinese phrases (set expressions called chengyu) came up this week in our readings. Although it simply means "not enough to go around", the Chinese term is so much better. How much do I wish that somewhere out there, some nouveau riche Chinese "Socialist" is surveying his party and saying aloud "gosh, I thought I bought enough cocaine and hookers, but it looks like I've got a real 'monks-many-porridge-few' (粥少僧多) situation on my hands?

Answer: a lot.

THE COUGAR DOMINATION PLEDGE DRIVE or, STARTS WITH AN 'R' AND ENDS WITH AN 'ECIPROCATION'*

The Official Pledge Drive mascot, an 11-day old South China tiger cub.

This tiger cub is cute, isn't it? Those watery eyes, that snuggly fur, and those adorably outsized paws, along with that little touch of sadness that just makes the cuteness all the more powerful. He is so cute, in fact, that although I have this newspaper image of him on my desk (ripped from the pages of the China Daily), I can't stop looking at the photograph of that picture that I have posted on the screen in front of me. Then again, I'm a little lonely these days.

School has been keeping me phenomenally busy, but not enough to make me forget that I haven't been hugged in more than 3 months, or that I lack companions with whom to watch all the pirated DVDs I've collected, to enjoy music with, or to battle the human oceans of Beijing. I'm also just about to have the loneliest holiday season EVER. It isn't that there aren't good people around, its just that the best people are in time zones far away from my own and I miss them so.

This is where you come in. I need mail. Desperately. I love to write postcards and letters, but I've been putting so much time into ye' old blog that I haven't been doing so much of that. However, considering the mail I have put out into the world in my lifetime, I think I merit a little something in return. I'm tired of looking into an empty mailbox, or carting up Jessica's twice weekly missives from her well-trained friends. I'm sick of half-heartedly sifting through the mail pile at school, knowing that nothing is for me (mostly I know this because I haven't given anyone my school address, but still - poor me!). Some of you have been extremely good, others could do much better. I'm not going to name and shame, but you know who are you. Thank you to all those who have written or sent goodies. I am so grateful (and responses are forthcoming)! To the rest, now is the time.

Below is my school address. If you e-mail me, I will happily provide my home address, but it seems a little foolhardy just to put it on the interwebs. Besides, if you send stuff to school all the other kids are going to think I am way popular:

China
Beijing 100084
Tsinghua University
Wen Bei Lou, 502
Inter-University Program

中国
北京100084
清华大学
文北楼502

(the Latin-script should be sufficient, but if you know Chinese, or feel like cutting, pasting, and printing, the Chinese-script will probably speed your mail along)

If you don't have the time to make real mail, send an e-mail (though I will probably take a terribly long time to respond). And if you don't want to e-mail, I do always appreciate comments in the handy forum provided below. It just makes me feel like you guys are out there somewhere, and that warms the heart mightily.

Thank you so very much, and happy holidays to all!

*"starts with a '[single letter]' and ends with a '[rest of the word]' are both copyright Mark Siano 1997 or earlier.

SEXY BEIJING

The weekend before last I was at an AIDS benefit with some classmates and overheard "Did you see Sexy Beijing?" "No, is she here?". I hadn't a clue what they were talking about but was told that this "Sexy Beijing" thing was a video-blog whose creator and star was in our midst. Although from the sounds of it I feared some sort of chipper horror of a expat covering the local club scene, my vision was quickly amended as the young lady in question, a sweet, diminutive American girl with distinctive horn-rimmed glasses, stopped to talk to my friends on her way out. My curiosity was piqued, so much so that I remembered the encounter despite the fact that it occurred early in the evening, before we passed a massage parlor offering not only a seemingly unnecessary "massage of the kidney", but also a possibly useful but rather shady sounding "massage of the ovary", as well as a tantalizingly vague "part of the body massage". It also withstood much wandering around a sleepy hutong looking for a secret bar called "Candy Floss", and ending up in a packed bar where a Chinese band played a surprisingly kick-ass cover of a song I usually hate, Sting's "Englishman in New York". It must have been the bongos.

Anyhow, last weekend, while coming down from a midterm, I looked up Sexy Beijing on Youtube, which, happily, is hardly ever blocked these days, and I actually quite enjoyed it. Su Fei is a personable hostess, and does the best kind of pop anthropology, chatting with regular folks about all manner of topics with apparent ease. The production quality is great, and the gimmick not overdone.

This one, on the English names Chinese people choose for themselves, is quite short and funny:



This one, on finding love in Beijing, is more in keeping with the spirit of the original:



This one is mostly ridiculous, but kind of worth it just so you can hear "我有bitches，我可以大电话给她" (I have some bitches I can call) [at about 4:47 if you're impatient]。 There are also lots of pretty girls and some very silly Chinese rappers.



The production company behind Sexy Beijing, Danwei.org, has some other good stuff out there too, most of it far more on the intellectual side of the infotainment spectrum, which I recommend you browse at your leisure as time and interest permits.

MY ROOMMATE JESSICA (狄可佳)

I've had this post in my drafts for ages now, but keep deleting half of it and then setting it aside and then editing it again. It's not easy to describe a friend, particularly someone who is (as Montana suggested), like an island for me here. I couldn't do without Jessica and I want you all to know how awesome she is, but I know I can't do her justice here, so for now, this will have to suffice.

Firstly, you should know that she doesn't like having her picture taken, so these socks, my birthday present to her, will have to do. She likes to pretend she's a bit of a grouch, but only as compared to me, seeing as some of my favorite things are whistling in the morning, jumping rope, and drinking Stolichnaya (a very dangerous $6.50 a bottle here). In reality, she is one of the most considerate, personable, generous, open-minded people I have ever encountered, but I suppose a veneer of negativity keeps her from being deluged with applications for friendship (also, you probably shouldn't cross her, ever). Sometimes she calls me Lele, short for 乐观 (leguan) or optimistic, and I call her Beibei, short for 悲观 (beiguan) or pessimistic. We make a good team.

The grumpy-face socks have a greater significance here in China, where for us foreigners the whole face-saving dance and concommitant avoidance of direct confrontation gets old quick, and it is a mighty relief to have someone to vent with. In Chinese you say 出气 (chu qi), or "to vent one's spleen". We make a habit of it.

Jessica and I only met at the hotel breakfast on the morning after we arrived here, but she has also spent the last two years in Bloomington, studying for her Masters in Chinese Pedagogy in the East Asian Language and Culture Department. Jessica already has a job lined up to teach Chinese at a private high school in Chicago next year, and actually taught first year Chinese last year at IU while I was in third year. Still, its awfully strange we never met.

We are studying at the same level here at IUP even though our abilities are very different. Jessica has been studying Chinese for five years off and on, and spent a year studying abroad in China while an undergrad. She has very precise tones, good pronunciation and excels at dealing with daily life. I have shoddy (but much improved tones) and can barely order a meal by myself, but I have an enormous vocabulary and in the right setting can talk easily about all sorts of big ideas. No, this has NOTHING to do with our individual personalities! How dare you think such a thing! We do, however, joke that our combined powers make for one excellent Chinese speaker.

We joke a lot actually, one might even say perpetually, and it is a very good thing. Readiness to laugh and to be delighted, rather than frustrated, by cultural dissimilarities and obstacles to going about daily tasks, is really a prerequisite for living here. Jessica is excellent to have around in all manner of situations, not only when being chased by douche or wandering the grasslands, but also in the wonderland of our local grocery store, or during long taxi rides when we entertain ourselves by looking up dirty words in our electronic dictionaries. She is particularly ace at responding to enthusiastic greetings on the subway. Not only does she have a powerful command of the Chinese expression meaning "piss off", but I once witnessed her befuddling of two Chinese dudes who she first spoke Japanese to and then explained to in flawless Mandarin that we really were Japanese. There is also no one aside from her that I would rather assist in wording a note to the upstairs neighbors humbly requesting that they reduce the volume on their amorous activities.

We're perfect roommates for the additional reason that she cooks to de-stress and I clean to de-stress, meaning that we enjoy delicious eats in highly sanitary conditions! She does a fantastic pumpkin soup, bean soup, persimmon pudding, banana bread, and seaweed and sesame salad; and uses her mean stir-fry skills to make tofu and veggies her bitch. This has given me ample practice in using the grammar pattern which foregrounds the object dispensed with, notably in the phrase 我把你做的饭吃完了 (literally: I took the food you made and ate it until it was gone).

Comprehende? She's rad.