A friendly face in front of Carrefour, the French Walmart...in China
Beijing on a goodday 蓝天白云
Beijing on a not good day
A girl with some sort of lower extremity malformation writing chinese sayings outside the cancer hospital.
Go to almost any public square or park and you’ll see them, women and men with perfect posture, moving regally and more or less with the rhythm of loud Chinese music. Elsewhere children are taking dance lessons, repeating the same step over and over with loud Latin/western music in the background.
Subway
Something mildly upsetting happened the other day. We were on the subway, and this clearly inebriated man heard us speaking English. At which point, he, for some reason, decided we were Taiwanese and started saying that China would drop bombs on us. He was yelling at us in a subway full of people, while we tried our best to ignore him. Even the other people on the subway were calling him a lunatic, mostly for randomly shouting at a bunch of strangers.
What truth is there in the ravings of a "lunatic"? I was left feeling very unsettled.
Interestingly, in a brief respite from his yelling at us, he handed us a card which stated his profession, a curer of cancer using traditional medicine. He told the people around him he could cure all cancers, except for brain and lung cancer, and that curing cancer was like curing the common cold for him (you all get the joke here.).
By far, the vast majority of people I’ve met have been friendly. Especially the ones at work; they’ve been super helpful. People on the street are kind of hit or miss, but that’s the case in any major city in the world, I think. As one of my friends was saying, when you live in a huge city, the likelihood of running into the same stranger again is very small, so what’s the point of being nice to them? It’s much easier to brush them off and continue on your own way. In smaller communities, or especially villages, this mentality won’t get you far.
Chinese Television
Watching Chinese TV is a trip. Not only because the one CCTV channel in English is fond of interviewing people who proclaim the end of American dominance and the rise of China as a superpower, but because on the other 70+ Chinese channels, you never know what you might see. One afternoon, after watching a particularly stirring rendition of John Denver’s "Country Road" sung in thick Chinese accents on one of the many variety shows popular here, I chanced upon the strangest game show….
Imagine this. There are two teams of 3 kids, ages 7-10 years old. One team is the red team, and they wear red clapboard signs with "X"s on them. The other is the blue team with blue clapboard signs with "O"s on them. In the center of the field is large tic-tac-toe board. The goal of the game is for the kids to get three in a row. Doesn’t sound too hard right? Except as they’re trying to get three in a row….they’re being chased by a bull.
Now, to be fair the bull is a young bull, and his horns looked somewhat dulled. But one kid definitely got gored and run over before someone pulled the bull off of him. I think the game show was a special on Spain and may have been filmed in Spain as one of the teams looked white and the other was Chinese. But the host of the show was Chinese and was speaking in Chinese, so I’m not sure. Either way, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t fly in the US.
More Pics!
He is pointing at the mayo that this pseudo-japanese restaurant puts on watermelon.
mmmmm.....these street stands are ubiquitous in BJ, serving lots of jummy danbing
at a restaurant. are you seeing a pattern?
riding on the back of an e-bike.Week 1 in Beijing
Hey all!
I arrived safe and sound in Beijing a week ago. It’s been a pretty busy few days. Mainly I’ve been apartment hunting like crazy which is both exhausting and stressful. Unlike in the US where you walk around the area and look at buildings that are renting, in Beijing you have to go thru a middleman whom you have to pay a hefty finder’s fee. Plus the market here is crazy! If you look at an apt and don’t buy it that day, it’ll be gone by the next morning. This happened a couple of times to friends of mine looking here. Also, sometimes the middleman doesn’t really understand or chooses not to understand what you want. He’ll show you a place with dirty concrete floors and walls with holes and a bathroom outside in the street, when you just told him that you didn’t want that. And if you want to live really close to the subway, you’ll be paying a ton for a very small size (think Olin dorm room) and not very nice quality. Still it all worked out, and I have a lovely apt (nicer than my old apt in St Louis!).
Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a gastronomical tour of Beijing. I have yet to be disappointed. There’s some stuff I’ve been reluctant to eat, like the piles of sea snails and the actual head of a chicken in stew, but mostly I’ve been pretty game. I’ll put up pictures soon.
Yesterday I had my first snafu with bureaucracy. So it turns out I was supposed to register at the local police bureau within 24 hours of arriving, (though in my visa it says I have 30 days, apparently there was some other slip of paper I missed). So I went with some friends in a similar situation to the police station where they told us to go to a bigger station 20 min by cab away, where they told us that we should get fined, but since we’re students we just had a sign a piece of paper apologizing for our badness and getting “punished” with a warning. Then this morning we had to go back to our local police station where they issued us temporary residence permits, and now we have to go register at yet another big bureau to get a different permit, so that we can go back to our small police station and register again. Apparently if we don’t complete this by a certain date we get fined 500 kuai a day(about US$75! Ah!) Thank goodness for friends who speak and read Chinese fluently, or else I’m not sure what I would have done. Hopefully this will all work out.
Oh btw, so far people have thought I’m Taiwanese, Singaporean, and I did get one Korean the other day. They don’t usually guess American at first. They can tell I’m not from here either cuz of the way I speak Chinese, or keep busting out into English, or the fact that I look confused when they talk to me. At one restaurant the waitress asked us where we were from and we said we were Chinese, but then we kept talking in English and didn’t recognize any of the vegetables on the menu and she kept asking: “Are you really Chinese?” haha, maybe by the end of the year I’ll blend in better.
:)m
For awhile now I’ve been racking my brain over what to call myself when I get to Beijing. I mean a name is kind of a big deal right? I’ve had friends who, whether by mistake or choice, ended up going by completely different names when they went to a new country or school. I myself have gone by different nicknames throughout the course of my life (and 3rd year rotations, attending dependent). Plus my English name is kind of hard for Chinese people to pronounce. So, you may ask, why not go by your Chinese name, didn’t you attend 8+ years of Chinese school? To this I would respond…what Chinese name?
You see for those of you who don’t know, a lot of effort goes in to making sure that a Chinese name is just perfect. Chinese names usually consist of the last name and then two characters. Each character has a meaning, whether it’s elegance or intelligence or something like that. The number of strokes in each character is important, as is the total number of strokes in the whole name. The sound has to be pleasing to the ear. Often children in the same family are given similar sounding names to highlight their relation. If you mess up in choosing a Chinese name, your kid could be screwed forever (she’ll never get into that ivy league school now!). My dad was thinking so hard about all these things that he had not yet formulated the perfect names for me and my sister before we started Chinese school.
This led to some humorous incidents. For example… My sister plays the violin. As a kid she won 3rd place in our Chinese school’s violin competition (which is pretty impressive given that all the kids in Chinese school play violin). So to honor the winners, our school decided to hang a big banner with the winner’s names (in Chinese of course). But alas! My sis didn’t have a Chinese name! So in her place it just said our last name and then “???” in nice big text at the front of the school.
When this happened, my mom decided enough was enough. She figured any name was better than no name, so she translated our names phonetically into Chinese. These led to functional names which we used in school. However, we ended up with names that didn’t mean anything, sounded weird to Chinese people, and didn’t really sound like our English names either.
Finally when my sister graduated from medical school, she told my dad as a grad present she either wanted her Chinese name (how would she succeed otherwise?), or a cannondale bicycle. He gave us the names.
Of course, being 22 at the time he gave me the name and never using it, I promptly forgot it (whoops). So recently, I’ve been thinking, should I take my old phonetic name, ask dad for the one he thought about for 22 years or come up with a new one of my own.
I decided to use the one dad worked on for so many years. Maybe I’ll help me succeed.
Hello friends :)
As many of you know, I'm spending my next year in Beijing, China doing cancer research. I was lucky enough to get a fellowship which sends people all over the world to work on global health issues. I'm super excited about this opportunity, though a bit sad about missing out on fourth year of med school with my friends. (For all you med school peeps, I want to hear how it is to be sorta maybe kinda almost a doctor! Please don't pimp me too hard if and when I'm your med student...)
This summer has been a bit crazy for me. Been back and fourth cross country a couple times for weddings, classes and orientations. So far I've been to STL, OC, Boulder, Lake Powell, Michigan, and DC. Soon off to NC to meet with my mentor and then off to Beijing!
I intend for this blog to be my way of updating you all about what I'm up to. Hopefully it'll make me slow down and reflect a bit on the year as well. I would also love to hear what you all are up to!
:) m
