I was catching up with Marc who mentioned that you guys see this newsletter not just as me having adventures but also with the sense of “wow it’s so nice for Jordan to be doing so well after his 2016.” That had me tearing up a bit.
The Foreigners in China are Extra Foreign
Spending time here, I’m constantly surprised at the prevalence of American culture. I see Steph Curry every day on the street hawking cell phones, Chinese movies and music use American styles and tropes, and everyone young person I’ve met has watched the either Friends, The Big Bang Theory, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in its entirely. I met a Chinese girl who has read Ray Dalio’s Principles (as well as a book on applying Maoist thought to entrepreneurship). Hillbilly Elegy even apparently has a big following in China. One friend’s boyfriend said it helped him understand his parents.
Every foreigner I met who lives in America, though, lives in America. The familiarity with US culture here doesn’t extend to everything that goes on in the US, even among the most educated people in China who speak really strong English and have spent some time in the states. For instance, A girl who lobbied for and eventually took it upon herself to write her company’s sexual harassment policy hadn’t heard of Harvey Weinstein. Another guy who’s active in Chinese minority rights issues didn’t know about Charlottesville.
With a little perspective, this really shouldn’t have surprised me. What it highlights though is first how a facebook feed can make it feel like everyone is talking about the same thing, and second that I and my friends in the US have such similar media inputs. However much we have conversations like “oh you should really watch this” or “you gotta read that article” the baseline percentage of knowledge and context we have overlapping as overeducated young Americans is extraordinarily high.
On a sort of related note, a Russian Ph.D. candidate here who does ecology was writing a paper about corporations polluting rivers in Russia. I said that she should publish it in an article. “Do I want to get killed?” she replied, like I was an idiot. It’s very different reading about this sort of thing versus seeing someone your age with similar interests having to make these sorts of calculations.
Dumb stuff I’ve bought on TaoBao
I got this Mongolian Barbie doll for $1 that I thought was cool but every Chinese person who has seen it so far it I thought was super lame and weird for buying.
Dating in China
I’m might be on a Chinese dating show! Adam Bao will be on Fei Cheng Wu Rao, the biggest dating show in China with the 24 girls and one boy on a game-show stage, and we recorded his background video together. Apparently, I hammed it up well enough that the director guy who was recording us said (unprompted!) that I could go on it. I think I’ll wait a few months to take him up on the offer since my Mandarin will get better. I can prepare by watching past episodes of foreigners on the show, since they always get asked the same questions (Do you want to live in China? Why do you like Chinese girls? How will you treat my parents?)
My floor is already brainstorming my shtick, which has to focus not on being charming or funny but sensitive, reliable, filial, prestigious and rich. I’m supposed to play up Yale, finance, and Judaism. We’re going to acknowledge that right now I’m renting an apartment in Beijing but imply that I own one in NYC that my family lives in (ie: I’m providing for them). You have to do a random talent and I think beatboxing or freestyling may be the way to go.
At a PKU grad student ‘Gala’ (maybe 1% foreign), for the first half hour had a student-made video on loop saying, according to Chinese friends without any irony, “you’d better be outgoing tonight, otherwise you’ll end up single at 27!” The next two hours felt like a Bar Mitzvah. There was a magic show, a waltz tutorial, a lottery to randomly match up peoples’ ticket numbers, a singing performance, and a hip-hop crew dancing to Charli XCX. On the one hand, it felt a little infantilizing to be treated as grad students as if they didn’t trust us to just talk to each other. But on the other hand, activities are fun and do help shy people break the ice!
A number of restaurants I’ve been to give girls who come in special free non-alcoholic drinks or sweets. I’ve whined and said “injustice!” and eventually the waiters brought me them too.
I went to a very nice temple in Beijing that was quiet, had monks and Beijingers treating the place with respect, as opposed to the way Chinese treat most tourist sites (ie: human demolition derby). My friend told me she prayed for a boyfriend.
The Party Congress: Aka The VPN’s Demise
I DJ’d my first party in China last weekend, the ‘Party Congress Party’ at our campus’ common room. Prior I went to a print shop and make our own propaganda poster…a friend recommended it to say “Welcome to the 19th Party Congress, Let’s All Strive to be Party Members!” I played some remixes of Katushka and the Internationale. Everyone left around 2am except for the Latinos, so I did a salsa and reggaeton set for an hour and a half till we went to bed.
I got a message for a Party Congress “watch party” which when I showed up to realized was actually a mandatory meeting for all party members (over 2/3rds of our Chinese classmates). The random Chinese propaganda phrases (“sustainable development through mutual prosperity”) sound much nicer in Chinese when they’re just four or five syllables.
VPN had a slow death over the past two weeks. Fighting to get on for five or ten minutes before the VPN app inevitably crashed felt like trying to grasp breaths of air while stuck on a sinking ship. Our campus wifi actually lets us get on gmail and facebook. Only when you’re forced to use bing and baidu do you realize just how incredible the google search algorithm is.
Every class and seminar discussion is recorded. Last year they hadn’t installed microphones in the rooms yet so they forced the (sometimes western) TAs to bring a school-issued recorder to class.
