Yes I’m alive and apologies for the delay. I’m hoping to back on the weekly update grind. Uploading pictures via tinyletter takes forever, so I made a facebook album with more photos and videos here.
I started a podcast! Check it out here https://soundcloud.com/chinaecontalk/ or search ‘ChinaEconTalk’ in any podcast catcher. Feedback and guest suggestions welcome–I know I need to say ‘um’ less.
And please give me updates on your lives I miss you all and am very curious!
Disorientating Orientation
My Yenching class has about 25 Americans, 20 mainland Chinese, and 80 of pretty much everywhere else. There are over 40 countries represented and though the English level is uniformly high, very few internationals went to undergrad in the US.
My rule of thumb for the first few weeks was the more native a classmate’s English was, the less time I tried to spend with them. But there’s still a divide that takes work. The first weekend we went out to some expat club, and only three mainlanders came along. We were later told in some orientation that Chinese kids like to socialize with small groups and then branch out, while Americans like to get drunk as big groups and then weed down their friends.
It’s hard not to speak in idioms and culturally specific references and analogies, particularly when explaining complicated things. That said, it’s striking just how familiar folks all over the world are with esoteric parts of modern American culture.
Americans have gotten triggered 3-4 times on our group WeChat (ex: “this kind of ‘joke’ and implied ignorance points towards an insensitivity rooted in unexamined privilege, which results in the perpetuation of cultural, societal, and political systems of violence and oppression…”). The non-Americans then ask what the hell is going on.
I’ve talked a dozen highly educated people who have never heard of Charlottesville, and no-one on 9/11 asked me about 9/11. My Russian RA told me that Russia had nothing to do with the election, and another Russian writes a dissident newspaper.
My neighbor is Chinese, and a few weeks ago we spent an afternoon setting up her VPN. When I showed her the Chinese NYTimes site, she said, “Wow it’s like a whole new world!”
After spending a year and a half not being able to go five minutes without talking about my head, I’ve had maybe three conversations about my concussion this past month.
Mandarin
There’s a really serious rock climbing club at Beida with a few hundred members and a dozen crazies who summitted Everest last year. I asked in a group chat for help signing up for an overnight trip, and someone immediately responded: “sorry you can only go on our trips if you’re a fluent Chinese speaker.” I said hey, it’s not dangerous if I can listen and speak, and finally, the leader chimed in saying “alright I’ll meet up with him and check out his level.” That night I learned the words for sleeping bag, rope, tent, and even an idiom for how to say “self-reliant” (自己自足). After twenty minutes this 19-year-old kid finally says “你的中文可以,” “your Chinese is alright,” and registers me.
When I told the group afterward that I passed the test, someone sent this sticker that says “there are no words, just applaud.”
This first month made me even more thankful that I put in the work on Mandarin. I’m now not the one that forces a group to switch the conversation to switch back into English if I join it, and can mostly follow along. I won a game of Mafia in Chinese (they play Werewolf here) by saying “look even if I’m mafia it’s not like I can be any danger because I don’t really understand so just kill me later.”
I had two professional conversations in June in Beijing that I had to do entirely in English. In September, I was able to meet both of these people and speak in 90% Chinese. Provided folks are educated enough to have studied English, if they and I use English for the hard technical words we can go pretty far. But I’m still functionally illiterate without apps to help decipher characters.
While I can still listen to Spanish speakers and understand almost everything, my speaking has evaporated. The words just come out in Chinese.
It’s a bit of a bummer to see other Westerners who have been studying much longer than me and can read the newspaper but haven’t developed speaking skills because they’re too shy and scared of making mistakes. Same goes for Chinese students who started studying English in middle school and can read academic papers today but struggle to string sentences together. But it’s more depressing seeing westerners who aren’t even trying to learn.
Club Fair
Wandering through the club fair and asking students about their interests was my favorite day in China so far. One of my friends whose English language resume I helped edit went to Beida undergrad. On it, it said his college entrance exam score ranked him second out of sixty-thousand in his district. These kids just killed themselves to make it here–the level of dedication to study required to make it to Beida as a mainland Chinese vs. a top American school as an American isn’t comparable. So to see these undergrads so colorfully breaking out of their high school identities and breaking the broader stereotypes of “no fun Chinese” was a beautiful thing. It also put in relief just how ridiculous an idea the Thucydides Trap (the idea that war between the US and China is inevitable) is.
Some clubs were very western-influenced (acapella, Model UN, parliamentary debate) but others were very Chinese. There were three different martial arts clubs and a whole line of seven that did ancient Chinese things like traditional poetry, Peking opera, and even Tang Dynasty cosplay. Other particularly active ones included the hip-hop dance club, the accordion club, and roller staking club. The “American culture appreciation” club was singing Hamilton songs.
Chinese kids told me that the Marxist club has the biggest nerds on campus (they like reading, they “care,” and are willing to potentially sacrifice their professional futures for ideals). They sang the Internationale and songs from Les Mis to get folks’ attention. They’re more left wing than the government and aren’t allowed to publish things on campus. There was no right-wing club at the fair.
I tried to explain to some friends that if I joined the Marxist club it would be hard to get a job in government afterward. They didn’t get it so I talked about Bernie Sanders and his visits to the USSR. The response, “Wait what’s wrong with being a socialist?” And then finally, “Oh, so it’s like blackmail!”
I’m shopping around with the drama club, badminton club, rock climbing, weightlifting, and traditional painting. I also stumbled into a waltz class which had terrible music but an incredible teacher (and was good Chinese because every time they say a word they act out what it means). Stay tuned for more.
High Holidays
The two options for services here are Chabad, featuring gender-segregated seating and Hasids on business trips, or Tehilat, a reform service in a hotel conference room with way too much English, didn’t fit for me. Though nothing compares to my synagogue at home, at least going to high holiday services in New Haven, DC, or even in Mexico City, there was a packed house of a few hundred people as opposed to Beijing’s 25-member strong communities. This holiday was my first moment in four months where it hit me in a city of 20 million how few folks share my background.
Dad is visiting in a few weeks and offered to let me stay with him in a nice hotel, but I thought that was a bad idea from a long-term sanity perspective. The more I live quasi-local, the less weird it feels to be in China. But whenever I have a flash of US life (drink some imported American beer, see the Bills opening their season 3-1, talk American politics with Americans…) I snap out of it and realize I’m halfway across the world somewhere really foreign.
There’s an unofficial rule that the Chabad (which has a kosher restaurant) isn’t allowed to let native Chinese in since the government doesn’t want them to be proselytizing. If you look Asian and don’t speak fluent English, they’ll want to see your passport.
There are video cameras in every classroom, for “taking attendance.”Chinese students have to take one Marxist studies course a semester which folks sleep through. The westerners want to take the Marxist classes and are bummed there aren’t any offered in English. In our coursework orientation, one administrator said, “Beida teachers are quite creative in selecting subject matter of these classes…”
One safety discussion told us not to get addicted to alcohol and had a photo of 4loko on the screen.
During our welcome program, there were two student musical performances. The first was an erhu performance of this song on an Erhu and for the second an acapella group used an app as a tuning fork and sang some High School Musical.
One professor quoted Mao on the reform era after all the original revolutionaries died. “Deaths have benefits. They can fertilize the ground.”
“Mosquitos don’t like pollution, but they can’t get a green card to move to the US.”
Tiananmen came up with our hippie-ish Chinese demographer. He said that they were going to do it in 1990 to set it up like every other country on the decade and thought about delaying it but then went along with it. He also said that the 20th-century censuses have only happened during the comparatively best years of Communist rule (’53, ’64, ’82).
“China only invades when it’s attacked.” This same professor who is an ex-senior diplomat and seemed half asleep for most lectures. He later told a story of when he had to eat bark as a kid, but said it was “bullshit” that some westerners said the Great Leap Forward was intentional.
An economics professor told a story of how he was a barefoot doctor. Almost all of them in the 80s or 90s got their PhDs abroad because they were lucky enough to be the one person selected in their department for a foreign scholarship. It’s surreal to think that the equivalent of China’s Harvard professors (not to mention everyone over 50) have seen this sort of arc in their lives.
Lazer Tag
Yesterday I played outdoor laser tag with twenty Chinese kids I didn’t know who were all in the same martial arts club (my one Chinese friend who knew this group bailed the morning of).
We left campus at 8:30 am and spent the whole morning at this place an hour outside Beijing playing Mafia and billiards. I asked why we hadn’t started playing yet, and a guy said “oh we just wanted to get to know each other!” Then we had chuar, or barbeque sticks (the character looks like the bbq stick! 串), and I was asked a few times if Americans also bbq. “Yes, but we don’t cut our meat into little pieces,” I said as I showed them photos of smokers filled with whole hogs.
The guy who worked there organizing the games wore an army uniform (PLA, naturally) and barked at us like we were recruits even though he couldn’t keep a straight face. He also brought out a mini-speaker for a soundtrack playing one four-minute movie soundtrack song on repeat for an hour and a half.
First, we played this lame paintball with bullets the size of rice krispies that both don’t hurt and can’t be felt when you get hit, so you don’t know if you’re out or not. Then we switched out our guns to laser ones and put on helmets that detected shots. At one point they changed the rules from a team game to all against all. I didn’t understand and was pretty confused when my friend started shooting me.
US Ambassador
The American Ambassador and ex-Iowa governor Terry Branstad came for a talk on campus. It was embarrassing having to explain away how low-level his speech was and how much he talked about Iowa by saying that American ambassadors are generally political appointees and don’t know too much about their subject matter.
I put on a suit hoping to look more right wing and got called on to ask a question. “I was talking US-China relations with a Chinese classmate and suggested he read some American news for a different perspective. He replied, why bother with a VPN since your president thinks it’s fake news anyways?” (I conversation this up).
In his response, he didn’t talk about free speech, said “there are some good things about the Chinese media,” and agreed that most mainstream news was fake news. Notably, his timbre tensed up a bit, and his voice pitched up like he had to force this answer out. It made Trump more real seeing an administration official spewing this stuff in person.