I shall start with the good things about yesterday. I got up early and walked around the campus for some time, looking at things, trying to figure out what was what. There are a lot of different student cafeterias, but I wasn't sure if one had to be a student to eat in them and besides, didn't feel like a heavy, unfamiliar sort of breakfast. Eventually I happened upon a convenience store and got myself a box of "milk tea"--cold, sweet and slightly chalky, but a reasonable semblance of my accustomed morning beverage. I also got some muffins, "orange milk flavor" which sounds unpromising but was perfectly fine. Eating is not exactly my top concern at present, just something to get out of the way.
After this, I went back and spent an extravagantly long time online. The business center here, where I can get internet, does not seem so costly by US standards, but (I am coming to see) is actually an incredible rip-off at 30 RMB an hour, relative to what the service needs to cost. The exchange rate may be (roughly) 8 RMB to the dollar, but the actual buying power of an RMB is probably more like 50 cents. Not that it need concern me, since my income is in US dollars, but it is an uncomfortable feeling to know you are paying too much for something. And yet I can't do without it. There is an ethernet line in my room, but it can only provide access to the university web system. I inquired about this at the front desk, since the hotel information implied that guests would have internet access. Apparently there's a special password that you need to get access to "international" internet. International students can get such a password, but presumably only when they're officially students, which I'm not yet.
I went out wandering again. Near where I am staying there is a little campus Minimart--really a bit like Wawa in Princeton, a big convenience store--which is together with the University Souvenir Store. Every university has one I suppose, only they're usually conjoined with the bookstore. I wandered in just out of curiosity, and asked the girl at the camera and battery counter about an adaptor for the computer plug. She had no idea what I was talking about, and also looked like she was about 12 years old. I explained in more detail, enough that she could say with certainty that she didn't have one. Still, I browsed around in some other areas of the store. To my delight I discovered a big display of bottled ink, both black and blue-black, my favorites and very reasonably priced. But no pressing need for it yet! And then I discovered a little section of various plug adapters, even converters (both ways). I took some time to decipher the Chinese on the converter so I would be sure to get the right type. As for the adaptors, I made a point of asking another salesgirl, explaining my situation and what I needed, just to be sure. They assured me it would work. I chose two different ones just in case (they were only about a dollar apiece), and it was a good thing, because only one had the right type of female connector. But that one did work, and my computer is now back in business--as you can see from this lengthy post.
Later, I wandered off the campus and along the street that surrounds it. I was vaguely looking around for a bookstore where I could buy a good map, and maybe somehow an equivalent of the Not for Tourist Guide we have for Chicago--a guidebook that actually tells you how to live in a place, not just which package tour to the Great Wall is the best. The street I walked along was a huge eight-lane monstrosity. I was again reminded of Seoul. Scattered along the way were venders selling melon slices for 1 RMB a piece. The melons were long and yellow, but the flesh looked like a cantaloupe. They cut it right as you watched, to remove any hygiene worries. I didn't have one, though lots of other people did. They looked tasty, but I wasn't hungry.
I did wander into a random bank as a test to see if I could change money, and how difficult it would be. It was a Bank of Beijing. I waited patiently in the queue for a long time, rehearsing my lines. When it was my turn, it all came off without a hitch. A lengthy and highly bureaucratic process, of course, but changing money always is.
At this point I should mention what a victory this all is. I approach every necessary conversation with the same dread I used to feel in Taiwan. I more or less know my lines, but it's the improv portion that always troubles me. Will I understand what they want of me? Will I be able to answer their questions? Yet unlike in Taiwan (a whole 6 years ago!), I pick up on my cues now. I often do understand the questions, and how to answer. I'm sure my grammar is all wrong and horribly inelegant, but they understand me too, more or less. I can use Chinese to get what I want--at least in daily life! Looked at objectively, my anxiety is all out of proportion to my actual abilities.
After crossing some very scary intersections, but only a block or so away, I found a bookstore and wandered in. A big, shallow, glossy place, surely something like a Chinese Barnes and Noble. Huge map and travel section, quite a number of Beijing maps to choose from. Whole BOOKS of Beijing maps. Nothing like the NFT Guide that I could see, certainly not in English (though they had a quite respectable English-language section). I don't think I want one in Chinese--too potentially confusing. But the maps in Chinese were fine, better even. After all, the street signs are in Chinese too. I remembered from Taiwan the habit people have of reading in a bookstore, maybe for hours. They do it here too, as if the bookstore were a library without borrowing privileges. People read whole books this way, and some of the books and the shelves are decidedly shopworn from having been read this way. But I applaud the habit, it being one I admittedly have myself.
In the same strip as the bookstore, there was a fast-food lunch place. The menu was like that at a sushi bar--you mark the things you want. Plenty of mysterious looking dishes, but I didn't feel like eating at random. I ordered Korean cold noodles and a Sprite. The imitation of naengmyun that I received was quite laughable. How can you make naengmyun with plain wheat pasta, almost spaghetti? or kimchee with just plain ordinary cabbage instead of Napa cabbage? Tomatoes? But despite its failings, it did convey something naengmyun-y. The broth was chokingly vinegared, but it had the right sort of flavor. The whole thing was quite funny.
On the walk home, I noticed that bicycles have their own traffic lights!Not that it helps: just at the intersection where I took this picture, two bicyclists crossing illegally against the light in opposite directions at top speed collided with one another directly in front of an oncoming bus which actually had the right of way! The bus slowed, the cyclists had been popped off their bikes but landed on their feet, recovering nimbly with hardly a pause, riding on so efficiently that the bus didn't even have to come to a full stop--and it didn't. No honking horns, no shouted imprecations, just business as usual. But how the thought of a bicycle collision horrifies me. And all the same, I wish I hadn't put away my camera just a moment before, so I could have captured it on film. In view of the happy outcome, it was actually very comical.
My next order of business was to attempt to call my new friends. They had suggested I give them a call when I had done my errands. It didn't work from my room, though I assiduously read the directions for phone calls in both English and Chinese (to make sure nothing had been lost in translation). It didn't work from the hotel desk. I asked the lady in the hotel convenience store about a phone card so I could try from a payphone. I showed her the number. She looked at it and suggested that it was written wrong, there was no such area code. The five should be a three, she said. Go back and try that. I went back laughing and tried it, still no results. A guy in a little phone stand by the mini-mart offered to sell me a no-frills Motorola cell-phone (actually quite like my old one) for the equivalent of $50. Is that a good deal or no? I wished I could ask my friends, but I couldn't call them. I told him I'd think about it. I was glad that a cell-phone is so easily to be had, though, as everything here depends upon them. (I hate that.)
In the end I had to admit defeat and send them e-mail from the expensive business center computers. I did not hear back from them, though I made a point of checking several times. And of course I wonder (as I ALWAYS do with social connections, not just in a foreign country!) whether I wrote something wrong, or if they are tired of me, or if it was an insult to e-mail instead of call. I explained my phone troubles in the e-mail, of course. Most likely the reason I didn't hear from them is that time, for them, is not so strangely elongated with the sense that every moment must be purposefully employed. For them, it's just a day give or take. At least I hope so, but still I might have said something wrong, or they might consider their friendly obligations now discharged, and can't understand why I don't take the hint--or what? There are few everyday stresses more horrible to me than the stress of social relationships on the acquaintance level.
Also online I looked at some apartment listings. But they all looked like scams to me and I felt completely distrustful. I went back to my room to rest and read for a few hours, because I just didn't feel up to doing anything else. There I did make a wonderful discovery: sorting through my pocket change, I came up with an extremely miserable, pathetic little coin, worth probably some fraction of a fraction of a cent, and made in 1977 to boot. It looked like--could it be…? Yes! It in fact passed the water-glass test for worthlessness of currency: it floats on water!! I think there are a few such coins in Hungary, but foolishly I never took the time to try them when I was there. But this--this was a superb sight, and made me feel deeply satisfied. By some inverted scale of value, I will treasure it always--one of the most worthless coins I have ever seen.Eventually I went back out to wander the campus a bit more. I found a big bulletin board being busily consulted by lots of returning students looking for housing prospects. Laboriously I waded through the crowd and read some ads. But they were mostly seeking roommates, or were for rooms in houses. My insistence on wanting a place of my own seems perverse when viewed through a Chinese perspective, I know that. How can I help it, though? There's no getting around the fact that if I try to live with anything else it will be stress and unpleasantness. A guy with a difficult accent came up and asked me what I was looking for. I spoke my lines well enough, but fumbled the cue each time he asked a question. I'm not sure what he had on offer, if he was honest or a scam-artist or just a curious person. In any case, whatever he was hoping I wanted, he hadn't imagined such luxurious perversity as what I told him (I suppose), and he drifted away. Possibly he was scared away by my apparently bad Chinese.
I have, incidentally, noticed in shopkeepers and waitresses a distinct tendency to be terrified at my approach. I can see them thinking, "Oh no, what if we are about to have an embarrassing language barrier miscommunication session? Save me!" This is generally transformed into relief when they realize that, however imperfect my accent or grammar may be, I can more or less talk like a normal human being. Well, except to this bulletin board guy.
Eventually I wandered away. Got lost trying to find my way back. I should add that there are other westerners around on the campus. My reaction to them surprises me. It may just be the hysteria of the first-week roller-coaster, but I don't feel any particular sense of fellow-feeling with them. I feel annoyed at their gangling, incompetent look, their ungainly expression of mild discomfort: no doubt it is a mirror of my own, so different from all the tidy Chinese faces who understand this world and their place in it. It's a wonder that the Chinese people tolerate us with such patient politeness. We are ugly. This is really different from my experience in Taiwan, where the sea of black hair and Asian faces seemed oppressive and my eyes used to seek out and linger on the occasional harassed-looking Westerner with great sympathy and friendliness...
All day today I did not speak a word of English.
I am sort of fascinated by the construction that is going on outside the building my room is in. I went in and out embarrassingly many times today, so I had many chances to observe its different phrases. Once I came out at lunchtime and all the workers were lined up and sitting down with their bowls of stew. There were so many of them, and the impression was startling somehow. Maybe because they were at ease, lacking in distraction, and so all their eyes turned toward me over their big enameled bowls. Another time I saw one of them mixing concrete by hand, and not even in a container, just on the ground--making a sort of grey mudpie. Another time, I saw a fellow shoveling up dirt and tossing it through a big propped-up screen. This had the effect of sorting out the stones and clods, making the resulting dirt pile on the other side very much finer. This MUST be done by machine in the U.S. I watched this process a little too intently, which attracted the attention of the others, so that behind my back when I set off again I heard them mumbling "lo wai, lo wai" (foreigner) and what I take to be the Chinese equivalent of a wolf-whistle, which sounded oddly like a bird-call, but was of course not polite. I guess you have to either ignore the construction workers completely (like everyone else does) or make up your mind to talk to them properly. So I took to ignoring them too, not wanting to attract the wrong sort of attention. But still I felt interested in how they did their work. Sometimes I really think men have so much more freedom than women. I can picture Colin (that is, if he could speak Chinese), having a really pleasant chat with these fellows. But there's some things, I suppose, that aren't worth regretting.
Beida seems a very elite place. It feels more like Princeton than like Harvard in that way. The students are very prettily dressed and neatly groomed. Girls ride side-saddle on the back of boys' bicycles, balanced very romantically. It makes me feel broad and very clumsy. It's like watching a movie of fairyland.
I got some bread and yoghurt from the Mini-mart and had a very small, quiet dinner in my room, together with some grapes from the bottomless box that FL and JZ gave me on my first day.
There is no way I will come even close to finishing the grapes. They are a strange oppression of kindness. They were fresh-picked the day I arrived, so they are going bad only slowly, but unrefrigerated the process is inevitable. We're talking about something like five pounds of grapes. They are supposed to be washed, but do I wash them in the suspect tap water or in the hot boiled water? In the hot boiled water they of course get hot. It is all rather overwhelming. On the other hand, while they last the grapes are a constant and healthy food source for snackish moments. (Now for example. I think I shall have some. Eating them seems like a virtue. The slight undoing of a sinful waste which will inevitably result from such a gift.)
Anyway, to round out the account of the day, I made an effort to watch some Chinese television. There was a nature program even, called "The Thrill of the Kill." Wolves snapping up hares, bringing down a buffalo which kept on fighting even when it was missing big bloody chunks of flesh. It was rather gory and also had a tendency to put me to sleep, so I switched it off. I should probably have made an effort to stay up longer but instead I drifted off.
And woke up oppressed by the anxiety of apartment hunting. Time is constricting. The end of the month approaches, and I will have to move out of here (Sept.1) and into SOMEWHERE. This area becomes highly congested around registration time, all the hotels filled up, I am told, this one included. I wonder who will have my room with its leaky bathroom. Will they be grateful or outraged? I will feel much better when I have my own nest. Much much better. But it seems so difficult. JZ is leaving for home today, and I don't know if FL will come through on the help he promised with her not around. Or if it was really a promise, rather than an empty courtesy. I worry that they are both put off by my perverse desires in the apartment department. In any case, tomorrow I suppose I am going to have to just do stuff without their aid. But first a cell phone... etc. I create my own difficulties, I suppose.
In the balance sheet of the day, I should consider that victories outweigh defeats, shouldn't I? I changed money, got an adaptor that works (though the transformer box gets alarmingly warm!). I know that a cell phone is obtainable, and could walk out tomorrow morning and obtain one, right at the corner. Of course I pay more for things than I should, but with the exchange rate so much in my favor the loss is inconsequential. And there was that wonderful floating coin. Today wasn't such a bad day. I hope tomorrow will be even more productive. As in Chicago, I have trouble getting used to a new place except very slowly and tentatively, always wanting to walk down the same street three or four times so it gets familiar before trying another one. I hate shocks and feeling lost. But this method is not conducive to hurrying, which is sort of what I need to do!
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