The Laowei Dialogues

First Dialogue

1: Do you see the foreigner?
2: The one with the prunes?
1: Yes, the girl with the bag of prunes.
2: Why do you think she has purchased prunes?
1: Perhaps her system is in a state of crisis.
2: She seems too sprightly to need to eat a prune.
1: Perhaps the system of a loved one or family member is in crisis.
2: Aha! Good thinking!

Second Dialogue

1: Where should I drive my expensive Mercedes?
2: Straight into the foreigner.
1: Which foreigner?
2: The one with the satchel of prunes.
1: But she is on the sidewalk.
2: So?

Third

1: It is a pity that the price of prunes is so high.
2: Yes, I pity those who need the aid of prunes.
1: Like many of the members of the Harvard Alumni Association currently in Xi'an.
2: Indeed. They are in bad moods.
1: Lethargically so.

***

These small pieces were inspired by my wanderings last night and by the language textbooks I've been browsing at the stores. I love language textbooks. They make everyone sound ridiculously stilted. I read a few pages of "Office Speak the Quick and Easy Way." My favorite sentence "Did you hear about the events in the marketing department?" And no explanation! What happened in this fictitious marketing department? Was there an upheaval? Did someone miss their flight at the international terminal of the airport which is on your left, past the sign?

We had the evening to ourselves. So I went and wrote the entry from last night, and when I returned to the room, my Mom was asleep. The time was 5:45. So I went to the hotel gym and returned to see if she was awake and would like to go explore. She was not awake. So I went exploring and also to buy prunes for certain people who have claimed that their stomachs are troubled by our diet.

Xi'an has a smaller foreign population than Beijing, so in the supermarket/department store, I was an object of much curiosity. Laowei is the word for foreigner and small children whispered it to their mothers and their mothers wondered what I was doing in a store where most of the pants would serve me well as mittens. I bought the prunes and walked around for a while carrying the prunes. I was also hoping to calm down the small taste of stir-crazy that was spinning in my head.

I didn't have enough Chinese money - yuan - to eat out so I went back to the hotel where I had pizza and beer. This did the trick. Pathetically, indeed, - sitting alone munching on pizza and drinking by myself in a hotel bar that is supposed to mimic an American sports bar. It got slightly more pathetic when a possible prostitute wandered in and began drinking. I say possible prostitute because her shirt was very explicit. If it had words on it the word might have said "look at my breasts and nipples through the thin fabric of this shirt." In lieu of words, the shirt simply displayed her breasts and nipples.

I might be wrong. It might be the fashion here. I doubt it. There's a fair preponderance of business travelers running around here.

Anyhoo, I woke up this morning (5:20am, OPT) and felt much better. Relaxed, ready to sightsee. It was also sunny out, which helped this very industrial city gain a measure of charm.

And now I can focus on talking a little bit about the Great Wall and the Terra Cotta warriors and describe them in terms better than "awesome" -

The Great Wall was awesome. In the legitimate sense of the word, implying awe. It's not continuous any longer, but certain sites have been preserved for the tourist crowd. Some are very touristy, I understand, and others are very rural. We split the difference by going to Mutianyu. It's about a 2 hour drive from Beijing - 3 in horrible traffic. Upon arrival we were met with the standard chorus of vendors.

American museums and sights have gift shops. Regulated gift shops full of standard tchotchkes, run by the museum or the park service. Chinese sites have hundreds of vendors, independently run, all selling slightly different versions of the same goods: Mao watches, lighters, plates, little red books, tableclothes, t-shirts. At the great wall many of these stalls also sold "North Face" coats. The vendors are insistent, strong, and will, if need be, grab you. It's unsettling.

If you want things you are supposed to bargain and you can get people to desperately low prices - pennies for t-shirts. One American dollar for several. And if you look and turn and leave without bargaining, they will cry out that they have a cheaper price, for you, their friend, don't you remember me? And if you keep going, some of them will grab you. I got grabbed by the wrist and pulled up stairs on the way back. A tiny lady with short hair and strength that alarmed me. I had to spin my wrist in a faux self defense move to keep going.

It's terrible. It's terrible to not get anything and it's terrible to bargain. Who are you to get the price of a crappy t-shirt from 120 yuan (roughly $12) to 15 yuan - two bucks? Mainly because it's impossible not to be conscious of the privilege you have and represent - guilty about it. I was. I know it's a standard traveler's trope - encountering the dispossesed. Which makes me feel strange to write about it - like another level of exploitation or ignorance on my own part. But that's what happened. I don't know what the right way is. I bought a t-shirt for less than the price asked. I tried to hustle down and not look interested in anything.

Aside from the chaos at the bottom, the top of the Great Wall is magnificent. We got to stay up there for about an hour, and walk back and forth from guard tower to guard tower. The great wall is also on top of extremely forbidding mountains and winds and switchbacks to the horizon in front of you. It's incredibly beautiful. I had a hard time imagining the Mongol hordes attacking up a mountain at the wall, but I guess they did pretty well at it. So, for a while I pretended I was a guard and I could see Mongol hordes on horseback. Mainly I took a lot of pictures of the mountains (mountains! the world is not a flat prarie!) which will not be as awesome when they are developed, but will help me remember how excited I was to be up there.

Today, we visited the tomb of the man that built the Great Wall. Qin Shihuang di. The first and only Emperor of the Qin dynasty which lasted from 221-208BC. He was instrumental in unifying China, driving the hordes back, building the wall, standardizing coins and the written language and being a complete bloody tyrant megalomaniac. I know this about him in part because in 9th grade I wrote my very first history paper on the tomb of Shihuang di. I believe that I used one source, a National Geographic magazine and quoted extensively from it.

This man's megalomania led him to develop a tomb that stretched over 56 acres. And, in 1974, local farmers, digging a well discovered a terra cotta head. Upon further excavation, over 6000 clay soldiers, all live size, with 300 different face molds, were discovered standing in ranks in three locations around his tomb.

Seeing them. Well, I'm not sure how to really describe it yet. I'm just amazed that it was done. That humans created these, painted them, ordered them, and then I'm back on a trip to see them because evidently humans like to see things that humans have done. People do things, eh? Build big walls, weapons.

And in their free time, like we saw in a local museum yesterday, make little depictions of what we do for fun, or what's pretty. And, until recently, bury it with us, maybe along with some unwilling servants and women.

I keep having unprofound thoughts about what they'll dig up from us. Cubicles? "Here, in this place, the Americans created many workspaces that symbolized their economic prowess." Skyscrapers? Toilets, both western and non-western.

So, that's Xi'an. Tomorrow we see the local Muslim culture and head for Guilin, where there is, I believe, mountains noted for their beauty. Good.

Bits and Pieces

Today we arrived in Xi'an, a mid-size city in the middle of the Shaanxi provice. And, of course, by mid-sized, they mean that it is home to 7.4 million people. A hamlet, really.

I am going a wee bit bananas. Another huge city, with a smoggy sky and a bizzare prediliction for billboards. Perhaps Xi'an means Billboard. Alas, no. It means "Peaceful Kingdom in the West." It used to be named Chang'an, which roughly translates into "Best Peaceful City" and then the capital got moved to Beijing. Sucks to be you, former Best Peaceful City.

My last day or so in Beijing was amazing, slightly depressing, and beautiful - quite sunny. The city took on a completely different quality when the smog lifted. But more about that and the Great Wall (AWESOME) later. Today is dedicated to random descriptions. In part because I can't always read what I've written and am having trouble composing a coherent narrative. And, in that I mirror China's 34 provinces and seventeen dynastys. Hooray for that. Okay - thoughts.

WILD SWANS
The book Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, which I read before I came is turning out to be a great asset in knowing some of the Chinese modern history that's so important - Mao, the Cultural Revolution. It's great. I feel like people might avoid it because it has the subtitle "Three Generations of Women in China" which sounds to Americans like a Steel-Magnolias type of work. This is incorrect. Only scoff at this if you too have been sent to forced labor in the mountains bordering Tubet and your mother was a concubine that fled a warlord husband whose first wife was trying to kill you. If you have done that, you may dismiss this as a chick-flick novel. Otherwise, it's fantastic.

TOILETS
One might think that toilets are toilets all over the world. This is incorrect. Chinese toilets are like the entire toilet has sunk into the ground, leaving the seat exposed. You squat on the seat, which is level with the ground, and pee into the bowl. Even in fancy places, most of the toilets are like this. How can one tell it is a fancy place? They give you toilet paper.

These toilets are not that hard to use, especially if you are okay with perhaps maybe peeing on your foot. I am okay with this, for I knew, long before I came to China that I was the type of person that was given the chance to pee on my foot, I probably would. I learned this in 5th grade at the last day of school picnic when I was trying to go to the bathroom in the bushes and peed all over my shorts. To avoid this being noticed, I dove into the lagoon by the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum. So, I can dig the risk.

OPT
Old People Time. This is what I am on. I go to bed at ten, very tired from all the exciting things. I wake up at four in the morning. Last night I fell asleep at the dinner table while an NPR reporter was speaking to us in a charming English accent. Normally a charming English accent will keep me awake for hours. Not so! I am old.

Although tonight is unscheduled and maybe I'll go nuts an be up until 10:15pm.

MAKE YOUR CHILDREN LEARN CHINESE (MANDARIN)
I am serious. All the things I have learned about China have lead me to believe we should all learn Chinese. Most of the Westerners living here have a very specific perspective on what's going on in China and it all adds up to the fact that this is a Communist country only in name and power - the economy is capitalist and the members of the Communist party are getting ridiculously wealthy. The one party system also means that the path of this country in the next two decades is fairly unpredictable - repressive rule could return to mediate the distribution of wealth and power. Or, there could be a popular uprising against what many Chinese people percieve as unecessary inequalities. Right now, China really wants to be our friend - we have a lot in common, both interested or possessing Superpower status.

But the way for the average non-Chinese person to circumvent this political situation (and I guess by this I mean the feeling that we could get locked into a very specific foreign policy in regards to China - now we're rather flexible, but it would be unfortunate if this moved towards the Cold War sorts of stances - detente and so forth) is to know Chinese. I wish I knew Chinese. I could say more than hello, thank you, and no. I could read the billboards. I could communicate with 1/5th of the earth's population. Or at least the 13.8 million of them in Beijing or the 7.4 of them in Xi'an.

BOTTLED WATER FREAK OUTS
Soon, one member of this trip will crack and start waving a bottle of water screaming "IS IT BOTTLED!??IS IT BOTTLED!!!". We're all obsessed with drinkable water. Soon, we might eat each other.

JON DINERSTEIN'S AUNT AND UNCLE ARE ON THIS TRIP
Jon Dinerstein was the piano player for IGP, subject to introduction often by saying, "Hey, have you met Jon? He plays piano?"

Jon was always mad we called him Jon Dinerstein and never just Jon in the abscense of other Jons. This happened to Mike Cohen the piano player too.

FOOD
The food is incredible and ranges from the interesting and delicious to the gross. I am trying not to be picky. Last night I tried duck heart. A bit dry around the ventricle.

Tips for future travel: do not sit with picky eaters. They will drive you ballistic.

You also might think I am eating lots of rice. Nay! Here in North China the main grain is wheat due to the lack of arable land for rice-paddies. Did I read that in a book? Yes!

MR. FRUSTRATINGLY GOOD QUESTION
There's a guy here, a total ham. Many jokes about marriage in the Take My Wife, Please vein. We asked Wendy, one of our guides when she met her husband and she said something and then he said, "But after marriage it's never the same! Crack the whip!"

But whenever we have a speaker he asks the BEST questions. Such good questions. Frustratingly good. ARG! Mr. Frustratingly Good Question!

THE BY FAR MOST PUZZLING EXCHANGE I'VE HAD

1: So, what do you do?
ME: I'm an actor.
1: Maybe you could put on a geisha play.

AREN'T GEISHAS FROM JAPAN?

YES.

WHO SAID THAT? WAS IT MR. FRUSTRATINGLY GOOD QUESTION?

YES.


So, that's the miscellaneous file. I want to see if I can read this here - it was blocked in Beijing. A shame. A tragedy for the free press.


The Great Wall, though - that was a genuinely amazing experience. So beautiful. I wish I could have sat up there all day without being at the whimsy of a tour. More on the last few days in Beijing a little bit later.

Mags, if you're reading this, write Mom an e-mail through me. We want to know if you've made out with Michael Phelps.

70% good, 30% bad

This trip has begun to have a protagonist. The protagonist is not me. The protagonist is Mao Zedong. The title of this post reflects the Party line on Mao's regin as Chairman of the Communist party.

Yesterday we met two women who lived through very different experiences in their relationship with Mao. One of them, the daughter of a friend of his was his english tutor and remembers him as a humorous and considerate man. The other woman's husband was killed during the Cultural Revolution. He was a rocket scientist who was labeled a spy because he studied abroad.

This marks the end of the second day in Beijing and the experience is, every moment, completely overwhelming. This is an enourmous city, laid out on a grid, but so full of pollution that you can't see more than a half-mile in front of you. And then, suddenly, a sixty story high rise will appear through the haze, half-completed, in some wild architectural motif. We heard today from the US Embassy's trade officer that Beijing is doubling its office space by 2008. But it's notin demand.

The streets are full of bicyclists and buicks, mercedes benzes, citroens, green and yellow buses. It's a mish-mash of European and American competition for the Chinese market in the advertising and signage. There are constant images of "globalization" - a thugged out Donald Trump on a Chinese magazine cover. The cars. A Max Mara clothing street. Fast food. It's the evidence of a globalization that makes us think that maybe we're shoving our service industry down their throats - a constant onslaught of leisure time activities and things to buy. That may be true, but somewhere in the country, they're making all of our clothes. The advertising is a sort of superficial sign of China's emerging nouveau riche - the people who make the money from the factories.

Yesterday we saw Tienamen Square, the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. Today we saw the US Embassy (there's a hilarious picture of Dick Cheney with the smirkiest shit-eating grin in there), the Hutong, and briefly went out to the Summer Palace of the Emperors before it started to pour.

The Hutong are these narrow alleyways which are the roads to the traditional house structures, which used to feature a number of rooms around a central courtyard, housing three generations of a family. The Communists bought them or took them and made them the center of the work unit. Now they are endangered by the same world-wide force that eats away at every neighborhood: the condo!

We ate lunch there, at a family's home. It was delicious. The best food here yet. A lot of the restaurant food is a little overdone. Or creepy looking.

So, there's amazing perks to being on the nerdiest tour imaginable. The things we get to do are great. And the company - well, I did rush to conclusions. Our professor and his wife are very fun. And, yet, there are still many many knobtools. For instance: the pollution is bad here and the air is occasionally thick. But must one buy and wear a SARS mask? Well, one guy thought he should. So he is. Maybe I'm being a jerk and he has terrible asthma. But it's very funny.

I've invented a voice to try to capture some of the ridiculous questions/conversations I've overheard. Remind me to use it at home.

Here's an attempted example: last night at dinner someone spilled a glass of wine.

SPILLER: I'm sorry.
MAN: It's not YOUR fault, it's HIS, for SPINNING the THING SO FASSSSSST.

He was speaking of the lazy susan.

I'm having a good time with my Mom. We agree on many of the knobtoolish behaviors displayed.

I woke up at 4:30am from the jet lag and went for a run down the street. I got some weird looks,and running here slightly resembles what it might feel like to run and smoke, but it was really nice to see a tiny bit of Beijing without so many people.

Tonight is "on our own" so my Mom and I get to go explore. I'm looking forward to it. We're making friends with our tour guide, a young Chinese guy named Michael. He's very accomodating of all the knobby questions.

So far, the trip? Better than Mao.

Beijing!

Perhaps I've seen too many Cold-War era movies, but there's something slightly perfect about flying into a Communist country when it's dark, covered in fog, and the giant, glistening modern airport is completely empty.

Of course, the fog turns out to be smog, the passport clerks don't send me any menacing looks, and capitalism is taking over, but it was nice and creepy for a minute there. Oh! I thought. I'm going to be inspected! And for a second I was slightly thrilled and then I became not a menacing underworld intelligence figure, but, rather, a dopey white tourist.

I'm in Beijing, which, coming in from the airport appeared as a series of spectral high rises, enormous western hotel chains, apparating through smothering white smoke and a faint tar-like smell in the air and the car. It was only about 8:30pm here so people were about on bicycles, waiting for buses, going out. Two women picked us up from the airport and we had a good conversation about the Olympics.

I was in a van with my Mom and two more people on our tour whom we met. They are retired, middle-aged, from Maryland, and very very nice. They have also done all the reading. THEY HAVE DONE ALL THE READING. WAS THERE READING?

It's time for me to fess up. This "trip" my Mom found is a Harvard Alumni Association trip. So, not only will my compatriots be twice my age, but they'll also be a little bit, eh, como se dice, Harvard? East-coasty? Nothing wrong with it, it's just a very distinctive attitude occasionally.

And, yeah yeah, don't judge a book yadda yadda, but I'm slightly uncomfortable with the situation. Hip Young Beijing Residents! Take me to a party!

Maybe this will be good for me. Expand my vocabulary. Get me back into the habit of utilizing an academic language I've, how shall I put it, finally "unpacked."

Pack up, biotches! We're wearing tweed! We're citing sources! And we're not sorry we did all the reading!

Tomorrow we go to the Forbidden City. Our hotel overlooks it. It's the hotel where Nixon stayed. I've always felt close with Nixon, ever since I drew a poster of his internal organs for 7th grade science. Now, proof. Nixon and I are destined to be together, separated only by the frustrating element of time.

The above paragraph leads me to believe I should get some sleep. I watched "The Day After Tomorrow" on the plane over from Tokyo and forsook sleep in order to look at the sunset out the window (and Mt. FUJI! It was gorgeous) and contemplate the bravery of Dennis Quaid in the face of sudden climate change.

All right. Until tomorrow. How are things?

Tokyo!

The first leg of the trip to China is duly completed. I am in Tokyo. And, thus, I am in the future. Yes, the future. While you slackers dither around in the early morning hours of the 25th, I have been in the 25th for a very long time and am currently relaxing in the ANA lounge at the Tokyo-Narita airport.

The plane ride was only 12 hours long. It wasn`t too bad. I dithered away the time by eating, reading and watching a bizzare Japanese movie entitled `Red Moon`. The movie centered on the life of one morally bankrupt Japanese woman living in Manchuria in 1935-45. She is involved in numerous love triangles, and leads one of her lovers, a spy in the Japanese secret police, to murder his other lover and behaves in a generally despicable way. But, this movie is complicated by the need to address, from a Japanese perspective, the difficulties the Japanese in Manchuria faced when the enemy withdrew and the various horrors the Japanese occupiers had inflicted on the Chinese. Red Moon negotiates this conflict by having every other Japanese character choose a noble death as redress for the sufferings of the Chinese, often with subtly crafted lines like, `I now choose death for what I and our people have done to the Chinese. But a noble death. I am a Japanese man.`

And then the movie ends with the woman choosing life, escaping, and, as she and her children (adorable kids who are always catching her in flagrante with the old spy cum opium addict) ride the train to leave the now-Soviet Manchurian state all these other Japanese people are ripping up the currency of the Japanese puppet state and saying things like, `You were no friend to me Manchuko!` She sits there and says `Thank you Manchuria.`

Part of me wonders if she learned her lesson. Part of me wonders if I`ll ever be able to absorb enough of the cultural symbolism in the movie to get it.

That`s not much of a story. Everything else is going fine.

And for those of you who wondered about the keyboard, I`ll say that who wondered about the keyboard, I`ll say that the keyboards here ａｒｅ standard except I cant figure out how to turn off this underlining function I just started.　Oh！It just stopped!

We also met a Chinese student from Shanghai and a Harvard B-School professor who is an enthusiast about B-School professor who is an enthusiast about the Olympics.He was nice. I think he represented the general phylum of people who will be on　our tour, although he himself is not on the tour. Very accomplished people who expect to be recognized as such, eh?　　

I`ll leave it at that. I want to try and take pictures of the Japanese soda machine.

It Begins

On Tuesday, my Mom and I will leave for a 16-day trip to China.

People go to China all the time. I know this. But it's strange for us to go to China. We've never been the kind of family that motivates for a long and exotic vacation. We go to Michigan. That's our thing.

But sometimes fate takes over and you find yourself in a position where you think, "Well, I guess I should go to China." And that happened this year when my Mom (a 6th grade history teacher) was awarded a sabbatical by the school she's taught at for almost 25 years. And since spending your time on sabbatical watching talk shows and eating snacks is considered "wasting your time," she's decided to kick off this year in style with a big old trip to China.

And, she's generously taking me along in order to have someone to blame things on.

That's a joke. A partial joke.

In addition to being exposed to amazing new people and things, this trip will be a great test of our relationship. She's a Mom. I'm a 25 year old with no particularly settled career path. Actually, the title of this blog should have a question mark after it, or be rephrashed - Can You Take It With You? It's more a hypothesis than a conclusion. There's a tiny chance that we'll get along fabulously. And there's a tiny chance that she will tell every person we meet that I should be in law school. And there's a miniscule but significant chance we'll just drive each other nuts by telling each other how one _SHOULD_ do something. Like, "You should not zip your coat like that." or "You should not handle your nail clippers in that fashion."

And, hence, the blog. An extremely biased study by me.

It's very strange writing on this thing. There's this self-consciousness that isn't present when I'm writing e-mails or letters to individual people. So, forgive initial stilted writing, please. I'm hoping that travel exaughstion and good stories in lieu of exposition will make it less awkward. Or, at least less awkward for me.

We leave on Tuesday. We return September 9th. I'm not even sure if I can use this website in China. But I hope so.

Until we hit Beijing -