Jan 15, 2018: Meeting Tupac, Shanghai, Jordan as Jew in China, One Day in Taiwan, a Touchy Russian, and Goals for 2018

I went to Shanghai for 72 hours for a school trip. It’s very nice.

One of the big things Beijing lacks as a west village-type neighborhood you can walk around with little stores and cafes. Also, they’ve got trees, a river, and not too many eight-lane highways cutting through the city. It felt much more western, familiar, and comfortable, but also less interesting.

I stumbled on a Joe’s Pizza which made my life. It’s the third Joe’s in the world, after two in downtown Manhattan. The (Italian American) guy who brought it to China was a high school friend of Joe’s family, was working in finance in China, got bored, asked them if he could set up a franchise, and then took a year and a half to figure out how to get it “at least 90% as good”. He’ll be on ChinaEconTalk in the next few weeks.

One night in Shanghai we got dinner with our entrepreneurship professor. He was born in mainland China but got a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia in the 1980s. At one point in the evening, I asked him how he made it to the US. He said that before college thanks to the Cultural Revolution he did three years on a farm. Once they opened the universities up again, they started sending a few kids to the states his sophomore year, but that year he couldn’t afford the $30 admissions fee to apply. So the next year they did a deal where they would give the Chinese kids a physics test and the highest scorers would get admitted.

He had only studied conversational English and only knew of this new path to admission two weeks before the test. So he found an English-language physics textbook, went down the index (“Chinese books didn’t used to have indexes, it was such a great idea!”) and memorized 200 words a day. Once he could understand the physics questions he thought it was very funny how easy they were.

He showed up in Columbia in 1980. The PRC had given him $500 and a suit. Their first day they had a meeting with the NYPD who told them to carry $20 in their pocket and say “I have $20 let me get it out for you” with no sudden movements if they got mugged. He was surprised when he visited the Chinese consulate on 42nd and 12th (it’s still in the same place) he was surprised how “pornographic” the neighborhood was. Integrating was hard at first but once he started TAing he started really feeling like part of the community.

I ran into a kid at Tsinghua at a salsa class who told me he was taking an English language class on ‘American Minorities.’ When he said he was presenting on Jews, of course I had to offer myself up as a guest lecturer.

The quality of their presentations were actually really impressive. When I passed around a Bible (actually a Chinese-English Christian bible that an American friend gave to me) the kids gave little bows to each other as they exchanged it.

I then spoke for half an hour about what a Jewish household is like, why so many Jews are famous comedians, a smidge on Trump and Israel, and then answered questions. There we curious about Yiddish. Never in my life would I have imagined myself teaching a group of thirty Chinese undergrads how to pronounce ‘mensch’ and ‘nebbish’. I got questions like “why are Jews successful,” “what do Jews think about Jesus” and (a direct quote) “why is there beef with Muslims?”

One night I had a little Hannukah celebration for ten kids on my floor. I ordered some jelly donuts from Dunkin Donuts, got some cabbage+potato pancake from a Korean place, and some candles from Taobao. Taobao, the Chinese Amazon, has everything you could possibly imagine…save Judaica (zero menorahs, one four-sided top but it was blank, so I had to write in the Hebrew with a sharpie).

A German classmate when I was explaining dreidel and gelt said: “oh, of course, the Jewish game has money in it!” When I told her afterward that wasn’t cool, she apologized and said: “you know you’re the only person in this whole program who calls me out on things.”

On the one hand, it feels like I’m starting to have less material for this email. The longer I’m here, the more things that I’d think would be noticeable end up being just life. But on the other hand, the more Mandarin I can speak and the more I sort of ‘get’ what’s going on around me the more fun I can have. Being in Taipei these past two weeks threw me back into Jordan tourist mode, aka wandering around a city listening to the new thousand page Stephen Kotkin Stalin book.To give you a taste, I figured I could narrate yesterday.

I woke up and wandered into a rooftop arcade that had a batting cage. Then I stumbled upon this free children’s museum of a preserved neighborhood. Next, I wandered into a student exhibition of senior projects for the “Department of Cultural Vocation” at Taiwan National University. Their professor latched on to me as I walked in and said in English “oh let me find someone to explain this to you,” but when I said “oh we can do this in Chinese” she got all excited and found a student for me explaining that my Mandarin was “incredible.” She had at this point heard me say four words–there’s no in-between when you first meet Chinese people between speaking no Chinese and having “amazing incredible Chinese.” So I started to walk around all their booths and have these kids explain their crafts projects.

From one student to another I went from “I totally understand what you’re saying” to “I feel like a Martian here.” I wonder if this happens as often learning languages other than Chinese. Extra variables like the range of accents and endless cognates make life really hard. I often just try to ride out a conversation, fighting to follow just enough to be able to ask a follow-up question that makes it seem like I know what’s going on. If I pause the conversation to look up a word, I hope it ends up being the key one that unlocks the meaning, since otherwise, you lose momentum and risk killing the vibe. Interestingly, the level of English of my interlocutor determines a lot of how well they understand my Chinese since my word order and word logic is very English-y. Maybe they’re also more used to listening to foreigners pronounce Chinese poorly.

Next, I walked to the river and stumbled on a baseball field. I shagged baseballs with some teenagers and old dudes for an hour. Then, I made it back to a bouldering gym that was a lot cleaner and friendlier than the Beijing ones I’ve been to (which the employees got a big kick out of me telling them). I learned the word for bouldering (包石, “hug rock” or “wrap rock,” the same character as baozi). On my way home I walked through a night market, ate some food I had never seen before and saw some old dudes huddled around picking lottery numbers.

In the Chinese Player Battlegrounds knockoff app game you can ride a mobike and shoot people inside a KFC.

I dj’d another party for our campus and afterwards a Chinese friend asked if she could have my songs. When I asked which one she said “all of them!”

Mom, Dad and Phil came to visit me for a week in Taipei! It was very fun. More on Taiwan later.

Goals for 2018
Get my Chinese good enough to go on 非诚勿扰, the chinese dating show that I bullied some of you into watching in the US. The casting guy is actually texting me once every few weeks asking me to come on, since I was on a little clip of Adam’s video that the host thought was funny. I know that if I go now it’l be pretty embarrassing. Regardless of when I go I’ll definitely have bad grammar and pronunciation but what I don’t want to have happen is totally not understand the questions they’re asking me.

Start livestreaming and make enough money on it to throw a party.