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I came "home" (I use that term loosely) yesterday to find my Korean roommate (Hyun Zhong) fighting with her Hungarian boyfriend (Janus Kiss) in Chinese (Han Yu). Feeling the need to become scarce (it feels so good to use complex English expressions after spending the weekend with non-native speakers and the British, who quite often sound like nonnative speakers to me), packed my books and sought out a study refuge.
Have you ever been to the library at Beijing Language and Culture University? If you have, you know that its second greatest failing (the first being a curious lack of books) is its smell. Someone explained to me that the smell is due to the fact that the toilets (and I use that term loosely as well) are on the first floor. As if that were explanation enough. At any rate, since the interior of the facility is lacking in ambiance, and since another shortcoming of this campus is its complete lack of study halls, student centers, or any place to curl up with a good book when your roommate is fighting with a Hungarian, and since it's been unseasonably warm, I chose to study outside the library.
A foreigner is never alone long in Beijing. Within a half hour, several Chinese had appeared to practice their English. I'm getting rather friendly with some (one just stopped me on the way to this computer center to invited me to see Titanic with him Thursday night). By dark, I had a little audience of 6 or 7 and we were discussing American movies and other random thoughts. Soon, three of us were off to dinner and yet another sampling of another restaurant's Mapo Tofu (a Sichuan dish that I'm particularly fond of--I'm trying it in every restaurant and, unfortunately for her, my friend Victoria is often along for the trials). Over dinner, my two companions argued loudly in English about Chinese politics. One was at Tiananmen in May 1989; she had strong opinions about the government and only looked around furtively once in a while remembering that there are some Chinese in the room who may very well understand what she's saying. Such talk is still rather dangerous.
Both talked simultaneously in loud broken English and kept asking my opinion of Li Peng, etc. I had a headache by the end of dinner. The tofu was excellent, though.
The day before yesterday (a term for which the Chinese have an actual word... but I've forgotten it already), a friend and I accidentally stumbled into a Japanese restaurant. We thought it was Chinese until we entered and heard the Chinese staff say youkoso iratusyaimashita (I had a friend help me write that btw). The menu was bilingual, which is good, but the two languages were Japanese and Chinese, which is not good. My dinner companion is trilingual, which is good, but her three languages are French, English, and German, which is not so helpful. I did ok ordering and ended up with oyako-don, the very dish I always get at Dai-Ten on Webster Street (hello, Webster Street!)
I was traveling all weekend. Went to the Forbidden City, Tiananmen, Tintian Park--all the big tourist spots. I explored the Forbidden City with Victoria and with Patricia, a French woman who lives in Singapore and who will be moving to Alaska in May and actually spent the 70s in Berkeley of all places. She turns 40 on Sunday, which qualifies her and me and a small handful of others for the seniors club here at BLCU.
The Forbidden City is the place where all the treasures of ancient China reside. The buildings date back to the 15th century and each corner and crevice represents yet another facet of the rich history of China, ancient gifts from the far west, and the amazing feats of Mao and his buddies in breaking through these doors. So, surround by all of this grace, beauty, history, and souvenir shops (every 200 feet or so; so much for non-capitalism), what do the out-of-town Chinese travelers want to take pictures of? Me, of course.
And not surreptitious pictures as I would take. No. Three or four times during my visit to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen, I hear squeals of "hello" and a group of 4 to 6 people gather around me asking if I will pose with them for a picture. So, yours truly will soon be residing in photo albums all over Asia.
Famously yours,
Debra.
P.S. congrats to John D from all of us for being inspired enough to actually buy that damn ticket to the UK!
P.P.S. I'm sorry if I don't answer your other questions. The guy next to me is playing a video game and I am forced to hear "he wei" every 10 seconds or so. My head is throbbing!
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