November 2017, 乖 Kids, Singles Day, Badminton, Tug of War, Taiwan, and Cabbies on Brexit

I was walking around the Muslim district and got some street food at a stall. We started chatting with the guy who sold us some bread meat mush, and he began to talk politics with us. The man, 64, mentioned that he was the same age as Xi Jing Ping (also a Xi’an native), but when Xi went down to the countryside for the Cultural Revolution, he just ran away. He said that he liked Kissinger, said Bill Clinton wasn’t bad, though Bush and Obama were ok but that Trump had no political skill at all.

After we were hanging out for a bit the guy told us to wait, went across the street, and came back with a 9-year-old girl (his niece). One of the best compliments you can give to a kid in China is 乖, guāi, meaning well-behaved. She was adorably guai. We chatted about her classes, and when she mentioned that she liked to paint I told her to let me see some paintings. She then ran back to her room and brought her notebook.

She said her favorite class was English (she couldn’t speak a word but it was just her first year). When she said she didn’t have an English name yet, I found a slideshow of famous female painters, and she picked Elizabeth Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s court painter. We tried to find an article about her in Chinese that didn’t talk about her bad reputation (lesbian affairs with the Queen…etc) but couldn’t. She asked if she could call me “older brother.”

Her mom when we were leaving told her that unless she studied hard and got good grades I wouldn’t want to be friends with her. Harsh, but then again when your parents sell street food what else is there but school?

Singles Day is a holiday that Alibaba made up to sell stuff. They now sell more stuff on this day than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. They also held a gala featuring Kris Wu and Pharrell embarrassing themselves.

I bought a lot of dumb stuff, but also went to a university organized dating event. I dragged a white female friend there with me and we were the two foreigners out of 250 people (I talked the whole time in Chinese). I stuck into a grad student speed dating event as an undergrad back in Yale, and this wasn’t quite the same…

First off, it started at 6:30pm on a Saturday and there was zero booze. Instead, there were some free milk tea samples since the organizers snagged a sponsorship. There were activities throughout like making people hold their hands spin around to get tangled up, and then have to untangle.

In general, whenever I started talking to someone, ten people around me would turn around and start looking at us. Then we would get interrupted with people saying “oh your Chinese is so good!” (note: Chinese people say this to anyone who can say ‘ni hao’).

Most girls were intimidated and didn’t quite know how to handle me, with two exceptions–a girl who worked at an international law firm and had very good English, and another who was in the drama school studying to be a director. When I was talking to the director girl in a group, a guy walked up to us and asked the girl if he remembered her. She goes, “maybe?” The guy says “you didn’t cast me for your play!” Later he mentioned that he did improv, so I did a scene in Chinese with him for five minutes in front of the little crowd that had gathered around us.

If a girl told her friend that a guy was cute, they would physically drag them over to the guy and say hi. The average Taiwanese guys seemed a little outgoing and comfortable with women than the mainland guy. At one point, in a group of five, I asked the Taiwanese guy why he wanted to study in Beijing. A mainland woman responded, “because he’s Chinese!” So then I asked the Taiwanese dude if he felt he was a Chinese, and he gave a sly smile and was like “eh…”. Later the girl messaged me saying “sorry I had to impose there but since we were in public I thought it was important to say the politically correct thing.”

Another Taiwan politics story: one class we were all going around introducing ourselves and saying where we were from. At first, the Chinese kids said that they were from China. When the Taiwanese kid said that he was from Taiwan, the following Chinese kids said they were from their province, implying that Taiwan is just another province.

A friend taught me the trick to asking anything somewhat controversial to Chinese people about China: first trash the US. Ex: when I met this guy who was in charge of an investment zone, I was like “hey so in the US we have states that compete for tax subsidies and they end up giving way too many tax breaks. Do you have the same dynamic there?” After being a little cold before, he quickly opened up, saying “oh totally!” and then started complaining about how he has to accept shitty projects sometimes because the guanxi makes him.

The first sentence Chinese kids learn to write in Chinese language textbooks when they’re 4 years old is “I am a Chinese. I love my country.” For American kids in one textbook it’s “I am special.”

I played a badminton tournament at PKU and for whatever reason, all our south asian classmates who are actually good at the sport didn’t show up, so I played #1 singles. I lost every game like 21-3 even though half the people I played were going easy on me. However, I did win myself a fan club. They liked that I tried hard, joked around (fake throwing my racket, doing the Tiger fist pump), and apparently “my lower legs.”

We had a delivery of duck for Thanksgiving. I was playing a youtube video of last year’s Macy’s day parade when both me and another American said at the same time, man, Matt Lauer looks sort of creepy…

It takes 40 hours of class-time to get a driver’s license.

Hercules iconography made its way to China over a thousand years ago.

Teachers break up high school couples by calling their parents if they think the relationship is interfering with their studies.

I like getting in car rides, getting the cabbie to start talking politics and just sort of riding the conversation. I rarely understand what’s happening but it’s sort of like synagogue when you know when to say “amen,” in that I can hear them say “do you agree,” and then I say “yes,” and then they keep talking for another few minutes before I have to chime in again with my approval of their point. Last weekend a cab driver told me that Mao was 牛B (“cool,” but literally a cow’s vagina) and thought Brexit was idiotic.