Then I strolled to campus. As I was walking toward my class I saw this woman come out of a building with two full bags of pure white steamed buns. Somehow, I just really liked the way she looked, walking down the street in the morning light. I didn't get my camera out quite fast enough and had to take the picture in a rush--so it's not quite focused. But still, it captures the moment, and has the composition I wanted if not the clarity.Today was the last day of proper lectures in the Myth and History class. It was a good one--as with most of them, it's on a subject I don't really want to study myself, but it's good to have a basic familiarity with it. Listening to the active, energetic professor somehow makes it more exciting.
I also found out what he means by "discussion class"--he means that each classmate will choose a topic and give a one-hour presentation. Er, no discussion involved, apparently. I guess it's good for them, but, grumble. It has effectively changed my classroom experience from listening to lectures by a well-known and skillful professor to listening to lectures by nervous, under-prepared, and mumbling graduate students. Maybe I'll bring my crocheting to class…
Quick flurry of text messages toward the end of class regarding my next engagement. It so destroyed my concentration, but was at the same time so unobtrusive, that it made me think how cell-phones should be categorically banned from classrooms. How to make it work? I don't know, but that's how it should be. It's way too easy to check your brain out, somehow much more absorbing than just writing ordinary notes.
No, XYs, my little waiter friend, did not want to have lunch with me. How about coffee at 12 instead? I said that I at least would have to get some lunch first, and would meet him at 1 instead. I had bebim bap again at Farm Garden. It's a good thing I am not a real Korean. I have already noticed that people here have no compunctions about serving you things in a chipped dish--the height of discourtesy, at least in my father's Korea. They call it, "having a tooth missing." In this case, though, the "missing tooth" ended up almost costing me a tooth, as it was still in the bowl and I accidentally bit down on it! No real Korean would stand for it.
To be fair, the black stone bowls they serve the dish in are probably not made to stand up to the intense heat of the gas burners they're slammed down onto day after day. And having chips of stone in your food is not as bad as having glass in your food. Still, I was a wee bit put off. It gives a whole new meaning to the saying, "watch what you eat."
I was also interested to notice that the Farm Garden has a "Muslim pure food" eating area, with no impure foods (pork and alcohol, I guess?) allowed. I knew China had quite a large Muslim population, but still I found this surprising and interesting because I had never seen one before. Alcohol, by the way, is freely sold in cafeterias here. I'm not sure that drinking age is something they try to regulate here, but if they do, it's definitely legal for college kids to drink. And do they ever drink! But people do most of their activities during the day, and this includes getting drunk. So occasionally you have the weird experience of seeing a reeling drunk teenager being dragged along by his friends in midafternoon. Boys will be boys.
Well, speaking of boys, I went to New Island Coffee with XYs. I had never been to New Island Coffee. It had a glass elevator up to an elegant seating area. Table service, more like a European café than an American one. Surprisingly good coffee too, for here. XYs had never had coffee before. I guess I forget how much of an acquired taste it is, having acquired the taste long ago. He thought it was awful, but bravely drank the whole cup. Poor kid, but it was also kind of comical.
He asked me what sort of food Americans like to eat. This question always make me feel at a loss for words. All kinds of food really… But they don't stir-fry things, right? He wanted to know. Well, we do, I said. It's just that when we stir-fry things then we generally consider it to be Chinese food or somehow associated with Chinese food. Americans eat more meat, right? (he's big into cultural generalizations) whereas we Chinese prefer vegetables? I suppose you could say that, I said, but there are lots of vegetarians in the U.S. and not a lot of purely vegetarian food in China. He didn't really listen to me say this. I'm not sure if he just doesn't listen very well or if he gets too impatient because I talk slowly (for a Chinese person) and kind of tunes out.
He proceeded to tell me that Americans are tall because they eat meat and Chinese are short because they don't. I think it has more to do with genes, I suggested. Sure, he concedes. But for generations they could only eat vegetables, so they were short and then they passed those genes to their kids. (I supposed he's obsessed with shortness because he himself is so short, shorter than I.) I tried to explain that it didn't work that way--in fact, it was a perfect indication that Lamarckianism is alive and well, at least in the popular mentality! I considered explaining about this, but decided to go for basics first. Did Chinese schools teach evolution? I wanted to know. Yes of course! Darwin etc. Obviously! It's not so obvious, I offered. Some places in America either don't teach it or don't want to believe it. Why? He wanted to know, mystified and contemptuous--though his own grasp on the concept was clearly a bit tenuous. It has to do with religion, I tried to explain. Blank look. Well, if God created man than he can't have gradually developed from something more like a monkey, can he? I could see him filing it away under "bizarre American beliefs." Well, that's deserved. I mean, I personally am all for evolution but as a "cultural ambassador" (ha ha!) I think the world deserves to know the truth about how foolish we can be at times.
It was oddly discouraging talking to XYs, and I was glad to go. Talking to someone ten years younger than you can be interesting if they're bright and curious and enthusiastic--and the type of person you tend to like, but XYs, just isn't as it turns out, any of these things. He's just…sort of ordinary. At least he was more into hitting on the waitresses than on me, so my firmness on that front at least sank in. (I've heard horror stories from others, but having a boyfriend, even a distant one, really comes in handy here.) I think I won't be spending any more of my Beijing time that way, but we'll see.
All told, I drank too much coffee and felt very jittery. Rested and worked in bed for a while to calm down, and then set off to my last engagement of the day. I have now gotten into the bad habit of assuming everything will take 30 minutes of travel time because that's how long it takes to get to school. WRONG! It takes 30 minutes to get to Wudaokou by bike, but for some reason I forgot to get my bike and set off on the bus instead. I have to remember that taking the bus at rush hour is an impossible proposition.
While I waited, staring morosely at multiple lanes of interwoven and totally stationary traffic, I witnessed a sad thing. One of the weathered sweet potato ladies was clinging to the wheel of her tricycle trailer yelling and hollering and crying. Two policemen were harassing her and trying to talk her into letting go. A crowd of silent observers had gathered, and when I say gathered, I mean it: pressed in close, and radiating about six feet in all directions except the street one. Completely silent but massively present. It's no wonder that the government here is afraid of its populace. It's as if their very gaze has a kind of power. Or that beneath the deep deeply-ingrained cautiousness there's a reckless streak that's waiting for its big chance to bust out. The people went on staring, the woman cried out to the heavy city sky and babbled incomprehensibly. Then suddenly it was over. The two policemen were stuffing her into a cop-car with all its lights flashing. The tricycle trailer with its hot barrel and humble roasted potatoes had disappeared. The crowd dispersed. Someone passing just two minutes later would be completely unaware that anything had occurred.
No, I didn't take a picture! What do you think I am, crazy?
But it was vivid in my mind. You can take a bet that her quality of life had just taken an enormous hit. Just dumb bad luck, or had she failed to pay the right sort of protection money?
I got to my meeting half an hour late, but because I was meeting with American graduate students, everyone else was half an hour late too. Sigh, why do we have to be so predictable, even if conveniently so!? We had a nice dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant. Sushi here should seem like a totally sketchy proposition, especially since all the sushi was half-price! but I suffered no ill effects. LK, who had recommended the restaurant, has a really touchy stomach, and I figured if it didn't bother her it wouldn't bother me. A good gamble in this case. Also, had lots of tea and wasabi, both of which are supposed to help.
When everyone was done eating we each ran through a quick summary of what we were working on and our specific activities in Beijing. It was fun, but one of those occasions where one particular person talked way to much, making everyone else (me included) especially antsy to talk and therefore more prone to rudely interrupt even the non-motor-mouth. One good thing to say about us, though, is we can be fairly forgiving of such things.
One person was working on the problem of street-vendors being busted, how a propos! He had a lot of interesting things to say about it, including that it was done in the name of having "an orderly market," which vague phrase is freely interpreting on a very low local level. He has done all his research on a couple of streets in Nanjing, just tracking everything that goes on there and getting to know all the vendors really well. It was a pol.sci. project, but it sounded kind of like anthropology. So interesting. That one was my favorite to hear about, though I also really liked chatting to tall KP. She is such a no bs type of person; I think she's great.
A chocolate parfait at a Chinese Japanese restaurant is about 50% cornflakes, about 25% whipped cream, and the rest is chocolate ice-cream and quite a lot of banana slices. Very weird. It was more like eating breakfast than dessert.
I guess it was a pretty stimulating time, but as usual I felt like a grad school dunce. Grad students seem to be all about posturing and proving that they can talk in long sentences with lots of abstract terms. Somehow that's not what I'm about and sometimes I worry about it. Are they all secretly judging and dismissing me because I always just want to tell it like it is? I guess I too want to prove that I'm smart, but I want to do it by having interesting results, not jargon-hued verbal fireworks.
Still, when it really comes down to it there's something disingenuous about my preference for simplicity… cause I think I probably couldn't talk like that even if I wanted to. I think I could back when I was an undergrad and somewhat into the whole pomo thing. But pomo consciousness has totally faded from my life because it just couldn't prove its usefulness in my field of study. It couldn't earn its keep or keep a place on my reading lists, which were ever more dominated by primary sources. As a result, I'm not even really an informed opponent of theory. I just have a sense, which may or may not be right, that it can't do much for me. And I have no natural enjoyment of it. Shrug. Maybe it'll mean I can't get a job, or maybe somewhere there'll be enough of the old guard around that I will. Ooh, probably I shouldn't talk like this on a not-all-that-anonymous blog. Oh well. I'll probably take this blog down when I'm back from Beijing and potentially on the market, so maybe anyone who reads this now will not make the connection by then. :P
An interesting thing I noticed and felt proud of in comparing my spiel to those of the others is that I'm the only one in the group who is making an effort to really get a sense of the traditional literary culture. It's a discipline thing, I think. People in modern western-originated disciplines tend to consider traditional culture for the most part an obstacle at best. To someone who's studying abandonment of female infants (for example), traditional culture comes down to a tendency for son-preference that is slowly leading to a demographic disaster, not to mention a lot of girl-babies in orphanages.
From the outside, in short, traditional culture can look pretty useless.
But the more you get into it, the more you see how integral it is. Even if they seem westernized, they all had to memorize Tang poetry in high school! Now I am memorizing some too--just the best of the best, my teacher says, to get a taste of it. It's actually fun to do it in a one-on-one tutoring situation, though I still get nervous reciting, and something I've practiced a hundred times suddenly drains out of my brain and leaves me blank. I'm really not good with public speaking, even to an audience of one.
Anyway, the meeting lasted until about half past nine, and shortly thereafter I made the unpleasant discovery that the bus I needed to take stopped running at 8. Damn morning people! At 10 on a weeknight, the whole area seems to shut down. Nothing but lonely taxis. After experimenting with some other buses, none of which brought me to within walking distance of my destination, I felt so fed up and exhausted that I finally took a taxi home. The taxi driver muttered a little at the short fare, but he took me graciously enough to my front door and I shelled out the minimum fair, which was $1.25. No tipping here, to anybody. Anyone giving you cultural advice about China will add fervently, "And don't get them started expecting it!" Well, it certainly is a bargain, I'll say that.
No comments:
Post a Comment